The Ruined House

by Ruby Namdar

  The café was packed. The graduates, laughing, stood by the display window of cakes, their solemn, powder-blue robes unable to hide their youthful excitement. Some, surrounded by parents, grandparents, and younger brothers and sisters, were already seated, their mortarboards on their knees, carefully protected from the crumbs and coffee drippings. Surveying the scene with the expert eye of an urban marksman, Andrew spotted a small table in a corner that was being vacated. An empty table on a day like this was surely an auspicious sign! He hurried over to it, placed his computer case on a chair, and laid his sunglasses on top of it as a double proof of possession before going to the counter to order his coffee. A semi-familiar face caught his attention on his way back to the coffee counter. Seated at one of the front tables was that man—it took Andrew a second or two to locate him in his memory—the Israeli man, with the two dogs, the one that taught Hebrew at Alison’s Sunday school in Brooklyn. He was hunched over his laptop, hitting the keyboard fervently. What was he writing there, with such passion? Funny, he didn’t strike Andrew as the bookish, intellectual type who could be so absorbed in writing. Joining a line of students, Andrew decided to ask for a cappuccino instead of a latte and even to indulge in a pastry, tempted by a heaping tray of fresh croissants carried in from the kitchen in the muscular arms of a kitchen worker. Never mind: one only lived once! He would go to the gym that afternoon and work off the extra calories. Whistling an unidentified tune, he took a seat facing the large window, through which the day looked finer than ever, opened the laptop, and hit a key to activate it. The cappuccino arrived with its croissant, along with little bowls of butter and jam. Andrew graciously thanked the young waitress, who smiled at him sweetly while arranging the table, then turned to his computer, eager to get to work. Yet instead of opening the document he had been working on, he found himself creating a new one, at the top of which, without thinking or knowing what he was doing, he typed the short line, as though it were the epigraph of an essay of uncertain contents: “Short views, for God’s sake, short views.” Beneath this, he wrote in italics: Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. He hit the Enter key twice to increase the space before the text that would follow, took his hands off the keyboard, leaned back in his chair, and stared at the screen as though waiting for it to write something on its own—something whose swift, even lines, one after another, would reveal a transcendent truth, long felt by him, that he had been unable to find the words for.

  Ten seconds went by. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Nothing happened. The odd motto remained by itself at the top of the page. Forty seconds. Fifty. A minute. Nothing: not an idea, not an association, not the shadow of a thought. A total, complete void. A free fall into a deep, bottomless pit. The romantic impulse that had brought him here had melted like wax wings in the sun. Andrew glanced blindly around him. He felt as crushed as if dropped from a great height onto the chair he was sitting on. The festive feeling of commencement day was gone, its place taken by a sour sorrow, a bitter, inconsolable fatigue. What should he do now? Mechanically, he saved the abortive document and looked around once more, head spinning from the colorful scene that revolved around him like a diabolical carousel. He was falling, falling into an abyss.

  The smell of something freshly baked brought him out of his trance. His croissant! With a wolfishness that wasn’t like him, he tore it open along its length, spread it with gobs of butter, and emptied the jam bowl onto it. It was good, fantastically good. The rush of sugar in his bloodstream made him dizzy. The jam—cheap preserves, with artificial red coloring—got all over his fingers and lips. Fantastic! Two or three large bites and it was gone. He had had no idea how hungry he had been. And still was. Famished. The croissant had only made his hunger worse. He had to force himself to be sensible and not order another. Although he licked his lips clean, his fingers remained sticky. He mustn’t get the keyboard dirty. Rising abruptly, he hurried to the men’s room, elbowing his way past the customers crowding the tables and aisles. There was more of a line than usual and he had a long wait. His sticky fingers were beginning to itch annoyingly. Jiggling his right foot impatiently, he awaited his turn for the café’s only sink.

  6

  The cool dampness of the men’s room made Andrew feel a little better. He took his time washing his sticky hands before leaning over the little sink and splashing cold water on his face. Drying himself well with paper toweling torn from a cardboard cylinder, he checked the mirror to make sure that none of it was plastered to his face. People here knew him after all. He wasn’t just anyone.

