The Involuntary Sojourner

by S. P. Tenhoff

  The boy seemed to wish he didn’t need to be there either. He perked up only once, when Dr. Tauber complained about the snowfall that had made the stairs even more treacherous than usual.

  “I like it,” the boy said, suddenly defiant. “I like snow.” Placing on the word a grave emphasis that was apparently the closest he came to ordinary childlike enthusiasm.

  “He likes snow?” Dr. Tauber grinned at the woman. “With these stairs?”

  The boy grunted affirmation.

  “No, no. It’s for her. That was for your mother.” With his finger Dr. Tauber made the invisible-line gesture from boy to woman that meant a translation was required.

  After the boy finished the woman spoke. “We don’t have snow,” the boy explained. “At home.”

  “At home? . . . Ah, right. Well of course: no snow.” He tried to imagine it: all heat and light and crumbling surfaces the color of dust. “That must be . . .” He stopped; he’d nearly ventured into a region he had no wish to explore.

  “I have one of my own,” he said to the woman instead. “A son. Much older now of course. When he was your son’s age he loved the snow too. Couldn’t get enough of it.” Dr. Tauber waited for the translation, then continued: “We used to build snowmen.” He turned to the boy. “Have you made one yet?” He wanted her to see that he was good with children. That he could be kind to her son.

  The boy looked at Dr. Tauber as if he didn’t understand English any better than his mother.

  “. . . A snowman,” Dr. Tauber said. “A man made out of snow. Sticks, a carrot. Maybe a hat, like Frosty. Frosty? You don’t . . . You must have seen one.” Squatting, he formed a small mound of dirty snow on the step above, squeezed together a slushball and set it on top.

  Mother and son looked down at what he’d made.

  He stood up. “Well this isn’t much of an example.” His shoe toppled it, crushed the shape flat. “Sometime we’ll have to . . .” He was about to say “build one together.” But something about the boy prevented him from behaving, even for a moment, in a fatherly way . . .

  And the boy’s actual father? Gone, Dr. Tauber was sure. Left behind in their sunbright, snowless country. Lost. Killed, possibly, in a war. Anyway permanently absent from the woman’s story . . .

  He arrived at the stairs at eight fifteen now so he wouldn’t miss her if she left early. He would wait in the cold on his usual step even after he’d finished catching his breath. And it began to seem to him that the moment when she appeared at the dormitory gate and descended to him, that this moment and not the office one hundred and thirty-three steps above was the reason he was on the stairs at all. Or that in any case it was this moment that allowed him to survive the superficial variety and underlying sameness of his days. Often they only exchanged pleasantries or smiled at each other as they passed, but he felt nevertheless as if he were receiving a day’s worth of some essential sustenance, enough—if only barely—to carry him through the long hours above spent presiding over ruin and decay . . .

  He’d never needed this sustenance before. Or: he’d needed it and hadn’t known it. He’d gotten something once from dentistry, not sustenance perhaps, but a craftsman’s pleasure at least, professional curiosity when a mouth opened and accomplishment when it closed and the Dixie cup filled with water . . . In the beginning of his career, when he was just out of dental school, a mouth had been a landscape. Mountains, cliffs, caverns: and the mouth itself a cavern. Caves within dank caves. What a mystery a mouth was! The secrets people held behind their lips. His first year in private practice: that elegant lady with the fanglike cuspid snaggletoothed in her upper left quadrant. Nothing could have been more charming. When she opened her mouth to him, he wanted to profess his adoration then and there. It wasn’t even sexual, or yes, possibly it was, but not in the obvious sense; it was the shy and reluctant revelation of a flaw. An opened mouth was a confession. He never looked into their eyes. It felt invasive. Too much. They were already vulnerable; he was already the master even as he was a supplicant before them. They lay frozen in the ergonomic chair, helpless, beyond humiliation. In surgery at least the patient was anesthetized; the conquest was hidden from the conquered. Here they opened themselves voluntarily, they chose to surrender to him . . .

