Census

by Jesse Ball

  When the man described her to the others, and she could imagine their minds matching her to the house and possessions, a sensation of giggling—of permanent and proper situation in that which is oblique—came over her. To this day it has never left me, she said. She kissed my son on the cheek and embraced me fiercely when we went away. A terrible thing, I believe, had happened at some point to her right arm, but she did not mention it, nor did we. In the photographs by the door she—as she put it, and here I am a bride, and here I am a bride, and here a child, and here a widow. But you are a widower—I’m sure you can recognize me in this photograph, however dark my costume.

  This is an example of the perfect accord of mind we fell into, the three of us. I had only to step through the door, only to introduce myself and showed my bonafides, and then, such a thing as that. I didn’t realize until after—as we drove, and I mulled the encounter in my mind—but while we sat there huddled over the parlor table, she reached out and grasped my hand and I did not shudder, and my son, he grasped her withered arm. There is nothing that cannot be natural.

  They call areas of Switzerland cantons. To my ear that has always sounded delightful. What fine things, I felt, as a boy, must be happening in the cantons. There is a constitution that some have, and I had it—to which everything foreign is wondrous, and all that is domestic, tiresome. I have often tried, in my reading, to look through the eyes of those who find in the most familiar things an endless reverie. I know it can be done. I have seen it done so often! But the turn—somewhere in it, there is a turn, and it is a turn I cannot make if I am not helped.

  My wife used to say, all flesh is continuous. By that she meant—anything fleshed can mirror another fleshed thing, can feel somehow immediately anything felt, and that it is even sometimes possible to compel another to feel that which you feel.

  The toll operator at the bridge between B and C, he knew her, my wife. I could scarcely believe it. He had seen her perform. It happened this way. We stopped the car and approached the tollbooth on foot, which in hindsight, was an odd thing to do, and I’m sure put the tollbooth operator on his guard. Nevertheless, we began our conversation in amity and it continued well. I explained what it was we were about. As a toll operator he seemed to feel that we were, as he put it, in the trade, and he was only too happy to go along with it all, although several times he had to stop to take tolls. Will you speak to them too? he asked, referring to the passersby. We will find them at their houses perhaps, I said. But what if they live far off? Wherever it is they go to, we will find them there in time. There is no hurry.

  I showed him my proofs and he saw in the papers my wife’s name, which is, it is true, an odd one. He said it out loud, my wife’s name. She was my wife, I told him.

  Yes, but was it her? Is she . . .

  Yes, she is the one you are thinking of.

  He related to us, to my son and me—how he had seen her in a grand theater at Weinau. That was before I knew her, I said. She had given up such things by the time we met. The man barked a loud laugh in spite of himself, recalling the grand theater at Weinau, recalling my wife’s show.

  I was very quiet, waiting to see if he would say more, but he said nothing, just stared and smiled and smiled again. He smiled again. He closed his eyes. He opened them. He smiled again. My son and I waited, leaned against the cheap wood of the toll shack. There was a pile of shit on the ground—probably from a dog. My son was looking at it—for there were flies congregating there, as many as angels on the head of a pin.

  The toll operator was working his mouth, getting ready to explain what he was thinking. He had that habit some have—of preparing the listener with the seeming difficulty of his saying anything.

  But, what was it like? I asked finally.

  I had heard, he told me, about her clowning. She was very popular at that time. First, no one had known anything about her—nothing at all, and then, suddenly, she was very popular. I was newly married, he explained—living over a shop that I worked in. We had very little money or time. We didn’t even have the clothing to appear in public really. The toll operator’s face hung over the proceedings of his speech. You have been young, haven’t you? You know what it’s like. But, still I knew—my fiancée and I, we had to go. And then, the show was free—it was always free, your wife demanded that, as it turned out. I knew that she was a clown, but in what way—it was never clear, not even now. Is it clear to you? I doubt it. The performance was bewildering. Her impressions of life were . . .

  He shuffled back and forth.

  I think I had actually forgotten about this, he said. It has been years since I thought about it—and now here it is. Here it is again, he said.

  We waited.

  Her impressions, they were more vivid than what I could muster with own arms, my own legs. It was almost horrifying. I mean—you wonder what is in a body. How is it animated? How does it move? She did a thing where she invited someone onto the stage, and then she would mimic that person entirely until it was unclear which of the two was moving first. The mimicry was so complete that the subject ended mesmerized, as by a more perfect mirror formed suddenly from air. Finally, the person would struggle to escape it—to somehow stop what was happening, but by then she would have them down and whatever they did, it didn’t matter. What was it the papers used to call her: a telepath, no, a physiotelepath—telepathic not with mind but body.

  He trailed off. We looked at the ground.

  But it cannot be true, he said—really, she was your wife?

  I said that it was true.

  What was she like?

  I said I wasn’t going to talk about that.