  He tossed the wet paper into the trash, conscious of the waiting line outside. Just as he was about to leave, however, his attention was caught by graffiti on the door. He had never seen it there before. Might it have been scrawled today, in honor of graduation? He felt that it spoke to him, its heavy block letters standing out from the scrawls around it:

  KNOWLEDGE IS NOT A COMMODITY!

  SOCRATES’ TUITION FEES = $0.

  COLUMBIA’S TUITION FEES = $28,000 PER SEMESTER

  AN ACADEMIC DEGREE IS THE SUREST ROUTE TO A JOB

  90% OF AMERICANS HATE THEIR JOB

  QUIT SCHOOL, START TO LIVE

  Andrew stared at the writing, surprised by the effect it had. Although its childish naïveté should have made him smile with fatherly indulgence, he felt a sour bitterness that caused him to swallow hard and make a face. Knowledge was a commodity. It determined your worth. You were measured by the number of your publications, your titles and degrees. You were as proud of them as was a warrior of the scalps he took. You trod the dry, cruel ground of a gladiator’s arena. At sixty no less than at twenty, you were a slave of the system. You danced to the tune of the administration, of the rich donors who funded a new library or wing of the law school. Knowledge was budgeted. Learning was quantified. Everything was calculated by its exchange rate, by the years until the next centenary celebration, the next public relations hoopla. The slightest hesitation, the smallest slip, and you were out. The academic establishment would let you know it. Nothing dramatic, of course. You weren’t excommunicated like Spinoza, even though, ironically, it might have helped your reputation if you were. No, you were ostracized quietly, humiliatingly, ground down step by step, slowly obliterated until nothing was left of you. It was all lies, perfectly useless nonsense. The truth is written with an iron pen on the tablet of the heart, with the point of a diamond.

  Andrew gave a start. Someone was knocking impatiently on the door. He looked around him in a fright: where had these strange words come from? Had he really said them out loud? It had been like talking in his sleep. Suppose someone had been listening? He was letting himself be helplessly transparent. Anyone standing by the door could look right through him. Whoever was within earshot would know he was deranged.

  There was another knock, louder and more insistent. Andrew flushed the toilet, as though to drown out the inner voice. For no reason, he washed his hands again at the sink, wiped them, unbolted the door, and stepped back into the crowded, brightly arrayed Hungarian Pastry Shop. The place was hopping. It seemed to have filled up even more in the few minutes he had been in the men’s room. He made his way through the crowd to his table, sank into his seat, and reached automatically for the empty coffee cup that was still by his computer, whose battery, he feared unreasonably, might be about to run out. Stinging butterflies roamed his stomach, scraping his insides abrasively. He put down the cold cup, rested his fingers on the keyboard, and kept them lifelessly there while staring blankly at the white screen. By now it was clear that he wouldn’t write a word today, that nothing would be accomplished. Another wasted day, a day like yesterday and the day before! He might as well pack up and go to the gym, where he could at least make up for his feebleness of mind by strengthening his body. Who was to say? Perhaps his mental state came from neglecting his physical one. There was no point in simply taking up space on a busy day like this. And yet he went on sitting there, unable to stop the pointless punishment inflicted by the cel
ebration around him. His despair made him nervous and hypersensitive, drawing him against his will into a conversation between two young men at the next table. Both unshaven, they had the self-satisfied look of wannabe revolutionaries cultivated by students in philosophy and film departments. A pack of cigarettes and a heavy, silver Zippo lighter lay ostentatiously on their table, even though smoking had been prohibited in cafés and restaurants for years. One had tattooed on his arm, the scrawny limb of an urban intellectual, a menacing assault rifle. Was he a member of the Special Forces? Of a secret militia? The second, with black, shoulder-length curls and silver rings inlaid with turquoise, had a vaguely South American accent, from what country Andrew couldn’t tell, though the more the two talked, the more he sounded like an ordinary New Yorker. They were conversing with a half-bantering earnestness, throwing around big words in a youthfully ironic tone while pointing repeatedly to a thin brochure that lay on the table between them. Clearly, they were having a good time, enjoying their erudite conversation as much as the slightly younger graduates were enjoying their cakes, which looked better than they tasted. Why did he feel such contempt for them? What had happened to that tolerant, all-knowing smile of his, the smile of someone who had been there himself and could look back without anger? Non, je ne regrette rien! Edith Piaf’s charcoal voice was the perfect sound track for the dramas of one’s youth. What did a young person have to regret? Nothing! The regrets came later, when it was already too late. When had the magic vanished? Why? Over the years he had only grown more intellectually mature. Knowledge as a commodity, knowledge as a career! You only noticed it once the first cracks appeared in the retaining walls of your complacency. What noise! It was unbearable. Home, to bed! The gym was the last thing he was up to. He was exhausted. He had to rest. Perhaps tomorrow.

