The Cost of Living

by Mavis Gallant

  1962

  NIGHT AND DAY

  SITTING next to the driver, who was certainly his father, he saw the fine rain through the beam of the headlights, and the eyes of small animals at the edge of the road. They were driving from Shekomeko to Pulver’s Corners, taking the route of the school bus. He felt a slight bump, nothing more, and sprawled on his face in an open field. Somebody, running, kicked him in the back. “Run,” he heard a voice say. “Get up and run.” They turned him over. “Be careful of my back,” he said. “I’ve hurt my spine.”

  He knew without opening his eyes that he had been brought to a farmhouse. “I’ve been hurt,” he tried to explain. They had placed him on a kitchen table, and now they stood round him and talked about him. They discussed his past, his character, and his destiny—and he powerless to reply! Then they all went out, and left him to die.

  I must be careful, he said to himself. I don’t know who these people are, or what they intend to do. He knew they were on the other side of the door, whispering, listening, waiting for him to die. He opened his eyes and saw the reflection of an oil lamp on the ceiling. The lamp had been placed out of his reach, on the kitchen floor.

  Without moving his head, he sensed the weight, or the presence, of a large piece of furniture, such as a Welsh dresser, somewhere behind. A window had been left open; he could smell the snow, and he was rigid with cold.

  “You poor devil,” said the woman they had left in the room with him.

  She got up from her chair and stood by the table. She bent over him; he could not see her face. “It’s a drink you want,” she said, “but I can’t give you anything to drink. I can just give you something to wet your lips. Wait.” She went outside to the yard and filled a cup with water at the pump. She poured the water from the cup onto his dry lips, but the water splashed to one side. None of it got to his tongue.

  “I was in England twenty years,” the woman said, close to his ear. “My husband was a schoolmaster. That is why my English is so fluent. They thought you would want to hear English when you came round.”

  They had placed his hands across his breast in preparation for his death, with the fingers of his right hand curled slackly on a worn piece of wood. In the dark—she had turned the lamp down, or else he had closed his eyes—he explored it, barely moving the muscles of his hand. His thumb came to the end of the piece of wood and pressed in.

  “You don’t need to ring for me,” said the woman. “I am here. I shall be here until morning.”

  She was crouched on the floor, down beside the lamp. He knew she had his examination papers. He heard her rustling them, tearing them perhaps. He moved his jaw; his glued lips parted. His tongue was swollen and dry. He said, “What are you doing?,” but all he heard of his words was “Aaah.”

  “You poor devil,” she said. “It’s a bad night for you. A week from now you won’t remember it.” She got to her feet, towered over him, and vanished. The room was rosy, then gray. The Welsh dresser dissolved. “Try to sleep,” said the woman’s voice, lingering after her person.

  In his sleep they placed him upon a bed as hard to his back as the table had been. Someone at the foot of the bed asked him questions, tormenting him. He made no attempt to reply. He was troubled now only because he could not imagine his parents’ faces, or think of their name. The people at the foot of his bed knew everything, but they did not know the name of his parents, or how they could be reached. “Do you feel that?” they said to him, grasping both his feet. They had tied electric wires between his feet and his spine. He said, “Yes, I can feel it,” and they all went out once again and left him alone.

  It occurred to him that he had been brought here for an important reason, dragged unwillingly, and had been injured when he fought. He spread his hands on his chest, and touched the turnback of the sheet, and then the blanket. He moved his hands slowly, exploring.

  The first thing he must remember was the name of the language these people spoke. He understood everything that was said but had forgotten what the language was called. The room was white and too bright, and the brightness was part of his pain. He lay in pain, but presently he found small discomforts just as serious. He was thirsty. The blanket covering him was heavy and coarse. “Yes,” he heard in answer to something he must have said aloud, and a woman slipped her hand beneath his pillow and gradually lifted the pillow and his head. She pushed a glass tube between his lips and he drank orange juice and went to sleep. Waking, he tested his fingers, then his wrists. He tried to change the position of his legs but gave it up. He moved his hands cautiously and discovered the wooden bell. It had been pinned to the garment he wore. There was a safety pin around the wire. He ran his fingers along the pin and the wire, and then rang the bell. He dreamed for a time of swimming. He felt the bedclothes drawn away and his hand gently lifted from the bell. He had lost the sensation of swimming and all that accompanied it—youth and pleasure—yet an indifference to his fate and future made him joyous and pure, as a saint might feel. “I have no past and no memories,” he thought he said. “This is what it means to be free.” A light shone on his face; he addressed the darkness around him.

  “Drink some water now,” she said. She laid the flashlight on the bed and brought the glass and tube toward him. He tried to lift his head.

  One day a blond nurse of great beauty fed him little pieces of toast. The toast was slightly burned, and the texture of the butter disgusted him. He swallowed one bit, was revolted with the next, and spat it out. This girl, whose face floated above him, was of mythical beauty. Her hair was silk and her eyes sea blue. He wanted to see her clearly, but there was a veil. The aura of her own goodness blurred her features. He had never seen the physical evidence of goodness until now, but then he had never in his life been treated so kindly. Meanwhile, the goddess was putting yet a third piece of toast into his mouth. He swallowed it so as to make her pleased with him, and suddenly began to weep; and the goddess, on whom he now depended for everything, was obliged to wipe his tears.

