The Moslem Wife and Other Stories

by Mavis Gallant

  This was the longest story I had ever told in my life. I added, “My grandmother is dead now.” My stepfather had finally shut his mouth. He looked at my mother as if to say that she had brought him a rival in the only domain that mattered – the right to talk everyone’s ear off. My mother edged close to Willy Wehler and urged him to eat bread and cheese. She was still in the habit of wondering what the other person thought and how important he might be and how safe it was to speak. But Willy had not heard more than a sentence or two. That was plain from the way the expression on his face came slowly awake. He opened his eyes wide, as if to get sleep out of them, and – evidently imagining I had been talking about my life in France – said, “What were you paid as a prisoner?”

  I had often wondered what the first question would be once I was home. Now I had it.

  “Ha!” said my stepfather, giving the impression that he expected me to be caught out in a monstrous lie.

  “One franc forty centimes a month for working here and there on a farm,” I said. “But when I became a free worker with a druggist the official pay was three thousand francs a month, and that was what he gave me.” I paused. “And of course I was fed and housed and had no laundry bills.”

  “Did you have bedsheets?” said my mother.

  “With the druggist’s family, always. I had one sheet folded in half. It was just right for a small cot.”

  “Was it the same sheet as the kind the family had?” she said, in the hesitant way that was part of her person now.

  “They didn’t buy sheets especially for me,” I said. “I was treated fairly by the druggist, but not by the administration.”

  “Ah ha,” said the two older men, almost together.

  “The administration refused to pay my fare home,” I said, looking down into my glass the way I had seen the men in prison camp stare at a fixed point when they were recounting a grievance.

  “A prisoner of war has the right to be repatriated at administration expense. The administration would not pay my fare because I had stayed too long in France – but that was their mistake. I bought a ticket as far as Paris on the pay I had saved. The druggist sold me some old shoes and trousers and a jacket of his. My own things were in rags. In Paris I went to the Y.M.C.A. The Y.M.C.A. was supposed to be in charge of prisoners’ rights. The man wouldn’t listen to me. If I had been left behind, then I was not a prisoner, he said; I was a tourist. It was his duty to help me. Instead of that, he informed the police.” For the first time my voice took on the coloration of resentment. I knew that this complaint about a niggling matter of train fare made my whole adventure seem small, but I had become an old soldier. I remembered the police commissioner, with his thin lips and dirty nails, who said, “You should have been repatriated years ago, when you were sixteen.”

  “It was a mistake,” I told him.

  “Your papers are full of strange mistakes,” he said, bending over them. “There, one capital error. An omission, a grave omission. What is your mother’s maiden name?”

  “Wickler,” I said.

  I watched him writing “W-i-e-c-k-l-a-i-r,” slowly, with the tip of his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he wrote. “You have been here for something like five years with an incomplete dossier. And what about this? Who crossed it out?”

  “I did. My father was not a pastry cook.”

  “You could be fined or even jailed for this,” he said.

  “My father was not a pastry cook,” I said. “He had tuberculosis. He was not allowed to handle food.”

  Willy Wehler did not say what he thought of my story. Perhaps not having any opinion about injustice, even the least important, had become a habit of his, like my mother’s of speaking through her fingers. He was on the right step of that staircase I’ve spoken of. Even the name he had given his daughter was a sign of his sensitivity to the times. Nobody wanted to hear the pagan, Old Germanic names anymore – Sigrun and Brunhilde and Sieglinde. Willy had felt the change. He would have called any daughter something neutral and pretty – Gisela, Marianne, Elisabeth – any time after the battle of Stalingrad. All Willy ever had to do was sniff the air.

  He pushed back his chair (in later years he would be able to push a table away with his stomach) and got to his feet. He had to tip his head to look up into my eyes. He said he wanted to give me advice that would be useful to me as a latehomecomer. His advice was to forget. “Forget everything,” he said. “Forget, forget. That was what I said to my good neighbor Herr Silber when I bought his wife’s topaz brooch and earrings before he emigrated to Palestine. I said, ‘Dear Herr Silber, look forward, never back, and forget, forget, forget.’ ”

  The child in Willy’s arms was in the deepest of sleeps. Martin Toeppler followed his friend to the door, they whispered together; then the door closed behind both men.

  “They have gone to have a glass of something at Herr Wehler’s,” said my mother. I saw now that she was crying quietly. She dried her eyes on her apron and began clearing the table of the homecoming feast. “Willy Wehler has been kind to us,” she said. “Don’t repeat that thing.”

  “About forgetting?”

  “No, about the topaz brooch. It was a crime to buy anything from Jews.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  She lowered the tray she held and looked pensively out at the wrecked houses across the street. “If only people knew beforehand what was allowed,” she said.

  “My father is probably a hero now,” I said.

  “Oh, Thomas, don’t travel too fast. We haven’t seen the last of the changes. Yes, a hero. But too late for me. I’ve suffered too much.”

  “What does Martin think that he died of?”

  “A working accident. He can understand that.”

  “You could have said consumption. He did have it.” She shook her head. Probably she had not wanted Martin to imagine he could ever be saddled with two sickly stepsons. “Where do you and Martin sleep?”

  “In the room next to the bathroom. Didn’t you see it? You’ll be comfortable here in the parlor. The couch pulls out. You can stay as long as you like. This is your home. A home for you and Chris.” She said this so stubbornly that I knew some argument must have taken place between her and Martin.

