In the Country of Last Things

by Paul Auster

  “Is he sympathetic?” the Rabbi asked.

  “He’s neutral,” Isaac said, “neither for nor against. He’s a tormented man, but absolutely fair, with no axes to grind.”

  The Rabbi turned to me to explain. “You understand that we have many enemies,” he said. “Our permit is in jeopardy because we no longer have full academy status, and I have to proceed with great caution.” I nodded, trying to act as though I knew what he was talking about. “But under the circumstances,” he continued, “I don’t see what harm it can do for Isaac to show you where this man lives.”

  “Thank you, Rabbi,” I said. “I’m very grateful to you.”

  “Isaac will take you to the door, but I don’t want him going any farther than that. Is that clear, Isaac?” He looked at his disciple with an air of calm authority.

  “Yes, Rabbi,” Isaac said.

  Then the Rabbi stood up from his chair and shook my hand. “You must come back and visit me sometime, Anna,” he said, suddenly looking very old, very weary. “I want to know how everything turns out.”

  “I’ll be back,” I said. “I promise.”

  ______

  The room was on the ninth floor, the very top of the building. Isaac scurried off the moment we got there, mumbling an inarticulate apology about not being able to stay, and then I was suddenly alone again, standing in the pitch dark hall with a tiny candle burning in my left hand. There is a law of city life that says you must never knock on a door unless you know what is on the other side. Had I come all this way only to bring down some new calamity on my head? Samuel Farr was no more than a name to me, an emblem of impossible longings and absurd hopes. I had used him as a spur to keep myself going, but now that I had finally made it to his door, I felt terrified. If the candle had not been burning down so quickly, I might never have found the courage to knock.

  A harsh, unfriendly voice called out from within the room. “Go away,” it said.

  “I’m looking for Samuel Farr. Is that Samuel Farr in there?”

  “Who wants to know?” the voice asked.

  “Anna Blume,” I said.

  “I don’t know any Anna Blume,” the voice answered. “Go away.”

  “I’m William Blume’s sister,” I said. “I’ve been trying to find you for over a year. You can’t send me away now. If you won’t open the door, I’ll just keep knocking until you do.”

  I heard a chair scrape along the floor, followed the sound of steps moving closer to me, and then heard a lock slip out of its bolt. The door opened, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with light, a huge flood of sunlight that came pouring out into the hallway from a window in the room. It took my eyes several moments to adjust. When I finally managed to make out the person in front of me, the first thing I saw was a gun—a small black pistol aimed directly at my stomach. It was Samuel Farr, all right, but he didn’t look much like the photograph anymore. The robust young man in the picture had turned into a gaunt, bearded character with dark circles under his eyes, and a nervous, unpredictable energy seemed to emanate from his body. It gave him the look of someone who had not slept in a month.

  “How do I know you are who you say you are?” he asked.

  “Because I say it. Because you’d be stupid not to believe me.”

  “I need proof. I won’t let you in unless you give me some proof.”

  “All you have to do is listen to me talk. My accent is the same as yours. We come from the same country, the same city. We probably even grew up in the same neighborhood.”

  “Anyone can imitate a voice. You’ll have to give me more than that.”

  “How about this,” I said, reaching into my coat pocket and pulling out the photograph.

  He studied it for ten, twenty seconds, not saying a word, and gradually his whole body seemed to crumple up, to sink back into itself. By the time he looked at me again, I saw that the gun was hanging at his side.

  “Good God,” he said softly, almost in a whisper. “Where did you get this?”

  “From Bogat. He gave it to me before I left.”

  “That’s me,” he said. “That’s what I used to look like.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  “Not really. You have to remember how long you’ve been here.”

  He seemed to drift off into thought for a moment. When he looked at me again, it was as though he did not recognize me anymore.

  “Who did you say you were?” He smiled apologetically, and I could see that three or four of his bottom teeth were missing.

  “Anna Blume. William Blume’s sister.”

  “Blume. As in doom and gloom, I take it.”

  “That’s right. Blume as in womb and tomb. You have your pick.”

  “I suppose you want to come in, don’t you?”

  “Yes. That’s why I’m here. We have a lot to talk about.”

  It was a small room, but not so small that two people could not fit into it. A mattress on the floor, a desk and chair by the window, a wood-burning stove, quantities of papers and books piled against one of the walls, clothes in a cardboard box. It reminded me of a student’s dormitory room—not unlike the one you had at the university the year I came to visit you. The ceiling was low, and it slanted down toward the outer wall so sharply that you could not go to that end of the room without hunching your back. The window along that wall was extraordinary, however—a beautiful, fan-shaped object that took up almost the entire surface. It was made of thick, segmented panes of glass divided by slender lead bars, and it formed a pattern as intricate as a butterfly’s wing. You could literally see for miles through the window—all the way to the Fiddler’s Rampart and beyond.