  They were speaking French. He understood everything they said, but had not been able to give the language a name. His language was English, which he had not forgotten—neither the name nor how to speak it. The people with secrets to keep, such as the little girls who swept the floor and were scolded by the nurses, talked in a dialect he could not follow, but he knew it was a dialect, and was not troubled as he would have been if it were something he ought to remember. It seemed to him that all anxieties and decisions concerning himself had passed into other hands. This lassitude, this trust, was a development of the vision he had been granted with the veiled goddess who fed him toast. He willed peace, harmony, and happiness to flow around his bed. He succeeded, and he understood how simple everything was going to be now. He smiled.

  “That’s a good sign,” said the dark nurse. “Smiling is the best sign. We are bringing your telephone back today. We took it out so the ringing wouldn’t disturb you. And look!” She whipped out her hand and held an envelope to his face. The handwriting said something to him, but his feeling was of apprehension, as if the letter had come too soon, and made too great a claim. He lifted his hand and took the letter. He had a wired arm attached to a wired spine. He was unable to read his own name. “There’s too much light in this room,” he said.

  “It’s the morphine,” said the nurse. She had a sugary voice. “You can’t focus. But you are getting smaller doses now.”

  That was all. From this momentary puzzle he moved on to his new state of bliss. He knew there would be nothing but brief periods of doubt followed by intervals of blessedness. Uncaring, impartial, he remembered the name for his condition: la belle indifférence.

  “We have used the expression too often and I for one am sick to death of it,” said the judge. Another voice remarked, “He is simulating indifference and knows very well what is in the balance.” “I used the term in an ironical sense,” said the consulting psychiatrist, rather crossly, “and did not intend the court to take it
seriously.”

  He saw the prisoner, the judge. The prisoner was smiling, dreamy, unaware; they could do as they liked. Had he really seen this? No, he had read about it. It was an account of a trial he had read that summer, sitting on a beach. He had the airmail edition of the Times. The Times gave a long, thorough, and sober account of the case. He read it on the beach, with his children and wife nearby, and he wondered about la belle indifférence, which seemed a state of privileged happiness reserved for criminals and the totally insane. His younger son crawled away with his sunglasses, his cigarettes. It was because of his children, both babies, that his wife could not be with him now.

  “When can I smoke?” he said, carefully putting the letter down.

  “That is a very good sign, wanting to smoke,” said the cooing nurse. “Your wife has called twice from Paris. We told her you were very quiet, no trouble at all. When you have the telephone you can talk to her. You must practice reaching, so that you can pick up the telephone. Pretend this is a telephone.” It was his toothbrush.

  In Europe, the doctors save you but the nurses kill you; before the operation someone had told him that. But he had a job in Paris and it was too expensive, out of the question, to go home. He had been told that in this place he would have care as good as any. What a mistake! The nursing was slipshod, slack. The girls were callous and unconcerned. They came and went, doing nothing really useful. They chattered together, and took little notice of him. And the doctor; what of the doctor? “Why hasn’t the doctor been to see me?” he asked in a new, querulous voice—like an ailing countertenor’s.

  “Aren’t three visits a day enough for you?” said the nurse, with all the honey gone from her voice. “You will be seeing less of him now. He has cases much more serious than yours. He is a celebrated surgeon, a busy man.”

  The goddess was a plain girl of about twenty-three. She was rough and impatient about his bath, and when she pulled the sheet taut underneath him it was an earthquake.

  “You have to do too much for patients in Switzerland,” she remarked. “I am French, and I am working here only to get an international certificate. All this washing and feeding…” She made a face and said, “In France, the patients look after themselves.”

  “I know it,” he said. “That’s why I came to Lausanne. I work in France.” He had intended to tell her all about himself that morning—all about his children and wife. Now he would tell her nothing. In any case, he hardly needed her now. He could move his head when he wanted to, and reach for the telephone or his cigarettes. With only a little help he was able to turn on his side.

  “You’re getting better,” the former goddess said placidly. “Bad temper is the best sign.”

  “You mean I’m a bad patient?” He resolved he would give as little trouble as possible, even if it meant hardship, hopeless neglect. Just the same, he thought, I think the doctor might come around more often than he does.

  Now he knew everything, of course. What lingered of his amnesia was the sweetness of la belle indifférence. Sometimes he regretted it, and wished he had been in a state to observe it and put it away in his mind, but the return of memory, and reason, brought all the reasonable problems of the future as well—sensible problems of convalescence, work, money, home. Very soon he recalled everything he needed for everyday life, although there were crevices now and again: he forgot the names of close friends, and once the number of his own telephone. In conversation with the doctor, an amateur botanist, he forgot “trillium.” And even much later, when nearly all of the first days had gone from his consciousness, he still could not believe he had ever come to this place voluntarily but secretly was certain he had somehow been tormented and then brought against his will.

