They started off slowly, Miss Printer a little disappointed as she had been hoping in her romantic heart for an elephant ride through the moonlit uplands.
The brothers at the monastery took in Iskandar and his elephant without demur, and, as it was now late, invited Miss Printer and Mr. Humpreys to stay for the night, giving them each a tiny guest-cell.
In the small hours Miss Printer was wakened by knocking.
“Who is it?” she called sleepily.
“The sick man is asking for you,” one of the brothers whispered through the keyhole. She hastily flung on clothes and followed him to the Infirmary, a long bare stone room facing east over the windswept hillside. Already the dawn was beginning to show wild and green, like streaks of toothpaste in the sky.
The little man Iskandar, washed and snug, a tiny kernel in a large nut, lay peacefully in a white bed, with the sharp lines of his face filed keener by the sharp light.
“I am dying,” he said matter-of-factly to Miss Printer as soon as she reached him. “You have a good face, so to you I entrust my elephant because she is a good elephant. She is a clever elephant too. She is over seventy years old and has seen the Czar of Russia when there was a czar. She has been left me by my father, who was a Russian landowner. After the revolution she was all that remained of his wealth. She and I escaped from Russia together and since then we have wandered many hundreds of miles.”
He gasped between his words and one of the brothers offered a drink.
Miss Printer was crying a little.
“Don’t be disturbed,” said Iskandar with a touch of impatience. “I have been journeying to this place for many years. I am glad to get here. All I ask of is that you take care of Chloe—take particular care of her ears, please—and that you arrange for her to see, once, my younger brother in London. She will carry my dying message to him. You can do this? I have his address here, on a bit of paper.” He fumbled at his small bundle of possessions and handed her a grubby scrap on which was written, in beautiful Cyrillic characters, the name Joachim Boyanus, and a London address.
“Oh yes, I can easily do that.”
“Good,” he said, and glanced through the window. A sheepish-looking lay brother had Chloe outside, and at a command from her master she threaded her black snakelike trunk through the window. Iskandar caressed it almost absently and then passed it over to Miss Pinter for mutual recognition and inspection.
“Now you must go,” he said in a businesslike tone. “I am about to die.”
Drawing closer about him the brothers began a deep-toned chant.
“Don’t distress yourself, miss,” said the kindly infirmarian, who spoke good German. “It is not your fault he dies. In his condition it is amazing that he lived so long.”
“But I had said that I wanted an elephant,” Miss Printer wept. “And then to be given one like this . . .”
“But you must think of Iskandar too,” the monk pointed out benignly. “How fortunate for him to meet a trustworthy English laay to carry out his last wish.” Much to Miss Printer’s surprise he gave her a cup of tea.
She wandered out into the windy dawn to escape from the sound of chanting and to become acquainted with her new responsibility.
Mr. Humphreys was frankly appalled when he heard of the matter, and more so when he discovered that he and Miss Printer would have to ride on Chloe if they were ever to reach a port.
Their car, apparently suffering from delayed effects of the collision, completely refused to start, and the nearest mechanic was fifty miles off. At length Humphreys gave in. After the monks had celebrated Iskandar’s funeral with every Orthodox rite, they piled their luggage on Chloe and rolled away southwards over the mountains.
“How you expect to get past customs and quarantine I’ve no idea,” Mr. Humphreys said sourly, but Miss Printer was perfectly serene.
“We shall manage somehow,” she said. “Chloe will take care of us.” And indeed Chloe took care of them to such good effect that they crossed two frontiers without troubling the Customs, sailing past the posts like something impalpable between dusk and dawn while once, when they were ambushed by Albanian bandits as they picnicked, Chloe picked up her two riders and stowed them about her person like a boy scout tucking knife and matches into his pockets, and drifted away down a rocky hillside before the astonished brigands had their sights set for this unexpected safety device. That time Mr. Humphreys’ bowler got left behind. It did not sweeten his attitude to Chloe.
