This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud Page A

them—lucklessly.)
    At last, when in a final and lingering hesitation Madame understood that Martha’s request was complete, she removed her finger from the page, laid the book aside, and shuffled to the kitchen without a word—her rolled-up trousers rustling at the knee. Reaching up to the high shelf above the stove, she chose from among the other crowded objects a bowl of waxen fruit, which she offered to Martha, evidently pleased to honour her request. The fruit glinted, still shiny in places, in the light of the kitchen’s single bulb. Martha’s French was indeed so poor in those days that she would have found it nearly impossible to refuse—or to clarify her request in any way—so she accepted the fruit graciously, with a nod and a smile.
    Especially in moments such as these, and with Madame there were many, Martha’s progress in the language struck her as frustratingly slow. She was unable to concentrate on the verb charts and vocabulary words that she had posted on her bedroom walls, and so rarely studied them at all. Instead, she drifted off into a disturbed sleep, where her dreams, laboriously translated from the English, exhausted her and she woke up tired.
    IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE third month of her stay, long after the incident with the fruit, that she realized suddenly, and with what seemed like no progression toward it, that she understood; she hardly needed to concentrate anymore.She was relieved, but at the same time—and this she never would have anticipated—a little disappointed, too. It was a different sort of Paris that she’d lived in when she’d understood so little. It had been like an object. Something she could put on , or examine , or hold . Only once that was gone did she realize how easy it was, even in Paris, to slip into the ordinary, to begin the inevitable depreciation of things.
    She would long remember the last—great—misunderstanding, however. It took place during her sixth week in the apartment, when Madame told Martha about the death of her son. The details would always remain distorted and vague, just in the way that Martha had first received them. She found herself afterward wondering about him not infrequently, sometimes horrified by small things—a desk, a globe, a knife—fearing they might have come into play somehow in a story that she had so thoroughly failed to understand.
    Later, Martha would tell Ginny of the event: “I thought I had it right. You know, you can’t just nod and smile with Madame, like with everyone else. I had to figure it out, you see. Where all the funny bits were, and laugh. And then, when the story got sad, I had to know that it did. And I did. I said ‘aah’ and ‘oh’ in all the right places, I’m sure of it! But”—and here Martha rang her hand down flat on the table, making Ginny (who for some time already had sensed the punch line) smile—“I could have sworn ,” Martha said, “that we were well out of the sad bits.” She paused. “It’strue, all stories have got to have both, but it just isn’t fair when you aren’t clear about which one is which.”
    â€œAnd so?” Ginny said, still grinning. “What happened?”
    â€œI laughed,” Martha said. “Right there, at the saddest part of the story.”
    This was just the punchline that Ginny had expected, and she herself laughed uproariously, which pleased Martha because she and Ginny had only just met, and it’s nice to make someone you’ve just met laugh. Also, this was a few weeks after she’d first met Charlie, and she would have been hard pressed, then, to believe that there was really anything sad about life after all.
    MADAME DID HAVE THE curious habit of pausing after she’d told a good joke, as though testing Martha to see how much—if anything—she’d understood; and Martha had learned, or thought she had, to