  He said we must be about the same age, that his son and my son were of an age too. He said it was funny that her son should turn out that way, that she was a clown, and her son was, well, like that.

  I didn’t say anything, just started to leave.

  He changed the subject. Farther north than there, he told me, people will not be so trustworthy as I might suppose. I should be careful.

  He asked if I had some picture of her with me, something to prove to him what I said. Not that I needed to prove it, but, he would think about it again and he would like to be certain. Did I mind? I took a photograph from my wallet. He looked at it disapprovingly.

  She is older there, he said, much older. I don’t think of her that way.

  C

  The day we left, the day we began, it was the first cold day. My son was standing by the door where the calendar hangs, and I stood there too. We looked at the calendar, and I turned it, and on each page, I said a letter. I said to him—and in this month we will pass through H and J and M and in this month through P and S and T. I drew the road we would take on a sheet of paper, and the drawing passed through fall and winter and emerged in the spring.

  If it would be the spring at some point on the trip, then he wanted to have his spare glasses. I agreed about this—the spare glasses were a good idea, and one I should have thought of.

  But when would it be spring?

  Did he want it to be spring already? I asked.

  No, no, no. He showed me his coat. He was eager for the season of coats. I, also, I said, like the season of coats. But when you get older you will find—the bones grow cold. It is not so warm as it once was.

  We laughed at how old I was, as old as a grandfather—was what he was saying.

  Then he wanted to leave the calendar on a spring month, some month we might return.

  I reminded him—we were not going to return. We were leaving the house for good.

  He began to cry.

  We are leaving the house for good. Don’t you remember?

  ››

  In the next village, the third in a string of settlements that together comprise C, a woman sold us fresh bread from a little cart. Her advice was: eat your lunch by the canal; it’s what I do. She said that the canal was built by a man named Holling, he and his lover, a man named Briggs designed it. They lived just up th
e road, quite a long time ago. Their studio is preserved. At the time there was the difficulty of them being two men, so she put it. But, they knew damned near everything that could be known about canals, and the plans they had made, that had been adopted, required their oversight for the completion of the canal (at that point already begun). So, everyone just had to swallow the confusion and let it be.

  I remarked that any number of great men have been that way, and in fact, I joked, a number of them have even been women, whether in their own person, or in the person of their wife, who made them, did what they did for them, etcetera. She was not really listening to me, though, and did not understand. Will you repeat it? Repeat what you said? I said not everybody does what they are supposed to have done. Sometimes someone else did it for them.

  Speaking is such a confusion.

  We went to the studio. It was closed, but there was a large plaque with very small writing on it in brass. It appears that Holling was the more traditional of the two. He preferred golden sections, classical lines. Briggs was much younger and, as the plaque put it—found his inspiration in peculiar forms—animal intestines, photographs of bombed landscapes, worried children’s toys. One of the main features of the canal was that it was not straight in any way. In fact, it served to string together disparate settlements, and wound around and through prominences of land. The idea was not to move ships from one watercourse or sea to another; it was for goods to move on barges. An odd side-prescription, put in also by Briggs was that fruit trees should be planted all along the track that runs from town to town the length of the canal. I thought of that part in Herodotus about a road in antiquity—where once a person could walk hundreds of miles in shade. That was in North Africa where shade must be a mercy.

  My son liked this idea of the trees, and when I told him they had all been cut down he went off a short distance and didn’t want to come back.

  Well, I didn’t cut them down.

  There was a picture on the plaque, and it appeared to me to be an image, a proposed sculpture of Briggs and Holling embracing, seated on a bench. Whether the sculpture exists in truth or not, I can’t say. At least we did not have time to look for it.

  With a block of cheese and a persimmon (and our bread) we went down to the canal. As she said, it was lovely. We sat by a lock. The entire thing appeared functional and well cared for. I always get the impression of a grist mill from a canal lock, the five or six I have seen. It is the sense that you are partly inside of or on the edges of a large mechanism. It’s like being in a clock—if that could be true.

  My son touched the lock with his hands, and climbed on it. He wanted me to photograph him there, and I did. There is a pose he likes to make, sort of like a gunfighter, with hips jaunty and hands at the side. It is a very nineteenth century pose and comes from his love of those heroic days. He made the pose then. I have not developed the pictures, but I believe it to be an excellent picture. The light was falling just over my shoulder, and the texture of his sleeve was lit as if with a brush.

  Ah—there was one thing about that lunch, and the persimmon. I will say it to elucidate his character.

  When I turned away a moment, my son ate the entire persimmon. I didn’t like that, I began to say something, I felt it wasn’t the kindest thing he could have done—but then I realized, the persimmon should go to the one who will eat it in a gulp when you turn away. Persimmons aren’t for people who soberly wait for their apportioned amount. That isn’t the kind of food they are. A good lesson—we munched our bread and cheese in silence.