In Athens, Miss Printer sent two cables, one to Joachim Boyanus, the other to her immediate superior at Rampadges: docking hull noon 19th on katina paxinou have elephant tapestkies stonework cuckoo clocks etc.
It was not her fault that the Greek telegraphist, always a bit shaky on translating to the Roman alphabet, should have sent the cable as elegant tapestries stone cuckoo clock works. Nor could she have been expected to know, off in the wilds, as she and Mr. Humphreys had been for the last two months, that Rampadges had been the subject of a vast takeover bid and was now under new ownership.
Nor could she have foretold that the new managing director, Mr. Appelbee, had decided to come down to the docks for a personal inspection of the rare goods brought back for the Christmas market by the firm’s most discerning buyer.
Chloe and Miss Printer had suffered on the voyage. The Greek ship was a tiny one and neither of them was a good sailor. Mr. Humphreys, chilly, correct, and unsympathetic, had visited them both impartially with basins of arrowroot.
Mr. Appelbee was in an irritable mood the day the ship docked. He was a small dyspeptic man who looked as if he had been scrubbed all over with a fine brush and the very best soap. He had stayed in bed. The morning was bleak, the dock filthy, Hull a bad and foggy dream. And then the cuckoo clocks had turned out, most disappointingly, not to be made of stone at all, and the tapestries not all that elegant.
It was the last straw when Miss Printer, pale and unhappy, made her appearance on the wharf followed by a small greenish elephant.
“What do you call that?” he snarled. “Have you been spending the firm’s money on that? Well, I tell you frankly, you had better take the next boat back to where you’ve come from and get rid of it. There’s no place for elephants in the new Rampadges—nor for damn fools who buy such damn-fool objects!”
Miss Printer looked round for Mr. Humphreys to give her moral support, but he had gone, walking elegantly off to chat to the manager of the Transport Department, and when she saw this craven betrayal the last shred of her love blew away in the chilly breeze.
She nerved herself.
“Mr. Appelbee,” she said, “you may have got enough money to buy Rampadges, but you can’t buy the loyalty of its employees. Loyalty has to be earned.
“I had intended to give Chloe to the firm, but I’ve changed my mind. Since she saved my life we’ve grown very close. Looking after her, taking the splinters out of her feet, and washing her ears, has taught me something.
You can give affection to an elephant that you can’t give to a firm, Mr. Appelbee. I’m going to keep Chloe for myself, and here is my resignation for you. I’m sure you will find Mr. Humphreys an excellent buyer when he has learned a few more languages.”
And she turned away, taking Chloe’s trunk under her arm, and walked briskly along the dock. A dark and bearded man in a city suit came up to her.
“Miss Printer?” he said. “I am Joachim Boyanus. I thank you for letting me meet Chloe once again.”
Chloe was delighted to see him. She wreathed her trunk round his neck.
“I have taken good care of her,” said Miss Printer, looking at him very directly with her clear grey eyes. Joachim turned back the flap of one huge leather ear and saw a great many pieces of slate-coloured sticking-plaster. Thoughtfully he pulled one loose and found under it a diamond as large as a hazel nut
“Ah yes,” he said. “The family diamonds. I wondered where Iskandar had hidden them all these years. It was kind of him to send them, and kind of
you to bring them. But really, you know, I have done so comfortably in the City that I hardly need them. Would you accept them, Miss Printer?”
“I?” She was dumbfounded.
“You have just left your job,” he pointed out. “Could you not use them? What is your dearest wish?”
“Oh,” she said, starry-eyed, “to travel, of course. To travel with Chloe.”
“Miss Printer,” he said, you are a woman after my own heart. For some time I have been intending to leave the City, whose moneymaking possibilities I have explored to the uttermost, and wander off to an older and more peaceable world. Could we not go together, you and I and Chloe?”
They looked at one another, liking what they saw.
And since nothing is very dilficult if two people are mutually attracted, and have plenty of money and a well-disposed elephant, it is probable that they are travelling still.