  Sam gestured for me to sit on the bed, then sat down in the desk chair and swiveled it in my direction. He apologized for pointing the gun at me, but his situation was precarious, he said, and he couldn’t take any chances. He had been living in the library for almost a year now, and word had got around that he had a large stash of money in his room.

  “From the looks of things here,” I said, “I never would have guessed you were rich.”

  “I don’t use the money on myself. It’s for the book I’m writing. I pay people to come here and talk to me. So much money per interview, depending on how long it takes. One glot for the first hour, a half glot for each additional hour. I’ve done hundreds of them, one story after another. I can’t think of any other way to go about it. The story is so big, you understand, it’s impossible for any one person to tell it.”

  Sam had been sent to the city by Bogat, and even now he still wondered what had possessed him to take the assignment. “We all knew that something terrible had happened to your brother,” he said. “There had been no word from him for over six months, and whoever followed him there was bound to wind up in the same pot of ink. Bogat didn’t let that bother him, of course. He called me into his office one morning and said, ‘This is the chance you’ve been waiting for, young man. I’m sending you over there to replace Blume.’ My instructions were clear: write the reports, find out what had happened to William, keep myself alive. Three days later, they gave me a send-off party with champagne and cigars. Bogat spoke a toast, and everyone drank to my health, shook my hand, slapped me on the back. I felt like a guest at my own funeral. But at least I didn’t have three children and a tank full of goldfish waiting for me at home like Willoughby. Whatever else you might say about him, the chief is a man of feeling. I never held it against him for choosing me as the one to go. The fact was that I probably wanted to go. If not, it would have been simple enough for me to quit. So that’s how it started. I packed my bags, sharpened my pencils, and said my good-byes. That was more than a year and a half ago. Needless to say, I never sent any reports, and I never found William. For the time being, it appears that I’ve kept myself alive. But I wouldn’t want to take any bets on how long that will last.”

  “I was hoping you could give me something more definite about William,” I said.
“One way or the other.”

  Sam shook his head. “Nothing is definite in this place. Considering the possibilities, you should be glad of that.”

  “I’m not going to give up hope. Not until I know for sure.”

  “That’s your privilege. But I don’t think it would be wise to expect anything but the worst.”

  “That’s what the Rabbi told me.”

  “That’s what any sensible person would tell you.”

  Sam spoke in a jittery, self-mocking voice, skipping from one subject to another in ways that were difficult for me to follow. I had the sense of a man on the verge of collapse—of someone who had pushed himself too hard and could barely stand up anymore. He had accumulated over three thousand pages of notes, he said. If he kept working at his present pace, he felt he could finish the preliminary work on the book in another five or six months. The problem was that his money was running low, and the odds seemed to have turned against him. He couldn’t afford to do the interviews anymore, and with his funds at such a dangerous ebb, he was now eating only every other day. That made things even worse, of course. The strength was being sapped out of him, and there were times when he became so dizzy that he no longer saw the words he was writing. Sometimes, he said, he would fall asleep at his desk without even knowing it.

  “You’ll kill yourself before you finish,” I said. “And what’s the point of that? You should stop writing the book and take care of yourself.”

  “I can’t stop. The book is the only thing that keeps me going. It prevents me from thinking about myself and getting sucked up into my own life. If I ever stopped working on it, I’d be lost. I don’t think I’d make it through another day.”

  “There’s no one to read your bloody book,” I said angrily. “Don’t you see that? It doesn’t matter how many pages you write. No one will ever see what you’ve done.”

  “You’re wrong. I’m going to take the manuscript back home with me. The book will be published, and everyone will find out what’s happening here.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Haven’t you heard of the Sea Wall Project? It’s impossible to get out of here anymore.”

  “I know about the Sea Wall. But that’s only one place. There are others, believe me. Up along the coast to the north. Out west through the abandoned territories. When the time comes, I’ll be ready.”

  “You won’t last that long. By the time winter is over, you won’t be ready for anything.”

  “Something will turn up. If not, well, then it won’t matter to me anyway.”

  “How much money do you have left?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere between thirty and thirty-five glots, I think.”

  I was flabbergasted to hear how little it was. Even if you took every possible precaution, spending only when absolutely necessary, thirty glots would not last more than three or four weeks. I suddenly understood the danger of Sam’s position. He was walking straight toward his own death, and he was not even aware of it.

  At that point, words started coming out of my mouth. I had no idea what they meant until I heard them myself, but by then it was too late. “I have some money,” I said. “It’s not so much, but it’s a lot more than you have.”

  “Bully for you,” Sam said.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “When I say I have money, I mean that I’d be willing to share it with you.”

  “Share it? What on earth for?”

  “To keep us alive,” I said. “I need a place to live, and you need money. If we pooled our resources, we might have a chance of making it through the winter. If not, we’re both going to die. I don’t think there’s any question about it. We’re going to die, and it’s stupid to die when you don’t have to.”

