About Grace (37 page)

On the fifth of December he moved into his new apartment. The view was good: Ship Creek, and the rail yard, and Knik Arm beyond. He brought in his few clothes, his Stratalab, his nerite shells; he taped Christopher's drawing to the center of a large blank wall.

In the mailbox was a letter from Soma, with a Santiago postmark.

Dear David
—

I've rented a Honda motoneta. I ride all over the place. Once you learn to be a little aggressive, things are much better. I drove it to the Moneda today. Most of the same offices are still there, with new people in them, of course. I saw where I used to work. They even let me into Felix's kitchen, which is all redone but still very much the same. I have bought each of the boys a little model of the palace, made of plastic, but very accurately done, and I think tomorrow I will wrap them in tissue paper and mail them off.

Naaliyah, we think, will stop here before she returns to the States.

My friend who I am staying with, Violetta, has a balcony on the thirty-third floor. We sit among her ferns and drink Fan-Schops, which are half-Fanta and half-beer. They taste very good, although I'm sure Felix would call them “for women” and say he felt sorry for the beer. I drink one of them and cannot stop. I pour another, and another…

I go jogging with Violetta which is hilarious because we are both
very slow and she wears bright orange shorts and hardly any top, and she makes sure we go through the Plaza del Mulato Gil de Castro where all the rich men sit and drink coffee, the two of us huffing and wheezing and stumbling on the cobblestones. Sometimes they whistle at her. I just try to keep my eyes straight ahead and not fall. The thing with running is that it feels so good afterward, when you're in the shower and all the beat is still in your muscles.

But the Honda is the most fun, riding up and down the streets, parking meters ticking by. I love that at any time you can look up and see the sky and the trees and the tops of buildings sliding past.

As he drifted toward sleep he saw Soma on her rented moped, riding the streets of Santiago, meandering in and out of neighborhoods, the city an elaborate version of one of Christopher's drawings: smog on the mountains, planes settling down over the vineyards by the airport, tourists streaming toward the shore, a thousand lamps going on and off in windows high in the buildings.

Did I mention that Violetta has a girlfriend? She calls her her
pareja
,
like the other shoe in a pair. Her name is Pamela and she grows bougainvillea. She is in charge of it for several huge buildings and she took me to see it today. It crawls probably a hundred meters high up the side of one of her towers downtown. The bricks are thick with it. Pamela said to wait, and we waited as the sun moved, and when it got to the corner of the building, all that bougainvillea, starting at the left, then halfway across, and then, for about twenty seconds, every single flower, caught on fire with the light.

Sometimes I can't believe I've been allowed to live this long, to see these things. After everything, after all this, I still can't help but think it is so lovely. Isn't it, David? Isn't all of it so damn outrageously beautiful?

That night he dreamed of snow. He was in the north, in the Yukon-Charley, in the little cabin at Camp Nowhere, and snow fell in the gaps, weighing down the boughs, filling the valley.

In the dream a figure labored up from the creek, feeling its way through the spruce, a hand going to branches as it pushed its way forward. Despite the snow and distance, he could tell the figure was a woman—he knew this from her gait, the shape of her hips. She was stooped under a load, her face hidden behind a hood. She brought her feet up through the snow. Behind her, faintly, traveled the shadows of animals, accompanying her out of the woods: squirrels and foxes and a pair of ghostly caribou, even a huge, sleek lynx, all of them looking right and left before taking a few more wary steps, insubstantial as shadows. She left the edge of the trees and started across the meadow. The animals followed, gathering behind her, stepping through the starlight, sniffing at the air, and her footprints, the places she had been.

She went not to the door but straight to the window where Winkler stood. She pressed a mitten to the pane and traced the frost there. His own hand went to the glass to meet it. “Naaliyah?” he said, but the figure was smaller than Naaliyah, lighter, and when her face finally turned toward the glass, he knew who it was, what the smile on her face meant.

He woke, and went to the window. The neighboring houses were dark and quiet. A train was easing into the rail yard, a yellow engine with a dozen or so tanker cars pulling in behind it. A gentle snow had
begun, its hundred thousand crystals touching down everywhere, on the train cars, and atop the big fuel tanks at the port, and all across the quiet black fields of the harbor. The stars had revolved again, and the Earth was tilting away from the sun.

Snow fell in the city; ice reached across the ponds; the sea groaned as it collapsed, again and again, onto the wharf.

From the reviews of
About Grace:

‘Etched with acute artistry…this is a formidable literary achievement'

PETER CARTY
,
Independent

‘An exceptional first novel…this book will take your breath away. Doerr writes with elegiac beauty about human frailty and the power of Nature, weaving complex metaphors into a literary carpet of dazzling luminosity. His sentences are turned stones, plain to the eye, but each revealing a wondrous whorl of life beneath. I can't remember when a novel so entranced me…faultless'

MELANIE MCGRATH
,
Evening Standard

‘Doerr writes wonderfully, lyrically, of the natural world…an impressive debut'

Guardian

‘Wonder and puzzled awe are matched perfectly by Doerr's prose, a straightforward narration and style finely tuned to its purpose, compelling, balanced and anchored to the solid ground of the story being told; with a finesse, flair and precision equally suited to its grander themes and to the heart and soul of the man at their centre'

ROBERT EDRIC
,
Spectator

‘Doerr's descriptions reveal marvels that normally go unnoticed…his sentences entice us with their beauty.
About Grace
is a remarkable novel'

Times Literary Supplement

‘Compelling…it lingers in the mind like an eerie dream'

Daily Mail

‘My personal pick for word-of-mouth book of the year'

SCOTT PACK
, Waterstone's Fiction Buyer

‘Doerr's gifts as a stylist are powerfully in evidence: his writing is crystalline, his attention to detail intense and evocative'

CLAIRE MESSUD
,
Daily Telegraph

Harper Perennial
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First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © Anthony Doerr 2005

PS section Louise Tucker 2005, except ‘On Wilson Bentley'
by Anthony Doerr © Anthony Doerr 2005
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Anthony Doerr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work
of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-40511-4

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