This I did. I gave the appearance of a man strolling in the evening, a casual post-prandial peregrination. And in fact, it was casual, for I had no motive in mind other than the cooling of my fevered brain.
There were only a few persons out at that hour: old men who had no homes at all, old women whose lazy daughters had sent them out on some paltry errand, old children who had already learned too much of the world and the world’s way. All moved quickly and surreptitiously and silently along the street, sidling shadow to shadow, eyeing me and one another with undisguised mistrust.
I was within a number or two of the Baltyk Kitchen when I heard voices, low, growling, drunken, and I recognized the three guardians. They stood in a shadowed recess just this side of the restaurant, pissing in unison against a wall of rough masonry. They had transferred their ordering intact: the first guardian still stood left-most, the third guardian was still on the right.
“A hundred lovers . . .” said the first.
“A million lovers,” corrected the second, energetically.
“A million lovers,” the third guardian repeated, dreamily.
“That’s what she’s got,” said the first.
“Won’t speak to us,” growled the second. “Won’t say fucking word one.”
“Fucking word one,” repeated the third, wistfully.
They spoke of Marta. I knew it, despite the obvious lie. What man would have coupled with Marta? What man, even in jest, would have spoken in the same breath of Marta and lust, Marta and jealousy, Marta and sweet concupiscence?
The answer to that question is so obvious I will not even take the space to record it here.
“Five husbands,” said the first guardian bitterly, “and a million lovers. And you and you and me unload our pockets there every day.”
“Not a wink, not a smile, not a word,” said the second.
“She don’t even want to serve us,” cried the third in some anguish, and for once not merely echoing his friends.
One, two, three, the guardians zipped up.
The third came in my direction. The second turned right around and crossed the street. The first went around the corner of the restaurant.
I determined to question one of the guardians. Not the third, though he was closest. He seemed merely to echo the sentiments of his companions. Not the first, for he was probably already beyond my catching him. But the second, whom I saw walking quickly away on the far side of the street.
I crossed hurriedly and followed him. I didn’t want to call out, and I didn’t want actually to run—those who dwell in the city are wary of such noise, and after hearing it, the second guardian would not be disposed to stop and talk to me. I wanted, if possible, to ease up behind him, slowly draw abreast, look directly in his eye—to disarm him with my genial aspect—and say “Sir, you and your friends just now—were you speaking of Marta? Do you know her? She interests me strangely.’’
And he would stop and tell me all he knew of Marta and her life.
The more I knew of Marta the easier it would be to prepare our adventure.
Two full blocks I followed, toward the eastern edge of my neighborhood, into darker streets and past houses more rundown and more boarded-over than those I was mostly familiar with. He lurched and veered drunkenly. If he heard me, he was not disquieted. Or if he was disquieted, it did not show in his gait. When he staggered into a dark, narrow alleyway, he was no more than five meters ahead of me. I hurried forward, catching at a corner of brick to assist me in a final, quick turning.
I heard a noise, like that of a large sack of flour hitting the floor and splitting its thick paper seams.
He, the second guardian, lay at length in the narrow alleyway. The only light was from a streetlamp, somewhere behind me. I stepped a little to the right, so that the light fell upon his face. I saw black blood upon his brow.
Crescented at the second guardian’s feet stood five persons, all grinning at me.
Two of them I recognized—the two young women who had jostled me on the street. The one whose hair was bleached stood on the left; the one whose hair was dyed jet stood on the right. Between them were three young men in black trousers, white shirts, and black leather jackets. They did not need to turn around for me to be certain of the winged hourglass insignia. Perhaps even in full daylight I would not have been able to tell the three men apart anyway, but in this quiet dark place, at night, they were wholly indistinguishable to me. They might have been photographic reproductions one of the other.
The young man at the very center of the crescent brought his hand from behind his back and held up a kind of flexible lead weight attached to a wooden grip. It’s just the sort of malevolent object that has an innocuous nickname, but I didn’t know what it was. With this, he would say, I have rendered the second guardian unconscious.
The young man at his right knelt down and systematically rifled the guardian’s pockets.
The girl with the black hair knelt down at the guardian’s side, unbuckled his belt, and with a dramatic flourish, pulled it completely free.
The girl with the white hair knelt and wrested off the guardian’s shoes.
They stripped him naked. His clothing, as it was removed, was carefully folded and handed to one of the young men who remained standing, with his arms outstretched before him, patient to receive the burden.
They left the guardian his socks.
“Is he dead?” I asked curiously.
All five looked at me then. They smiled. None said anything.
I was suddenly struck with the conviction that all this had been planned and executed for my benefit. The motive itself might still be obscure, but the intention itself was obvious and inescapable. They had no use for his clothing. They had garnered only a few bills of low denomination from his wallet. For so little the guardian might very well be dead.
When I say For so little, I do not mean his clothes and his money—I mean whatever it was that they intended to show me by this curious tableau. A tableau it certainly was. There lay the second guardian, naked but for his socks; and there stood his five attackers, reorganized into their careful crescent. The young man from the left still held the guardian’s clothing neatly stacked on his outstretched arms.
