Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  “Even so, was he kind to you?”

  He laughed without mirth. “He was a Dragoon. Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him. I remember one day—I was about four or five and I’d just been given new slippers. It was a cold winter morning. The people next door to us were moving. The moving van had come—a horse-drawn carriage then, of course. The driver had gone into the house to help get the furniture and there was this wonderful carriage and no one about.

  “I ran out through the snow, new slippers and all. The snow came half-way up my legs but I didn’t care. I climbed up and I sat in the driver’s seat, high above the ground. Everything as far as I could see was quiet and white and still. Only far in the distance there was a black spot moving in the whiteness of the new snow. I watched it but I couldn’t recognize what it was until suddenly I realized it was my father coming home. I got down as fast as I could and raced back through the deep snow into the kitchen and hid behind my mother. But he got there almost as fast as I. ‘Where is the boy?’ he asked, and I had to come out. He put me over his knees and leathered me. He had cut his finger some days before and wore a bandage. He thrashed me so hard, his cut opened and blood poured out. I heard my mother scream, ‘Stop it, you are splashing blood all over the clean walls.’ ”

  • • •

  Her boss was on the phone, feet on his desk, rolling a piece of Scotch tape between his fingers.

  “What about Blazer? Why don’t we publish Ezra Blazer anymore? Hilly wouldn’t know literature if it went down on him.”

  Alice dropped a file into the wire tray outside his door and kneeled to fiddle with the strap on her shoe.

  “No. No! I didn’t say that. Hilly’s full of shit. I said we’d do a million for the new book plus two-fifty for the backlist, even though it’s unearned by more than the value of your house in fucking Montauk. Does that sound ‘prudent’ to you?”

  • • •

  In Germany today, this notion of “prominent” Jews has not yet been forgotten. While the veterans and other privileged groups are no longer mentioned, the fate of “famous” Jews is still deplored at the expense of all others. There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.

  • • •

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  “Hello.”

  “How are you, Mary-Alice?”

  “I’m all right. You?”

  “I’m fine. I just wanted to check on you.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You sure you’re all right? You sound a little blue.”

  “I am a little blue. But it’s nothing. Don’t worry. How’s your book?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Who knows if it’s any good. It’s a funny business, this. Making things up. Describing things. Describing the door someone just walked through. It’s brown, the hinges are squeaky . . . Who gives a shit? It’s a door.”

  “ ‘Endeavors in art require a lot of patience,’ ” Alice said finally. She could hear the frogs croaking.

  “Memory like a steel trap, Mealy Potatoes.”

  • • •

  The camp was between forty and fifty acres (six hundred metres by four hundred) and was divided into two main sections and four subsections. The “upper camp”—or Camp II—included the gas chambers, the installations for the disposal of the corpses (lime-pits at first, then huge iron racks for burning, known as “roasts”), and the barracks for the Totenjuden, the Jewish work-groups. One of the barracks was for males, another, later, for females. The men carried and burned the bodies; the twelve girls cooked and washed.

  The “lower camp” or Camp I was subdivided into three sections, rigidly separated by barbed-wire fences, which, like the outer fences, were interwoven with pine branches for camouflage. The first section contained the unloading ramp and the square—Sortierungsplatz—where the first selections were made; the fake hospital (the Lazarett) where the old and sick were shot instead of gassed; the undressing barracks where the victims stripped, left their clothes, had their hair cut off if they were women, and were internally searched for hidden valuables; and finally the “Road to Heaven”. This, starting at the exit from the women’s and children’s undressing barrack, was a path ten-feet wide with ten-foot fences of barbed wire on each side (again thickly camouflaged with branches, constantly renewed, through which one could neither see out nor in), through which the naked prisoners, in rows of five, had to run the hundred metres up the hill to the “baths”—the gas chambers—and where, when, as happened frequently, the gassing mechanism broke down, they had to stand waiting their turn for hours at a time.

  • • •

  She was about to send off an email rejecting another novel written in the second person when her screen went black and the air-conditioning sputtered out, leaving behind a dim, primordial silence.

  “Fuck,” said her boss, down the hall.

  An hour later she and her colleagues were still bent over stalled paperwork in the dank-growing air when he came around scowling and told them all that they could go home, if they could get there.

  Twenty-one flights down in the lobby, firefighters milled around the sealed elevator bank, eyes raised to the halted dials. On Fifty-Seventh Street, cars jockeyed for a path through the lightless intersections while the number of pedestrians seemed to have quadrupled since morning. Just north of Columbus Circle, where a self-appointed traffic conductor worked in mirrored sunglasses and shirtsleeves rolled up to his biceps, the line for Mister Softee ran the length of the block. Longer still were the lines to use the old-fashioned phone booths earning another stay of execution: people approached them warily, even sheepishly, as if entering confessionals right there on the street. At Sixty-Eighth and Seventy-Second shuffling throngs pushed onto buses already sagging from the load. At Seventy-Eighth World of Nuts and Ice Cream was giving cones away. Another block up, the neon harp outside the Dublin House appeared drained of all its color, and heat that was only average began to feel, under these mysterious circumstances, extraordinary: seeping and sinister and ineludible, like gas filling a cell. Outside Filene’s Basement two women with four bags and five children between them haggled with the driver of a limousine pointed uptown. On the opposite corner, looking more hunchbacked than ever under his hundred coats, the homeless man rested his elbows on a newspaper dispenser and, taking it all in, yawned.

