by Tom Rachman
Humphrey grew, but his sister remained stunted. At age five, he was the taller, though she was the elder by three years. Doctors drove syringes into her, dosed her with powders, cut her apart. When she writhed in bed, her mother stood on one side, her father on the other, Humphrey holding her feet. “Help me,” she whispered. “Please, help me.” They placed iced facecloths on her forehead, which at least gave them a sense of doing something.
His sister died at age eleven. She had feared being forgotten, but the opposite proved true. Humphrey gained a doubleness of experience, incapable of fitting through the narrow doors beyond which others lived, being two people now. He still refused to say her name. But, his whole life, he saw his sister in any little girl, and wondered what she’d have become, had she lasted the nearly unimaginable seventy-five years since her disappearance.
Humphrey’s father gave up ideology after his daughter’s death. He resumed work at the jewelry store, no longer moaning about the clients. His wife, by contrast, adopted his former political fervor and intended to act on it. Reports circulated about arable land in the Soviet Union, available to committed foreigners. Her husband had left the USSR as a young man, and resisted returning. She pressed him daily, citing the tumult in Austria, where Dollfuss turned the nation into a Fascist state, and in Germany, where Hitler had taken power. Nazis in both countries agitated for unification, which would put the Reich at their doorstep. It was time to go East.
From impatience, she decided to travel ahead and, if all went well, they would join her. Humphrey’s father read her letters aloud. The boy shared his mother’s enthusiasm for the cause and viewed his father unforgivingly. They should have gone—his father spoke fluent Russian, and could have helped. The Communist bureaucrats disbelieved her story, and held her at the border. Finally, Humphrey’s father packed up their belongings. But the train took them in the wrong direction, north to Rotterdam. He informed Humphrey that his mother had died. They took a ship for South Africa, wearing black armbands on board, their grieving restricted to the time at sea.
His father polished diamonds in Johannesburg, and they lived in an adequate house in Orange Grove. Humphrey attended local schools, and was young enough to learn the language rapidly, his foreign accent gone by adolescence. Soon he and his father spoke only English together. At school, there was a map on which the history teacher stuck thumbtacks to mark the latest battles in the European war. South Africa was almost a straight line south from the fighting. It was up there in Europe that Humphrey ought to have been. He had—and not for the last time—the sense that his life unfolded in the wrong place.
The war ended, and he graduated from secondary school, after which he studied to become a pharmacist, a choice determined by early exposure to medicaments during his sister’s illness. Potions, when rightly dispensed, alleviated suffering. As for doctoring, he never considered that, retaining a distaste for his punitive maternal grandfather, who exercised that profession. Or had done so. Neither he nor any of her family had been in touch since Humphrey and his father arrived in Johannesburg.
Jewish agencies issued lists of those murdered in Europe, and Humphrey glanced down the rolls, looking for someone whose name was the same as his, as if a doppelgänger had conducted his proper life, and death, up there. Lists of survivors arrived, too. One woman shared his sister’s name; another shared his mother’s. He wrote to the authorities overseeing the displaced-persons camp, identifying himself, inquiring into the story of this woman with his mother’s name. Weeks later, he received an answer: she had survived three years in various Nazi camps but weeks after liberation had committed suicide with laudanum.
Humphrey and a fellow student opened a pharmacy. After a few years, they had three stores. Humphrey bought two apartments, both in the same building, one for himself and the other for his father, whom he lodged a floor above, meaning that he could attend to the man by listening to his footsteps. They spent lots of time together, since Humphrey had a limited social life. The rules of romance perplexed him: the more you liked someone, the less they liked you; the less you liked them, they more they liked you. How could it ever work? By his thirties, he pretended to be jaded, kibitzing with the pharmacy assistants and playing the curmudgeon, which endeared him to women in a thoroughly nonsexual way. It was preferable to being shunned.