  When had this surrender stopped feeling like a privilege? It wasn’t that the woman had replaced the pleasure of dentistry; her presence simply reminded him that he must have lost it at some point long before, and that he’d been existing since with nothing to put in its place. Still, his work, and his devotion to it, had continued to provide something. Balance and order, for example. His life hadn’t been unbearable; if there was loneliness and an absence of joy, he’d barely noticed. And meeting her had brought . . . what? Imbalance; disorder. An incursion of the unknown into what had until then seemed a perfectly satisfactory existence. It was clear what he’d lost; but what had he gained? Momentary and meaningless encounters on the stairs with a woman who didn’t even speak his language.

  He’d decided to stop waiting for her there, and was even considering going to work earlier or later to avoid seeing her, when, one morning, the woman reached into her shoulder bag and produced a pair of giant onions.

  She held them up, one in each hand.

  “Onions,” Dr. Tauber said. “Un-yunz.” Enunciating carefully, thinking she might be asking for the English name.

  She took a step closer, stretched her arms toward him.

  “For me?” Dr. Tauber glanced at the boy. His face, as usual, was giving up nothing. And the woman’s face? He’d hoped he could learn to decipher it; but he couldn’t have named what he saw there as she set the onions on his palms.

  “Ah. Really? You shouldn’t . . . That’s, well, thank you.” She shook her head and, smiling, said something, but the boy provided no translation. Then they left, Dr. Tauber still holding up the onions as if on display, feeling somehow it was wrong to lower his hands.

  He didn’t eat the onions; instead he placed them on a stainless dental tool tray and set the tray in an alcove beside his desk. He didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a custom in her country to give onions to neighbors? Or her own odd but endearing idiosyncrasy? Or was it, conceivably, something else—some kind of sign? He was afraid to read too much into it. Nevertheless, it wasn’t completely implausible that the gift contained a meaning he was meant to understand. He might not have been as young as her, but he was distinguished and he was a doctor and in her country the idea of a younger woman and a man not yet old but somewhat older might be perfectly acceptable or even preferable since the mature man, if a professional like himself, would be in a position to take care of— But he was getting ahead of himself . . .

  What he felt for her: it wasn’t as though it represented a return to the lost feelings of his youth. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this for his wife, or for either of the women he’d dated in dental school. But maybe all of this—the sad and persistent yearning, the daydreams, the unmoored helplessness he experienced when he looked at a pair of onions on a tool tray—maybe it was all a symptom of something other than love, whatever that word might want to mean. An unusually concentrated form of gratitude, for instance. How often was he given vegetables? How often was he given anything? And if not precisely gratitude, an emotion perhaps without a proper name in his language, and impossible therefore to convey to her. But actions, he reminded himself, speak louder than words: what, after all, was her gift if not a wordless action? He could repay her, and show his feelings (whatever they were), with the action he performed best . . . Then again, no: offering to examine her mouth at no charge might be taken the wrong way . . .

  “Thank you again for the onions,” he said the next time they met. “They were delicious. And I wanted to show my appreciation.”

  He waited for the translation. With an open hand the woman made a sign of erasure. He ignored it and forged on: “I don’t know if I mentio
ned it, but I’m a dentist actually.” When the boy hesitated, he clarified: “I’m a . . . tooth doctor. I fix teeth.” Baring his own, he tapped his incisors with a forefinger.

  He had to use the finger to make the invisible-line gesture before the boy reluctantly translated.

  “And your son,” he said, “I was thinking I’d be happy, you know, to give him an oral diagnosis. A dental checkup. Pro bono publico, as they say. Free of charge. Just my way of . . . Just. Well.” He smiled down at the boy. “Go ahead, tell her. Tell her I can check your teeth for you.”

  For a moment the boy stared silently back at him. Then, without taking his eyes off Dr. Tauber, he said something to his mother.

