Foreign Bodies

by Cynthia Ozick

  He had read about those legendary writers who sat in a favorite café every morning, driving their pens, oblivious to everything around them, the clatter and chatter, the passersby, the street noises, the car horns. He had never witnessed anything like that, which didn’t imply that it couldn’t be done, and as a matter of fact he was doing it right now, not in the morning (he didn’t get up early if he didn’t have to) but at two o’clock in the afternoon, at Le Tisserand, where he had never worked and wasn’t known and wouldn’t be laughed at. About the check he was both happy and resentful — happy because he could loiter here, with a bottle of beer and his smooth new notebook with its margins marked in red, and resentful because he understood that the money was both a bribe and a threat. One more month, his father had written below the numbers and the percentages, and then home. Those six monosyllables pounded like gongs. A brief chirp from his mother: Are you all right, Julian? We miss you. Nothing from his sister — she had other means: she hid his letters, and answered them secretly.

  He had already filled four pages: his idea was to invent a series of clever little fables, in style something between Aesop and La Rochefoucauld (Alfred had put him on to La Rochefoucauld), with morals at the end, only the morals wouldn’t be morals — he’d call them immorals, and they’d be the opposite of what his deceptively straight-faced tales appeared to prescribe or warn against. And the language would be simple and “transparent,” a term he had learned from Alfred; but Alfred was unhelpfully dead, and the Paris Review had already sent back half a dozen of his fables. He thought he should find another name for them.

  It had begun to rain, at first lightly, and a deadening of the air, and the smell of wet pavement drifting in from the outdoors, excited him a little: it was the smell of anticipation. Then it darkened, and a dimness settled over where he sat against a rear wall, with his feet on a chair belonging to a nearby table, and the rain hurtled down with a tropical force in dense gray curtains that flew in from the street. A rowdy party of three or four young girls dashed in, instantly soaked through, laughing and tugging at their backpacks: there was a lycée in the neighborhood. He liked looking at them — the rounded calves above their low socks, the rise of the small hillocks just under their collarbones, dripping hair falling to the middle of their backs. They were twelve or thirteen or even fourteen; and right behind them, a middle-aged woman. He presumed the woman was a teacher (she was carrying a briefcase), or else the mother of one of the girls, but she quickly separated herself from the group and left them standing in the doorway, giggling and squeezing the water from one another’s hair and braiding it into pigtails. The woman spotted a vacant table and opened her briefcase: rain trickled from its sides. But Julian kept his eye on the girls — only one of them was really pretty. He wished she were older, eighteen, say; if she were eighteen, or twenty, he would get up and sidle close and tease her in his improving French. Or if she were one of those American girls (but no, she wasn’t, the whole noisy bunch of them had erupted out of that lycée down the street), those American girls who were everywhere nowadays, in every corner of the city, he could start out as he always did with American girls: “So which one are you, Gertrude or Alice?” — which was of course a sort of test, to earn him either an ignorant retort or an invitation to say his name and where he was from and what he was doing in Paris, and after that who could tell what might follow? Especially if it turned out she was one of those French majors from Vassar or Smith or Bryn Mawr, who always knew who Gertrude and Alice were. And that was the joke of it: he’d learned from the photographs that Gertrude and Alice were ugly and old, in fact they looked like ugly old men, squat and (he guessed) pigeon-toed. The woman who had hurried in along with that gaggle of wild girls — the pretty one couldn’t have been more than thirteen — wasn’t exactly ugly, and not as old as he had at first imagined, but he’d had only a flash of her, she was no one he would ordinarily notice. He was noticing her now only because she was a distraction, more from the girls than from his pathetic cat fable, which was faltering anyhow: she was pulling a sheet of paper and a mechanical pencil (the kind his father kept in his breast pocket) out of that briefcase, cheap cardboard flaking off at the seams — it wasn’t made to be rained on. She had arranged her things — a long-sleeved sweater and a bag with the oval end of a bread sticking out — two chairs away from where he sat (the one in between had his feet on it), and he could almost see what she was writing. It had the commonplace shape of a letter, and at once he lost interest: she wasn’t a fellow inventor of fables, she wasn’t pretty, she wasn’t young, she wasn’t a sort he would ever approach to ask about Gertrude or Alice. She was only a woman who had come in out of the wet.