He considered moving with his father to England, which for him represented the height of civilization. South Africa had never suited them: heat and exploitation and complacency. But his father resisted another move. Finally, the man in the apartment above was too frail, forgot names, locked himself out. Humphrey tended to his father as long as possible, then admitted him to the Jewish care home. To erase the present, Humphrey disappeared into books. He contemplated death, ran through the imagined stages of his own suicide, toying with laudanum in the pharmacy after hours.
When his father died, Humphrey was in his forties. Just as his mother had once done, he yearned for a world of bohemian intellectuals. He lingered at cafés in Hillbrow frequented by the university students. But he was two decades older than those kids. He studied chess as an excuse to interact with them, and treated them to coffee so they’d stay in his company. Embarrassed to be just a pharmacist, he said—and it wasn’t a lie—that he’d come from Europe. To exoticize himself further, he adopted an accent. Rumors circulated that he was from the Soviet Union, because the false accent was, unintentionally, that of his Russian-speaking father, who had never shed his Old World syntax, constantly bungling idioms: “I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t hear it with my own eyes!” and “Never count your eggs before they cooked!” However, someone recognized Humphrey from the pharmacy and, to humiliate him, turned up with a modern-languages student who addressed him in Russian. Humphrey sold both apartments, plus his share in the pharmacies, then figured out how to get his savings out of the country, and set out to find the intellectuals.
His first stop was London. He didn’t fit in, lacking the education and social sense. He experimented with playing the Soviet dissident again, but was caught out and moved countries, refining the impersonation over time. He had ample savings, and didn’t spend much anyway. By the 1980s, he was in Asia, passing through Thailand, where he rented a house—he often took overly large lodgings, in hopes of attracting company. He met a young Canadian, a charmer with a thick beard who welcomed a place to stay, then invited others to join him. Soon Venn was using the house as he pleased, while Humphrey was confined behind his chessboard, toilet-paper earplugs to block out the pounding music below.
“Which is when I met you,” she concluded.
Throughout much of this account, Humphrey had listened, his eyelids clenched shut, squeezing from his synapses the weak pulses of recall. But, by the end, he had faded.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she told him. “It’s you and me again. But I’m finding a place out here in Sheepshead now. Don’t have tons of money, so I’m hoping there’s something in this building. Wouldn’t it be nice if I was on the same floor? Or maybe I could get a room on the floor below you, so I can hear when you’re walking around!”
He mumbled a few words—the spasms of a spent brain. Without further warning, he was asleep, deeply so, forehead still furrowed from the preceding effort.
By nightfall, she helped him onto his mattress and cleared a patch of space for herself on the floor, lying parallel to his bed. She gazed up, able to make out his shape under the covers, hearing his slow breaths, and she reached her hand over his wrist, which quivered at each heartbeat. When people have children, she thought, they don’t think of them as adults, don’t think of them as old or lonely. They think of having a baby, not having an old man. Tooly was glad that Mac had met Humphrey. Maybe someday the boy would be the last person in the world to remember him.
After sixteen hours of impenetrable sleep, Humphrey was slow to wake the following morning. She smiled, informing him of the remarkable duration of his slumber. Tooly expected to encounter the man who had exerted hims
elf the day before, but such a person had retracted. She sought to summon anew the details of his life, but he betrayed no interest.
Nevertheless, for the first time since her arrival Humphrey was peaceful. He could not see or hear properly, and remained doubtful about the time of day. But he knew who she was, and was uncommonly affectionate, holding her hand as she sat beside him. He kept saying this was the perfect life.
“What do you want to eat this weekend?” she asked. “I want us to have a blowout. Something we can’t afford. The shops will be shut when the storm arrives, so I have to pick up stuff beforehand.” She emptied out her wallet: less than forty dollars. “Champagne? Actually, probably can’t afford that. But a bottle of wine? Or vodka? You used to like vodka tonic. I can make you cocktails, Humph, and we can make toasts about things. What do you think?”
