always things we felt we had to work out first in our own lives, together and separately, and time simply passed without bringing any resolution, or a clearer sense of how we might go about being something more than what we were already struggling to be. And though when I was younger I believed I wanted to have a child, I was not surprised to find myself at thirty-five, and then forty, without one. Maybe it seems like ambivalence, Your Honor, and I suppose in part it was, but it was something else, too, a feeling I’ve always had, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that there is—that there will always be—more time left for me. The years went by, my face changed in the mirror, my body was no longer what it had been, but I found it difficult to believe that the possibility of having my own child could expire without my explicit agreement.
In the taxi home that night I continued to think about that mother and her children. The wheels of the car softly rolling over the pine needles on the forest floor, the engine cut in a clearing, the pale faces of those young painters asleep in the backseat, dirt under their fingernails. How could she have done it? I said aloud to S. It was not really the question I wanted to ask, but it was as close as I could get just then. She lost her mind, he said simply, as if that were the end of it.
Not long afterwards I wrote a story about the dancer’s childhood friend who had died asleep in his mother’s car in the German forest. I didn’t change any of the details; I only imagined more of them. The house the children lived in, the buoyant smell of spring evenings seeping through the windows, the trees in the garden that they had planted themselves, all rose up easily before me. How the children would sing together songs that their mother had taught them, how she read the Bible to them, how they kept their collection of birds’ eggs on the sill, and how the boy would climb into the sister’s bed on stormy nights. The story was accepted by a prominent magazine. I didn’t call the dancer before it was published, nor did I send him a copy of the story. He lived through it, and I made use of it, embellishing it as I saw fit. Seen in a certain light, that is the kind of work I do, Your Honor. When I received a copy of the magazine I did wonder for a moment if the dancer would see it and how it would make him feel. But I did not spend very long on the thought, basking instead in the pride of seeing my work printed in the illustrious font of the magazine. I didn’t run into the dancer for some time afterwards, nor did I think about what I would say if I did. Furthermore, after the story was published, I stopped thinking about the mother and her children who had burned to death in a car, as if by writing about them I had made them disappear.
I continued to write. I wrote another novel at the desk of Daniel Varsky, and another after that, largely based on my father who had died the year before. It was a novel I could not have written while he was alive. Had he been able to read it, I have little doubt that he would have felt betrayed. Toward the end of his life he lost control of his body and was abandoned by his dignity, something he remained painfully aware of until his final days. In the novel I chronicled these humiliations in vivid detail, even the time he defecated in his pants and I had to clean him, an incident he found so shameful that for many days afterwards he was unable to look me in the eye, and which, it goes without saying, he would have pleaded with me, if he could have brought himself to mention it, never to repeat to anyone. But I did not stop at these torturous, intimate scenes, scenes which, could my father momentarily suspend his sense of shame, he might have acknowledged as reflecting less on him than the universal plight of growing old and facing one’s death—I did not stop there, but instead took his illness and suffering, with all of its pungent detail, and finally