The Tragedy of Izaak Levinsky || bxb

PROLOGUE

MY FEVER HAS GOTTEN STRONGER; my hands and body are weak, and shake wildly, reminding me that they are real and not another figment of my imagination, fueled by feverish dreams.

I lie under four blankets, despite the heat of an Australian summer coming through the window in beams of harsh light. The two pillows prop me up against the metal railings of the bed, and to my left there is a ceramic bowl, the only thing I could find in the moments in between my bouts of increadible nausea. The white is stained a greenish-yellow now, a watery layer on top with bits floating like islands for the two flies who seem delighted by the terrific sink.

The light is too bright in this small room; the metal of my bed railings too hard, but I cannot find the energy to roll over and pull myself out of the bed and to the window where a black-out curtain waits to be pulled across, a remenant of a war, now so long ago. Instead, I lay on my back, unable to read and write, tucked under all the blankets I could find, watching as everyone I have ever known enters and leaves the room like visiting family. Some of them speak; some of them don't; some are only vague imprints of characters I knew long ago, but all of them, all of them, are as real as the bowl of vomit beside me, and I know that finally I am dying and I am atoning for my sins.

The first I can remember - properly remember - is Mary Thompson. She's still the same as when I last saw her; black a-line skirt and blouse, a black cloche hat planted on a head of blonde curls. She is imortalised at twenty at my mothers burial, although now she is over thirty, probably married and a mother in her own right.

I can just imagine her: two children and another on the way. The oldest is a boy, maybe five or six, and her husband chooses the name. A David or a Richard. The second child is a girl called Jane, because Mary's favourite author is Jane Austen. She is three, chubby and beautiful; they dress her in baby blue. The child on the way is a boy, and my wishful thinking is that they will call him Issac, an English spelling of my name, but only because by then Mary will know I am dead. Issac will be lovely, everything I am not. He will marry at 25 and have children of his own, and they will have children of their own. Mary will be happy, and so will Issac.

"Oh Izaak," Mary says, and she cries. She is standing over my grave, missing me in a way she has not done in over ten years. "I love you."

She was my sister and mother the way my own mother wasn't. I loved her too.

My father is another phantom visitor, another ghost. I can barley remember him - he died when I was four - and so he doesn't look completely right. He is a combination of what I remember, what my mother had told me, and what features of mine I couldn't see in my mother's face. He is tall, as tall as me, with brown-blonde hair. He is younger than I am now.

"Da, daddy," I cry out in Polish, because despite all the languages I can speak, my mother tongue remains my strongest.

He watches me silently.

I think because he died when I was very young, I never got the chance to hate him because I never saw his flaws. There is something inherently tragic about it, but those half-remembered four years mean more to me than the remaining eleven with my mother.

Something reaches out to grab him, and pull him away. I recognise it as the linen shroud he was wrapped in before his burial.

"Tata," I cry out again, but he has already gone.

After this I am very upset. For a long time, I toss and turn, whimpering about not very much. The sunlight is too harsh, and the sweat on my forehead makes my hair plaster down. Then I cry and cry, and finally, when I have no more tears left, and I am a weak shell of whatever person I once was, my mother comes.