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The Story of the Night - Part One
[ This chapter has been split into the original page breakup of the book,
and for that reason starts off at page three ]
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During her last year my mother grew obsessive about the emblems of
empire: the Union Jack, the Tower of London, the Queen, and Mrs. Thatcher.
As the light in her eyes began to fade, she plastered the apartment with
tourist posters of Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard and
magazine photographs of the royal family; her accent became posher and her
face took on the guise of an elderly duchess who had suffered a long
exile. She was lonely and sad and distant as the end came close.
I am living once more in her apartment. I am sleeping in her bed, and I
am using, with particular relish, the heavy cotton sheets that she was
saving for some special occasion. In all the years since she died I have
never opened the curtains in this room. The window, which must be very
dirty now, looks on to Lavalle, and if I open it I imagine there is a
strong possibility that some residual part of my mother that flits around
in the shadows of this room will fly out over the city, and I do not want
that. I am not ready for it.
She died the year before the war and thus I was spared her mad
patriotism and foolishness. I know that she would have waved a Union Jack
out of the window, that she would have shouted slogans at whoever would
listen, that she would have been overjoyed at the prospect of a flotilla
coming down from England, all the way across the world in the name of
righteousness and civilization, to expel the barbarians from the Falkland
Islands. The war would have been her shrill revenge on everybody, on my
father and his family, and on the life she had been forced to live down
here so far away from home. I can
3.
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