We did not see my father’s two brothers or his sister very much in all those years. I remember that we met his sister on the street one day and I did not recognize her. But now they appeared in the house in all their gravity, and they spoke in whispers.

I went into my parents’ bedroom a few times in those days; the room was darkened because the curtains were drawn, but I could still see that the figure in the bed had grown thin, and his face now was like the face of an old man. I did not want to touch him or go too close to him, and I was glad when I was told by my mother that I was not to go into the room again. A doctor came and went, and then a nurse arrived and sat in the room and came out and whispered something. I watched her but I did not hear what she said. I remember it as a time when there were hardly any sounds: light footfalls, soft voices, doors being noiselessly opened and closed. I did not go to school for days on end, but drifted around the apartment or stayed in my room. I was not allowed to listen to the radio. I did not think that my father was really alive in there. He did not talk, and he could not eat. Sometimes, they said, he slept, but I did not know what he did when he was awake. He was part of a world I could not imagine, his body fading away in a darkened room, his family keeping vigil. I did not think about him then at all.

He must have died in the night. My aunt came and whispered the news to me in the morning, and told me not to cry or make any noise. Just to get up quietly and put on my clothes. I was not surprised. I hoped that they would bury him and then we could come home. I pictured us coming back up the stairs without him, into the empty apartment, and opening up the curtains in the bedroom, and making dinner, and turning on the radio, and continuing as though he had never existed.

But I wanted these days to be over. I wanted the apartment to myself again. I hated the hushed voices. I tried to imagine what they would do now. Would they take all his clothes off? How would he get from here to the church to the grave? How soon would his body rot and his teeth fall out? I was just past my twelfth birthday and I was growing all the time. My uncle took me out of the apartment to buy me a new set of clothes. I passed my mother in the hallway, but she was surrounded by people and had a handkerchief to her nose. My uncle and I sneaked by her, tiptoed our way out of the apartment.