by Lore Segal
Ilka and Matsue leaned forward, watching Paulino across the aisle. Paulino was withdrawing his envelope from out of his breast pocket and upturned the envelope onto the slope of his lap. The young student sitting beside him got on his knees to retrieve the sliding batch of newsprint and held onto it while Paulino arranged his coat across his thighs to create a surface.
“My own puzzle,” Leslie said, “with which I would like to puzzle our panel, is this: Where do I, where do we all, get these feelings of moral malaise when wrong goes unpunished and right goes unrewarded?”
Paulino had brought his first newspaper column up to his eyes and read, “La Paz, September 19. Señora Pilar Patillo has reported the disappearance of her husband, Claudio Patillo…”
“Where,” Leslie was saying, “does the human mind derive its expectation of a set of consequences for which it finds no evidence in nature, in history nor in looking around its own autobiography? Could I please ask for quiet from the floor until we open the discussion?” Leslie was once again peering out into the hall.
The audience turned and looked at Paulino reading, “Nor does the consular calendar for September show any appointment…” Shulamit Gershon leaned toward Leslie and spoke to him for several moments while Paulino read, “A spokesman for the Israeli Mission to the United Nations denies a report…”
It was after several attempts to persuade him to stop that Leslie said, “Ahmed? Is Ahmed in the hall? Ahmed, would you be good enough to remove the unquiet gentleman as gently as necessary force will allow. Take him to my office, please, and I will meet with him after the symposium.”
Everybody watched Ahmed walk up the aisle with a large and sheepish-looking student. The two lifted the unresisting Paulino out of his seat by the armpits and carried him reading, “The car of Pilar Patillo, wife of Claudio Patillo…” backward, out of the door.
The action had something about it of the classic comedy routine. There was a cackling, then the relief of general laughter. Leslie relaxed and sat back, understanding that it would require some moments to get the evening back on track, but the cackling did not stop. Leslie said, “Please.” He waited. He cocked his head and listened: It was more like a hiccupping that straightened and elongated into a sound drawn on a single breath. Leslie looked at the panel. The panel looked. The audience looked around. Leslie bent his ear down to the microphone. It did him no good to tap it, to turn the button off and on, put his hand over the mouthpiece, to bend down as if to look it in the eye. “Does anybody know - is the sound here centrally controlled?” he asked. The noise was growing incrementally. Members of the audience drew their heads back and down into their shoulders. It came to them—it became impossible to not know—that it was not laughter to which they were listening but somebody yelling. Somewhere there was a person, and the person was screaming.
Ilka looked at Matsue, whose eyes were closed. He looked an old man.
The screaming stopped. The relief was spectacular, but lasted only for that same unnaturally long moment in which a bawling child, having finally exhausted its strength, is only fetching up new breath from some deepest source for a new onslaught. The howl resumed at a volume that was too great for the size of the theater; the human ear could not accommodate it. People experienced a physical distress and put their hands over their ears.
Leslie rose. He said, “I’m going to suggest an alteration in the order of this evening’s proceedings. Why don’t we clear the hall—everybody, please, move into the lounge, have some wine, have some cheese while we locate the source of the trouble.”
Quickly, while people were moving along their rows, Ilka popped out into the aisle and collected the trail of Paulino’s news clippings. The student who had sat next to Paulino retrieved and handed her the envelope. Ilka walked down the hall in the direction of Leslie Shakespere’s office, diagnosing in herself an inappropriate excitement at having it in her power to throw light.
* * *
—
Ilka looked into Leslie’s office. Paulino sat on a hard chair with his back to the door, shaking his head violently from side to side. Leslie stood facing him. He and the panelists, who had disposed themselves around his office, were screwing their eyes up as if wanting very badly to close the bodily openings through which the understanding receives unwanted information. The intervening wall had somewhat modified the volume, but not the variety—length, pitch, and pattern—of the sounds that continually altered as in response to a new and continually changing cause.
