Verwandte Artikel zu Changing Light

Changing Light - Hardcover

Gallagher, Nora

 
9780375424519: Changing Light
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375424512 ISBN 13: 9780375424519
Verlag: Pantheon Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Fleeing a crumbling marriage in New York for rural New Mexico, Eleanor falls in love with the disoriented, ill man she rescues, unaware that he is Leo Kavan, a troubled scientist who has gone AWOL from the Los Alamos atomic bomb project.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nora Gallagher is the author of Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith and Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace. Her essays, book reviews, and journalism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, DoubleTake, and Mother Jones, among other publications. She is also the editor of the award-winning Notes from the Field, a collection of literary essays about the outdoors. She grew up in New Mexico and lives with her husband in California and New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

0375424512|excerpt

Gallagher: CHANGING LIGHT

one

Eleanor stood up in the garden from tilling a plot for early lettuce, shook off her hands, and stuffed them into the sleeves of her brown wool sweater. The wind was up; it blew dirt from the adobe wall into the newly hoed ground, dry pods from the chamisa bushes rattled like bones. She walked toward the house, sniffing the air like the dog beside her, climbed the steps to the door, opened it, walked past the stove, her hands still nestled in the sleeves—like one of those Chinamen, she thought to herself—and turned into the bedroom, where she’d put him last night.

All night long he’d listed between sleep and a rushing wakefulness, muttering in what she thought was German but couldn’t be sure. “Lotte,” he cried. “Raus aus dem Feuer!” And then, a word she thought might be English but didn’t know. “Implosion,” he said. She had placed rags on his head soaked in water and chamisa to break his fever, get him to sweat. He looked to her like men she’d met in New York: dark, Jewish, probably; curly black hair. Last night, when she’d found him lying in the bosque beside the river, his face was turned toward the sky. The dog circled him. She bent over him, her heart beating in her throat. His lips were cracked, his eyes shut. His wet khaki pants clung to his legs like vines. He grasped a pair of boots by their laces and a heavy belt in his right hand. Her eyes moved from the boots to the river and the mesa that rose up on the other side.

She bent down. “Hello?” she said. “Hello.” His head moved, the eyelids lifted. His eyes were a pale, startling blue. “Lotte?” he said.

“No,” she replied. His accent on the name was thick, and in her memory she heard someone’s voice speaking with these inflections, like an echo off a high stone wall. “Are you ill?” “Ill,” he repeated, and ran his tongue over his lips. She walked back through thick sand to the Ford, took her canteen out of the glove box, returned. He drank in small gulps, like a bird; she could see the water traveling down his throat. Water spilled out of his mouth and onto his chest, and he shivered. She jerked the canteen away.

“Can you walk?”

She wrapped his head in her father’s old sweater, the sleeves crossed over his eyes. She stood between his legs, grasped his ankles, and pulled. When she got him to the Ford, she squatted down, put her arms under his shoulders, and heaved him up to sitting against the front tire, then pulled him forward, whispering to him as she would to a horse, “Easy, now, easy, don’t fall.”

She had planned to drive him straight to the hospital, but as she started the engine he whispered to her, “No doctors.” She looked over at him and saw in his face a barely controlled desperation. And so she took him home. She shouldered him into the house as she had her brother when he came home drunk from a debutante’s party, and tipped him into bed.

She stood over him in the room plastered white with thick adobe walls that she and Estaban built last May before the sudden rain came in July and washed all the plaster off the outer walls and the dirt out of her garden, leaving only gravel, and she had to dig her carrots up with a pick.



He whispered in his sleep, half wakeful. His eyes opened and he saw her arm pass over his body like the shadow of a bird.

“What happened to you?” she asked. Leo turned his head to the wall, licking his lips.

We tickled the dragon’s tail, Leo thought. One of us was burned.

Slotin was moving the two half-moons together with screwdrivers. The counter ticked and the red signal lamps were blinking. The lamps blinked faster as Slotin moved the half spheres closer, like a drummer or a Japanese man with his chopsticks.

Then there was the sound of a screwdriver hitting the floor. The meter stopped. Leo heard the silence first. He yelled to Slotin, “Raus aus dem Feuer!”



The moon had pulled him across the deserted streets, between the trees, to the hole in the fence that the teenagers made to outfox the guards. His legs felt like sacks filled with sand. He got down on his hands and knees and bowed his head, feeling along the sharp ends of the linked fence with his hands first before he pushed himself through. He sat on the other side, his breath hot in his lungs, and then started to weep, his whole body shuddering. To be free of the place. He pulled the knapsack stuffed with a blanket and bread and cheese through the fence after him, adjusted the heavy belt stuffed with money that he carried with him through all border crossings, stood up, and began to find his way. In the dark were animal shapes moving through the trees: a deer, then a wild turkey, its wings folded neatly against its round breast. After a while he noticed the small swift bats flying past his nose, sonar alerting them to his head. He felt a sudden calm to be among them, the life of the world; as a boy he had always loved the dark.



Leo could not stay awake. He felt he should; he did not even know where he was or who this woman was who bent over him, asking questions. But he was too full of dreams or memories, he was not sure which. Slotin’s hands. The Chicago beehive assembly. His sister, Lotte, standing in the Woodrow Wilson train station in Prague.



Eleanor washed red and white beans in a colander at the sink. She poured water from a large earthenware pitcher through the beans and watched their colors darken as the liquid ran over and through them. She caught a cup of water from under the colander and poured it on the pink geraniums in the Folgers can on the windowsill. Outside the light changed to pink; streaks of purple lit up the Jemez. Her garden looked red for an instant. Tomorrow, the doctor, she thought, and almost said it out loud. Tomorrow she would drive into town. Even the unconventional gringa can’t allow a strange man to stay in her house, even if he’s ill.

She checked on him but he was deep in sleep, so she lit her kerosene reading lamp, but didn’t sit down. She was reading Willa Cather, a sweet, sad story about a family of Bohemians in Nebraska. She turned on the radio to hear a little jazz and felt lonely for the first time in months, when, for the first time in months, there was someone else in the house.



Her living room had a little fireplace placed in the wall at waist level that Griefa and Estaban built one afternoon.

“Ande yo caliente ya riase la gente,” Estaban said when he was finished, and when Eleanor asked him “En Inglés?” he shrugged his shoulders. Griefa said, “As long as I am warm, let the people laugh.” Griefa had plastered the walls wearing a dress—her bra showing under the arms—and a hat with plastic flowers. The floors were dirt mixed with cow’s blood, made by the dancers at San Ildefonso Pueblo. It had aged to a shiny deep red. Beside the bed was a wool rug in gray and black from the Ortega family in Chimayo. Against the wall were several canvases, and Eleanor’s paints were neatly lined up. The ceiling was made of heavy vigas with latias woven between them, thin aspen saplings that Estaban had cut in the forest above the boy’s school at Los Alamos.

This was what she had wanted, this room, imagining it while lying in the apartment in New York, sick with a headache, unable to go outside and face the crowded streets for fear of the paralyzing din in her head. She had built this house room by room in her mind ever since she had first seen New Mexico and known she would have to come back. When she and Griefa...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Pantheon Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375424512
ISBN 13 
9780375424519
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar