Tenderness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “Uh…also, uh…I love you!” I tried to say it as insincerely as I could get away with and half-smiled as I spoke. I was still hugging the boy, so he couldn’t see the disingenuous look on my youthful face. It made me feel less weird to smile like it was a joke. But then the boy hugged me tighter and whispered in my ear. He spoke flawlessly, without a stutter and without hesitation. “I love you, too.” There was such tenderness and earnestness in his voice, and just like that, I thought I would start crying. — I was in my office, talking to Jimmy Dill on the night of his execution, and I realized I was thinking about something that had happened nearly forty years earlier. I also realized that I was crying. The tears were sliding down my cheeks—runaways that escaped when I wasn’t paying attention. Mr. Dill was still laboring to get his words out, desperately trying to thank me for trying to save his life. As it got closer and closer to the time of his execution, it became harder for him to speak. The guards were making noise behind him, and I could tell he was upset that he couldn’t get his words out right, but I didn’t want to interrupt him. So I sat there and let the tears fall down my face. The harder he tried to speak, the more I wanted to cry. The long pauses gave me too much time to think. He would never have been convicted of capital murder if he had just had the money for a decent lawyer. He would never have been sentenced to death if someone had investigated his past. It all felt tragic. His struggle to form words and his determination to express gratitude reinforced his humanity for me, and it made thinking about his impending execution unbearable. Why couldn’t they see it, too? The Supreme Court had banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, but states like Alabama refused to assess in any honest way whether the condemned are disabled. We’re supposed to sentence people fairly after fully considering their life circumstances, but instead we exploit the inability of the poor to get the legal assistance they need—all so we can kill them with less resistance. On the phone with Mr. Dill, I thought about all of his struggles and all the terrible things he’d gone through and how his disabilities had broken him. There was no excuse for him to have shot someone, but it didn’t make sense to kill him. I began to get angry about it. Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right? I tried not to let Mr. Dill hear me crying. I tried not to show him that he was breaking my heart. He finally got his words out.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I set off again, intending to follow the path up to the road and then to find my way home. I had decided not to go back to school, I would go straight home, but after another turn in the path I stopped again. There was a clearing to the left and at the side of the path a horse was grazing, still hitched to its cart. Horses are common in Mladost, gypsies use them on their rounds, but I had never seen one unattended before. There was no one in sight; maybe someone had been called by the summons after all. It was a pitiful creature, sickly and thin, its skin hanging loose over protruding ribs; it might have been a portrait of misery, I thought as I stepped closer, but it was grazing sedately enough, pulling at the sparse tufts of grass in the rocky soil. I watched it for a few minutes, and then I laid my hand on its flank, which was dark and broiling with sun, almost too hot to touch. I felt it give a sudden sigh, a quick unburdening of breath as it shifted its frame a little. It wasn’t tied up, I saw, it could have wandered off anytime it chose; but there was nowhere for it to go, of course, and the cart I supposed was heavy, and there was something however meager to be had there where it stood.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Walter grew much more relaxed during our visits. As we became more comfortable with each other, he would sometimes veer into topics that had nothing to do with the case. We talked about the guards at the prison and his experiences dealing with other prisoners. He talked about people back home he thought would visit but hadn’t. In these conversations, Walter showed remarkable empathy. He spent a lot of time imagining what other people were thinking and feeling that might mitigate their behavior. He guessed what frustrations guards must be experiencing to excuse the rude things they said to him. He gave voice to how hard it must be to visit someone on death row. We talked about food he liked, jobs he’d worked when he was younger. We talked about race and power, the things we saw that were funny, and the things we saw that were sad. It made him feel better to have a normal conversation with someone who wasn’t on the row or a guard, and I always spent extra time with him to talk about things unrelated to the case. Not just for him but for myself as well. I was trying so hard to get the project off the ground that my work had quickly become my life. I found something refreshing in the moments I spent with clients when we didn’t relate to one another as attorney and client but as friends. Walter’s case was becoming the most complicated and time-consuming I’d ever worked on, and spending time with him was comforting even though it made me feel the pressure of his mistreatment in ways that became increasingly personal. “Man, all these guys talk about how you’re working on their case. You must not ever get any peace,” he told me once. “Well, everybody needs help, so we’re trying.” He gave me an odd look that I hadn’t seen before. I think he wasn’t sure whether he could give me advice—he hadn’t done that yet. Finally, he seemed to say what he was thinking. “Well, you know you can’t help everybody,” he looked at me earnestly. “You’ll kill yourself if you try to do that.” He continued looking at me with concern. I smiled. “I know.” “I mean, you gotta help me. You shouldn’t hold nothing back on my case,” he said with a smile. “I expect you to fight all comers to get me out of here. Take ’em all down, if necessary.” “Stand up to giants, slay wild beasts, wrestle alligators…,” I joked. “Yeah, and get somebody ready to take over the battle in case they chop your head off, ’cause I’m still going to need help if they take you out.”

