She had never before seen the Baron, but she understood at once who he was — the man Kleinman called their benefactor, the man who had pledged to pay, one by one, the passage out of Nineveh. He was large all over, Kleinman’s height but so much vaster, a continent next to Kleinman’s slim peninsula. He flicked at the floor with an ornamented walking stick; he wore green leather gloves. He was smiling even as he was ordering her never to return — an ingratiating smile, more kindly than sardonic. And how could he not be kind, the Centre’s founder, the befriender of the displaced? She hadn’t caught what the two of them, the Baron and his manager, were saying; her little booth under the hooks was too far back to hear, but it had to be, it had to be, otherwise why was the Baron sending her away? She had come to the Centre hours late this day, many dreadful hours, she had come in her unwellness, but able somehow to conceal it all, it was numbly concealed, no one could tell, Kleinman could not know, he knew only that instead of commencing at nine with the others, she had arrived at two in the afternoon, and surely she recognized, Kleinman said, what an infraction it was, the rules weren’t his, they were the Baron’s, and of course he would never expose her, it was only that he was himself afraid of exposure, there was no way to predict, morning or night, when the Baron, who guarded his francs against waste, would burst in to inspect . . . But he is one of us, Lili thought, Kleinman is one of us, why should he betray me? It has never happened before, only this once. This terrible once. And she thought again: Because he has become careless, he no longer minds, he is on his way, already in his feelings he is gone, he is free, and how are we to live, where will we go? A mistake! She had supposed it was possible to seize the living moment for its own sake, as if past and future were no more substantial than mist. As if this life, this boy, were all there was to be grasped in the doom of having been born. As if birth were a thing of no value.
She stood in the street and breathed in the small cold wind of dusk. She had Julian to face, after all. Turning away — she was still in pain — she could not hear the last of the colloquy behind the Centre’s door.
“That woman,” Kleinman was saying, “is maimed.” In the summer, when she was alone in her cubicle examining papers, he had looked in to see the sleeves of her blouse rolled up from the heat.
“I did not maim her,” the Baron retorted.
“Intolerable, sir,” Kleinman began again, and frowned under his hat. He had taken it off, but now he put it on again. Also, he had intended to omit the “sir,” a habit he hoped to erase. “To sack her for no reason —”
“No reason? You saw what I saw. Hysteria. Breakdown, no self-control. Given what our aims are here, to succor the unfortunate, to place the morally discontented in more favorable circumstances elsewhere . . .”
The Baron was assuming his public tone, the fluently memorized phrases that so often earned him communal admiration — and, on one brilliant occasion, a framed commendation and a medal from an important city official. But he could sense how ridiculous he sounded — he glimpsed it in Kleinman’s look, Kleinman who dared to judge him! Why trouble to scatter these pearls before this foreigner, who either did or did not take them seriously? So, still smiling and teasing, he planted his stick against the manager’s chest, and said, “You will see, M’sieur Kleinman, how they will deal with you in Spain!”
39
BUT JULIAN was not there. The room was almost dark, only a ribbon of white on the wall from a streetlight; the window had no curtain. Lili threw herself on the bed — her groin ached still, she was hollowed out, an iron comb had hollowed her out, she was too weary to stand or walk or even cry. And again the tears broke from her, why should she not cry for the old man who had died in this very bed? She cried for the old man, and for herself, and for what she had made happen that day, and she cried with a deep relentless anger because Julian was not there, because she had permitted him to go — it was senseless, she had argued against it only weakly. He had gone in search of François, who could always get him employment in the cafés, he didn’t care if it looked a bit shady, François the friend of that Alfred who was dead, as dead as the old man, and she cried for the old man, and for Alfred, and for herself, and for what she had made happen that day. Senseless and useless, that hand-to-mouth life of the cafés, how would it help them now? How were they to get on? They had parted in the morning, Julian to seek out François — but unnerved, distracted, she had argued against it only weakly; her thought was on what she would make happen that day.
She lay on the bed, shoeless and curled up with folded knees to assuage the ache in her groin, waiting for Julian.
In less than an hour he returned, carrying a paper bag.
“Supper,” he said. Two rolls and some uneven lumps of hard cheese — his old trick, he’d cadged them from leavings on plates. He hadn’t found François. He’d looked in one café after another, the Napoléon, the Monaco, all the usual places. No one had heard from François, he hadn’t been seen in weeks. One of the fellows at the Deux Magots (but he was new and unreliable) guessed that François had been in trouble with the police — drugs, or drink, or a boy prostitute, how could anyone know?
She could not eat. She could not swallow. There was nothing to drink.
Julian said he would ask the landlady for a pitcher of water.
“Don’t go,” she said. But he left her.
“She hasn’t got anything like a pitcher,” he reported. “She says she’ll look for something else. I gave her some money.”
“Today,” Lili said, “I am sent away.”
She saw that he was half alarmed and half bewildered: tenuous under the solidity of his young man’s flesh. Yet she must injure him.
“Finished,” she said. “No more. There is nothing now.”