  A slash of sunlight cut into his eyes, reflected from a passing wind-shield: the storm was suddenly spent. The sea-salt aroma of after-rain hissed up from the sidewalk, and the girls with their pigtails and knapsacks tumbled out, shrieking, into the renewed afternoon. He tried to put his mind to his story: a free-spirited yet dutiful cat who always returns obediently home after a day of carousing in alleys. And what was the immoral of that? He couldn’t think, he was impatient with it, it was stupid, he was bored. He didn’t want to be the cat who comes submissively home, but he was homesick all the same; or at any rate sick. He felt sick, sick, partly in his stomach, partly he hardly knew how. He admitted to tedium, to looseness, to nothingness, it was all over with the crowd he’d been running with, that brilliant crowd Alfred was in the middle of, Alfred who could reel off a comic disquisition on a pubic hair held between thumb and forefinger (the rape of the lock, he said) — he’d run with them and drunk with them, but he wasn’t of them, he didn’t belong; he was always on the periphery. He tried and tried, he flattered them and scurried to catch up with them, he tried to deserve them, but finally they were sick of him or he was sick of them, he couldn’t tell the difference. Either way it left him out. It was their brilliance he was sick of; it didn’t stick, it was all mobility, it rolled here and there, aimlessly, quip after quip. His immorals too were no more than shallow quips. But the real trouble was the cat — he needed a bigger animal, one that would be capable of frightening the family when it returned. A bear; a fearsome grizzly bear. No: what household would keep a bear for a pet? Besides, once let out, a bear would be a fool to come back to domestic life, where undoubtedly it would have to resume the chain.

  “Damn, I can’t do it,” he said.

  The woman glanced up, and he realized he had spoken aloud. He was embarrassed, but only a little — lately he sometimes talked to himself. It was anger that did it, lava foaming up out of a dried-up throat, he didn’t care, he could do as he pleased, he could yell in the street if he liked. At three in the morning once, coming finely dizzily boisterously soused out of the Napoléon, Alfred three sheets to the wind, the pair of them yelling into the sky, yelling into the night, fat glorious American yells, and hey listen, Alfred said, which was the real wilderness anyway, the New World (it had aged substantially by now) or the Old? It felt marvelous, with Alfred’s arms around his neck (but Alfred had killed himself, Alfred was dead), not to know whether he had or didn’t have a body.

  The woman said, “Then you must persist.”

  This old thing was answering him, as if he expected it, or needed it, or wanted it! The look she was giving him was both more and less than annoyance, the kind of look you turn on a child who throws a stone that seems about to strike you but doesn’t. It made him believe even more than before that she must be a teacher from the lycée, some sour-tongued harridan that rough pack of girls had determined to snub. He took his feet off the chair. This small grudging feint toward propriety — she’d caught him out, she’d shamed him — made her laugh, she was laughing at him! From that first sound it was plain she wasn’t French, she certainly wasn’t American, what was she? Even a laugh can have a foreign chime in it, and this intrusive woman, with that elderly furrow between her eyebrows, was laughing at him!

  22

  THE BOY WAS absu
rd. The boy was contemptible. The self-consciousness of it, lord of the world, commandeering a flock of chairs as if he owned the planet earth, one of those know-nothing Americans besotted with old tattered visions of Sartre, that dolt, that foul Communist, that abettor of the worst. Paris was infested with these imitation baby Sartres and Gides sitting in cafés over their inky manuscripts, an apéritif placed just so at the nearest knuckle to authenticate the parody, the foolish superannuated play-acting. And this one in romantic agony over some tragic flaw in his genius! A plaything, their Paris, a toy: they would wear it out, it would wear them out, one or the other would be discarded. And when they were done with it, away they’d go, how easy to fly off with their easy American passports to those waiting rich cities and their movietone skyscrapers, their happy Clevelands and Chicagos and Bostons! They could come and they could go, ignorant that the ground was scorched, so obliviously soft was it under their feet, and here was this raw entitled boy with his big dirty sandals up on a chair, showing dirty toenails . . .