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  It was dark as it never was in the city, and if I had been alone I would have been frightened, I think, I wasn’t a brave child; but my father lay beside me, large and warm in the grass, resting his head back pillowed on his hands. I mimicked this posture as I listened to his voice direct me to the stars and their patterns, which I could never pick out, the patterns and the names that I loved, some of them strange and others homely, Cassiopeia, I recited, the Big Dipper and the Little Bear. I was in my father’s confidence, I felt, in the warm thick of it, and so it didn’t frighten me to think of the stars and the millions of years it had been since that light was made, even the very light that rained down on us now; nor did it frighten me to think of the dark through which it passed or the dark (my father said) from which it had come, the star itself having gone dark already, perhaps, having ceased to produce the light that reached us and would continue to reach us for millions of years; or maybe then (the voice still spoke but not I thought to me) it would fall where there was no one to receive it, the orphaned light, maybe it would rain on barrenness, our human kind having gone somewhere else, or maybe having disappeared altogether. Surely I only imagine now, from this distance, that there was longing in his voice as he spoke, surely I didn’t hear it then, when I turned to him and put my arms around him and buried my face in his chest, as I was still young enough to do, when he wrapped his arms around me in turn, holding me even as I could feel him withdraw into his own reverie or contemplation. But I do hear it, the longing I think he felt as he drifted away from me and from the scene we inhabited together, which must have seemed so different to him, for whom it was the life he had escaped. It was only six months or so before the day when I left my classroom and walked into the September heat that I learned fully both the extent of his longing and the full measure of what he had fled. My sisters had come to visit me in Sofia, my half sisters, the two daughters my father had with his second wife. They were more than a decade younger than I, and I had always felt an overwhelming tenderness for them, which competed with the envy I felt of the love my father showed them so freely.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Finally we stopped laughing, we rose and brushed the dirt from our clothes. We had been walking for hours when we got back to my father’s house, and as we slid beneath the door again we complained that our feet and our legs hurt, and K. said his back hurt as well. We were both exhausted and we fell gratefully onto the bed in the main room; it was a waterbed and we laughed again as we fell onto it, it knocked us up and down and we grabbed on both to the frame and to each other to steady ourselves. We managed to find our balance and keep the mattress still, or not quite still exactly, even turning our heads made it wobble, but though we were tired neither of us was in the mood to sleep. We lay beside each other, as always endlessly talking, and then K. complained about his back again, asking if I would rub it for him. He rolled over to give me access but it was impossible on the bed, when I applied my weight the mattress just gave way beneath him, he said he didn’t feel anything, and so he got up and sat down on the wooden frame, placing his feet on the ground and turning his back to me. But he still wasn’t comfortable, he asked me to reach beneath his shirt and rub the skin itself, and I did, I gripped his shoulders and kneaded them, I applied pressure until he hissed and then I eased off. I worked his neck and down the column of his spine, the muscles bunched on either side, and maybe for the first time in our friendship our constant chatter had ceased. I had never touched anyone in that way before, I wanted to keep touching him, and I was dismayed when K. shifted his weight, I thought he had had enough and was getting up. But instead he began to lean back, so slowly that I was confused at first and resisted him, pressing my hands more firmly against his back; it was only when he insisted that I understood and allowed him to lean into me, as he pressed farther leaning back in turn, so that we fell slowly backward until we were lying on the bed again, I on the bed and K. on me. I hadn’t taken my hands out from under his shirt, I had reached around him as he lay back, and now I held him in an embrace that if he didn’t return he didn’t reject, either, he received it, he let his head fall back against my chest and we lay like that for a while. Then he shifted again, or maybe I did, and we were lying beside each other.