He loved the idea of a celebration, but wanted no alcohol—didn’t want to dull anything now. Tooly abstained in solidarity, stepping into the liquor store, then out again with nothing. She prepared him a smashed-potato sandwich, not because it was the lunch hour but because it gave him pleasure. And who cared about time? That was mere conformism!
“Is it all right?” she asked, watching him take a bite.
“Oh, God.”
“What?”
“Oh, my God!”
“Is it terrible?”
“It’s delicious!” he shouted, turning wide-eyed to face her, though unable to orient to her.
“I’m so happy to hear that, Humph.”
“I love smashed-potato sandwiches!” he cried. “How did you know?”
“Because I know you.”
“But how did you know?” He looked blindly beyond her. “How did you know?” Without waiting for an answer, he took another bite. “Delicious!”
After only one further mouthful, he fell asleep again, sandwich still gripped. He grunted when she tried to ease it from him.
Hurricane Irene was supposed to devastate New York City but had diminished into gales and heavy rain by the time it hit that Sunday morning. She went out to witness the wild weather, which always stirred her. Despite the evacuation order, the neighborhood wasn’t empty. There was even a café open. Two young Russian women served, conversing in their language with four male customers, all brazenly nonchalant in their defiance of public-safety warnings.
Tooly asked what damage there had been around here. They spoke of a few fallen trees and toppled power lines, and said the bay had overflowed. But nothing too serious. She bought a black tea and sat at the window, gazing at the empty intersection. A grocery store across the way was boarded up. The barbershop had its shutters down. A traffic light swung in the wind, changing colors without any vehicles to respond. Seemed almost unreal: the pelting rain, the chattering Russians behind her, Humphrey just around the corner, Duncan in Connecticut perhaps peering out the window at the storm, Venn in Ireland with wife and baby. Maybe Fogg was at World’s End, listening to the radio, dusting the stock. All these places at once.
With nearly her last dollar, she bought a croissant for Humphrey. When she returned, saying his name softly in case he slept, he remained still, because his heart had stopped.
1988: The End
HUMPHREY BECKONED HER to follow him out of the house. She reached for his hand, but it rose, resting on her head. “Your hair is wet from rain,” he said, as they walked down the alley. “Warm now, also.”
“Because of the sun,” Tooly explained, touching the hot crown of her head, sandwiching his fingers there and holding them for the entire walk to the main road.
The traffic—buses and tuk-tuks and motorcycles, fumes tickling her nose—overloaded her senses after weeks inside that house. He hailed a taxi and helped her into the backseat, flopping in after her and giving her address. Odd to hear him say “Gupta Mansions,” as if a character from this version of Tooly had wandered into the previous version. She watched him looking out the car window, his old eyes following each vehicle they passed, focus dragged along with it, then the next.
The taxi stopped at her street. “Very soon,” Humphrey said, opening the door on her side, speaking differently than he had, more seriously, “very soon you will grow up. Being small is hard bit of life. But you are nearly done with it. When you are grown, Tooly, you can be boss till the end. You are someone who must be boss of your life, not pushed around. So be careful.”
“I’ll be careful of trivial beings,” she suggested, to please him.
He smiled sadly. “Yes. Of trivial beings.”
“And the Moron Problem.”
“This also.”
She stepped from the taxi, watching him, unsure what was happening. “Are you going?”
“Good luck for your life,” he answered through the window.
The driver turned the cab around. Humphrey’s head was visible in the rear window as the taxi drove away.
She stood beside a pothole, looking into it, then stepped over and continued down the soi, past the fruit stall, past the tailor pumping his foot-pedal sewing machine, past the construction workers in bandannas.
