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Cats moved out of sight, and shadows – even the very shadows – stayed as they were. And there was a hushed holding-in of things, no wind, no rustling in the leaves of trees, no animal sounds. I heard afterwards that for two hours or more some days earlier the birds had withdrawn from the air as though it were night or there were some cataclysm in progress that meant danger to them and made them retreat into their nests. When I arrived in Cana there was a strange emptiness in the streets. As I set out, I did not know that he had already died. I wondered if I should visit him or his sisters. So I did not ask for news of him but I often thought of him, especially as I prepared to come to Cana. I do not know for how long this went on I know that they cared for him and I know too that it was as though a golden harvest had been mowed down by a night's dark wind, or a pestilence had come into the trees, and it was unlucky even to mention his name or ask for news of him. If the door opened as someone came into the room, it would be enough for him, he would cry out. But there was nothing to be done, there was poison growing in his head, he began to weaken and he could not bear light, even a chink of light. I know that he moaned in pain for a day or two and then he was better and then the pains came again, and they came in his head and they often lasted through the night and that he cried out, he cried out that he would promise to be good. There were years when I did not see him, the years when the family moved to Bethany before they returned to live in Cana, but I always heard the news and it always included something about him – how he was growing up golden and graceful, serious and kind, and how worried they were because they knew they would not be able to keep him, that something would happen to him, that a great city would call to him, that the charm he exuded and his beauty, grown manly now, would need another realm in which to flourish.īut no one realised that it would be the realm of death he was destined for, that all the grace and beauty, all of his aura of specialness, like a gift from the gods to his parents and his sisters, that all of it was a grim joke, like being teased by a smell of delicious food or the possibility of plenty, when it was really only something passing by, destined for elsewhere. I now know that he was alone among us in possessing something strange – he had not been visited by darkness or by fear, by what comes into our spirits in the deepest part of the night or the end of the Sabbath and lurks there.
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Instantly, as soon as other children saw him, they wanted him in their game whatever they did once he was there became peaceful and harmonious. It made Ramira at times almost embarrassed because when we came to visit we would discover that we were not alone in feeling that we had come to visit the boy as he learned to walk and talk as much we had come to see his parents or his sisters. When we visited Ramira, his mother, she would put her fingers to her lips and take us across the room to where his cot lay and when we looked in he seemed to be already smiling.
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He seemed to smile before he did anything else. Of all the children that any of us had, he was, from the day he appeared in the world, the most beautiful and giving. C lose to the house of my cousin Miriam was the house of Lazarus.