“Everything” by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Philip Boehm and Tess Lewis

When we sit down to eat like two people turned to stone or when we meet at the door to the apartment in the evening because we both thought to lock it at the same time, I feel our grief stretching like a bow from one end of the world to the other—in other words, from Hanna to myself—a bow that is drawn and fitted with an arrow that must fly straight to the heart of the unmoved heavens. When we walk back through the front hall she’s two steps ahead of me, she goes into the bedroom without saying “Good night” and I flee to my room, to my desk, where I stare into space, her lowered head before my eyes and her silence in my ears. Is she lying down and trying to sleep or is she awake and waiting? What for?—since she isn’t waiting for me!

When I married Hanna it was less about her than because she was pregnant. I didn’t have a choice, I didn’t have to make a decision.…