“Finished?” he echoed. How stupid he sounded!
“Dismissed.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “Really, Lili, I promise. I’ll find something right away, even tomorrow, there’s got to be something —”
“There is nothing,” she said again, and stared at his mouth. A young man’s moist and writhing mouth, with its leaping tongue. She hated it then, the mouth, the tongue. She hated his body, all of it, the long thighs, their treacherous male grip.
Wearily she lifted the burden of what she must tell him, of what he must know. The clinic, she told him, was very clean, she was treated kindly, how sympathetic they were, it was not an ordeal at all, it was only that her groin still hurt, already the hurt was ebbing, they had hollowed her out, her body was empty now.
“I asked to look at it,” she said. “It was nothing. A little bloody bud. A bloody little head, no more. Not a human head. Not human. A little fish.”
She had injured him, yes — she had never before seen him with such clarity: how he felt for her, how little he knew, how feeling could be so improbably distant from knowing, and what did it matter that he felt for her if he understood nothing, nothing at all? How perversely untouched, how whole! The tiny fishlike thing they had wrested out of the sea of blood . . .
His breathing was too close. He took her hand. She let him take it; her impulse was to recoil. He made a shelter for her head against his chest, and the buttons of his shirt cut sharply into her cheek. Her ear pressed down on a seashell roar: his calamitous heartbeat.
“Why,” he said, “why, why?”
“Why do you ask why? Stupid, stupid!” she cried, and pulled away from him.
“But it was alive,” he said, “it was alive, it could make up for —”
He halted. Make up for. He had learned that certain ordinary idioms she could not fathom.
Guardedly, in fear of her, he began again: “It might have been instead, instead of —”
Her palm shot up against his mouth.
“Stupid! There is no instead!”
She was flinging death at him, and he was failing her. And why shouldn’t there be an instead of? Why shouldn’t there be renewal? Why else had he fled to Paris in the first place, if not for re
newal? Not to be his father’s son; to be made over. He had read in the Psalms about deliverance. He felt chastened, ashamed. She was sobbing beside him, long heaving gasps. The worn old mattress shook with the labor of it, and he remembered the Sixth, how slowly, carefully, taking it in, he had copied out I am weary with my groaning, all the night I make my bed to swim, I water my couch with my tears, copying like a medieval scribe in the notebook with the red margins.
A noise on the stairs. Mme. Bernard, bringing water — he’d left the door open for her. She had made him pay for the water, she was suspicious of him, one of these American loafers, and that little brown woman, a Jewess probably, a pair of vagrants, were they good for the rent? Her narrowed look fixed on his battered sandals. Une cruche? Her precious crystal pitcher, a thirty-year-old wedding present, she kept it for proper company. For money she would search for an empty bottle.
But it was his sister who stood in the doorway.
“Julian? It’s so dark in here, is something the matter —”
“You didn’t go,” he said.
“Julian, what’s wrong, is it Lili, what is it?”
“She’s out of a job, and what’s wrong with you?” he barked back. “What are you doing here, why haven’t you left?”
“I came to tell you. I wanted to tell you —”
“You were going to go back!”
“I’m staying, that’s all. I decided to stay, Phillip said I could stay. I’ll be helping him, he wants me to, and then —”
“Stay, go,” he shouted, “only go away! Can’t you leave us in peace, can’t you see?”
He was running her off, driving her out — that downward clatter on the stairs. His sister, an intruder, a witness, he was stricken, and how could she not see how their lives were shaken? Lili rocked by unholy spasms. He wished that God could be real; only in the Psalms was God real, nowhere else. He wished that the fishlike thing with the bloody head had lived.
“Lili,” he said, “Lili.”
“Finished,” she answered. “Enough.”
How old she looked to him now: raw eyelids, swollen nose and lips. The corners of the mouth cracked from dryness. Haggard. The tumbled hair. The weeping was done; in an instant of self-mastery she was declaring it done.
She said, “It is time you go home now.”
“Because of your uncle? You want to go to your uncle, is this what you’re telling me?”
“That place is not your place.”
“Don’t leave me, Lili, don’t,” he pleaded, but he knew his force, it seized him at the shoulders and in his straining calves. “Don’t, don’t,” he said, and with his man’s body and his boy’s fear he bore down on her, pleading, and she yielded, she opened to him, dry-eyed, dry-mouthed, surprised and unsurprised, hurting in the place where they had combed her that day with an iron comb, he hurt her, he hurt her, until they lay breathing, breast to breast.
40
A BIG-CITY COMEDY, snatches of jazz among the skyscrapers, a swoop of cello when the elevator breaks down between floors, the usual strings for the lovers: it could be scored in under a month. Leo was indifferent to it. Another B movie, Brackman getting stale, getting pushed down the pole, Leo Coopersmith with him.