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Let me help you now, I said, you should go back to Varna, you should be with your mother. At this his eyes softened still further, and I watched them fill with tears. Mitko nodded, he would take the money, and I wondered what urge had been satisfied in pretending he might not. Istinski priyatel , he said again, letting go of my hand and turning back to his drink. But I am your friend too, he said then, the tone of his voice shifting as he poured more milk into the cup, do you know how good a friend I’ve been? Other people, when they’ve seen us together, they’ve said Mitak—which was another one of his names, people here have many nicknames, I had seen others use it with him on Skype or hookup sites but I had never used it myself; it sounded hard to me, Mitak, I never felt it would summon the person I wanted him to be with me. Mitak, they’ve said, what are you doing with that guy, why are you hanging out with that faggot, and he used the word pederast , here as elsewhere it’s the preferred term of abuse. There are other words for what he said, of course, but pedal or obraten wouldn’t have struck with the same force, I would have had to translate them, however quickly; words in a foreign language never wound us like words in the language to which we’re born. But when I heard this word, pederast , I drew away from him slightly and grew very still. But ne ne vikam az , he went on, I say he’s not a faggot, I tell them leave him alone, toi e hetero . He was stirring the yogurt in its little cup as he said this, staring not at me but at it, his eyes still unfocused though he was more lucid than I had thought, I realized, lucid enough to make his threats, since I knew it was a threat he was making. Why are you saying this, Mitko, I asked, giving up our private names, why are you saying this to me?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I felt his erection—the idiot emblem of the day—yearning against my thigh, and waited resignedly as his hands wandered down towards my own. It was a curious experience, for while he stroked he seemed instinctively to be feeling for other symptoms, exercising that slight pressure which discovers a tender kidney or a swollen gland. He was rather fastidious when he reached his objective too. I turned on my front, and he gave a little humorous sigh and tipped his forehead against mine while I told him of a thing that happened on the train. It was while I was coming to see him and had taken place just in front of me, an ordinary thing and yet calmly beyond the turmoil of my own mood, in fact wonderfully self-sufficient and entire. Among the crowd that got on at Tottenham Court Road were a black couple with a baby: they took the two places against the glass partition, so that the man and I sat—as I had done with Gabriel shortly before—knee to knee. Once he had looked at me politely as I shifted to make room for him he had no interest in me at all—and I hardly took notice of him. His wife held the impassive and very young child in her arms: despite the heat it was dressed in a quilted one-piece suit, but with the hood back. My thoughts were all elsewhere, though I saw the man, about thirty, I suppose, lean over the baby’s open flawless face, and smile down on it, out of pure pleasure and love. His fingertips moved from his own softly bearded lips and gently stroked and almost held within their span his child’s lolling wispy head. His other hand lay loosely in his lap, and it took me a while to see that he was hiding and coaxing—yes—a hard-on in his respectable grey slacks. I was not aroused by this; but did I dwindle, if only for a moment, in the face of their glowing, fertile closeness? I felt perhaps I did.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  GLOSS. (non occ.) Because human prosperity seems to consist chiefly in the honours of the mighty and the abundance of their riches, after speaking of the casting down of the mighty, and the exalting of the humble, he goes on to tell of the impoverishing of the rich and the filling of the poor, He hath filled the hungry, &c. BASIL. (ubi sup.) These words regulate our conduct even with respect to sensible things, teaching the uncertainty of all worldly possessions, which are as shortlived as the wave which is dashed about to and fro by the violence of the wind. But spiritually all mankind suffered hunger except the Jews; for they possessed the treasures of legal tradition and the teachings of the holy prophets. But because they did not rest humbly on the Incarnate Word, they were sent away empty, carrying nothing with them, neither faith nor knowledge, and were bereft of the hope of good things, being shut out both of the earthly Jerusalem, and the life to come. But those of the Gentiles, who were brought low by hunger and thirst, because they clung to the Lord, were filled with spiritual goods. GLOSS. (ordin.) They also who desire eternal life with their whole soul, as it were hungering after it, shall be filled when Christ shall appear in glory; but they who rejoice in earthly things, shall at the end be sent away emptied of all happiness. 1:54–5554. He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; 55. As he spake to our fathers, Abraham, and to his seed for ever. GLOSS. (non occ.) After a general mention of the Divine mercy and holiness, the Virgin changes the subject to the strange and marvellous dispensation of the new incarnation, saying, He hath holpen his servant Israel, &c. as a physician relieves the sick, becoming visible among men, that He might make Israel (i. e. him who sees God) His servant. BEDE. That is, obedient and humble; for he who disdains to be made humble, cannot be saved. BASIL. (non occ.) For by Israel she means not Israel after the flesh, whom their own title made noble, but the spiritual Israel, which retained the name of faith, straining their eyes to see God by faith. THEOPHYLACT. (vide etiam Tit. Bost.) It might also be applied to Israel after the flesh, seeing that out of that body multitudes believed. But this He did remembering His mercy, for He hath fulfilled what He promised to Abraham, saying, For in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. (Gen. 12:3.) This promise then the mother of God called to mind, saying, As he spake to our father Abraham; (Gen. 17:12.) for it was said to Abraham, I will place my covenant between me and thee, and thy seed after thee, for an eternal covenant, that I shall be thy God, and the God of thy seed after thee.