![]() ![]() Siding with the man, the furniture supplied few clues: a secretary of dark wood was fitted in its top section with pigeonholes and small closed drawers. The expression, not calm but contained, was unrevealing. As a boy, Leith had wondered how his father could always have good clothes so seldom renewed-a seeming impossibility, like having a perpetual two days' growth of beard. The torso broad but spare the clothes unaffected, old and good. Forehead full, full crop of longish white hair. Features fine and lined, light eyes, one eyelid drooping. In an enactment of momentary interruption, the man was half-turned to the camera, left elbow on blotter, right hand splayed over knee. It was one of those pictures, the author at his desk. Aldred Leith was holding a book in his right hand-not reading, but looking at a likeness of his father on the back cover. Meanwhile, he was examining a photograph of his father. He would presently see that rain continued to fall on the charred suburbs of Tokyo, raising, even within the train, a spectral odour of cinders. Leith sat by a window, his body submissively chugging as they got under way. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain. ![]() From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. There were thuds, hoots, whistles, and the shrieks of late arrivals. Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. To be published in October, 2003 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. Excerpt from The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. ![]()
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