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?
17
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.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, and to Princeton University for its generous Hodder Fellowship—thank you, Mary Hodder. Enormous gratitude to Nan Graham and the incomparable Wendy Weil. Also: Molly Kleinman, Emily Forland, Alexis Gargagliano, Judy Mitchell, and Alan Heathcock. To my brothers, always. To Hal and Jacque Eastman for their unceasing encouragement. To most everyone else: You’re in here. For more information on snow crystals, visit the excellent site www.snowcrystals.com.
More than anything, thank you, Shauna, for all your countless graces.
About the Author
ANTHONY DOERR, originally from Cleveland, Ohio, has lived in Africa and New Zealand. He is the winner of numerous literary prizes and is currently a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Praise
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
By the Same Author
The Shell Collector
Copyright
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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
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