  She reacted not with words or a change in expression but bodily, lurching backward like she’d been pushed and nearly tripping on the step behind her. She recovered her balance and took the boy’s arm. And then they were passing him, two dwindling figures descending the stairs and vanishing around a corner.

  He stood holding the handrail, waiting as if—although he knew better—they might reappear at any moment.

  He spent the weekend reenacting the scene in his mind. What had he done? Did the offer of dental care in her culture constitute some unforgivable faux pas? Maybe it was rude to have used the words pro bono, as if they were indigents unable to pay. Or did she simply dislike dentists? By Monday he’d half convinced himself that her reaction had nothing to do with him or what he’d said. There were any number of possibilities, he thought, arriving even earlier than usual to wait for them. But the way she gripped her son’s hand as they came down the stairs—and on the other side of the handrail!—without once looking in his direction had already confirmed the worst even before she ignored the “Good morning!” he called out in the most ordinary tone he could muster.

  That afternoon, after the limping man had completed his delivery of dental supplies, Dr. Tauber stopped him outside his office.

  “Excuse me.”

  He closed the door so Angela, his receptionist and dental assistant, wouldn’t hear.

  “A question. If you don’t mind. In your country people receive dental care, yes? I mean, of course you do. And it’s not common to . . . You are from the same country, am I right? As the Vis—as the people in the old dormitory down the hill?”

  Was country the proper word? It might be a region. Or something else: a borderless wasteland; a land with new and arbitrary borders . . .

  Yes,” the man said. Then added (proudly? contemptuously?), “But I don’t know those people.”

  “Well of course not. It’s not like I think you all . . . Of course not. It’s just that I need to . . . clear something up.”

  There had been a slight misunderstanding, Dr. Tauber explained, during a discussion about an appointment. He left out the onions and the offer of free dental care. Nothing in the man’s manner indicated a willingness to help or even any interest in the matter—he seemed, if anything, impatient to return to his deliveries—but Dr. Tauber was nevertheless able to recruit him to act, however reluctantly, as translator.

  At the dormitory gate Dr. Tauber hesitated for an instant, feeling suddenly like a trespasser. The building, salmon-colored stucco, looked more like a motel than a dormitory: three stories of doors behind rusted walkways faced a treeless courtyard of weeds and shattered concrete. He realized he had no real information to give the man: he didn’t know their apartment number; the woman’s name he couldn’t possibly repeat; the only thing he remembered about the boy’s name was that strangled “gaa” . . . The most he could provide was a brief physical description of the two.

  The man hobbled over to a little girl kicking a ball against the building. She pointed at a door on the second floor. They climbed iron stairs. As the man knocked, Dr. Tauber halted behind him and then took three steps back. He was no longer convinced of the husband’s permanent absence. He might be there, on the other side of the door: hairy and brutish and nearly bursting out of mismatched clothes . . .

  When the door opened, though, it was a woman. Another woman. He’d assumed finding her would be straightforward: how many families could there be with a single mother (if she was a single mother) and a boy of his age? Five, as it turned out. When they left, the woman kept her door open in spite of the chill, peering out at them as they went down the hall. The same thing happened at the next door they tried: a knock; the wrong woman; a face peering out as they left. All around him, he could sense them—a woman with a laundry basket; a pair of teenage boys—stopping in their tracks to watch him. Even the little girl: ball abandoned, she stood on the cracked concrete observing Dr. Tauber and the limping man as they went back and forth, from floor to floor, conducting their search. Maybe they thought he was there in some official capacity, to inspect or investigate or deport. But he didn’t feel empowered by the attention. He felt, instead, furtive and self-conscious, as though he were the Visitor, wandering an unknown land without a proper visa . . .

