(Note: End of August thought of what has not been done, what is to be done or... this book was finished many years ago and I waited and waited, but could never think of who might read it or who might publish it... (the Elizabeth of this book is now happily married and they have their first child, Augustus)
WITH ELIZABETH. For want of a better title or maybe this is the best title or it could be called THE STORY OF A DEAD TIME a journey with my daughter.
Begin with what happened after Elizabeth and I came back from Europe during the winter.
Beginning at the beginning. The best way to go about talking, no, writing, since that is what...
Now, at this moment in the year 2---, no place where the story or our story could be told: no room, porch, campfire, ocean voyage, rail journey. No setting where such a story could be teased out and then the effort to see this conversation redundantly and artfully fixed to the page, arranged by the Scalpel of Chaos, though we hadn't gone to Zagreb where such an instrument is available in a cafe near the cathedral.
Neither Elizabeth nor I could suspend our disbelief in order to hear me talking with a stranger on the flight back from London: to hear me retelling what appeared to us as we moved about the English countryside and then to Paris and in one of the near villages painted by Monet: no, not that famous garden, for this was in January, seemingly so long ago as I write in July and soon to be August then September and...
Or, in Vienna in a taverna near the train station where the Balkans are said to begin, where we were to hear about what Nuala had taken us to see from the hill in Dalkey: the light to be made visible rising up out of the Irish Sea revealing the colour of the winding sheet for the corpse of our dreams as it was sent back into the earth.
All through the Spring I would take notes of what had happened much as I did even on the flight back when I had been reading Front de 1'est, 1941-1945 from which I copied out what Leon Degrelle writes, "Shaking my hand firmly in his two hands at the moment of my departure. Hitler told me with stirring affection: "If I had a son I would want him to be like you."
Aware to be sure of the folly of the taking for granted what had happened as being ordinary yet with the possibility it was of interest that a father and his daughter might travel to Europe looking for something that was not there in the still New World.
But nothing could be as simple as that because life is never so easy as anyone knows who has ever tried to describe even the brief moment of a hand about to reach out to be shaken by... though if what had happened did not happen I would have been complaining in reply: no, nothing much had happened while we were away--- no building fell down as we walked by, no man held a gun to the head of a child demanding the President of the United States get on the line and talk to him, right now, motherfucker, hear me!
No, nothing had happened to us, I guess, like any of that, but... though taken speechless and afraid of what had happened as I sat in the aisle seat while Elizabeth looked down to the mountains of Greenland, already that far along in the flight back to New York: the mountains of Greenland across which no one has ever walked, I think, or wanted to walk and of waking in the middle of the night trapped on the side of one of those mountains while the plane flies overhead with a girl leaning to see more clearly the figure waving helplessly up to the plane.
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