Oswald's Tale

Chapter 1

1

Volchuk

When Valya was three years old, she fell on a hot stove and burned her face and was ill for a whole year, all that year from three to four. Her mother died soon after, and her father was left with seven children.

When they buried her mother, Valya s father said, Now, look at her and remember her. He put them all around the coffin and told them again, Try to remember your mother. There they were, all seven children, dressed in black. Valya s dress had an ornament like a small cross. She remembers that, and how all her brothers and sisters cried. Their mother had died giving birth to her eighth baby.

She passed away at a hospital fifty kilometers from where they lived, and when her mother felt she was at her last, she asked somebody to call Guri, her husband, and tell him that she wished to say a few words. So, she lay in bed waiting, her eyes on the door, and when she saw that door open, she was so weak she could only say, Guri, please take care of our children, and then she died. She couldn t live a moment longer. Of course, she still comes back to Valya in her dreams.

While Valya was only the fifth child in this family, she was the second sister, so when her oldest sister left home a couple of years later, Valya had to take care of the house. It was a good family all the same, and they were kindhearted, and approximately everybody was equal. When Valya was seven, she could already bake bread in a stove where you had to use a flat wooden spade to insert your loaf of dough, and everybody was happy when she made her bread because it was tasty.

Her father was a switchman and worked on the Smolenskaya section of the Soviet rail system at a town called Pridneprovsk. Since his children had no older woman to help them now, Guri married again. And his children were not upset by this new wife but loved her, for she was a nice person, and they even called her Mama. She was very kind to them, even if she was not healthy and had been

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.

Praise for Oswald s Tale
 
America s largest mystery has found its greatest interpreter. The Washington Post Book World
 
Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection. Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books
 
A narrative of tremendous energy and panache; the author at the top of his form. Christopher Hitchens, Financial Times
 
The performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity. Martin Amis, The Sunday Times (London)
 
Praise for Norman Mailer
 
[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation. The New York Times
 
A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent. The New Yorker
 
Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure. The Washington Post
 
A devastatingly alive and original creative mind. Life
 
Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. The New York Review of Books
 
The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book. Chicago Tribune
 
Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream. The Cincinnati Post