Every morning, on my way to work, I walk past the hospital and look at the long, graceful sweep of its various buildings. Within them there is no space for regret, and little space for any personal past, and instinctively I envy the hospital the unreflecting peace it has made with itself. On the other side of the road is the nurses' home, with its decayed windows and rusty walls. The nurses are mostly immigrants from a part of the world that no one ever visits, and to be true to what they feel themselves it is best to introduce them in this way, only adding parenthetically that they are also my compatriots. For when I see them sitting at the windows watching the traffic on the road beneath them, I know that their hearts do not belong here either; and when they huddle together in their tight little groups, I can almost feel the spiritual warmth they are trying to kindle among themselves. Even now, there they are, standing about the overgrown gardens near the archway, the corners of their mouths sucking away at their smoky lives, as if trying to comprehend some unfamiliar scent. Sometimes I think they have been here forever, without moving on, in their own minds, from the idea that they have only just arrived. Perhaps it is the lack of things the nurses’ home offers them in compensation for the memories it takes away that makes the exchange a poor one; perhaps, on the contrary, their past is too bright for the present here to seem anything but shadowy and dim and difficult to decipher. My father and I used to sound the horn as we rode past them in the car when I was young; I liked the way they instinctively moved aside and looked back at me guiltily, as though I had caught them doing something they shouldn't. But of my father, I remember little more than that hand - a hand at the tiller, a hand at the wheel, a hand to fashion me and pick me up and admonish me for crimes I never really understood. Perhaps this versatile hand was attached somewhere to a body of sorts, but the possibility neither concerned nor interested me. Looking over my shoulder, I see that childhood again stretched calmly behind me, like a soft, blank field upon which all the flowers have been painted black.

Then one day, apropos our persecutions during the war, I came across the intimate yet ambiguous assessment: "They were an insular, religious, self-destructive people, filled with superstition and pride, dreams and old horrors, rooted to a past they revered and despised and never could regain,” and, described this way, I suddenly felt a bitter love for my race, and the strange tongue that sustains it, and the fact that everything about us seems always to have settled about or stood between, but never quite touched upon or been secured by anything. Indeed, it sounded so romantic I felt jealous of the ones who had remained, and wanted to leave right then, if only because the past tense that recalled them also extinguished their lives forever, and I wondered how it must feel to live with them beyond the void. It was then that my personal past, as if in collusion with its more collective parent, started to sidle away from me; I caught at it absently, but it would not wait, though ultimately neither one of us had the strength to drag the other back completely. I was a young man and this was not the only provocation, of course, but it was the first, and once a chink had become visible, then I could see clearly the outline of the door, and the rest of it was easy and involuntary. Suffice to say, beyond the door there was a great house; there was light in every corridor as uniform and undiluted as the greyness of the gardens about it; there was a furious bustling and clinking of glasses, and, in the exhileration of the thing, I hardly noticed I had spent all evening loitering in the entranceway listening to an effusive, overbearing divorcee, while the bakelite switch panel dug in my back, and the only initiative I undertook was to find out ever-changing routes among the spaces of carpet where people had chosen for a moment not to stand, in the many quests for wine that I undertook on her behalf. Returning on the last of these, I met with more opposition than I had anticipated, for a sizeable group had chosen that moment to depart, and whether she had forgotten me, or misunderstood and thought that I had forgotten her, or whether she was simply swept along by that general exodus, having lost her bearings among the many suits and tables and rooms and wine, there was now only an empty sweets trolley where she had been standing. And then I saw that the dishes, too, had been cleared away, and the piano closed up at the end of the dance hall, and people with unkempt hair and dirty overalls were starting to move about behind the scenes, and sometimes crossed quickly in the shadows between two rooms, like rats that lived in the walls. I do not have a word for that gulf, that prelingual gasp that is the shape of that evening in a calendar, and the bright windows of the house hanging on the night. At the same time, if I could have my life again, I would do things in exactly the same way, for it is not so much the sense of misspent opportunity that causes my past to seem separated so starkly from my present, but rather the fact that my story is the story of our race; my people are their own inheritance, sown by their own fingers, and garnered by their own hands; we have no guides or advocates, yet we have always been too proud to ask the way or turn aside when we are spoken to.

On the wall where the pigeon spikes end, one of the nurses is sitting, swinging her legs and watching me.

“You wish you had a different life; you wish you could go home,” she says suddenly. Then she asks me for the price of a bus fare, and I know, if I see her again, she will probably make exactly the same observation, followed by exactly the same request, with the same admixture of sincerity and dissimulation. If I knew for sure she were thinking only of me when she spoke, then perhaps it would be different, even as if I knew for sure she were thinking only of herself or her family. But we do not understand one another; we do not understand generally in this place, and what concerns us is usually at odds with anything we can change.

Later, somewhere between night and day, I suddenly find myself awake, as if the thin, irresolute drone of the present had abruptly ceased. Then, once again, I hear my daughter crying in her sleep, like a lost, grey ghost at the end of a long, lightless path; and, hearing her like that, I remember again the black flowers governing the field, and do not envy her the way ahead. For at such times, when there is nothing to distract you except the darkness about you, it is very hard to accept that everything your children will learn and love and achieve will die with them, and yet their lives will need to be lived and believed in, all the same.