  There were dead vines there by the wood of the lock and it was a cold day. Did I say that it was late in the year when we began the census? Perhaps that is a better beginning:

  It was late in the year when we went with the census into the north country.

  I think it is too dramatic however. I would rather go about the thing plainly—a plain description of how things have happened. In any case, it was cold, and we wore our coats generally.

  When in the evening we came to a house ten miles on, how surprised we were to find the same woman there—she who had sold us the bread.

  Yes it’s me again, she said. You went the long way. The roads run in circles.

  Is this where the bread is baked?

  Yes, yes of course. Where else would it be baked?

  She was not ready to let us all the way in, so we went about the full business in her entryway.

  Are we done? Will you go?

  Is there anyone else in the house?

  No, no one.

  I could have sworn I heard.

  That was just me. I talk to myself.

  What were you saying?

  Oh, you know. Things you have probably said yourself.

  ››

  My son likes for me to talk about my father and mother and to tell the stories of their lives. He never met them although he would like to—and asks if we can. They are dead, they aren’t anywhere, I always say.

  He doesn’t pay attention to that part. For him they are somewhere, they are there when I tell the stories, and gone when I don’t. It’s fairly simple.

  One story I tell is about a hat my father used to wear. My mother hated the hat. She wanted to get rid of it, but my father was always protecting it, hiding it, keeping it away from her, and then appearing with it on when they were about to go out.

  It was a bowler hat, a fairly simple bowler hat, I don’t know why my mother hated it.

  In any case, she finally got her revenge. She found the hat one day when he was out. He hadn’t been careful enough. She cut out the top with a pair of scissors.

  My father’s return salvo was to sometimes sit reading the paper in the yard with this absurdly compromised hat on his head. The hat has since been passed on to my son, who will wear it on occasion. When he does, we laugh together. We make the hand sign for cutting with scissors, and laugh and laugh.

  Part of giving the census is being able to argue on its behalf. Not everyone will just agree. Not everybody will permit themselves to be marked. And this is especially true the farther you go, or so it seems.

  As it happens, I found a good way of persuading people. I let them in on a picture of the census as an endless parade of census takers approaching them along the road. Each census taker will give an argument to them. Each census taker will want to thereafter set a mark on their side. Any one of the census takers can easily be put off. But how many are you prepared to argue with? For this reason, I say, it is best to simply get it over with now. Can’t you see that?

  If they don’t believe me, I go into detail. I say, in the place where I was born, there are thousands like me. We sit in rows through childhood learning just one lesson—how to take the census in the most efficient way. We love no one, know no one. We are dispatched in waves, and travel, like waves, across the landscape, touching every last thing that may be touched, seeing every last thing that may be seen. The route that I have been assigned, it has been assigned to a hundred others, and that is just in this year alone. I am possibly the first of this census, but I will not be the last, I assure you. This census is to continue for a double-decade, twenty years, and in that time, you will see perhaps two thousand census takers coming down this road, stopping at your humble shack to bang upon its broken wood frame and call you to account for who you say you are. As the census goes on, the conditions become worse and worse. The census takers become colder, crueler. The environment in which they operate becomes more brutal. Everything—every last thing becomes worse. Perhaps it is better to have to deal with me—the kindest of them all, or perhaps not the kindest, but the kindest to you? No one else cares as much as I do. Then when the others come you may call to them as one who has been embraced, and they shall go on gladly. You will never be accosted, never.

  I am not sure that it is a very good argument, but it turns out to be persuasive.

  When I came up with the argument, I was a bit concerned about its veracity, as, in so far as I understand the matte
r, there are not and will be no other census takers assigned to this region. But, then I considered the matter metaphysically and then I considered the matter metaphorically and what I came to was: certainly though no one will come, there is a way in which each person wants to be known, and if this person permits some basic misanthropy (basic to us all) to rise up in himself or herself and thereby thwart the census, then it is only to himself, to herself that he or she does harm. How sad that would be. Then that person could only wait in the hopes that another census taker would come. So, I am merely stating the opposite of what is true, and as they say in hell, a thing can only be as true as its opposite.

  If someone will on no account be questioned, if someone wants nothing to do with it at all, then I put a little tally on a map indicating the place where the refusal occurred. As I find it intensely pleasurable to mark down these refusals, I feel a great ambivalence about the work of the census, and am never put out or displeased, however it goes.

  D

  While we drive, it is a tradition in the family to sing. We do this because we have never had a car with a radio. I think it costs more to have a radio, or did once, and we got used to that. Since then—always, no radio. The car should be a kind of mechanical mule, I think. By that I mean—it should get you slowly to the place you need to go, faithfully to the place you need to go. The car does not need to go quickly. It does not need to be as beautiful as a mule is, for I like the way mules look. But, other than that, it should be largely the same. And, of course, a person riding a mule and singing—isn’t it obvious that this is a superior situation to a man on a mule with a radio?