  1962

  ONE ASPECT OF A RAINY DAY

  HE HAD SEEN his older brother, Günther, swear personal allegiance to Hitler when Günther was fifteen and he, Stefan, only six. Actually Günther promised nothing aloud, but stood with his lips tight. Later on, the boys’ father said to Günther, “You haven’t proven anything. No one knows what you were thinking. It was too late to drop out at the last minute. You have promised what the others promised, whether you wanted to or not.”

  What Stefan had never known and wondered now—it came back to him eighteen years later on a winter morning in France—was whether Günther was against the words because they were binding or against the idea they expressed. The formula of fidelity had been changed since the war (from 1939 until the capitulation, one swore to the person of Hitler instead of to the State), and perhaps Günther positively did not wish to make a gift of his life. Whatever his silence concealed, it stood for extreme feeling. Günther, now dead, had nothing more to say or conceal. And Stefan, walking among the French on a rainy morning, was wordless, as his brother had been eighteen years before.

  In the laboratory outside Paris where Stefan’s scholarship had taken him, the professors, the technicians, his friends and comrades, had put on their coats. Someone said, “Is Germany with us?” “Germany” meant Stefan. The rooms were dark and the heat in the building turned off; there was a general strike from eight until noon. Stefan went with the rest. It was too dark to work and he couldn’t very well stay there alone.

  There were nearly eighty of them straggling along the pavement. They walked slowly, as if it were a mild spring day instead of a winter morning of rain. They walked by the stone walls, the brick houses, the drenched winter gardens of this town that had been a quiet suburb and was now ringed with factories and fragile-looking blocks of flats. Rain darkened Stefan’s fair hair. If the police came now and asked them what they were doing, he intended to excuse himself. “Forgive me,” he would say, “but it was impossible to stay behind. I am in France with a scholarship. I am a guest of the country. I regret any worry I might be causing you by walking to the center of town instead of remaining at my work.”

  He was more than a guest; they had sent for him. What is a foreign scholarship if not a sort of bribe? Faint conceit made him glance at a girl walking beside him—a girl who had flirted with him in the halls. Now she walked with her hands in the pockets of her raincoat. Her head, in a cotton scarf, was bent slightly forward. She was silent and thinking hard; he could see that because of the way a tooth held her lower lip. It would have seemed to him attractive, rather sensual, if she had not been so removed. Stefan hoped for her sake that she was wearing a sweater under her thin raincoat. Now and again she shivered. When they got back to the laboratory, he would advise her to take aspirin, he thought.

  The general strike made the country seem submerged; he felt as if they were walking through waves. And now a smaller strike of one hour had been called. Plenty of cars rushed by, splashing the walkers on the pavement, but some taxis pulled up to the side of the road, and some shops were locked, with the blinds drawn. The main street, which they now descended, was the highway to Paris. Here they seemed to Stefan conspicuous. How intent, how uncasual they would seem if the police should appear now! He hoped he would have time to say, “Excuse me, this is none of my affair.” In Germany the police broke up demonstrations with fire hoses, and the most anyone got was a good wetting. He wondered why the French police didn’t copy this tactic instead of moving in with clubs.

  The leader of their group was a young man Stefan had seen in the laboratory but scarcely knew. Why should he be leader all at once? He had taken on authority without asking consent. This leader had a proclamation in his pocket, and they were on their way, all eighty of them, to the city hall of a Parisian suburb to read the proclamation to the mayor. The proclamation said they were against violence and murder, and that they stood for the Republic, whatever the Republic was. The owner of a fruit shop, who had joined in the one-hour strike, stood in his doorway, watching the fruit outside to make sure none of it was stolen. The pears under their protective netting looked delicious. If you bought one the merchant would say, “Is it for lunch, or dinner, or tomorrow?” If it was for lunch, it had to be eaten straightaway; to
morrow the interior would be spotted and brown.

  At the city hall neither of the armed guards at the door moved an inch; not the guardian of the peace with his club and his gun, or the statue in dark blue with his machine gun. Being armed and in uniform, the two were not men. They were targets, objects, enemies—pictures of something. The group trailed past them and into the building and stood, scuffling their soaked shoes, in the dark lobby. A marble plaque, yellow now, gave the names of the dead in the 1914 war, and a much smaller, whiter piece of marble held the names of the few who had died twenty years ago. The building felt as if it had not been heated for days. The group waited, giving off an aura of coldness and dampness like a cloud. The leader had his proclamation to read, but the mayor was away—on a voyage, said the elderly clerk, who, if you forgot the armed guards outside, was the greeting committee. The mayor’s assistant was away as well. There was no one to read the proclamation to, and so the young man read it aloud to Stefan, the shivering girl, and the rest of them. Stefan was aware of a feeling of dissatisfaction with the young leader—as if he had promised a victory and failed. Someone observed they could at least mark the occasion with one minute’s silence, and that gave the leader another chance. He looked at his watch and said the minute had begun. In the long minute, Stefan heard people walking to and fro in the building and a telephone ringing. When the minute was up, the group pressed back out to the rain, which was warmer than indoors. The minute had tired them more than the walk. “Keep in line,” the leader urged them. “Let us look as if…” He was losing his authority again; but surely it wasn’t his fault if the mayor was away on a voyage? And the mayor’s assistant, too?