by Неизвестный
Noon, and he would be trudging by my side under the searing September sky, his hand in mine. The new satchel lashed to his back, cap low over his forehead, lips slightly parted, the faint mutter of his breathing, his eyes looking at the world nakedly, without detachment, never shifting the angle of his inner vision.
Acquaintances wave their hats at me, come over, shake my hand, bend over him, take his little hand, press it. They try to smile. His dull upward glance freezes them. Imbecile, utter imbecile.
After a week I let him come home by himself. My fears had been unfounded. The children did not need to take the trouble to isolate him—he was isolated to begin with.
The girls were married that year. On the same day, hastily, as though urged on to it, as though they wished to flee the house. And they were so young still.
A year of turmoil. Not a week went by without some sort of revelry in the house. With tears in their eyes the girls would demand that I hide him, and weakness made me comply. I would take him out and we would wander through streets, fields, along the beach.
We did not talk. We watched sunsets, the first stars; rather, I watched and he would stand by my side, motionless, his eyes on the ground. But then the rains came and turned the fields into mud and we were forced to stay indoors. The two suitors had appeared on our horizon, followed by their friends and by their friends’ friends, and the whole house went up in smoke and laughter. We tried hiding him in the maid’s room, but when he could not sleep we would sneak him into the kitchen. There he would sit in his pajamas and watch people coming and going, then get up and wipe the cutlery; just the spoons at first, then they let him do the knives as well.
Gradually he gained access to the drawing room, the center of commotion. Serving sweets or biscuits to begin with, then filling glasses and offering lighted matches. First, people would draw back at the sight of him. A brief hush would fall upon the room, a kind of sweet horror. One of the suitors would start up angrily from his seat to go and stand by the dark window, seeking refuge in the gloom. Nothing would be audible in the silent room but the child’s excited breathing as he moved from one to another with a hard, painful solemnity, his tray held out before him. No one ever refused to take a sweet or a biscuit.
People became used to him in time. The girls softened toward him and tolerated his presence. His small services became indispensable. And when, late in the evening, everybody would be overcome with lassitude, his own face would assume a new light. One of the guests, flushed with drink, might show a sudden interest in him, pull him close and talk to him at length. The child would go rigid in his grip, his eyes dumb. Then he would go to empty ashtrays.
By the end of that summer we two were alone in the house.
The girls were married one day in mid-August. A large canopy was put up in our garden one afternoon beneath a deep blue sky. Desiccated thorns rustled beneath the feet of dozens of friends who had gathered there. For some reason I myself was suffocating with emotion. Something had snapped within. I was tearful, hugging, kissing everybody. The child was not present at the wedding. Someone, one of the bridegrooms perhaps, had seen to it that he be absent, and he was brought back only late in the evening. The last of my friends were tearing themselves from my embrace when my eye suddenly caught sight of him. He was sitting by one of the long tables, dressed in his everyday clothes except for a red tie that someone had put around his neck. A huge slice of cake had been thrust into his hand, the soiled tablecloth had slipped down over his knees. He was chewing listlessly, his eyes on the yellow moon tangled in the branches of our tree.
I went over and gently touched his head.
Flustered, he dropped the cake.
I said: That moon…To be sure, a beautiful moon…
He looked back at the moon as though he had not seen it before.
Thus our life together began, side by side in the quiet house with flasks of perfume and torn handkerchiefs still strewn about. I—a poet fallen silent, he—a feebleminded, lonely child.
Because it was that, his loneliness, that he faced me with.
I understand that now.
For that he was lonely at school goes without saying. During his very first week at school he had retreated to the last bench, huddling in a corner of the room, a place where he would stay for good, cut off from the rest of his class, the teachers already having considered him hopeless.
All his report cards were inscribed “no evaluation possible,” with the hesitant scrawl of a teacher’s signature trailing at the bottom of the sheet. I still wonder how they let him graduate from one class to the next. For though occasionally he would be kept back in a class for a second or even a third year, he still crawled forward at the slow pace they set him. Perhaps they were indulging me. Perhaps there were some teachers there who liked my old poems.
Mostly I tried to avoid them—
They did their best to avoid me too—
I do not blame them.
If we were nevertheless forced to meet, on parents’ day, I always preferred to come late, to come last, with the school building wrapped in darkness and the weary teachers collapsing on their chairs in front of empty classrooms strewn like battlefields and illuminated by naked bulbs.
Then I would appear stealthily at the door, my felt hat crumpled in my hand. My long white mane (for I had kept my mane) would cause any parent still there—a young father or mother—to rise from their seat and leave. The teachers would glance up at me, hold out a limp hand and a feeble smile.
I would sit down and face them.
What could they tell me that I did not know?
Sometimes they forgot who I was.
“Yes sir, whose father please?”
And I would say the name, a sudden throb contracting my chest.
They would leaf through their papers, pull out his blank card and, closing their eyes, head on hand, would demand severely:
“How long?”
Meaning, how long could they keep him since it was a hopeless case.
I say nothing.