It was Shelly who answered the door. She backed away to let Tooly in, bowed, hastened to her quarters. Paul was still away at work. Tooly found her bedroom tended and tidy, bed made, sheets tight. The apartment was air-conditioner cold, its thrumming units rippling the curtains. On the desk, her schoolbooks were lined up. She opened her book bag, looking for Nicholas Nickleby, but had left it behind. She took out her sketchbook of noses instead, yet couldn’t bring herself to draw more than a line, so left it on the desk. She jumped onto the bed, landing on her knees, mattress jiggling—her first proper bedding after weeks in the tent. She let herself fall flat on her face and lay still, her mouth dampening a patch of bedspread.
At the sound of Paul arriving home, she awoke with fright but did not move for several seconds. Finally, heart racing, she walked into the living room.
“Tooly.” He gaped at her, absently putting down his briefcase. “Tooly.”
She held still.
Paul reached out, and she extended her hand to shake his. He’d only meant to touch her arm.
“Did Sarah bring you?”
Tooly shook her head.
“Are you okay? You look so thin. Are you hungry?”
As they ate, he asked if she wanted to stay with him and that she could—he’d figure it out somehow. They could leave right now, move again. Did she want that? But these questions were too direct coming from Paul—she expected him to be otherwise, so didn’t know how to answer.
All fell quiet, like their meals of old. Just the tremors of his desire to speak. So strange after days of free discussion with Humphrey and everyone there, after all she’d done—drinking coffee each morning! cheating at chess! debating one of the Great Thinkers!
She asked to get down from the table, and went to her room. She hadn’t had a door for so long, and was unsure whether to use it now, if it would be rude. From the other room, he cleared his throat, as if to call her back. She knew where he’d be: seated stiffly on a chair, work folder in his lap, willing her to join him.
However, she found him otherwise than imagined. He lay on the couch, arm draped over his eyes. She stood beside him, looking at his shielded face. He reached over to draw his daughter nearer. But she turned, spiraling away.
On her balcony, Tooly gazed down at the lit swimming pool in the courtyard, a pane of blue glass. The shacks on the other side of the wall were dark. Lights from distant skyscrapers dotted the night.
She slipped out, ran down the stairs, passed under the jacaranda trees, beyond the saluting porter, up toward Sukhumvit Road, into the first tuk-tuk.
The destination she gave was Khlong Toey Market—she and Sarah had passed it that first night. Upon arrival, she handed the driver all her money, the tips from helping tend bar. She was on her own in a swirl of strangers, and looked for the alley. She tried one, but it was wrong. She walked up the next. All grew darker as she went. She closed her eyes,
the better to listen for music and crowd noise. She heard only traffic, far behind her now. Tooly turned a blind corner. And there it was: the house. She crossed the concrete patio and tried the front door, which opened immediately.
All three of them stood there, their conversation interrupted. The way they regarded her—Venn smiling slowly, Sarah reaching for her cigarettes, Humphrey compressing his lips—it seemed that the discussion might have been about Tooly herself.
“I figured you’d make it back, little duck.”
“Thank God, thank God, thank God—thought I’d lost you,” Sarah said, though she was looking at Venn.
“Look what I got,” Tooly said, taking out her passport.
Venn lifted it from her hand, flipped through, and handed it to Sarah, from whom Humphrey grabbed the document. He appeared uneasy about the girl’s return, lips parting as if to object, though he had no power to dissuade anybody. He had tried. But people didn’t listen to him.
“See,” Sarah told Venn, eyes wide. “She wants to come with.”
“You’re being unrealistic.”
“It’ll arrive in my account every month; he promised. It’ll come to me and I’ll share it with you. I don’t mind.”
“Who’s looking after her?”
“I will,” Sarah said.
“Me, you, and her going around together?”
“We’ll be company for you,” Sarah told Venn. “You can do what you like. With whoever you like. I’m not trying to make some claim on you. You won’t get sick of me. I promise.”
Humphrey addressed Tooly: “They’re not staying here. You know that? They’ll be going some other place. You might not like it. I won’t be there. There won’t be school, probably. It might not be safe.”