Leslie said, “Mr. Patillo, we need you to tell us the source of this noise so we can turn this off?”
Paulino said, “It is my father screaming.”
“Or my father,” said Ilka.
“Seeing her in the door way, Leslie said, “Mr. Patillo is your student, no? He won’t tell us how to locate the screaming.”
“He doesn’t know,” Ilka said. She followed the direction of Leslie’s eye. Maderiaga was perched with a helpless elegance on the corner of Leslie’s desk, speaking Spanish into the telephone. Through the open door that led into the outer office, Ilka saw Shulamit Gershon hanging up the phone. She came back in and said, “Patillo is the name this young man’s father adopted from his second wife who was Bolivian. He is Klaus Herrmann, who headed the German Census Bureau. After the Anschluss they sent him to Vienna to put together the registry of Jewish names and addresses, then to Budapest and so on. After the war we traced him to La Paz. I think he got in trouble with some mines or weapons deals. We put him on the back burner when it turned out the Bolivians were after him as well.”
Maderiaga hung up and said, “Hasn’t he been the busy little man! My office is going to check if it’s the Gonzales people who got him for expropriating somebody’s tin mine, or the R.R.N. If they suspect Patillo of connection with the helicopter crash in which President Barrientos died, they will have more or less killed him.”
“My father is screaming,” said Paulino.
“It has nothing to do with his father,” said Ilka. While Matsue was explaining the reverse bug on the blackboard, Ilka had grasped the principle that disintegrated now, when she was trying to explain it to Leslie. And she was distracted by a retrospective image: Last night, hurrying down the corridor, Ilka had turned and must have seen, since she was now able to recollect, Ahmed and Matsue walking together, in the opposite direction. If Ilka had thought them an odd couple, the thought, having nothing to feed on, died before her lively wish to maneuver Gerti and Paulino into one elevator before the doors closed. She now asked Ahmed, “Where did you and Matsue go after the class last night?”
Ahmed said, “He needed me to unlock the New Theater for him.”
Leslie said, “Ahmed, I’m sorry to be ordering you around, but will you go and find Matsue and bring him here to my office?”
“He has gone,” said Ahmed. “I saw him leave by the front door with a suitcase on wheels.
“Matsue is going home,” said Ilka. “He’s finished his job.”
Paulino said, “It is my father.”
“No, it’s not Paulino,” said Ilka. “Those are the screams from Dachau and from Hiroshima.”
“That is my father,” said Paulino, “and my mother screaming.”
* * *
—
Leslie asked Ilka to come with him to the airport. They caught up with Matsue queuing with only five passengers ahead of him, to enter the gangway to he plane.
Ilka said, “Matsue, you’re not going away without telling us how to shut that thing off!”
Matsue said, “Itto dozunotto shattoffu.”
Ilka and Leslie said, “Excuse me?”
With the hand that was not holding his boarding pass, Matsue performed a charade of turning a faucet and he shook his head. Ilka and Leslie understood him to be saying, “It does not shut off.” Matsue stepped out of the line, kissed Ilka on the cheek, stepped back, and passed through the door.
* * *
—
When Concordance Institute takes
hold of a situation it deals humanely with it. Leslie found funds to pay a private sanitarium to evaluate Paulino. Back at the New Theater, the police, a bomb squad, and a private acoustics company that Leslie hired from Washington, set themselves to locate the source of the screaming. Leslie looked haggard. His colleagues worried when their director, a sensible man, continued to blame the microphone after the microphone had been removed and the screaming continued. The sound seemed not to be going to loop back to any familiar beginning so that the hearers might have become familiar—might in a manner of speaking have made friends—with some one particular roar or screech, but to be going on to perpetually new and fresh howls of agony.