  The bluntness of my words shocked us both, and for several moments neither one of us said anything. It was all so stark, so preposterous, but somehow or other I had managed to speak the truth. My first impulse was to apologize, but as the words continued to sit in the air between us, they went on making sense, and I found myself reluctant to take them back. I believe we both understood what was happening, but that did not make it any easier to speak the next word. In similar situations, people in this city have been known to kill each other. It is almost nothing to murder someone for a room, for a pocketful of change. Perhaps what prevented us from harming each other was the simple fact that we did not belong here. We were not people of this city. We had grown up in another place, and perhaps that was enough to make us feel that we already knew something about each other. I can’t say for sure. Chance had flung us together in an almost impersonal way, and that seemed to give the encounter a logic of its own, a force that did not depend on either one of us. I had made an outlandish suggestion, a wild leap into intimacy, and Sam had not said a word. The mere fact of that silence was extraordinary, I felt, and the longer it went on, the more it seemed to validate the things I had said. By the time it was over, there was nothing left to discuss.

  “It’s awfully cramped in here,” Sam said, looking around the tiny room. “Where do you propose to sleep?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’ll work something out.”

  “William used to talk about you sometimes,” he said, showing the faintest sign of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “He even warned me about you. ‘Watch out for my kid sister,’ he would say. ‘She’s a spitfire.’ Is that what you are, Anna Blume, a spitfire?”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said, “but you don’t have to worry. I won’t get in the way. I’m not stupid, after all. I know how to read and write. I know how to think. The book will get done much faster with me around.”

  “I’m not worried, Anna Blume. You walk in here out of the cold, plunk yourself down on my bed, and offer to make me a rich man—and you expect me to be worried?”

  “You shouldn’t exaggerate. It comes to less than three hundred glots. Not even two seventy-five.”

  “That’s what I said—a rich man.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. And I also say this: it’s a goddamned lucky thing for both of us the gun wasn’t loaded.”

  That was how I survived the Terrible Winter. I lived in the library with Sam, and for the next six months that small room was the center of my world. I don’t suppose it will shock you to hear that we wound up sleeping in the same bed. One would have to be made of stone to resist such a thing, and when it finally happened on the third or fourth night, we both felt foolish for having waited for so long. It was all bodies at first, a mad crush and tangle of limbs, a splurge of pent-up lust. The sense of release was enormous, and for the next few days we went at each other to the point of exhaustion. Then the pace died down, as in fact it had to, and then, little by little, over the weeks that followed, we actually fell in love. I am not just talking about tenderness or the comforts of a shared life. We fell deeply and irrevocably in love, and in the end it was as though we were married, as though we would never leave each other again.

  Those were the best days for me. Not just here, you understand, but anywhere—the best days of my life. It’s odd that I could have been so happy during that awful time, but living with Sam made all the difference. Outwardly, things did not change much. The same struggles still existed, the same problems still had to be confronted every day, but now I had been given the possibility of hope, and I began to believe that sooner or later our troubles were going to end. Sam knew more about the city than anyone I had ever met. He could recite the list of all the governments of the past ten years; he could give the names of governors, mayors, and countless sub-officials; he could tell the history of the Tollists, describe how the power plants were built, give detailed accounts of even the smallest sects. That he knew so much and could still feel confident about our chances of getting out—that was the thing that convinced me. Sam was not one to distort the facts. He was a journalist, after all, and he had trained himself to look skeptically at the world. No wishful thinking, no va
gue suppositions. If he said it was possible for us to get back home, that meant he knew it could be done.

  In general, Sam was hardly optimistic, hardly what you would call an easy-going person. There was a kind of fury surging up in him all the time, and even when he slept he seemed tormented, thrashing around under the covers as though battling someone in his dreams. He was in bad shape when I moved in, malnourished, coughing constantly, and it took more than a month before he was restored to a semblance of decent health. Until then, I did nearly all the work. I went out shopping for food, I took care of emptying the slops, I cooked our meals and kept the room clean. Later on, when Sam was strong enough to brave the cold again, he began slipping out in the mornings to do the chores himself, insisting that I stay in bed to catch up on my sleep. He had a great talent for kindness, Sam did—and he loved me well, much better than I had ever expected to be loved by anyone. If his bouts of anguish sometimes cut him off from me, they were nevertheless an internal affair. The book remained his obsession, and he had a tendency to push himself too hard with it, to work beyond his threshold of tolerance. Faced with the pressure of organizing all the disparate material he had collected into something coherent, he would suddenly begin to lose faith in the project. He would call it worthless, a futile heap of papers trying to say things that could not be said, and then spin off into a depression that lasted anywhere from one to three days. These black moods were invariably followed by periods of extreme tenderness. He would buy small presents for me then—an apple, for example, or a ribbon for my hair, or a piece of chocolate. It was probably wrong of him to spend the extra money, but I found it difficult not to be moved by these gestures. I was always the practical one, the no-nonsense housewife who scrimped and fretted, but when Sam came in with some extravagance like that, I would feel overwhelmed, absolutely flooded with joy. I couldn’t help it. I needed to know that he loved me, and if it meant that our money would run out a little sooner, I was willing to pay that price.