Their lesson in all this was obscure. I was anxious to know if it were connected somehow with Marta. As I turned the matter over in my mind, I became almost certain it was.
“Do you—” I began, but there was, somewhere behind me, the sound of footsteps.
I glanced down the street. Two men were approaching. When I turned back, the five had disappeared, swallowed by the darkness of the alley.
Instinctively, I hurried after them, deep into the obscurity of that narrow passageway between derelict buildings. I could not see my way at all, but proceeded by dragging my hand along the left-hand wall. The bricks were cold and rough, and the occasional expanses of mortar were crumbling and clammy. Sometimes I flew past brief interstices of superior blackness—these might have been recessed doorways but I did not pause to explore. I turned back once and saw the two men, back-lighted, pausing at the mouth of the alley. I heard their voices, in a foreign tongue, discussing the plight of the second guardian. As one began to stoop over the unfortunate victim, I turned again and plunged deeper into the darkness.
Sometime later, I emerged in another street, well-lighted and unfamiliar. It was in another neighborhood altogether. The five were nowhere in sight. Sticking to thoroughfares and only the best-lighted side streets, I reached home just at midnight.
6
My elation buoyed me up to the third floor of my apartment building. I scarcely needed the stairs.
My entire life, I was convinced, had new purpose and meaning. I didn’t foresee all that would come of this chance meeting with Marta in the Baltyk Kitchen—for how could I ever have predicted the infinite ramifications of that?—but I knew that things had changed. My brain was awhirl.
I was so excited that I actually, and for the first
time ever, forgot the proper sequence of keys and lock-turnings for the door to my flat. I had pressed the keys into the locks in the right sequence, I suppose, but the turns and half-turns had gone awry, and I couldn’t get inside. I had to remove the keys and begin again, this time pausing a moment to slow the maelstrom in my head. Those swirling waters gradually calmed to the extent that I was able to get the keys into their locks again and to turn them in the proper sequence: one full turn to the left for the top key, one half turn to the left for the second key, one full turn to the right for the bottom key, and a further half turn to the left for the second key. My three guardians. The door scraped open, and I was inside.
I removed the keys, shut the door, and turned the combination lock carefully, to a cunningly innocuous number.
This lock, on the inside of my door, is set at 1/3/12, the month/day/hour of my birth. It is always locked while I am inside the apartment, even if I have returned intending to remain only a moment. Whenever I go out again, I am forced to retrace that arcana of my birth: 1/3/12. I leave the apartment in the right frame of mind, in mild contemplation of my natal hour. I am better prepared against the adventitious exigencies of the world without.
There is, or there was, a rear door to my flat. It leads, or it led, from the kitchen to a set of wooden stairs at the back of the building. I nailed it shut. I hammered boards over the window. I spilled hot wax into the keyhole. I knifed liquid glue all around the door and stuck it to its frame. I painted it the same color as the wall and set my refrigerator in front of it. There are times, I’m happy to say, when I forget that it’s there.
When I’ve come into my apartment and I’ve spun my combination lock, I am confident there is no way out, for me or anyone who happens to be there—an unlikely chance, admittedly—without first dialing 1/3/12, the month/day/hour of my birth. That is an acknowledgment of my authority.
My flat is large. It occupies the whole of the fourth floor of my building. I have a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bath. Many apartments in the city have as much to boast of, but my apartment is different from almost every other in that these rooms are not connected to one another directly. Each one exists alone and apart. The intervening spaces are traversed by corridors. Some of these corridors are short and quite wide; others generously long but absurdly narrow. I’ve twice as many corridors as I’ve rooms. Some of the corridors have closets along their length, others have no features at all. One, a fairly short corridor as my corridors go, has three lights in equidistant sconces along the left-hand wall, left-hand that is, going from the dining room toward the kitchen. And another, a fairly long one, from my bedroom to the living room, has no light whatsoever, and as all my doors are on spring hinges and slam shut as soon as I take my hand from the knob, I must move down this particular corridor in total darkness. It is well, I consider, that I have complete faith in the benignity of my apartment toward myself. In such a maze of corridors and with my rooms so widely separated one from the other, there is much latitude for dishonesty and trickery. I might, for instance, easily forget what door leads where. There are so many doors, and as I mentioned, they’re on spring hinges. They slam shut. They’re always closed. They’re identically fashioned, and even I might occasionally mistake them. Yet I never do. When I go to open the door of my bedroom closet, I’m never shocked to find myself walking instead into the corridor that leads to the kitchen. Always I’m greeted with that black vista of my six suits, S-1 through S-6, and nothing else. I’m never disappointed. With so many doors and so many possibilities, I could be driven crazy if things started shifting around. But, as I said, once I’ve turned that combination lock, the place is irrevocably mine. It has my stamp and seal upon it. It is docile and unrebellious.
