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the dishes he cooked. The place where he read while Píulix
climbed on top of him or counted his ribs, the place where
the two of them listened to
Peter and the Wolf
on winter
nights. The place where on Wednesday our daughter
scratched out her first notes on the violin and he was
moved—recently he was easily moved by things related to
her or to me. The same place where two weeks ago I, who
never put on my music, dared to play Charles Trenet while
he was in the kitchen cooking
kokotxas
(hake cheeks) and
he suddenly appeared when he heard
“Que reste-t-il de nos
amours,”
wanting to dance the last part with me as he
whistled the tune. It was unusual for him, and yet, at the
same time, it was one of those amorous outbursts that
could only have come from him, for just imagine—if I’d
been the one to request the dance, one burned
kokotxa
would have sufficed for all hell to break loose! No, no . . .
you couldn’t play around with these things, especially if he
was in the kitchen or if there was music involved.
In any case, the living room was very much his space. And
now the objects in it are challenging us: “Place me in the
present, make me useful, give me a purpose!” We lost the
living room in my home when my father died. It was almost
as if it had been closed off. After that it was always lifeless.
Of course, I belong to that generation where parents didn’t
let children set foot in the room. The living room was
sacrosanct and immaculate, a place for entertaining that
resembled a model room in a show house or a furniture
store, one that children weren’t allowed to contaminate