Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Do you know much about Tanya’s father?’ she asked me.

  ‘I know he was an actor and that he died when she was eight and Marty was eleven.’

  ‘Not just an actor. He was a musician, a director, a storyteller, a bit of a poet and a devastatingly handsome man. We were in a theatre company together. That’s how we met. We went on tour to all the regional cities and the country towns. His name was Eduard. Did you know that? But it wasn’t spelt like your name. He was Czech so he spelt it E-D-U-A-R-D.’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘No, well he Anglicised the surname when he got here after the war. He was a socialist and a Jew. It wasn’t enough for him to be a bit unusual, he couldn’t help but be unique. A professional dreamer, he could make you dream his dreams with him wherever you were or whatever you were going through. Women loved him and … he loved them. But sometimes, even while he was still alive, I had to dream his dreams for him, without him. You see … he suffered from depression as well.’

  ‘As well as what?’

  ‘As well as Tanya. I see so much of him in both the children but more in Tanya than in Marty. You love her for many of the same things that made me love him, their humour, concern for the world, quickness of mind, the music that is always in them even at times like tonight when she is lying on her bed in the dark with a slow dirge churning away inside her. But Eddie, this isn’t post-natal depression or whatever they call it now. This is Tanya. You have to know that and try to help her. You won’t be able to get her completely well but you have to love her anyway, in spite of it. It comes with the territory and, please, don’t ever … leave her, no matter what she might say.’

  ‘Leave her! I couldn’t leave her. She has been my life since I was seventeen. There is nothing more important to me than her and Abby. I am not me without them. I know about her depression. Perhaps I’m naive but I haven’t given up hope of a complete cure, but even if that never happens I won’t be leaving her. I love her too much. Hers is the voice that’s always inside me when I’m at work, when I’m away because of work, in the car, always. It’s because of her and Abby that I really do consider myself the luckiest man in the world. I’m not just saying it. I appreciate your concern but if you really knew the extent to which she is my life you wouldn’t feel the need to say any of this.’

  ‘There’s more. What has she told you about her father, about her father’s death?’

  ‘You were away on tour. She and Marty were being looked after by friends of yours, or neighbours. It was very sudden, a heart attack. She has said that she always felt cheated of the chance to say a proper goodbye to him. She had thought he would only be gone for two weeks. As a young girl, for years after his death, she kept expecting him to come walking in again with some stuffed toy, a kangaroo or something that he’d promised her, as though you had made a mistake and he wasn’t really dead but only lost like one of the inland explorers she’d been learning about at the time you, he, went away.’

  ‘Really? Is that what she says?’

  ‘Yes. She’s said that.’

  ‘We were away on tour with a play, something … I can’t remember. It was Shakespeare, but I can’t remember which one.’

  ‘I can only imagine how painful this is. You don’t have to tell me about it.’

  ‘No. I think I do. We were away. It was the first time he had put up his own money, our money. There were no backers, no investors. We had gone to the bank, made out a case and borrowed the money in our own names. Eduard had long wanted to start his own theatre company, one which would travel the country offering a mixed repertoire of light comedies, drawing-room farce and, of course, Shakespeare. He thought that Shakespeare was the font of all wisdom, a wisdom he could help disseminate. Being the kind of man he was, he was always falling out with the sorts of people we depended on for work. Whenever I tried to temper his enthusiasm for pointing out their shortcomings, he would tell me life was too short to swallow all of the truth himself without leaving people that part of it which concerned them. This was how he talked.’

  ‘Sounds like Tanya.’

  ‘I know. It does, doesn’t it,’ she said moving from the vodka to the Scotch.

  ‘We were staying in one of those grand country hotels—you know, the kind that sits proudly on the main street of every country town next to the post office, police station and municipal offices, with a different bar for every street aspect and a public dining room with mirrors on the wall and a piano in the corner. Eduard and I were treated like royalty by the staff, the original Larry Olivier and Vivien Leigh. We had dinner several times with the manager and with members of the local chamber of commerce … Between them they must’ve owned half the district. Apart from the injection of culture, it seemed we were good for business. They even offered to take Eduard rabbit shooting one night. I should’ve known something was up then.’

  At this, she tilted her glass indicating that it was empty. I went to the kitchen, brought back the two bottles and refilled both her glasses. I looked at her with a quiet sympathy. Thinking of this once very attractive young actress who had fallen for the archetypal dark stranger in her midst only to be left suddenly alone with two young children, I was unable to escape the melancholic fallout of my own inarticulacy. She spoke with that tenderness so regularly born of exhaustion, the exhaustion of years of subservience to an often mocking hope that one day something either circumstantial or incarnate might have pity on her.

  ‘Eduard had lost his family in the war. He had seen his parents and siblings taken away at gunpoint by the Nazis. He himself couldn’t kill an insect yet he had agreed to go rabbit shooting with the mayor and some of his friends, and, I later found out, with the mayor’s daughter. They really did go rabbit shooting. I saw the pelts. Afterwards they drank into the morning and Eduard managed to get himself alone with the mayor’s daughter. And he wasn’t used to drinking heavily, he was epileptic.