For a time, when I first found this place, shortly after I went to work for my Employer, the flat was no more than an agglomeration of empty rooms, empty shelves in empty closets, and this confusing labyrinth of corridors. I slept on the kitchen floor with a bath towel for a pillow. I covered the windows with brown paper. I hung one suit in every room, so that no room would forget that it was I who inhabited the place. I needed furniture I decided, but I didn’t want to buy it. It wasn’t a question of money, really, though at the time I had but little. But I knew, from sad experience, that furniture is resentful of purchase. Furniture prefers a trial of use before it is signed over. Ownership is a two-way street. If I had gone out and simply bought a bed, I might have been displeased with it. Perhaps the headboard would have been too low, or the footboard too far away, or the mattress too soft, or the springs too loud. And quite as possibly, the bed might have been displeased with me: I might have been too tall or too heavy, or I might have thrashed about in my sleep, or perhaps the bed would have had no view from the position in which I set it. (I do not in fact think that this would have been the case, for I am of a model height and weight, I do not move at all in my sleep, and my bedroom has adequate views from every point; but a bed, in a furniture showroom, would know nothing of this and would keep its trepidations.) All of which is to say that I went out and leased five rooms of furniture from a store, quite nearby, which specialized in such accommodations. If I did not get along with the furniture, or if the furniture did not get along with me, then no harm would have been done. I would simply have the five rooms returned, an annulment of a doomed marriage.
I chose Early American, because that was the only style in which five complete rooms were available. I had no wish to mix genres. To move from a living room into a dining room is an experience sufficiently jarring in its very nature, without having also to deal with a revolution in interior decoration as well.
In the showroom I was careful to say, in quite a loud voice, for the reassurance of the furniture, “I don’t want to buy. I only want to lease, to take the pieces on trial.” This, I think, got us off to a good start, and, as it happened, I chose well. The furniture suited me perfectly. I evidently suited it. For two years I forwarded my payments according to the terms of the lease. Then one day, as I happened to walk past the store, I noticed a “Going Out of Business” banner taped in the window. I suspected this was no more than an advertising ploy, in which old, inflated prices were touted as new and reduced, but when I returned that way the following week, I saw that indeed, the store had been closed. I stopped sending in my monthly check and suspected that something would happen. I’d receive a notice that my lease had been turned over to Such and So Company for collection, or a van would pull up before my building and reclaim all five rooms. But nothing happened. My lease was perhaps lost in the shuffling out. Or, Early American having fallen decidedly out of public favor, my five rooms were not thought worth the bother of reclamation. But whatever happened out there, nothing at all happened inside my apartment. The five rooms of Early American became all mine, in this sidling manner. The furniture itself sensed the alteration in actual ownership, I think. It appreciated the subtle and unstraightforward manner in which this was accomplished. Bills of sale are ugly crass things, and this transference was accomplished slowly and without any jerks. All five rooms seemed to shiver a little in their new identity—like a cobbler’s boy who, after five years of what he imagines to be voluntary apprenticeship, suddenly catches sight, for the first time, of his indenture papers at the bottom of a trunk—and then to settle in for good. After that I had to go through the whole apartment and rearrange the pictures on the wall. Each had come little askew on its wire—a final, obscure gesture of independence.
When I went into the kitchen, I was surprised to see, set out on the counter, all the ingredients for a meal I had planned for myself this evening—less of course the one spice that had been wanting, a lack that became the linchpin for all that tumbled down afterwards. How paltry it all looked, how insignificant! Rather than return those bags and boxes and jars to their proper shelves, I shoveled them all into the trash. That was an extravagant gesture and needlessly wasteful, I know, but I needed to mark the importance of the evening.
After all, if I had found that particular spice, I would have returned home without untoward incident, prepared that simple dish, eaten it in quiet, and never known of the existence of Marta of the Baltyk Kitchen. At nine o’clock, I would very likely have been sitting in the dining room, contemplating the remains of that very dish, when Marta herself walked by on the sidewalk outside. I trembled thinking how close I had come to the maintenance of such criminal ignorance.
The cookbook open on the corner, I did not throw it away, though I did rip out the page that contained the recipe I had wanted to make. That I burned with one of the wooden matches I use to light the gas burners on the range. I replaced the cookbook, suddenly dear to me above all others I owned because of that missing page, back on the shelf in its proper, alphabetical by author, place. It was on the seventh shelf, twelfth from the end. I have many cookbooks, twelve shelves of them, in fact, which I keep in the short wide corridor that leads from the kitchen to the bathroom. I have no books other than these. If for some reason a book other than a cookbook comes into my possession, I destroy it. I have no compunction when it comes to fiction, history, and philosophical speculation. Fiction I tend to burn, history I simply discard, philosophical speculation I rip to shreds, signature by signature.
I prepared a tray and took it into the dining room. On the tray were a glass, a bottle of milk, a spoon, and a container of chocolate sauce. I poured the glass of milk and then placed a spoonful of chocolate into my mouth. I drank down a third of the glass of milk and mixed the two within my mouth until it had become the exact replication of the chocolate milk which is the single pleasant memory of the dreary and painful length of my childhood. The milk is very white, the chocolate is very nearly black. I do not like to mix them in the glass, where the mixture suffuses to a murky, characterless brown. I will do that only in my mouth, where the dilution of the white and black takes place in darkness and where the mixture is swallowed without my ever seeing the diminution of the colors’ integrity. I performed this comforting ritual twice more until the milk in the glass was gone, and then I returned the tray to the kitchen.
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