Educated: Chapters 24–29

Articles had appeared in nearly every major newspaper blasting the government’s callous disregard for life.

I hadn’t seen him look so helpless since he’d crouched next to our wrecked station wagon, watching Mother’s face bulge and distend, unable even to touch her because electrified cables were sending a deadly pulse through the metal.

This estrangement was not formalized: I just didn’t feel like seeing him, or hearing his voice, so I didn’t.

I know that when Mother had removed the gauze that morning, she’d found that his ears were so burned, the skin so glutinous, they had fused to the syrupy tissue behind them.

I can still picture her gripping the knife, her eyes fixed, focused, but where my father should be, there’s an aperture in my memory.

She had no idea if it would work—if there was even an organ in that part of the body to absorb the water—but it was the only orifice that hadn’t been scorched.

Mother offered to buy him pharmaceuticals, the strongest analgesics she could get her hands on, but he declined them.

Instead I kept the burden for myself, and my friendship with Nick, already anemic, underfed and underused, dwindled in obsolescence.

I learned about the Jewish diaspora and the strange history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

It was as if the universe understood this and was trying to prevent the blasphemy of my going.

His will, it turned out, was that Emily give birth at home at twenty-six weeks’ gestation.

Finally the staircase opened onto the roof, which was heavily slanted, an inverted V enclosed by stone parapets.

My supervisor, I learned, was the eminent Professor Jonathan Steinberg, a former vice-master of a Cambridge college, who was much celebrated for his writings on the Holocaust.

He was lithe, and his eyes moved about the room with probing energy.

“Many women struggle with their faith after they learn about polygamy,” he said. “My mother did. I don’t think she’s ever understood it.”