  ‘Eduard was always far too easily flattered, he said so himself. Anyway, I don’t know exactly where they were, how drunk he was or how far they’d gone but it was far enough for the mayor, when he caught them, to be in no doubt as to what Eduard was doing with his daughter. The whole town knew about it by lunchtime the next day and we were immediately evicted from the town hall auditorium we had been using for a theatre. We had the wages of the cast and crew to pay and Eduard had just stopped our cash-flow with one drunken night’s indiscretion. Instantly we went from being celebrities to foreign aliens, in Eduard’s case quite literally. People made racist remarks in the local shops when they saw him. There was talk that he had stolen someone’s shotgun. Some people even refused to serve anyone connected with the troupe, including me. But worse than any of this for Eduard was his guilt for the pain he had caused me. He had told me his life with me was the life he was meant to have had in Europe and he felt he had destroyed it.

  ‘I know I sound quite objective about it now. That and arthritis are what time can do for you, and anyway, whatever he did or didn’t quite do with the mayor’s daughter almost twenty-five years ago has paled into insignificance. The silly bugger thought I’d never forgive him a quick roll in the hay with a country mayor’s daughter. He’s more than paid for it and I’ve forgiven him for that too. I forgave him years ago but I don’t know whether his children ever will. Tanya couldn’t even forgive him for not keeping his promise to bring back a toy koala … or was it a kangaroo? I think perhaps it was a kangaroo. You’re right. I’d forgotten.’

  She paused, as if seeing it all.

  ‘He spent the next day and a half in bed in the dark. He wouldn’t eat because he didn’t deserve food, he said. I was furious till he took it all away with a gun they probably used for rabbits and foxes. He shot himself in the bridal suite of the Grand Hotel. It was two days after the night he had accepted the mayor’s invitation. I was downstairs at the time holding a crisis meeting with the cast and crew who were by then understandably mutinous …

  ‘I never stopped loving him, E
ddie, because it wasn’t selfishness that made him that way. It was an illness from which he would alternately gain and then lose reprieves. I’ve always been afraid that Marty and particularly Tanya wouldn’t understand this, that if they knew the whole story they would hate him and I couldn’t have that. He loved them dearly and was so proud of them. He didn’t forget her kangaroo you know, but when they took away the body they didn’t clean up everything, only what they had to. It was with him, it was there in the room when he did it. And I couldn’t look at it. So I had to let him disappoint her.’

  We sat in the dark and let her words hold the air. My first thoughts were of her courage. Who was there to love her after this tragedy, the one that those she loved most could never know about? Hers was a platinum fidelity, rare, quietly durable, and fusible only at a very high temperature. For nearly twenty-five years the pain would have fed on itself; the trivial callousness of his infidelity, the horror and senseless brutality of his own reaction to it, her forgiveness twice over that went twice unacknowledged, the necessary but painful perpetuation of a lie fundamental to the wellbeing of her children and then, of course, the unmitigated loneliness that was always there, gently holding her hand like the vaguely familiar cousin of an approaching death once or twice removed.

  I thought also of Tanya and how she must never know. There could be no haggling with the truth in a circumstance in which it could not help but be too costly. If Tanya believed she had inherited even just the stigma of her father’s illness then she would take to her bed as if it were her birthright and she would be powerless to fight it.

  Finally I wondered why her mother had told me this. Did she really think I needed to know it or was it a combination of this coupled with her need to say it? From within my arms she whispered, tears still falling down her cheeks.

  ‘He’s with me you know. I still talk to him, I always have. I never stopped. I tell him about the kids. He would be so happy you love her the way you do. It’s the most we could’ve wished for.’

  By the time (or perhaps because) Abby had started to say ‘Mama’ with a new discipline born of understanding, Tanya had begun to resume her place upright in the world of open curtains, breakfast dishes and newspaper editorials written as if for liberal excoriation. That it was in no small part Abby who had helped her up nurtured my hope that there was an integrity in our feelings for each other which might just see us past whatever shapes our fears would take when they crystallised. She had taken maternity leave which delayed the expiry of her two-year contract with the university, and then upon resuming, she was offered another two-year contract. This also helped. Her PhD thesis remained far from finished but most of the time that did not matter. Abby went to creche at the university, and regional conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa and the Indian sub-continent kept us all fairly happy.

  ‘The end of the Cold War was meant to usher in a new world order but since 1989 national, ethnic or religious differences have resulted in military operations in Liberia, Angola, the Sudan, the Horn of Africa, the former Yugoslavia, the Caucasas and the Trans caucasus, ex-Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, Lebanon, East Timor and Burma. Is this order? Is it even new? The New World Order is one of those magnificent calming, grandiose and meaningless terms coined by some bright young thing who, upon deserting the Bush administration, was immediately in a position to cash in on the riches of the lecture circuit as the coiner of the “new world order”. Imagine coining phrases as an occupation, Eddie, taking living words and snap freezing them into cliches. Eddie, why are you smiling like the cat that swallowed the cream? Actually cats don’t smile, do they?’