  So Lili laughed, and in her oddly arranged English snapped out her little mockery, and went back to writing to her uncle.

  But the stupid boy didn’t take it for the indifferent gibe it was, simple low sarcasm, or if he did, he was pitifully in want of conversation, and would put out his tongue for any crumb of human warmth. She had no warmth to give him; she was cold, her warmth was for her poor lost mother’s brother, far away where she had unearthed him; it was her intention to go to him, in two months, in three. Lonely, then; the boy ought to be on his way, he had a family somewhere, why should he persist? Persist in what? In play-acting in a café? She had seen them everywhere, their drinking, their raucousness, their play-acting. Make-believe exile, an ephemeral game. The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren’t the lords of the earth.

  Yet this lord of the earth was looking at her unhappily, angrily — bitterly. His sorrows, whatever they were, were trivial, he was uneducated, his ignorance was no different from innocence; but she could smell the fume of bitterness.

  “Am I a joke?” he said. Because she had laughed, and who wouldn’t laugh at such a travesty?

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Exactly so. Because there are so many of you.”

  “So many what?” Only see how ready he is to be belligerent!

  “So many purposeless. A carnival to pass the time. You come here and you do not know why.”

  He was being scolded; worse, he was being exposed. And by an imperious meddlesome woman who thought herself a clairvoyant. As if he had no right to be whatever he was. She was taking him to be part of a crowd, and he had given up the crowd; it wasn’t fair. A pang of missing: only his sister was sympathetic. Well, his mother too, but she was so much under his father’s thumb . . .

  “You don’t know me,” he said, “so don’t judge me.”

  In his own ears he sounded childish.

  “You should go home,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I have no home.”

  Oh, portentous! This caricature, this scion of good fortune, claiming homelessness!

  “No? Then where do you come from?”

  He let it out like a worm: “California.”

  “So that is your home, is it not?” — though he might have said Antarctica, for all the reality it had.

  “Getting born in a place,” he retorted, “doesn’t make it your home, not if they don’t treat you like you’re an actual person —”

  She was drawing him in, he supposed, with the intention of drawing him out: why should he allow it, why should he tell her anything at all? Already he had said too much, again that childish speechifying. Now he examined her in earnest — how small she was, the jutting collarbone, the narrow well above the upper lip, the bitten flesh of the lip itself. White fingers still gripping that mechanical pencil.

  And that laugh again! Scorn. A kind of hollowness in it. Was he a joke?

  “You speak better than you know,” she said.

  He was mistaken, she wasn’t old, thirty-five or so, it was only her voice that seemed aged. Such voices belonged to greenhorn immigrants in remote pockets of New York. He had seen the old films, the pushcarts, the shuffling old babushkas, the old men. He knew his father had had an immigrant grandfather (but not his mother, no!); it was a kind of family secret. His father had contempt for alien accents, he derided them, they offended him.

  She saw how perplexed he was. Bitter, why bitter? A bewildered boy, he understood nothing. California, a fairyland, Deanna Durbin, Fred Astaire, singing dancing movies while the world burned.

  And he — because of that voice, with its awkward foreign approximations overlaid by an unfamiliar cadence (it was too quick and also too slow, it was wrong), and the vibrating burr of her throaty r — he felt it, it stung him, he submitted to it: what she was. One of them, the ghosts of the Marais, those vagabond pigeons pecking at scraps underfoot. You were required, if you weren’t repelled, to pity them, grungy things, a kind of litter in themselves. But if you pitied, even a little, they might brighten sleekly into doves, cosmopolitan knowers with hidden histories brought low by a wicked whirlwind. Doves were what he had named them, and when they landed, astoundingly, in the pages of Merlin (Alfred’s doing!), doves they remained.

  And she — observing just then in the darkening of those pale eyes some inescapable recognition, she took in the notebook with its red margins: suppose she was too hastily contemptuous, suppose there was a worthiness in that notebook, a boy in his twenties can think worthily, Eugen in his twenties was worthy, and even beautiful, not unlike this stretched-out boy with his big shoulders and sadly pointed chin above a softly plump neck, and the scraggle of mustache and the uncut hair and the broad nose with its curled lobes. But she did not wish to think of Eugen, and she did not wish to think of Mihail. She cast them away, Eugen and Mihail, she purged her eyes when they forced their way into them. A black purge, like a vomiting.

  So they came together that afternoon, Lili and Julian, between ridicule and condescension, between vacuousness and uproar. He croaked out his California, the land of unknowing, no better than fabricated cats and bears. She bled out her Transnistria, where too much was known, and nothing he could imagine: she covered it over for him, the typhus, dysentery, starvation, shootings. The shootings and shootings. Mother, father, Eugen, Mihail. And then only Lili, Lili alone, with this ugly hole in her arm (she covered it over) from a failed shot, and the uncle lately uncovered in a far place. The black devil’s Transnistria, and afterward the red devil’s Bucharest, welter and waste. But she covered it over.

  It came of pity: she pitied him because of his emptiness, he pitied her because she had been full and was stripped, and because of the hideous hole in her arm. She told him she intended to go to her uncle; her uncle was living in Bat Yam, a town on the sea, not far from Jaffa; her uncle was expecting her, and did Julian know Jaffa? He didn’t. Where Jonah sailed from, she said; he barely knew Jonah, he had no religion. But in the end — it took more than a month — she went with him to carry his things away from Mme. Duval’s. The two of them agreed (how difficult it had been to persuade her) to live for a while in Dr. Montalbano’s unoccupied flat. She had much to teach him. He had nothing to give her but the miracle of his gratitude.

  What she taught him was Europe. She thickened his mind. And he entered her body, gratefully. He forgot pity. She, who had less of it (because in truth he deserved less), forgot it too.

  23

  LEO WAS ANGRY, he was humiliated. He had met with the director that morning to discuss some newly added scenes — where the music would enter and where it would exit. The director was insisting on “hits,” on “story points” — it wasn’t the lingo Leo minded, it was the insult to his score. He wanted, for once, to have the thing flow from start to finish, seamlessly: s
o that, even though it coursed under and through the dialogue, even though it rose and swelled where there was terror or exhilaration, even though it galloped with the horses, even though it undulated evocatively at the moment of the lovers’ climactic recognition, it would live, apart from this foolish drama, as the independent organism he meant it to be: it would be his.

  “Leo! What in hell do you think you’re doing,” the director barked — it was Brackman, nasty arrogant Brackman — “a concert piece, we’re in Carnegie Hall? You’re giving me an opera? Look, I need to spot some sort of big noise right here, I don’t care what, a drum maybe, a crash, you figure it out. Stick to the action, don’t give me any fancy art music, you follow me?”

  But the work had a trajectory, it knew its purpose, it was a living arrow, it had its own bloodstream. Schönberg, even Schönberg! Master, sublime inventor, and a failure in the movies; they’d thrown him out. Schönberg! They had no use for complex polyphony, for originality, for the higher imagination. If Brackman could have hired, say, Prokofiev instead of Leo Coopersmith, he would sneer just as he sneered at Leo Coopersmith — never mind that Eisenstein and Prokofiev had collaborated like a pair of angels! Such a time would never come again. Yes, why not opera? Why not the empyrean, the sublime? What Brackman wanted was what he had heard before, in a hundred other films, reliable old sounds to fit reliable old images. Meandering tempos and saccharine strings.