“But the first voice kept rummaging through pieces of satin, peering out onto balconies with strictly kept hours; crossing a station left dusty and rattled by a passing express train; but almost always on a balcony, at dusk, when a trunk catalogued by the nostalgia of strange women was a prospect still far away. And as they smoothed out a piece of darkly colored felt, or returned a locket to its place, I thought of how there should be no such thing as fatherless women (children mattered little to me, I thought only of women), unprepared, suddenly abandoned when someone turned cold beside long needles slowly injecting an intravenous liquid; a bandage gripping a thigh, until the listless, futile dripping went on no more, and someone in the same room suggested potential funeral parlors, without understanding, without despairing to think of how unschooled they were after the way they smiled, the way they said they were willing to work, to be brave—when it wasn’t true, they, with their agonizing predicaments, weren’t even ready for the most ordinary happiness, or the recommended job, or the silent house with visiting days, or the moment they might be hungry—even if it wasn’t true hunger, but a hunger for small, varied servings—or to grow weary of things that were easy, of things that were too much, or of things awaited at the end of the day, the struct and calculated day that didn’t end with a belated good night in the certainty of brushing against the same cheek the next day.”
-from People in the Room by Norah Lange, translated by Charlotte Whittle