  Stifling a resigned sigh, Andrew switched off the laptop, gathered his things, and glanced up from the grayish-brown tabletop. The front window of the Hungarian Pastry Shop gleamed in the afternoon light, which turned it into a magical planetarium in which a blue, vitreous moon hung beside little glass stars like props in a children’s play. A very pretty, ethereal young woman in her last months of pregnancy was leaning on the counter and talking to the help. Proud, she glowed like a celestial body against the stars and bright spheres in the window as though at the center of her own enchanted solar system. In the light pouring in from outside, she could have been a Renaissance painting, her thin summer dress forming a soft halo around the deep curve of her hip and high belly with its entrancingly prominent navel. Her high, patrician forehead beneath the ribbon pulling back her hair had an otherworldly radiance. It was as though a portal had been opened through which this Madonna of the Coffeehouse projected a different age, a luminous time full of longing, into the dim, crowded interior of the café.

  Andrew stared at her in wonder, feeling a strange absolution. Thinking of Linda’s pregnancies, he couldn’t help but smile. How comical they seemed when compared to the magazine-like perfection of the young woman by the counter. Even Linda had laughed at her ordinariness. She had been a textbook case: her morning sickness, her insomnia, her lower back pains, even her perfectly banal craving for sour pickles and exotic foods. Her face puffed and her ankles swelled until she could barely walk. By the third month, even before she started to actually gain weight, her body had adopted the pregnancy posture, with her back arched and her hands half crossed on her abdomen. Yet these months, especially the first time, were remembered by him as good ones. Perhaps they had even been happy ones. There had been tender, intimate moments, punctuated by memories that became the funny anecdotes recounted at holiday dinners. “Do you remember that time in the middle of the night when she had to have, just had to have, a slice of pizza? And with anchovies! She always hated anchovies. The thought of them made her sick!” He had run from one pizzeria about to close for the night to another. In the end, an elderly Italian who was saving his last slice of pizza with anchovies for his own midnight snack took pity on him and smilingly let him, the future father, have it. Everyone knew the story and could even supply its punch line. “And so you finally brought it home—and when you did, she was in such a deep sleep that you couldn’t wake her for love or anchovies!”

  It evoked a bittersweet smile. Where had it all gone? What had happened to all the memories of their intimate, shared past? He still remembered the course they took before Rachel’s birth with the breathing exercises practiced by all the young mothers with a religious devotion, as if no child could be born without them. The fathers, ties loosened after a day at the office, had joked awkwardly to hide their discomfort. The two of them shone, Linda gay and laughing, Andrew the charming egalitarian husband hugging her from behind on the floor, her back propped against his bare legs, her head nestled in the crook of his neck while they breathed rhythmically together. The men grumbled. The women regarded Linda with curious “What does he see in her?” looks. But the two of them, not without pride, floated above all the subliminal, pre-partum currents. Young and beautiful, their future ahead of them, they enjoyed playing the perfect couple. Andrew winced, carried away on a wave of poisoned nostalgia. The promise had remained unfulfilled. Whatever it was, they failed; they had lost it and could never get it back.