But something had happened. He woke into it, it was inescapable, it had taken root in what he presumed were the wrinkly lobes of his brain, though too often it flashed down to inflame the tender secret testicles that lurked like darkened planets between his legs. He felt it more than he heard it, or so he at times believed. He felt it in his sexual parts, even in the stiffened tips of his nipples, as a woman might feel it. Yet mainly — there was no denying it — he heard it, the elusive horrible noise of it, and he could occasionally smell it, too, a smell like earth turned under a spade. How had she done it, how exactly had those polyphonic antiphons, if that’s what they were, come into being, and from no recognizable system — what could you call that sound? When he tried to imagine it (he was always trying), it was scarcely stable, it was a fleeting exultation, or else a hideous hollow, like an anus, or a growly scrabbling of animal claws. Or — this was unbearable — a perpetual crazed crescendo. He struggled to remember the position of her hands: the left hand with the fingers spread, of that he was nearly certain, the long thumb reaching beyond an octave; but the right? It made no sense that she had rolled it into a fist. A fist could not account for the shudder of beauty between his legs.
It was the exultation he was after. He sat at the Blüthner hour after hour, hunting it down. Now and again, by gently throbbing the pedal, he could almost catch hold of a single legato thread of it, in B-minor, in the bass, sighing like a leaf-tremor; but of course she had been stolidly standing in those middle-aged homely shoes of hers, and what did she know of pedaling? He understood it had been fortuitous, a kind of mystical miracle — in plain words, nothing more than an accident. She was a musical nonentity, it was a lucky hit; yet it had happened, and if it happened once, it could be replicated, it could be found. No such chimera in the world as a lost chord, that silly old song by a fool who aspired to grand opera, and got famous through jiggling tunes for jingles. The lucky hit, the accident, the mystery, was there, shut up in the Blüthner, undisclosed; he had only to seek out the operative combination. It existed, it was alive in the keys . . . it was there.
41
24 November
Dear Mrs. [this was crossed out]
Dear Miss Nachtigall [this was crossed out]
Dear Miss Beatrice Nightingale,
Please forgive me that I write suddenly this letter. My husband does not wish me to write it, but from many difficulties he agrees. English I read with more skill than I can write or speak, but such is the way with language that is not one’s mother tongue. Please forgive my errors, and also my penmanship on this poor paper. I no longer am permitted the typewriter, being dismissed from my former employment. Some small wages I received without expectation on my dismissal, they are already gone.
I write now because I have been told that you are a teacher in an American school, and I believe I too own the quality to be a teacher in an American school. I have diploma (is this a correct expression?) in Modern Language from my university in Bucharest, but unfortunately all document evidence for unhappy reasons is no more.
I can teach French, Italian, Spanish, and (if necessary) German. (I think there is no use of Romanian in an American school!) I request humbly whether it is your opinion such a position can be available, in your own school or elsewhere. I can also translate, though perhaps not in America so usefully. Here in Paris in recent weeks I am translating literary works from Romanian into French language. My husband has no employment.
From many difficulties (I acknowledge I say this twice, it is unhappily truthful) we do not live in a good way here. We are deciding to go to America. From my work of translating, which is not very much, nevertheless we have already billets for the voyage. My husband being a citizen of USA, we are assured of my entry without great impediment. I ask humbly and gratefully, can you accept us in your home for a short while? We come to New York nine days from today. Please reply par avion to Poste Restante 51, Paris.
Yours sincerely,
Lili Nachtigall
Perhaps you are thinking, what will my husband do in America? He will return to be a student.
So the scheme was under way — Marvin’s wily mean thinking, invading, pressing. His suspicions, his clever convoluted cynicism. His crafty distrust. Lili’s plot, and what else could it be, if not a plot? My husband, my husband, and Julian nowhere in sight, neither in name nor in volition. A boy with a wife is a man, and a man with a wife cannot be left to drown. She had cajoled him to retrieve what was his: his America, and thereby his father, and thereby his father’s overflowing dollars. Life-stricken and impoverished, she was a canny woman who had maneuvered a rich American boy into marriage for the sake of his family’s money, if only he would be compliant: one of the oldest stories in the world. She was cautious, she was intelligent, she
would take it step by step, pretense by pretense. The pretense of looking to be independent — laughable anyhow, a foreign-born would-be teacher from an Eastern European country lately turned Communist, at a time (and who should feel this more than Bea?) when principals everywhere were pushing for loyalty oaths, how likely was that? And the even more improbable pretense of Julian’s easy surrender to his father’s design: he will return to be a student, what guile, what calculation!
And the whole of it resting on Bea. On Bea’s opening her door to the wanderers, a respite before the great transcontinental charge to golden California. On Bea’s having paved the way with Marvin, and readied him for conciliation — oh, but she hadn’t, and surely Lili had counted on it! How deliberate, how explicit, were those sly preparations for the pounce, those shrewd old urgings: you should say what you know . . . now nothing is hidden, you see? And the most cunning of all: I do him good.
Marvin’s thinking, Marvin’s mania. How it worms its way into your brain, how it works its way into whatever you believe!
But it was the last that made Bea hesitate. Was it really a ruse, was it really a plot? I do him good — words that, despite every doubt, carried the sound of a widening world.
42
November 25
The Suite Eyre Spa
Foreign Bodies Page 17