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  There were more pictures, always the two of them alone, one or the other awkwardly angling the camera. They were so young, these boys in the frame, children really, and yet despite their eagerness for each other it was as though they were documenting something they knew could not last. Of course there were no witnesses in their small town to what they were together, neither their families nor their friends, not even strangers passed on the street, since none of the photos was taken outside. Except for these photographs, these digital memories he scrolled through now, nothing would have survived of those embraces that for all their heat had come to an end. Where is he now, I asked Mitko, flooded with tenderness and wanting access to some greater intimacy with him. He didn’t look at me as he answered, still clicking from image to image, his hand moving absently across his chest. He was a schoolteacher, Mitko told me, he left to study abroad and lived in France now, having fled his country along with (I thought) nearly everyone with the talent or means to do so. Of these two men locked together on the screen, then, one left, buoyed by talent or means or both, and the other stayed and was transformed somehow from a prosperous-looking boy to the more or less homeless man I had invited into my home. As if he sensed my sadness and shared it and wanted to give it voice, Mitko opened a new page, a Bulgarian site for video clips, where one can find almost anything, copyright laws have little meaning here. Music, Mitko said, I want you to hear something, and he typed the name of a French singer, someone I had never heard of and whose name escapes me now, into a search engine that dredged up a remarkable number of files. Mitko scanned through several pages, searching for the clip of a song he had shared with Julien, something they had listened to and loved together. Each of the thumbnail images showed a frail woman softly lit, holding a microphone prayerfully in both of her hands.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It could never have come about at all without the tacit consent of the North; and this consent robs the North, historically and actually, of any claim to moral superiority. The failure of the government to make any realistic provision for the edu cation of tens of thousands of illiterate former slaves had the effect of dumping this problem squarely into the lap of one man-who knew, whatever else he may not have known, that the education of Negroes had somehow to be accomplished. Whether or not Washington believed what he said is certainly an interesting question. But he did know that he could ac complish his objective by telling white men what they wanted to hear. And it has never been very difficult for a Negro in this country to figure out what white men want to hear: he takes his condition as an echo of their desires. There will be no more Booker T. Washingtons. And whether we like it or not, and no matter how hard or how long we oppose it, there will be no more segregated schools, there will be no more segregated anything. King is entirely right when he says that segregation is dead. The real question which taces the Republic is just how long, how violent, and how expensive the funeral is going to be; and this question it MAR TIN LUTHER KING is up to the Republic to resolve, it is not really in King's hands. The sooner the corpse is buried, the sooner we can get around to the far more taxing and rewarding problems of integration, or what King calls community, and what I think of as the achievement of nationhood, or, more simply and cruelly, the growing up of this dangerously adolescent country. I saw King again, later that same evening, at a party given by this same friend. He came late, did not stay long. I re member him standing in the shadows of the room, ncar a bookcase, drinking something nonalcoholic, and being patient with the interlocutor who had trapped him in this spot. He obviously wanted to get away and go to bed. King is some what below what is called average height, he is sturdily built, but is not quite as heavy or as stocky as he had seemed to me at first. I remember feeling, rather as though he were a younger, much-l oved, and menaced brother, that he seemed very slight and vulnerable to be taking on such tremendous odds. I was leaving for Montgomery the next day, and I called on King in the morning to ask him to have someone from the Montgomery Improvement Association meet me at the air port. It was he who had volunteered to do this for me, since he knew that I knew no one there, and he also probably re alized that I was frightened. He was coming to Montgomery on Sunday to preach in his own church.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But needless to say it was a long time ago.’ I didn’t want to pursue this vein, and strolled reflectively along to where the two boys ran, as Charles saw it, towards the water. Or perhaps they were already standing in water, lapping round their long-eroded legs. They were intensely poignant. Seen close to, their curves were revealed as pinked, stepped edges, their moving forms made up of tiny, featureless squares. The boy in full-face had his mouth open in pleasure, or as an indication that he was speaking, but it also gave a strong impression of pain. It was at once too crude and too complex to be analysed properly. It reminded me of the face of Eve expelled from Paradise in Masaccio’s fresco. But at the same time it was not like it at all; it could have been a mask of pagan joy. The second young man, following closely behind, leaning forward as if he might indeed be wading through water, was in profile, and expressed nothing but attention to his fellow. What did he see there, I wondered—a mundane greeting or the ecstasy which I read into it? That it was merely a fragment compounded and rarefied its enigma. Charles rested his hand on my shoulder as I bent over it. ‘Jolly fellows, aren’t they?’ ‘I was thinking they were rather tragic.’ ‘My dear, what I want to ask you is this.’ Feeling the physical weight of him on me, I was sure for a moment that he had some physical demand in mind. Would I let him take my clothes off, or kiss me. A don at Winchester had asked a friend of mine to masturbate in front of him, and though he didn’t, such things can harmlessly be done. I stood up straight and looked away over his shoulder. ‘Will you write about me?’ I caught his eye. ‘Well—how do you mean?’ He looked down, quite bashfully, at the bathers. ‘About my life, you know. The memoirs I’ve never written, as it were. I assume you can write?’ I felt touched, and relieved; I also felt that it was quite impossible. ‘I did once write two thousand words on Coade Stone garden ornaments.’ ‘Oh, it would be much more than that.’ ‘But I don’t know anything about you,’ was a second reservation. He smiled. ‘I thought you might be interested to find out, as you say you haven’t anything else to do. I could pay you, of course,’ he added. ‘It’s not that, Charles,’ I said, resting my hand in turn on his shoulder. He looked almost tearful at having brought his idea to a head and facing possible disappointment. ‘Before you say anything else I want to ask you, take time to consider it. Because, though I say it myself, I think it would prove to interest you a very great deal. It wouldn’t be an immense amount of work, in a sense. I’ve got masses of papers.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Its ‘country-house’ smell and the established presence of my things subdued him rather. He gazed abashed at my Whitehaven picture and, with an access of solemnity, embarked on a reading of Tom Jones. I was glad of his self-reliance; and companionable hours passed with him, sprawled in an armchair with his book, and me behind him, at my writing-table, going through Charles’s papers and looking up now and again with a sudden rush of the blood at his powerful figure and sober head, his face, full of thoughts, turned from me in a lost profile. The quiet, slightly contrived domestic mood made me think of Arthur again, and I couldn’t help being grateful for the open windows, the normality, the cool of the new set-up. Not that there weren’t things I missed. It was fine, making love to Phil, and I was obsessed with his body. But he lacked the illiterate, curling readiness of Arthur, his instinct for sex. Both of them were teenagers over whom I had many advantages; both of them watched me for the moves I would make. But where with Arthur, when I did move, there was an immediate transport, a falling-open of the mouth, a mood of necessity that was close to possession, with Phil there was a more selfconscious giving, callow at times and imitative. When I was rough with him it was to break through all that. Phil’s affection expressed itself too in a kind of wrestling, which was sweatily physical but which wasn’t quite sex. There were no rules and it generally involved him in his pants and me in nothing at all, clinching wildly on the sofa or wherever we happened to be, tumbling on to the floor, straining, twisting and squeezing at each other but showing enough decorum not to knock things over. I suppose all this assertion of muscle was his familiar shyness, and silly as it was it had something authentic of him in it, which was beautifully exposed over those few seconds when our eyes at last held each other’s, he fell into a silent slackness of submission and the ragging and bragging dissolved into tenderness and release. I had had a brief talk with Bill after the boxing. The contest itself went on and on and through much of it I sat around in the changing-room while Bill exhorted or solaced his team and a succession of teenaged boys got dressed in front of me. Sometimes fathers, who fancied themselves as boxing pundits, came in with brothers or friends, and lectured, berated or praised their bruised progeny.