  The second pregnancy was less, much less, idyllic. He would never forget Linda’s face after giving birth to Alison. Pale and anguished, she was unrecognizable: a gray, limp-limbed woman holding a crimson-faced baby that looked more like her granddaughter. She was almost forty and had been in labor for twelve hours. It wasn’t fair to remember her that way. But although he had often tried to erase the scene from his mind, it kept coming back with its aversion and guilt. They had tried, honestly tried, to breathe life back into their relationship. The baby had been so sweet and innocent: the cowlicks of milk dribbling down her round cheek when she fell asleep after nursing, the first flashes of self-awareness, the first smiles, the first teeth. She was only a year old when he left home. The thought of it caused his upper lip to tremble. The tremors went to his nose, traveled up it, and reached the blocked tear ducts of his eyes. Trying to shake off the black mood he was settling back into, he glanced at the counter, where he hoped to see his bright Madonna again. But she was gone. The window was just a window, its stars and constellations orbiting in empty space.

  Andrew stifled another sigh, took the check from the table, and went to the counter to pay. Home! He needed to rest. Maybe this evening he would feel more inspired. Or clearheaded. Or something.

  7

  June 1, 2001

  The 10th of Sivan, 5761

  Linda stands barefoot on the stone floor, pilloried at a crude stake. The coarse rope around her waist makes her exposed breasts look heavy and vulnerable. Large, milky tears drip slowly from her enlarged nipples into a pool, forming little gray storm clouds in the turbid water. A frenzied crowd of leprous, one-eyed, disfigured invalids surrounds her. Mouths with rotted teeth like the broken columns of ruined temples sound jagged, bestial cries, wild screams and laughs. I stand in the crowd, paralyzed with fear. Linda looks at me imploringly, but I’m rooted to the spot. A single word from me can save her! An abyss of regret. Who cares who the father is? Is there the slightest doubt whose child it is? The last of the bitter waters dribble from the corners of her mouth, leaving black trails of ashes. I want to run to her, to wrap my jacket around her and protect her from the lewd, greedy stares of the riffraff besieging her. I want to get her out of here and bring her home but I can’t move. It’s too late. All is lost. It’s all my fault.

  8

  June 1, 2001

  The 10th of Sivan, 5761

  Two forty-five a.m. A fierce, burning sensation in the pit of his groin violently shook Andrew from his sleep, searing his bladder like burning coals and sending him, doubled over, to the bathroom. Shutting the door without turning on the light so as not to awaken Ann Lee, he groped his way in the dark to the toilet, lifted the seat, and leaned over it, the stabbing pain causing him to choke
back a frightened gasp. But though he felt unable to hold his urine in a second longer, it took its time, pressing on his tormented bladder while refusing to flow and grant relief. He sought to summon nameless muscles he always had taken for granted. He squeezed, bent, straightened up, leaned forward again with his hands on the wall in front of him—nothing came. Something was blocking it, holding it up. Only when he arched his body against the wall behind him did a sudden, irregular jet of liquid slash its way through him as if laced with slivers of glass.

  Andrew sprang forward, trying not to undershoot the toilet bowl. The flow of urine stopped and started again, dividing into two: a current that arched into the bowl and another, weaker one that dribbled in large, warm drops onto his pajama pants and bare feet. Their sting fully woke him from his painful semi-sleep. Though fully aware now of his state, he wanted only to tear off his stained pajamas and cleanse himself of the surprisingly warm urine that might be a sign of some terrible disease. For a moment, he stopped its flow by half-involuntarily contracting the muscles hiding behind his pubic hair. The burning sensation resumed—not as strongly as before, but enough to reactivate his panic. He pulled off his pants, bent to wipe his feet with them, rolled them into a ball, and flung them in the sink. Dry, he felt more in charge, as ludicrous as it was to be standing there like a baby waiting to be diapered. Never mind. It was too dark to see and Ann Lee was a heavy sleeper.