  My baby was back. Abby and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  CHAPTER 16

  It did not require the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the state that had given the Stalinist brand of Marxism a more than fair try for the cry of the mutant child of Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand to seep in under the doors and spread throughout the length and breadth of the Department of Planning and Environment. It began with meetings, a series of them at all levels and at all times. Each of us was asked to prepare a ‘mission statement’. Since I had never heard the expression before, it did not occur to me that it would put so many departmental noses so far out of joint when I wrote that I had too much work to do and that an emission statement would mean very little to the general public, in my opinion, and that only the policing of strict legislation would have any effect on the oil companies and car manufacturers. But, in principle, I was all for them.

  I was requested to go downtown to the Ministry offices for an interview.

  Was I serious? they asked me. ‘Hardly ever,’ I answered.

  ‘Things tend to run more smoothly that way, I’ve found. This is true not merely in the work environment but in nearly all human interaction, even in the parent–child interaction. I’m not what you’d call an expert on this sort of thing, although I am a parent. I’m the father of my wife’s child. My daughter has just turned three. Do you have children? I think I have a photo of her in my wallet. I could show you.’

  Was I a team player? they asked.

  ‘Oh, God no. Whenever I pair up with my wife against our friends for scrabble we always fight. Usually it’s about the role of slang in educated discourse or which Latin words have become part of English. She’s had problems with animus.’

  The distance between what you say in a daydream and what you actually say to a superior at your place of work is proportional to the number of adults unsuccessfully seeking full-time employment.

  I was requested to go downtown to the Ministry offices for an interview where I was told to prepare a mission statement. Forsaking sanity, I complied with that MBA-inspired direction.

  There were rumours of the appointment of sub-departmental managers. I had heard these rumours, as one does, in the post-industrial economy’s version of a market place, the staff tea-room, but despite their increasing frequency, I had not believed them. The internal mail was a bit slow, it was true. And there was a tendency for people to leave their coffee mugs soaking in the sink rather than making them ready for the next person, but I had always taken this to be one of the unalterable traits of the species, something that could be observed and noted but not changed without first isolating the gene responsible for it. Also, soft-centred biscuits were without fail the first to go, but as with the other problems in our organisation, it seemed the even smoother running of things could be implemented without recourse to more managers simply by invoking the time-honoured ‘suggestion’ box.

  But in these times other times were not honoured. A colleague, Chamberlain, approached me furtively in the tea-room and began a conversation in whispers.

  ‘Have you met him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The new guy, the manager.’

  ‘No. When did he get here?’

  ‘This morning. Wants to meet everyone one by one.’

  ‘That’s nice of him. Is he an engineer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A chemist?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is he a scientist at all?’

  ‘No. Apparently he wasn’t even a bureaucrat till last year when he finished his MBA, but he does have a computer background.’

  ‘I thought you said he wasn’t a scientist?’

  ‘No, he isn’t. He used to import computer software and before that he just imported things … generally.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he did write a book on cyberspace.’

  ‘On cyberspace, a book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Before the MBA or after it?’

  ‘I don’t know but I’d better go—he might be coming.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘Well, he wants to meet each of us personally.’

  ‘You mean individually, separately, alone.’

  ‘Yes, and he’s already met me and he’ll probably come around here to see you. I don�
��t think it would look too good if he saw me …’

  ‘A grown man whispering to his colleague in the tea-room.’

  ‘He’s not so bad I suppose. Well-built guy, solid.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Gerard … something. He’ll tell you to call him Gerard.’

  Incredulous is the wrong word to describe me or my state of being upon hearing that name, attached to that position, being introduced back into my life. At no time did it occur to me either that this new manager might be someone other than the ex-Tanya, currently cum Amanda, Gerard, or that he had changed for the better in the interim (and I was proved right on both counts). Indeed, such was my incredulity that on the way home that day I decided, without knowing why, that I would not mention it to Tanya. This was tantamount to an acknowledgement, at least to myself, that it was true. Of all the two-bit departments of planning and environment in all the world he had to walk into mine.

  The reintroduction of Gerard in our lives, his reincarnation as a dangerous escapee from a graduate school of business management, would have to be at the top of the how-was-my-day news broadcast when I got home. It would have to be a headline. So I crept into the house that night, in an attempt to avoid the headlines altogether and come in unexpectedly at the weather.

  Tanya was bathing Abby and they were deep in conversation. A few months earlier we had made the mistake of telling Abby she was four and a half that particular day. She had wanted a party upon hearing the news. We explained that people did not celebrate half birthdays but she insisted that some people did. When we inquired who these people were, she said they were at kindergarten with her but she had forgotten their names. Whatever their names, if Abby could remember them when she turned five, she could invite them to her fifth birthday party. Since then there had been much discussion about a fifth birthday party and birthday parties in general. Did we have a party the day she had been born? No. Then maybe we owed her one. I expected to hear something along these lines but it was not quite like that.