They would grow angry. Perhaps the darkness outside would increase their impatience. They would insist I take him off their hands. Where to? They do not know. Somewhere else. An institution perhaps…
But gradually their indignation subsides. They admit he is not dangerous. Not disturbing in the least. No, on the contrary, he is always rapt, always listens with a singularly grave attention, his gaze fixed on the teacher’s eyes. Apparently he even tries to do his homework.
I crumple my hat to a pulp. I steal a look at the classroom, floor littered with peel, torn pages, pencil shavings. On the blackboard—madmen’s drawings. Minute tears prick my eyes. In plain words I promise to help the child, to work with him every evening. Because we must not give up hope. Because the child is a borderline case, after all.
But evenings at home I yield to despair. I spend hours with him in front of the open book and get nowhere. He sits rigidly by my side, never stirring, but my words float like oil on the waves. When I let him go at last he returns to his room and spends about half an hour doing his homework by himself. Then he shuts his exercise books, places them in his schoolbag and locks it.
Sometimes of a morning when he is still asleep I open the bag and pry into his exercise books. I look aghast at the answers he supplies—remote fantasies, am startled by his sums—outlandish marks traced with zeal and beyond all logic.
But I say nothing. I do not complain about him. As long as he gets up each morning to go mutely to school, to sit on the back bench.
He would tell me nothing about his day at school. Nor would I ask. He comes and goes, unspeaking. There was a brief period, during his fifth or sixth year at school, I think, when the children bullied him. It was as though they had suddenly discovered him and promptly they began to torment him. All the children of his class, even the girls, would gather around him during recess and pinch his limbs as though wishing to satisfy themselves that he really existed, flesh and blood, no specter. He cont
inued going to school all the same, as indeed I insisted that he do.
After a few weeks they gave it up and left him alone once more.
One day he came home from school excited. His hands were dusted with chalk. I assumed he had been called to the blackboard but he said no. That evening he came to me on his own and told me he had been appointed class monitor.
A few days went by. I inquired whether he was still monitor and he said yes. A fortnight later he was still holding the post. I asked whether he enjoyed his duties or whether he found them troublesome. He was perfectly content. His eyes had lit up, his expression became more intent. In my morning searches of his bag I would discover, next to bizarre homework, bits of chalk and a rag or two.
I have an idea that from then on he remained monitor till his last day at school, and a close relationship developed between him and the school’s janitor. In later years they even struck up some sort of friendship. From time to time the janitor would call him into his cubicle and favor him with a cup of tea left by one of the teachers. It is unlikely that they ever held a real conversation, but a contact of sorts was established.
One summer evening I happened to find myself in the neighborhood of his school and I felt an impulse to go and get acquainted with this janitor. The gate was shut and I wormed my way through a gap in the fence. I wandered along the dark empty corridors till I came at last upon the janitor’s cubicle, tucked away beneath the stairwell. I went down the few steps and saw him.
He was sitting on a bunk, his legs gathered under him, darkness around. A very short, swarthy person deftly polishing the copper tray on his knees.
I took off my hat, edged my way into the cubicle, mumbled the child’s name. He did not move, did not appear surprised, as though he had taken it for granted that I would come one night. He looked up at me and then, suddenly, without a word he began to smile. A quiet smile, spreading all over his face.
I said: “You know my son.”
He nodded, the smile still flickering over his face. His hands continued their work on the tray.
I asked: “How is he? A good boy…”
His smile froze, his hands drooped. He muttered something and pointed at his head.
“Poor kid…crazy…”
And resumed his calm scrutiny of my face.
I stood before him in silence, my heart gone cold. Never before had I been so disappointed, never lost hope so. He returned to his polishing. I backed out without a word.
None of this means to imply that I was already obsessed by the child as far back as that, already entangled with him. Rather the opposite, perhaps. I would be distant with him, absentminded, thinking of other things.
Thinking of myself—
Never had I been so wrapped up in myself—
In the first place, my silence. This, my ultimate silence. Well, I had maintained it. And it had been so easy. Not a line had I written. True, an obscure yearning might well up in me sometimes. A desire. I might whisper to myself, for instance: autumn. And again, autumn.
But that was all.
Friends tackled me. Impossible, they said… . You are hatching something in secret… . You have a surprise up your sleeve.
And, strangely excited, I would smile and insist: “No, nothing of the kind. I have written all I want to.”
First they doubted, at last they believed me. And my silence was accepted—in silence. It was mentioned only once. Somebody (a young person) published some sort of resume in the paper. He mentioned me en passant, disparagingly, calling my silence sterility. Twice in the same paragraph he called me that—sterile—
Then let me off—
But I did not care. I felt placid.
This wasteland around me—
Dry desert—
Rocks and refuse—
In the second place, old age was overtaking me. I never imagined that it would come to this. As long as I move about town I feel at ease. But evenings after supper I slump into my armchair, a book or paper clutched in my lap, and in a while I feel myself lying there as though paralyzed, half dead. I rise, torture myself out of my clothes, receive the recurring shock of my aging legs, drag myself to bed and bundle up my body in the clothes, scattering the detective novels that I have begun to read avidly of late.