Neither the Japanese Embassy in Washington, nor the American Embassy in Tokyo got anywhere with the tracers sent out to locate Matsue. Leslie called in the technician. The technician had a go at explaining why the noise could not be stilled. “Look in the wiring,” Leslie said and saw in the man’s eyes the look that experts wear when they have explained something and the layman repeats what he said before the explanation. The expert had another go. He talked to Leslie about the nature of sound; he talked about cross-Atlantic phone calls and about the electric guitar. Leslie, said, “Could you check inside the wiring?”
Leslie fired the first team of acoustical experts, found another company and asked them to check inside the wiring. The new man reported back to Leslie: He thought they might start by taking down the stage portion of the theater. If the sound people worked closely with the demolition people, they might be able to avoid having to mess with the body of the hall.
* * *
—
The phone call that Maderiaga made on the night of the symposium had in the meantime set in motion a series of official acts that were bringing to America—to Concordance—Paulino Patillo’s father, Klaus Herrmann/Claudio Patillo. The old man was eighty-nine, missing an eye by the act of man and a lung by the act of god. On the plane he suffered a collapse and was rushed from the airport straight to Concordance Medical Center.
* * *
—
Rabbi Grossman walked into Leslie’s office and said, “What am I hearing! You’ve approved a house, on this campus, for the accomplice of the genocide of Austrian and Hungarian Jewry?”
“And a private nurse!” said Leslie.
“Are you out of your mind?” asked Rabbi Grossman.
“Almost,” Leslie said.
“You look terrible,” said Shlomo Grossman, and sat down.
“What,” Leslie said, “am I the hell to do with an old Nazi who is post operative, whose son is in the sanitarium, who doesn’t know a soul, doesn’t have a dime, doesn’t have a roof over his head?”
“Send him home to Germany,” shouted Shlomo.
“I tried. Dobelmann says they won’t recognize Claudio Patillo as one of their nationals.”
“So send him to his comeuppance in Israel!”
“Shulamit says they’re no longer interested, Shlomo! They have other things on hand!”
“Put him back on the plane and turn it around.”
“For another round of screaming? Shlomo!” cried Leslie, and put up his hands to cover his ears against the noise that, issuing out of the dismembered building materials piled in back of the Institute, blanketed the countryside for miles around, made its way down every street of the small university town, into every back yard, and filtered in through Leslie’s closed and shuttered windows. “Shlomo,” Leslie said, “come over tonight. I promise Eliza will cook you something you can eat. I want you and Ilka to help me think this thing through.”
* * *
—
“We know that this goes on whether we are hearing it or not. We—I,” Leslie said, “need to understand how the scream of Dachau is the same, and how it is a different scream from the scream of Hiroshima. And after that I need to learn how to listen to what sounds like the same sound out of the hell in which the torturer is getting what he has coming.”
Here Eliza came to the door. “Can you come and talk to Ahmed?”
Leslie went out and came back carrying his coat. A couple of young punks with an agenda of their own had broken into Herrmann’s new American house. They had gagged the nurse and tied her and Klaus up in the new American bathroom. It was here that Ilka began helplessly to laugh. Leslie buttoned his coat and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to go over there. Ilka, Shlomo, I leave for Washington tomorrow, early, to talk to the Superfund people. While I’m there I want to see if I can get funds for a Scream Project…Ilka? Ilka, what?” But Ilka had got the giggles and could not answer him. Leslie said, “What I need is for the two of you to please sit down, here and now, and come up with a formulation I can take with me to present to Arts and Humanities.”
* * *
—
The Superfund granted Concordance an allowances for Scream Disposal. The dismembered stage of the New Theater was loaded onto a flatbed truck and driven west. The population along route 90 and all the way to Arizona came out into the streets, eyes squeezed together, heads pulled back and down into shoulders. They buried the thing fifteen feet under, well away from the highway, and let the desert howl.
OTHER PEOPLE’S DEATHS
Everybody Leaving
The coroner’s men put James in the back of the truck and drove away, and the Bernstines, once again, urged Ilka to come home with them, at least for the night, or let them take the baby. Again Ilka was earnest in begging to be left right here, wanted the baby to stay here with her. No thank you, really, she did not need—did not want—anybody sleeping over.
