Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,15

play an important role.”

“Like in cooking certain dishes?”

She nodded.

I thought about that for a moment, but the only thing that came to mind was the image of a gigantic pie cooking slowly in an oven at low heat.

“And the answer to my second question?”

“What was that again?”

“Whether you ever regretted your choice of what to wish for.”

A moment of silence followed. The eyes she turned on me seemed to lack any depth. The desiccated shadow of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, suggesting a kind of hushed sense of resignation.

“I’m married now,” she said. “To a CPA three years older than me. And I have two children, a boy and a girl. We have an Irish setter. I drive an Audi, and I play tennis with my girlfriends twice a week. That’s the life I’m living now.”

“Sounds pretty good to me,” I said.

“Even if the Audi’s bumper has two dents?”

“Hey, bumpers are made for denting.”

“That would make a great bumper sticker,” she said. “‘Bumpers are for denting.’”

I looked at her mouth when she said that.

“What I’m trying to tell you is this,” she said more softly, scratching an earlobe. It was a beautifully shaped earlobe. “No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.”

“There’s another good bumper sticker,” I said. “‘No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.’”

She laughed aloud, with a real show of pleasure, and the shadow was gone.

She rested her elbow on the bar and looked at me. “Tell me,” she said. “What would you have wished for if you had been in my position?”

“On the night of my twentieth birthday, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

I took some time to think about that, but I couldn’t come up with a single wish.

“I can’t think of anything,” I confessed. “I’m too far away now from my twentieth birthday.”

“You really can’t think of anything?”

I nodded.

“Not one thing?”

“Not one thing.”

She looked into my eyes again—straight in—and said, “That’s because you’ve already made your wish.”

“But you had better think about it very carefully, my lovely young fairy, because I can grant you only one.” In the darkness somewhere, an old man wearing a withered-leaf-colored tie raises a finger. “Just one. You can’t change your mind afterward and take it back.”

—TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN

NEW YORK MINING DISASTER

A friend of mine has a habit of going to the zoo whenever there’s a typhoon. He’s been doing this for ten years. At a time when most people are closing their shutters, running out to stock up on mineral water, or checking to see if their radios and flashlights are working, my friend wraps himself in a Vietnam-era army surplus poncho, stuffs a couple of cans of beer into his pockets, and sets off. He lives about a fifteen-minute walk away.

If he’s unlucky, the zoo is closed, “owing to inclement weather,” and its gates are locked. When this happens, my friend sits down on the stone statue of a squirrel next to the entrance, drinks his lukewarm beer, and then heads back home.

But when he makes it there in time he pays the entrance fee, lights a soggy cigarette, and surveys the animals, one by one. Most of them have retreated to their shelters. Some stare blankly at the rain. Others are more animated, jumping around in the gale-force winds. Some are frightened by the sudden drop in barometric pressure; others turn vicious.

My friend makes a point of drinking his first beer in front of the Bengal tiger cage. (Bengal tigers always react the most violently to storms.) He drinks his second one outside the gorilla cage. Most of the time the gorillas aren’t the least bit disturbed by the typhoon. They stare at him calmly as he sits like a mermaid on the concrete floor sipping his beer, and you’d swear they actually feel sorry for him.

“It’s like being in an elevator when it breaks down and you’re trapped inside with strangers,” my friend tells me.

Typhoons aside, my friend’s no different from anyone else. He works for an export company, managing foreign investments. It’s not one of your better firms, but it does well enough. He lives alone in a neat little apartment and gets a new girlfriend every six months. Why he insists on having a new one every six months (and it’s always exactly six months) I’ll never understand. The girls all look the same, like perfect clones of one another. I can’t tell them