The house breathes silence. A lost, exhausted tune drifts up from the radio. I read. Slowly, unwittingly, I turn into a large moss-covered rock. Midnight, the radio falls silent, and after midnight the books slip off my knees. I must switch the silent radio off and rid myself of the light burning in the room. It is then that my hour comes, my fearful hour. I drop off the bed like a lifeless body; bent over, racked by pain, staggering, I reach for the switches with my last strength.
One night, at midnight, I heard his steps in the hall. I must mention here that he was a restless sleeper. He used to be haunted by bad dreams that he was never able to tell us about. So he had a night light by his bed, and when he woke he would go straight for the kitchen tap and gulp enormous quantities of water, which would calm him.
That night, after he had finished drinking and was making his way back to bed, I called him to my room and told him to turn off the light and the radio. I still remember his shadow outlined at the darkened doorway. All of a sudden it seemed to me that he had grown, gained flesh. The light behind him silhouetted his mouth, slightly agape.
I thanked him—
The following night he started prowling through the house again about midnight. I lay in wait for his steps and called him to put out the light once more.
And every night thereafter—
Thus his services began to surround me. I became dependent upon them. It started with the light and sound that he would rid me of at midnight and was followed by other things. How old was he? Thirteen, I think…
Yes, I remember now. His thirteenth birthday was about that time and I made up my mind to celebrate it, for up till then I had passed over all his birthdays in silence. I had planned it to be a real party, generous, gay. I called up his class teacher myself and contacted the other teachers as well. I invited everybody. I sent invitations in his name to all his classmates.
True, all the children in his class were younger than he. Hardly eleven yet.
On the appointed Saturday, in the late morning hours, after a long and mortifying wait, a small band of altogether ten sniggering boys showed up at our place waving small parcels wrapped in white paper. Not a single teacher had troubled himself to come. None of the girls had dared.
They all shook hands with me, very much embarrassed, very much amazed at the sight of my white hair (one of them asked in a whisper: “That his grandfather?”), and timidly entered the house which none of them had ever visited before. They scrutinized me with great thoroughness and were relieved when they found me apparently sane.
The presents were unwrapped—
It emerged that everyone had brought the same: a cheap pencil case worth a few pennies at most. All except one curly-headed, rather pale boy, a poetic type, who came up brazenly with an old, rusted pocketknife—albeit a big one with many blades—which for some reason excited general admiration.
All the presents were accompanied by more or less uniform, conventional notes of congratulation. The little poet of the pocketknife had added a few pleasing rhymes.
He accepted his presents silently, terribly tense.
It surprised me that no one had brought a book.
As though they had feared he might not be able to read it—
I waited on them myself, taking great pains with each. I served sandwiches, cake, sweets and lemonade, then ice cream. They sat scattered over the drawing room, embedded in armchairs and couches, munching sweets, not speaking. Their eyes roved around the room incessantly, examining the place as though suspicious of it. Occasionally tittering among themselves for no good reason.
My boy was sitting forlornly in a corner of the room, more like a visitor than the guest of honor at his own party. He was munching too, but his eyes w
ere lowered.
I thought my presence might be hampering the children and left them. And indeed, soon after I had gone, the tension relaxed. Laughter began to bubble up in the room. When I returned after a while I found them all with their shoes off, romping on the carpet, jumping up and down on the couch in their socks. He was not among them. I went to look for him and found him on the kitchen balcony, cleaning their shoes.
He said: I am the monitor—
That’s how his birthday party ended. Their clothes in wild disarray, stifling their laughter, they put on their shoes, then rose to face me, shook my hand once more and were off, leaving nine pencil cases behind them. As for the old pocketknife that had aroused so much admiration, the little poet who had brought it, asked there and then to borrow it for a week and apparently never returned it.
It is in self-defense that I offer these details, since less than a fortnight later, he was polishing my shoes as well. I simply left them on the balcony and found them polished. He did it willingly, without demur. And it became a custom—his and mine. Other customs followed.
Taking my shoes off, for instance. I come back from work late in the afternoon, sink down on the bench in the hall to open my mail. He appears from one of the rooms, squats at my feet, unties the laces, pulls off my shoes and replaces them with slippers.
And that relieves me to some extent—
I suddenly discover there is strength in his arms, compared with the ebbing strength in mine. Whenever I fumble with the lid of a jar, or fail to extricate a nail from the wall, I call upon him. I tell him: “You are young and strong and I am growing weaker. Soon I’ll die.”
But I must not joke with him. He does not digest banter. He stands aghast, his face blank.
He is used to emptying the garbage can, has done it since he was eight. He runs my errands readily, fetches cigarettes, buys a paper. He has time at his disposal. He spends no more than half an hour on his homework. He has no friends, reads no books, slouches for hours on a chair gazing at the wall or at me. We live in a solid, quiet neighborhood. All one sees through the window are trees and a fence. A peaceful street. What is there for him to do? Animals repel him. I brought him a puppy once and a week later he had lost it. Just lost it and showed no regret. What is there for him to do? I teach him to tidy up the house, show him where everything belongs. He catches on slowly but eventually he learns to arrange my clothes in the cupboard, gather up the papers and books strewn over the floor. Mornings I would leave my bedclothes rumpled and when I returned at night everything would be in order, severely in order.