Bodies
JOYCE CAROL OATES
She met him in the cafeteria of the Art Museum, on a Thursday. His name was Draier, Drayer—she couldn’t quite make it out. “Please call me Anthony,” he said, leaning forward against the wrought-iron table, jarring it, and his attempt at intimacy was blocked by the formality of that name also. Pauline’s friend, their mutual friend, hadn’t figured much in her life for several years, and she wondered where his loneliness was leading him—he had been reluctant to introduce Anthony to her, she could see that. Her friend’s name was Martin. He had something to do with an art gallery; his art galleries were always failing, disappearing, and returning again with new names. Pauline wondered if Anthony was an artist.
“I’m not an artist. I’m not anything,” he said. He smiled a sad, quick smile. She was startled by his frankness, distrusting it. He had a striking face, though he had not shaved for several days, his eyes set clearly beneath the strong, clear line of his eyebrows. Beside him, Martin was silent. Students from Pauline’s art class were carrying their trays past this table with serious faces; their faces, like the work they did, were intense and prematurely aged.
“Pauline does beautiful work,” Martin said. He seemed to be talking to no one in particular. “But it’s very difficult to talk about art, or about anything. I can’t explain her work,”
“Why should you explain it?” Pauline said. She stood to leave; she never took much time for lunch. The noise of the cafeteria annoyed her. Formally, with a smile, she put out her hand to Anthony. “It was very nice to meet you,” she said.
He looked surprised. “Yes, very nice . . .”
She was out of the restaurant before he caught up with her. Before turning, she heard footsteps and it flashed through her mind, incredibly, that this man was following her—then she turned to face him, and her expression was curious rather than alarmed. “I thought—I thought I’d walk with you. Are you going to look at the pictures?” he said.
Look at the pictures. “No,” she said. “I have a class at two.”
His face, in the mottled light of the broad, marble-floored hall, looked sullen. She had thought he was fairly young, in his mid-twenties; now she supposed he was at least ten years older. His hair was curly, black but tinged with gray, and it fell down around the unclean neck of his sweater lazily, making her think of one of the heads she herself had done a few years ago . . . in imitation of a Greek youth, the head of a sweetly smiling child. This man stared at her rudely. She could not bear to face him.
“I have to teach a class at two . . . she said.
They walked awkwardly together. Not far away were the stairs to the first floor, and once upstairs she could escape . . . the side of her face tingled from his look, she thought it foolish and degrading, she wondered what he thought of her face . . . was he thinking anything about her face?
“Do you live around here?” he said.
“No. Out along the lake.”
“Out there?” His tone was suspicious, as if she had been deceiving him until now. This was her own fault—though she wore her pale blond hair in a kind of crown, braided tightly, and though her face was cool, slow to awaken to interest, held always in a kind of suspension, she wore the standard casual clothes of girls who were artists or wanted to be, living alone, freely, sometimes recklessly, down here in the center of the city. She wore dark stockings, leather shoes that had been ruined by this winter’s icy, salted sidewalks, a dark, rather shapeless skirt, and a white blouse that had once been an expensive blouse but now looked as old as Anthony’s sweater and blue jeans, its cuffs rolled up to her elbows, its first button hanging by a thread. Her hands were not stubby, but there was nothing elegant about them—short, colorless fingernails, slightly knobby knuckles, small wrists. She was anxious to get back to work, her fingers actually itched to return to work, and this man was a pull on the edge of her consciousness, like something invisible but deadly blown into her eye.
“I have to leave,” she said abruptly.
“You don’t have a place down here? In town?”
“I have a studio. But I live at home with my mother.”
She faced him and yet was not facing him; her eyes were moving coldly behind his head. He had no interest for her, not even as someone whose head she might copy; she had done a head like his once, she had no desire to repeat herself. She felt very nervous beneath his frank, blunt scrutiny, but her face showed nothing. Like the head of an Amazon on a stand near the stairs—a reproduction of an Etruscan work—she was vacuous, smooth-skinned, patient. From art she had learned patience, centuries of patience. The man, Anthony, was humming nervously under his breath, sensing her desire to get away and yet reluctant to let her get away.