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The guard came in and he was angry. He snarled at me, “You should have been done a long time ago. You have to leave.” He began handcuffing Henry, pulling his hands together behind his back and locking them there. Then he roughly shackled Henry’s ankles. The guard was so angry he put the cuffs on too tight. I could see Henry grimacing with pain. I said, “I think those cuffs are on too tight. Can you loosen them, please?” “I told you: You need to leave. You don’t tell me how to do my job.” Henry gave me a smile and said, “It’s okay, Bryan. Don’t worry about this. Just come back and see me again, okay?” I could see him wince with each click of the chains being tightened around his waist. I must have looked pretty distraught. Henry kept saying, “Don’t worry, Bryan, don’t worry. Come back, okay?” As the officer pushed him toward the door, Henry turned back to look at me. I started mumbling, “I’m really sorry. I’m really sor—” “Don’t worry about this, Bryan,” he said, cutting me off. “Just come back.” I looked at him and struggled to say something appropriate, something reassuring, something that expressed my gratitude to him for being so patient with me. But I couldn’t think of anything to say. Henry looked at me and smiled. The guard was shoving him toward the door roughly. I didn’t like the way Henry was being treated, but he continued to smile until, just before the guard could push him fully out of the room, he planted his feet to resist the officer’s shoving. He looked so calm. Then he did something completely unexpected. I watched him close his eyes and tilt his head back. I was confused by what he was doing, but then he opened his mouth and I understood. He began to sing. He had a tremendous baritone voice that was strong and clear. It startled both me and the guard, who stopped his pushing. I’m pressing on, the upward way New heights I’m gaining, every day Still praying as, I’m onward bound Lord, plant my feet on Higher Ground. It was an old hymn they used to sing all the time in the church where I grew up. I hadn’t heard it in years. Henry sang slowly and with great sincerity and conviction. It took a moment before the officer recovered and resumed pushing him out the door. Because his ankles were shackled and his hands were locked behind his back, Henry almost stumbled when the guard shoved him forward. He had to waddle to keep his balance, but he kept on singing. I could hear him as he went down the hall: Lord lift me up, and let me stand By faith on Heaven’s tableland A higher plane, that I have found Lord, plant my feet on Higher Ground.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  You want to be the big American, R. said in a final charge, you think you can fix things, you want to save him. And maybe that was part of it; certainly there was a tenderness in me that Mitko struck as no one else did, and I hated that, for all his sometimes brutality, he was finally so helpless in a world that took little heed of him. I did want to help him, but I no longer believed, if I ever had, that Mitko could be drawn in any permanent way out of what had become his life. I knew I couldn’t save him, but how could I explain to R., especially to him, the feeling of inevitability I had whenever Mitko appeared, as though we were in a story that had already been written. He was waiting patiently when I stepped outside into the cold, standing beside the door and drawing on a cigarette that he left in his mouth as he held his hand out in greeting. K’vo ima , he asked, glancing up at the dark apartment, what’s wrong? A friend is staying with me, I said, the lie R. had told me to use, and Mitko nodded, Yasno , I get it. Your friend from Portugal, he said, the obvious assumption, though I was taken aback to hear any mention from him of R., and I quickly shook my head, as if dismissing the thought of him from the air. No, I said, just a friend, and then, before he could ask anything else, Are you hungry, should we go somewhere to eat? We began walking slowly together over the ice, which was thick and many-layered on the sidewalk. Mitko was wearing the same clothes I had last seen him in, the same thin jacket, but he seemed unbothered by the cold, and in general he looked better: he had showered and shaved, his clothes were clean, and looking down, I saw that the canvas sneakers had been replaced by short leather boots, well-worn but sturdy. A friend gave them, Mitko said when I asked, shrugging his shoulders, they’re not so nice but they do the job, they’re better than the others.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  But I’m done with that now, he said, making a gesture as if wiping his hands clean, I don’t want to do that anymore. What happened when you got out, I asked, what did you do then? He shrugged again, I was in Sofia for a while, he said, I found some work here, and he told me how he had worked on a construction site, not as a builder but as security, watching over the premises at night. Skuchna rabota , he said, boring work. I thought about calling you, I still had your number, but I wasn’t sure you would want me to, I thought you were still mad. I shrugged, wondering if I was, and he went on, I worked there a few months, and then it stopped. At my inquisitive glance, They ran out of money, he said, it’s what always happens, we had to stop working. He had gone back to Varna to his mother’s apartment, which was all right in the summer, when there were people, he said, there was something to do, and I thought how he must love it, those few weeks when his city became a little Europe, the beautiful young coming from the west for the cheap beaches and beer, the Balkan carnival, maybe it seemed like the life that should have been his. But no one’s there now, he said, the city’s empty, and so he had come back to Sofia to look for work. But there isn’t any work, he said, what can you do. I stayed with friends for a while, but there’s no one you can count on here, and now his face darkened, the people who say they are your friends aren’t friends at all. And then this happened, he said, gesturing down at his lap, and I don’t have any money; they want me to take pills first, and then if they don’t work I need an injection. But the pills are forty leva, he said, and then, disingenuously, where will I get forty leva? I’ll help you, I said, of course, don’t worry. We had finished eating already, and so I stood and took my wallet from the little shelf by the door, taking out forty leva and then another twenty. Here, I said, for the medicine.