  At Anna’s door there was no answer. Inside her own apartment Alice shed her shoes, her blouse, her three-hundred-dollar skirt, poured herself a glass of Luxardo, and slept. When she awoke it was to a fathomless blackness and the plaintive beeping of her phone. Immediately outside her front door a fifth flight of stairs led up to the roof, or rather to a door bearing warning of an alarm that in two years she’d never heard go off; ignoring it now she ascended through the purple rhomboid of sky and in the relief of a feeble breeze walked across the ceiling of her own apartment to stand at the building’s prow and look down into the street. A car turning off Amsterdam accelerated west, its headlights pushing through the dark with a new and precious intensity. Candlelight flickered on a fire escape two facades away. To the right, beyond the ribbon of river black as ink, the shore of New Jersey was illuminated as sparsely as if by campfires in the wild. “Cold beer here,” a man’s voice floated up from Broadway. “Still got some cold beer here. Three dollars.”

  Her phone sounded another dire beep. Without the subway rumbling, without trains hurtling up the Hudson and the hum of air conditioners and refrigerators and Laundromats three to a block, it was as though a mammoth heartbeat had ceased. Alice sat down and a moment later looked up to confront the stars. They seemed much brighter without the usual competition from below—brighter and more triumphant now, their supremacy in the cosmos reaffirmed. From the direction of the flickering fire escape came a few noncommittal
chords on a guitar. The beer seller gave up or ran out. The moon, too, looked sharper and more luminous than usual, such that all at once it was no longer Céline’s moon, nor Hemingway’s, nor Genet’s, but Alice’s, which she vowed to describe one day as all it really was: the received light of the sun. A fire engine Dopplered north. A helicopter changed its direction like a locust shooed by giant fingers slicing through the sky. In her own hand Alice’s phone sounded three final exasperated beeps and died.

  • • •

  . . . there comes to light the existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men—the saved and the drowned. Other pairs of opposites (the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the cowards and the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are considerably less distinct, they seem less essential, and above all they allow for more numerous and complex intermediary gradations.

  This division is much less evident in ordinary life; for there it rarely happens that a man loses himself. A man is normally not alone, and in his rise or fall is tied to the destinies of his neighbors; so that it is exceptional for anyone to acquire unlimited power, or to fall by a succession of defeats into utter ruin. Moreover, everyone is normally in possession of such spiritual, physical and even financial resources that the probabilities of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, are relatively small. And one must take into account a definite cushioning effect exercised both by the law, and by the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

  • • •

  “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2003 has been awarded to the South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee, who, in the committee’s words, ‘in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider.’ ”

  Alice turned off the radio and went back to bed.

  • • •

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  Beep.

  He hung up.

  • • •

  At her door again:

  Shave and a haircut, two bits.

  Sighing, Alice picked up her keys and her phone and followed the old woman shuffling eagerly down the hall. The vacuum cleaner stood agape in a large dining room with floor-to-ceiling curios and a fireplace whose delicate molding had not yet been smothered over by their landlord’s indiscriminate brush. Behind them stretched a shadowy maze of yet more rooms, one after another all the way to the street, and in the air hung a stale, savory smell—half a century’s worth of latkes and sauerkraut, Alice guessed. On the mantelpiece lay a rent slip gritting its teeth for $728.69.

  “Have you changed your clocks yet, Anna?”

  “What?”

  “Have you changed your—”

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  The words flashed like a heartbeat resuscitated in her hand. “I’ll be right back, Anna, okay?”

  He sounded woozy, as if he’d recently woken up from a long nap, and in the background she could hear an aria diminuendoing. “What are you doing, Mary-Alice?”

  “I was just helping the old lady on my floor replace the bag in her vacuum cleaner.”

  “How old?”

  “Old. Older than you. And her apartment is bigger than both of ours combined.”

  “Maybe you should be fucking her.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  Back down the hall Anna was trying to wedge the vacuum’s bag out of its recess with a carving fork. “I’ll do it,” offered Alice.

  “What?”

  “I said I’ll do it for you.”

  “Oh, thank you dear. My granddaughter gave it to me. I don’t know what for.”

  “Have you changed your clocks yet?” Alice asked, standing.

  “What?”

  “I said did you remember to change your clocks back this morning?”

  Anna’s eyes watered. “My clocks?”

  “Daylight Saving Time,” Alice said loudly.

  • • •

  Culled from the mail:

  A Symphony Space flyer on which he’d circled the Kurosawa films he thought she should see, specifically Rashomon and, if she were able to stay for the double bill, Sanjuro.

