Roman Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Our apartment, on the first floor, was only five hundred square feet, but for the first time we had our own tiny bedroom, where the morning sun poured in, where we’d wake to that rush of light and the birds exchanging their secret messages, incomprehensible in our world. We liked the soft sheets and, whenever the children were napping and we managed to push the door shut, a white light would bathe our souls while we made love. We even joked of having a sixth child. The air in that house was in constant motion, which saved us during that prematurely hot spring. It felt almost like the beach, inside. We could even hear the occasional seagull. A real beach, we said to each other in amazement, as if we were on vacation, by the sea, without the hassle of sand or jellyfish, but always with that same light that warms your bones and, if you close your eyes, lets you see that phosphorescent red behind your eyelids.

When I was twenty I married a girl from my country who left behind all she knew to live with me on the other side of the world. She landed on a bleak spring day, and while we waited at the airport for the train home, she was dazed from the trip and couldn’t stop trembling. Sadly I had no coat to offer her. My mother had insisted on lining our doorway and the building’s stairs with vases full of flowers, to give my wife a traditional welcome, even though the other tenants had complained, regarding this auspicious gesture as a nuisance and even a potential hazard.