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  My mother and I were standing now, gathering our things, lifting our large bags from the rack, and I found I didn’t know how to say goodbye to the boy. I wanted to tell him to study, to work hard, above all to study his English, which he would be helpless without; it was his best chance, I wanted to say, but that’s the kind of thing one can never say, there’s no way to say it, or no way for it to be heard. And so instead I opened a small pocket of my bag, telling him I wanted to give him something, something you couldn’t find in Bulgaria, I said, and I handed him a drugstore peppermint from a packet my mother had brought over for me. It was my favorite candy when I was a child, and I was glad beyond words at the pleasure it gave him when he twisted off the plastic wrapper and popped it in his mouth. Then the train stopped, and my mother and I moved into the corridor, clumsy with our bags and with the prospect of being alone together. As we joined the line of people getting off at the last stop before Sofia, I looked once more at the little boy, whom I felt I would never forget, though maybe it wasn’t exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn’t what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn’t really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it. The doors opened, the line began to move, and I saw that the boy was already clambering into the seats we had left, claiming a new space as his own. And then my mother and I stepped off the train into the evening air, nearly gasping in relief at its freshness.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I watched him moving about, doing a little tidying, neatly stacking up Charles’s tumbled notebooks. For all his compact, self-contained ordinariness he was a shape-changer. He was exercising his ability to make himself bigger, stronger, and more beautiful. I could still summon up one image of him when he first came to the Corry—standard material, a bit overweight, uncommunicative. Now he grew better week by week. His whole gait was changing as his thighs became more massive, rubbing together as he walked and so pushing his knees apart and turning his toes slightly in. As a result his ass, even more than before, seemed to be proffered, thrust out ingenuously towards the admiring hand. Whilst I was Impotens he was a great consolation just to hold and touch—like those exhibitions of sculpture that are put on for the handicapped. Instead of the normal brutal rush our lovemaking was tentative and respectful—it was as if we were both of us afflicted by some cruel, slowing illness that made us think everything out from scratch. ‘Still reading those books?’ he said, with a hint of reserve, as he came and sat on the floor by my chair and activated the remote control of the TV. I don’t think he really knew what the books were, and looked on them as some tiresome academic pursuit to which I was snobbishly attached. ‘There’s no tennis,’ I said, as the still of the court welled up in the screen, accompanied by optimistic light music. ‘Do you fancy any of the tennis players?’ he asked. ‘I think tennis the least erotic of all sports,’ I lied firmly, ‘marbles and pigeon-fancying not excluded. Please turn it off.’ He fairly jabbed down the button, and I could see him forcing back a reasonable riposte and remembering to be tolerant of me. He sat with his head bowed, until I reached down and stroked the side of his neck, pulling his chin back, and running my fingers over his face. When my palm covered his mouth, he kissed it slightly, and I was perhaps forgiven. ‘No telly today,’ I said. ‘I’m going to read to you. Please excuse my temporary lisp. Our hero is just arriving at Port Said, with him three rather keen young men, Harrap, Fryer and, um, Stearn; all are wearing panama hats and too many clothes. The date, September 12, 1923.’

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “It has been wonderful, Bryan. When I first came, I’d look for people who had lost someone to murder or some violent crime. Then it got to the point where some of the ones grieving the most were the ones whose children or parents were on trial, so I just started letting anybody lean on me who needed it. All these young children being sent to prison forever, all this grief and violence. Those judges throwing people away like they’re not even human, people shooting each other, hurting each other like they don’t care. I don’t know, it’s a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.” I chuckled when she said it. During the McMillian hearings, a local minister had held a regional church meeting about the case and had asked me to come speak. There were a few people in the African American community whose support of Walter was muted, not because they thought he was guilty but because he had had an extramarital affair and wasn’t active in the church. At the church meeting, I spoke mostly about Walter’s case, but I also reminded people that when the woman accused of adultery was brought to Jesus, he told the accusers who wanted to stone her to death, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The woman’s accusers retreated, and Jesus forgave her and urged her to sin no more. But today, our self-righteousness, our fear, and our anger have caused even the Christians to hurl stones at the people who fall down, even when we know we should forgive or show compassion. I told the congregation that we can’t simply watch that happen. I told them we have to be stonecatchers. When I chuckled at the older woman’s invocation of the parable, she laughed, too. “I heard you in that courtroom today. I’ve even seen you here a couple of times before. I know you’s a stonecatcher, too.” I laughed even more. “Well, I guess I try to be.” She took my hands and rubbed my palms. “Well, it hurts to catch all them stones people throw.” She kept stroking my hands, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt unusually comforted by this woman. It would take me nearly five hours to drive back to Montgomery once I got things settled for Mr. Caston and Mr. Carter. I needed to keep moving, but it felt nice sitting there with the woman now earnestly massaging my palms in a way that was so sweet, even though it seemed strange, too. “Are you trying to make me cry?” I asked. I tried to smile.