TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Goran Vojnović

Hunter’s Album .

Shall I read it to you? he asked, as a way of bringing her back round, and severing the melancholy that he’d brought into the house. He was surprised when she nodded, and he took the book from beneath her hands and started to read. He thought he’d just read a page or two, but when he went to return the book to the pile, she said More , and so on he read, and then she said More yet again, and he carried on reading, until the light had faded and he could no longer see the letters, and was forced to stop in the middle of a page. Mid-sentence. The following morning, it was she who placed a book in his hands. Another book. A book by Somerset Maugham. Of Human Bondage . She’s remembered yesterday, he thought to himself, she’s remembered him. It moved him, and his voice faltered as he read. He felt, for the first time in a long time, that something had occurred between them again; that his voice was getting through to her. Maybe it was only individual words that were getting through; maybe, for her, reading was only a pleasant murmur, a slight variation on silence that she longed to hear. But there was something between them again, which had spent the night in her memory and which had awoken with her the next day. And so he kept on reading. The sun shone through the window and the letters on thepage bathed in the light. Shewas calmagain, and it seemed as if she were listening, as if she were present, with 74