“Do you come around here often?” he said.
“No.”
“Why are you so . . . unfriendly?” He smiled at her, his face grown suddenly shabby and appealing, his eyes dark with wonder. Tell the truth, he was pleading. It occurred to her that he was insane. But she laughed, looking from the inhuman composed face of that Amazon to his face, hearing him say again, Are you going to look at the pictures?
“Come over here. Can I show you something?” he said. He took her arm with a sudden childish familiarity that annoyed her. In the noisy confusion of this part of the museum, at noon, she had to give herself up to anything that might happen; it was part of coming here at all. When she had begun teaching at the Art Institute across the street, years ago, she had brought her own lunch and eaten in her studio, she had thrown herself into her work and that had been, maybe, the best idea. Meeting people down here was a waste of time. The people she spent time with socially were friends of her mother’s, most of them older than she, a careful, genteel network of people who could never harm her. Down here, the city was open. Anything could happen. This stranger, whose name was Anthony Drayer, whose rumpled clothes told her everything she needed to know about him, now took her by the arm and led her over to a reproduction of another Etruscan work she had been looking at for years with no more than mild interest.
“Did you ever see this?” Anthony said. He was very excited. The piece was a tomb monument, showing a young man lying on a cushion with a winged woman at his side. The man’s hair was bound up tightly, in a kind of band; his face was very strong, composed. Pauline had the idea that Anthony saw himself in that face, though his own was soft, sketchy, as if done with a charcoal pencil, not shaped vividly in stone. His smile moved from being gentle to being loose, almost out of control. “Who are these people?” he said, glancing at her.
She saw that his fingers were twitching. Her eye was too intimate, too quick to take in shameful details—it was a fault in her. She could not help noticing that the skin around his thumbnails was raw from his digging at it. “I moved down here a few months ago and almost every day I come to the museum,” Anthony said. He spoke in a rapid, low murmur, as if sensing her coldness but unable to stop his words. He picked at him thumbnail. “I like to look at the pictures but especially the statues. You do statues? That must be expensive, isn’t it, to buy the stone and all that . . .?
I could never do anything like this, my hands are too shaky, my judgment isn’t right, I can’t stand still long enough, but I love to look at these things, it makes me happy to know that they exist . . . Are those two in love? Is that why she’s reaching out toward him?”
“No, they’re not in love,” Pauline said, wondering if her tone could rid her of this man forever. “The man is dead. The woman is an angel of death, or a demon of death. You see how her hand is broken off?—she was holding out to him a scroll with his fate written on it. This is a monument to adorn a tomb. It isn’t about life, it’s about death. They’re both dead.”
Anthony stared at the figures.
“But they look alive . . . their faces look alive . . .”
“Do you see how their bodies are twisted around? The demon’s body is organically impossible, it’s out of shape from the waist down, and the man’s body is almost as unnatural . . . That’s a typical Etruscan characteristic.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why,” she said, avoiding his melancholy stare. “The artists weren’t interested in that part of the body, evidently their interest was in the head, the face, the torso . . .”
“Why is that?”
He scratched at his own head, at the dusky, graying curls. She could smell about him an odor of something stale, sad—cigarette smoke, unwashed flesh, the gritty deposit of decades in some walk-up room. Her own odor was clean and impersonal. Her hands smelled whitely of the clay in which she worked. Anthony looked sideways at her. His look was pleading, intense, threatening . . . for the first time in years she was afraid of another person.
“I have to leave,” she said.
“Can I see you again?”
She was already walking away. Her heart was pounding. He was calling after her—she nearly collided with an elderly man making his way slowly down the stairs—she had the excuse of apologizing to this man, helping him, saying something about the danger of such wide stairs. “And outside it ain’t no better, all that goddamn ice,” the old man said angrily, as if blaming her for that too.
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