  A Film Forum postcard on which he’d circled the Charlie Chaplin films he thought she would enjoy: The Great Dictator, City Lights, and Modern Times.

  A MoMA Film brochure featuring a photograph of an actress drinking from a coupe glass in Rosenstrasse and whose hairstyle he suggested she try, should she ever decide to cut hers short.

  His back was bothering him again, so she went to the Film Forum alone.

  “When he twists the lady’s nipples with his wrenches!”—and she ran around the room, tightening the air with invisible wrenches. “And when he salts his prison food with cocaine!”—and she bugged her eyes and put up her dukes. “And when he roller-skates in the department store! . . . And when he runs down the up escalator! . . . And when he gets drunk on the shot-up barrel of rum!” Flinging out her arms, so that an imaginary pair of shirt cuffs flew off, Alice did a sort of slow-motion moonwalk around him in his reading chair, and sang:

  Se bella giu satore

  Je notre so cafore

  Je notre si cavore

  Je la tu la ti la twaaaaah!

  “Señora?”

  “Pilasina!”

  “Voulez-vous?”

  “Le taximeter!”

  “Eat your tart.”

  “Tu la tu la tu la waaaaaaaah!”

  “Oh, Mary-Alice,” he laughed, wiping an eye and reeling her in to kiss her fingers. “My darling, funny, cuckoo Mary-Alice! I’m afraid you’re going to be very lonely in life.”

  NOW THAT HIS BOOK was done, a number of deferred medical matters could be addressed, including a colonoscopy, a prostate screening, and some tests a pulmonologist had recommended to investigate a recent shortness of breath. He didn’t have cancer, and a steroid inhaler did away with the wheezing inside an afternoon, but it was also decided, at the urging of a new orthopedic surgeon, that his spinal stenosis be treated with a laminectomy. The surgery was scheduled for late March and a rotation of private nurses arranged to be on hand for two weeks, which stretched into three. One Saturday, shortly after he’d started another novel and gotten back on his feet, he and Alice and Gabriela, the day nurse, went out for a walk.

  “Four pages,” he announced.

  “Already?” said Alice. “Wow.”

  Ezra shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s any good.”

  They sat down to rest on a stoop on Eighty-Fourth Street and watched as a man with a toddler leashed to his wrist paused to frown at his phone.

  “You want children, Samantha?” asked Gabriela, who was Romanian.

  “I don’t know. One day maybe. Not now.”

  “That’s okay. You have time.”

  Alice nodded.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know. You look sixteen.”

  “She gets that a lot,” said Ezra.

  “Anyway, you still have time.”

  “Thanks.”

  “. . . It’s when you are thirty-five, thirty-six, you need to worry.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “So when do you want to have children?”

  “Well, as I said, Gabriela, I’m not sure I do want to have them, but if it were up to me I’d wait until the last possible moment. Like when I’m forty.”

  Gabriela frowned. “Forty is too old. Forty things don’t work right. Forty you are too tired.”

  “When do you think I should do it?”

  “Thirty.”

  “No way.”

  “Thirty-two?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “Thirty-seven. You can’t wait longer than thirty-seven.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  A long-le
gged redhead in spandex jogged past. Ezra watched her all the way to the corner.

  “I know,” said Gabriela. “Let’s ask Francine.”

  “Who’s Francine?”

  “The night nurse,” said Ezra. “She doesn’t have kids.”

  On Columbus, they stopped again so that Ezra could chat with the hot dog vendor. “How’s business, my friend?” The vendor made an exasperated gesture up and down the block, as though his truck were parked in a ghost town. “Terrible. No one want hot dog. Everyone want smoothie.”

  “Is that right?”

  The vendor nodded glumly.

  Ezra turned to Alice. “Want a hot dog?”

  “Okay.”

  “Gabriela?”

  “I like hot dogs.”

  “Two hot dogs, sir.”

  “What does ‘halal’ mean?” asked Gabriela.

  “Good for Muslims!” the vendor called down proudly.

  While Gabriela took a call on her phone, Alice and Ezra sat on the bench where they’d met. They rested quietly for a moment, until Ezra said something about the plane trees that Alice didn’t hear for her thoughts—about where she’d been in her life, where she was going, and how she might get there without too much difficulty from here. Considerations complicated by this maddening habit of wanting something only until she’d got it, at which point she wanted something else. Then a pigeon swooped in and Ezra shooed it away with his cane; the way he did this, with a debonair little flick, reminded Alice of Fred Astaire.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, watching her eat. “This summer, why don’t you take two weeks off and come out to visit me? Would you be bored?”

  “Not at all. I’d love that.”

  He nodded. Licking mustard off her palm, Alice asked, “What did Adam say about your book?”

  “ ‘Ezra, I—I don’t know what to say. It’s genius. A masterpiece. I mean, Jesus Christ it’s good. Every word . . . Every single fucking word . . .’ ”

  “Is spelled correctly.”

  Ezra blew his nose. “Is spelled correctly.”

  “When’s he going to submit it?”