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

identify those moments—to fill them in—even when she had, indeed, understood very little. On the occasion in question Madame had paused in just this way, and it was into that pause that Martha had (after a troubling moment of uncertainty) laughed . She knew in an instant that it was wrong, but—and for a reason that afterward she could not explain to either Ginny or herself—she did not stop laughing right away. Perhaps she hoped to suggest, in continuing to laugh, a more complete and impenetrable misunderstanding.
    When she did stop, she saw that Madame’s face was stricken and sad, but not knowing what else to do—how togo backward and undo anything that had now been done—she only apologized, throwing up her hands. Then—unable to express anything in the past tense, and so refer to the misunderstanding in particular—she said, “I never understand anything,” and quickly exited the room.
    Nothing else passed between them until the next morning, when Martha, as usual, brought Madame her coffee in bed. As she entered the room, Madame gestured to a picture on the nightstand of a young man, then put her hand to her open mouth, pointing her forefinger to the back of her throat like the barrel of a gun, and fired.
    This, Martha understood. She stopped, frozen, with the tray in her hands and did not move until Madame, who seemed afterward her usual self, plumped up her pillow and asked for her coffee, because it had not come.
    IT WAS TRUE: if Martha at that time believed anything at all, it was that life, though sad in moments, sad in parts, was not—in sum—sad at all, and that the sad parts served in the end only to strengthen the overall story. Still, until she moved away from the Left Bank and into Charlie’s apartment in the Eleventh, leaving Madame and Madame’s son forever behind, she came to avoid certain objects, certain corners of the house. Sometimes she would find herself thinking bitterly of Madame because of the manner in which she had introduced her son—that other, perpetually doomed presence—into the house, as if he, too, were a necessary element in an otherwise essentiallyagreeable system of which Martha had been part. (Wagner in the mornings, cheese at noon, a mutual understanding of the perfect falsity of language.) Until, that is, Martha discovered Charlie’s French doors and moved across the river and began—slowly at first—her own depreciation.
    Perhaps that was the real purpose of Martha’s stay with Madame Bernard. Not to provide the one luxury Madame afforded herself, the morning coffee in bed, but rather to abet a distribution of the terrible, untranslatable loneliness of that house—to share in the weight of it, and even take a little with her when she went away.
    Later, she couldn’t help wondering if the boy had really done it like that (Madame’s forefinger, aimed at her throat), or if perhaps it had been performed somewhat differently, or even not at all, but that Madame could think—at that time—of only one foolproof method by which so great a sadness might be explained, or conveyed.

T HIS WILL BE DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN

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    For Monika
    AN OFFICER, IN THE very early morning, came to our door. We couldn’t sleep, and so we crowded on the stairs. We listened to our parents’ voices: rising.
    Then the officer went away, but still we didn’t sleep.
    My mother took the dog out to the yard. He howled and would not stop. It was dawn; the dew was on the grass. I could see it on the edges of each blade, from the door.
    The officer was a small man. No bigger than my thumb. When I sat with my brother at the top of the stairs, I could, with the tip of it, conceal him entirely. I showed my brother. He laughed. Then came the shot. I covered his ears.
    WHEN THE SUN CAME in it was like the moon that we were waking upon. Where was the bed? Where, finally—had I slept—I would have