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “Well, I suppose that wouldn’t do any harm,” Jenifer said doubtfully. She frowned, and I felt a sudden wave of affection for her. There was something heroic in what she was doing. She was sacrificing all her most cherished principles; her clever, skeptical friends would be merciless to her face and probably lethal behind her back. But what mattered most to Jenifer was what was best for Jacob. “You see,” she continued, “it’s all very well for people like Herbert and me to reject religion. But Jacob—he needs something—he needs some kind of support.” “What you mean is,” I said caustically, “that religion is really just for idiots, weaklings, and defectives.” “Oh dear.” Jenifer grinned rather nervously at me. “How awful. But yes . . . yes, if I’m honest, I suppose that is what I think . . .” she trailed off and looked at me sheepishly. I couldn’t in all conscience take issue with her. Had I not just dismissed God myself as an illusion? But Jacob deserved some consolation. “All right,” I said at last, “I’ll take him.” In finally relinquishing the last vestiges of religious belief, I had come closer to the mainstream than ever before in my life. During the 1960s, religion had died in Britain, and church attendance plummeted. England was fast becoming one of the most secular countries in the world, topped only by the Netherlands. The Harts’ principled rejection of religion had once seemed daring and iconoclastic, but it was now unremarkable, especially among intellectuals. But although the Harts regarded Catholicism as ludicrous, they were not crusading atheists. They were both admirers of the utilitarianism first enunciated by the nineteenth-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Jenifer’s pragmatic approach to Jacob’s churchgoing was essentially utilitarian. Actions are not intrinsically good or evil, but should be judged by their consequences. Right acts are those that produce the best results. There was nothing in itself wrong with attending Mass, so even though it was the product of a belief system that was palpably false, if it helped Jacob, then he should go to Blackfriars. Many of their friends, whose repudiation of faith was more militant, would find this faintly reprehensible.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  We are confronted with the speeding wheels of the carriage, the relentless hooves of the horses, and a small, running, ragged boy, trying to get out of the way. He is knocked down, he is run over, he is killed : and I knew something about that. The moment that most stands out, for me, is that moment in the tumbril, near the end of the film, when the seamstress (Isabel Jewell) recognizes that Sydney Carton (Ronald Colman ) is dying in his friend's stead. I knew nothing about that, but I had been taught greater love hath no man than this, and some thing in me believed it. Yet, when Bill whispered to me, dur ing the scene of the storming of the Bastille, "Every time somebody drops from the drawbridge, they die," though I watched the people dropping off the drawbridge lik e so many dead cockroaches being swept into the dust pan, I was also aware that Bill was not telling me that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was murdering all these people, any more than that that guil lotine was really going to chop off Ronald Colman's head. The guillotine was going to chop off Sydney Carton 's head: my first director was instructing me in the discipline and power of make-believe. For, while believing it all, and really believing it, I still knew that Madame Defarge was really an actress named Blanche Yurka, and that Lucie Manette was really an English girl, named Elizabeth Allan. Something implacable in the set of Yurka's mouth probably reminded me of my grandmother, and I knew that Elizabeth Allan-Lucie Manette reminded me of my music teacher, a Miss Taub, with whom I was desper ately in love. When Lucie Manette and Charles Darnay are torn from each other's arms in the courtroom, tears rose to my eyes, for I knew something about that: yet, at the very +88 THE DE VIL FI ND S WORK same time, I also knew that Charles Darnay was really an ac tor, named Donald Woods. This was the first time in my lif e, after all, that I had seen a screen rendition (so the ads and the press put it) of a novel, which, considering my age, I could claim to know. And I felt very close to the actors, who had not betrayed the friends I had lived with for nearly as long as I had lived with the people of Uncle Tom's Cabin. I had read Uncle Tom's Cabin compulsively, the book in one hand, the newest baby on my hipbone. I was trying to find out something, sensing something in the book of some immense import for me: which, however, I knew I did not really understand. My mother got scared. She hid the book. The last time she hid it, she hid it on the highest shelf above the bathtub.