The friends and colleagues trooped down the path, the Shakespeares, the Bernstines, the Ayes, the Zees, the Cohns, and the Stones. Outside the gate they stopped, they looked back, but Ilka had taken the baby inside and closed the door. They stood a moment, they talked, not accounting to themselves for the intense charm of the summer hill rising behind Ilka’s house, of standing, of breathing—of the glamour of being alive. Leslie asked everyone to come over for a drink.
They moved along the sidewalk in groups and pairs. Dr. Alfred Stone walked with his wife. The report of the accident had come in the very moment the committee was about to vote on Jimmy’s retention. Alpha had called Alfred. It was he who attended at the scene. Dr. Stone was arranging the sentence he ought to have spoken to the widow when he arrived at her house or at some moment in the hours since. Everybody stopped at the corner. Ilka’s door was open. The two policemen who had spent the day trying to be inconspicuous were finally able, now that the body had been removed, to go home. The smaller, Spanish policeman walked out the gate, but the big young policeman turned and waved. Ilka must be standing back in the darkness. The two policemen got into the police car and drove away.
Inside her foyer Ilka closed the door and leaned her head against it, devastated at everybody’s leaving.
* * *
—
Words to Speak to the Widow
At the Shakespeares’ there was the business of walking into the sitting room, of sitting down, of the drinks. “A lot of ice, Leslie. Thanks.” “Martini, please, and hold the vegetables.”
Joe Bernstine smiled sadly. “I wonder if we retained Jimmy.”
Leslie said, “Alpha will schedule us a new search committee.”
Nobody said, We could hardly do worse than poor Jimmy.
Jenny Bernstine said, “Ilka is being very gallant and terrific.”
Nobody said, She didn’t cry.
Alicia said, “Ilka isn’t one to throw her hands up.”
“Or the towel in, or the sponge,” said Eliza. “Joke. Sorry.”
Alicia said, “Ilka is not one to drown in her sorrows.”
“Well I’m going to drown mine.” Eliza held her glass out to Leslie, who refilled it.
Alicia said, “We live on borrowed time.”
Alpha asked her husband, “The policeman said there was fire?” and the friends’ and colleagues’ imaginations went into action to dim or scramble or in s
ome way unthink the flames in which Jimmy—the person they knew—was burning. They wanted not to have an image of which they would never after be able to rid themselves.
Dr. Stone replied that there was fire but Jimmy’s body had been thrown clear. The fall had broken his neck.
The flames were gone. The friends envisaged the unnaturally angled head with Jimmy’s face.
Dr. Alfred Stone took his drink. He sat down. He looked around the room and located his wife sitting beside Eliza Shakespeare. Were they talking about the death? Alfred had, earlier in the day, seen Alpha talking with Ilka and had wondered what words Alpha might be saying to the widow: To refer to the death would be like putting a finger in a wound, but how not mention it? And wasn’t it gross to be talking of anything else? Alfred mistakenly believed himself to be singularly lacking in what normal people—the people in this room—were born knowing. He thought all of them knew how to feel and what to say. He watched them walk out and return with drinks. They stood together and talked. Dr. Stone remained sitting.
* * *
—
At eleven o’clock that first night, as a brutal loneliness knocked the wind out of Ilka, her phone rang. “We thought we’d see how you were doing,” said Leslie. “Did the baby get to sleep?”
“The baby is okay. I’m okay. Is it okay to be okay? I could do with some retroactive lead time. I need to practice taking my stockings off with Jimmy dead. Relearn how to clean my teeth.”
Leslie said, “Wait.” Ilka heard him pass on to Eliza, who must be in the room, who might be lying in the bed beside him, that Ilka was okay but needed to relearn how to clean her teeth with Jimmy dead. His voice returned full strength. “Eliza says we’re coming over in the morning to bring you breakfast.”