  Finally a door opened—number 7, first floor—and this time it was her. Dr. Tauber stayed back, in the courtyard, wishing there was a tree he could hide behind. But then she spotted him, and he regretted standing so far away: it made him look like some suspect character lurking in the distance. The limping man spoke. And then they were exchanging those sounds of theirs, at first tentatively, then with increasing urgency from her and lengthening stretches of silence from him, until she said one last thing and closed the door.

  The man swung around, and for a second Dr. Tauber thought he was about to get hit.

  “You are a shame,” the man hissed.

  “I’m a what?”

  The man lurched past Dr. Tauber, then stopped.

  “Here, you people. You think about you only. What you want, you say. But what you said to her? In my country, you can’t say such things.”

  “Can’t say . . . what? Dentists can’t offer free dental care?”

  “Can’t . . . I don’t know the word. A shame. To want to be . . . not her husband. To be like her husband. To want to . . .”

  “What? But that’s ridiculous. I never . . . I never said anything of the kind!”

  The man looked skeptical. More than skeptical.

  “No: listen to me. I’m telling you, I never said anything like— There was a mistake. A mistake in the translation. Must have been. I used the words pro bono. It’s Latin. It means ‘for the common good.’ In other words no charge. I offered to examine her son’s teeth at no charge. Nothing else. Maybe the boy misheard me. Or didn’t understand.”

  Although the man didn’t appear completely convinced, he was eventually persuaded to return to her door, where he knocked, repeating something in his language, until it opened. Dr. Tauber wasn’t sure if it was safe to move closer but he did, until he was almost at the door himself. The woman’s face was set and hard; the diagonal crease he’d seen that first time had returned. The man gestured toward Dr. Tauber as he spoke.

  “I’m not a bad man!” Dr. Tauber interrupted, afraid that before the man could finish the door might close forever. “Tell her! No: don’t tell her that. Tell her my intentions are not . . . My intentions are to help her. To help her son. To check his teeth. She gave me onions.”

  The man translated.

  As she listened, the woman’s face lost its hard focus, then went slack and inward with some kind of understanding. And Dr. Tauber, succeeding finally in reading her face, understood as well: he knew what had happened.

  Leaving the door half open, she disappeared inside. When she returned, her son was beside her. They stood formally in the doorway until she touched the back of the boy’s head.

  “Sorry,” he murmured, wet eyes glistening with hatred.

  She touched his head again (but tenderly; why so tenderly?).

  “I’m sorry,” he said, louder this time. “For lying.”

  The woman spoke.

  “She says
her son has afraid of dentists,” the man told him.

  “Right. Well.” Dr. Tauber cast an amiable expression in the boy’s general direction, avoiding his eyes. “It wouldn’t be the first time. Children and dentists. Anyway, no harm done. Water under the bridge. It’s an expression. All is forgiven, basically.”

  He waited for the man to translate and then continued: “The main thing is that I’m here to help. I want your son to learn he has nothing to be afraid of.”

  ***

  Ordinarily Dr. Tauber didn’t work on weekends, but he made an exception, arranging the appointment for three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon—there was no need, after all, to involve Angela in this informal pro bono case, with its unclear issues regarding the necessity of legal forms and insurance, among other things. He’d put on lab coat and gloves and set a mask under his chin, and was anxious to see the woman’s reaction to the sight of him in uniform, but when they arrived at the reception area she gazed past him, at the scene framed in the window: rooftops and miniature trees and a skyline of distant buildings glittering in the sun.

  She put her fingertips to the glass and exhaled a sound or a word.

  “Quite a view, isn’t it?” he said, making a grand gesture that encompassed the entire city, as if in the sweep of his arm he was offering it all to her.

  The boy wasn’t looking out the window. He was staring through the doorway at the still-darkened operatory.

  “Ready to get started?” Dr. Tauber walked over to him. “Follow me.”

  The woman was about to go with them, but he barred her way with a smile and pointed toward the reception area’s sofa and magazine rack. As much as he wanted her near him, he needed the boy alone so he would understand the hopelessness of his situation; the fact that there would be no rescue.