  I intended this room to be my home. There was no question about it in my mind. I had not yet finished high school; I had been taken out for anti-aircraft duty, then sent to the front. The role of adolescents in uniform had been to try to prevent the civilian population from surrendering. We were expected to die in the ruins together. When the women ran pillowcases up flagpoles, we shinnied up to drag them down. We were prepared to hold the line with our 1870 rifles until we saw the American tanks. There had not been tanks in our Karl May adventure stories, and the Americans, finally, were not out of The Last of the Mohicans. I told my mother that I had to go back to high school and then I would apply for a scholarship and take a degree in French. I would become a schoolmaster. French was all I had from my captivity; I might as well use it. I would earn money doing translations.

  That cheered her up. She would not have to ask the ex-tram conductor too many favors. “Translations” and “scholarship” were an exalted form of language, to her. As a schoolmaster, I would have the most respectable job in the family, now that Uncle Gerhard was raising rabbits. “As long as it doesn’t cost him too much,” she said, as if she had to say it and yet was hoping I wouldn’t hear.

  It was not strictly true that all I had got out of my captivity was the ability to speak French. I had also learned to cook, iron, make beds, wait on table, wash floors, polish furniture, plant a vegetable garden, paint shutters. I wanted to help my mother in the kitchen now, but that shocked her. “Rest,” she said, but I did not know what “rest” meant. “I’ve never seen a man drying a glass,” she said, in apology. I wanted to tell her that while the roads and bridges of France were still waiting for someone to rebuild them I had been taught how to make a tomato salad by the druggist’s wife;
but I could not guess what the word “France” conveyed to her imagination. I began walking about the apartment. I looked in on a store cupboard, a water closet smelling of carbolic, the bathroom again, then a room containing a high bed, a brown wardrobe, and a table covered with newspapers bearing half a dozen of the flower-less spiky dull green plants my mother had always tended with so much devotion. I shut the door as if on a dark past, and I said to myself, “I am free. This is the beginning of life. It is also the start of the good half of a rotten century. Everything ugly and corrupt and vicious is behind us.” My thoughts were not exactly in those words, but something like them. I said to myself, “This apartment has a musty smell, an old and dirty smell that sinks into clothes. After a time I shall probably smell like the dark parlor. The smell must be in the cushions, in the bed that pulls out, in the lace curtains. It is a smell that creeps into nightclothes. The blankets will be permeated.” I thought, I shall get used to the smell, and the smell of burning in the stone outside. The view of ruins will be my view. Every day on my way home from school I shall walk over Elke. I shall get used to the wood staircase, the bellpull, the polished nameplate, the white enamel fuses in the hall – my mother had said, “When you want light in the parlor you give the center fuse in the lower row a half turn.” I looked at a framed drawing of cartoon people with puffy hair. A strong wind had blown their umbrella inside out. They would be part of my view, like the ruins. I took in the ancient gas bracket in the kitchen and the stone sink. My mother, washing glasses without soap, smiled at me, forgetting to hide her teeth. I reëxamined the tiled stove in the parlor, the wood and the black briquettes that would be next to my head at night, and the glass-fronted cabinet full of the china ornaments God had selected to survive the Berlin air raids. These would be removed to make way for my books. For Martin Toeppler need not imagine he could count on my pride, or that I would prefer to starve rather than take his charity, or that I was too arrogant to sleep on his dusty sofa. I would wear out his soap, borrow his shirts, spread his butter on my bread. I would hang on Martin like an octopus. He had a dependent now – a ravenous, egocentric, latehomecoming high-school adolescent of twenty-one. The old men owed this much to me – the old men in my prison camp who would have sold mother and father for an extra ounce of soup, who had already sold their children for it; the old men who had fouled my idea of women; the old men in the bunkers who had let the girls defend them in Berlin; the old men who had dared to survive.

  The bed that pulled out was sure to be all lumps. I had slept on worse. Would it be wide enough for Chris, too?

  People in the habit of asking themselves silent useless questions look for answers in mirrors. My hair was blond again now that it had dried. I looked less like my idea of my father. I tried to see the reflection of the man who had gone out in the middle of the night and who never came back. You don’t go out alone to tear down election posters in a village where nobody thinks as you do – not unless you want to be stabbed in the back. So the family had said.

  “You were well out of it,” I said to the shadow that floated on the glass panel of the china cabinet, though it would not be my father’s again unless I could catch it unaware.

  I said to myself, “It is quieter than France. They keep their radios low.”

  In captivity I had never suffered a pain except for the cramps of hunger the first years, which had been replaced by a scratching, morbid anxiety, and the pain of homesickness, which takes you in the stomach and the throat. Now I felt the first of the real pains that were to follow me like little dogs for the rest of my life, perhaps: the first compressed my knee, the second tangled the nerves at the back of my neck. I discovered that my eyes were sensitive and that it hurt to blink.

  This was the hour when, in Brittany, I would begin peeling the potatoes for dinner. I had seen food my mother had never heard of – oysters, and artichokes. My mother had never seen a harbor or a sea.

  My American prisoner had left his immediate life spread on an alien meadow – his parachute, his revolver, his German money. He had strolled into captivity with his hands in his pockets.

  “I know what you are thinking,” said my mother, who was standing behind me. “I know that you are judging me. If you could guess what my life has been – the whole story, not only the last few years – you wouldn’t be hard on me.”

  I turned too slowly to meet her eyes. It was not what I had been thinking. I had forgotten about her, in that sense.

  “No, no, nothing like that,” I said. I still did not touch her. What I had been moving along to in my mind was: Why am I in this place? Who sent me here? Is it a form of justice or injustice? How long does it last?

  “Now we can wait together for Chris,” she said. She seemed young and happy all at once. “Look, Thomas. A new moon. Bow to it three times. Wait – you must have something silver in your hand.” I saw that she was hurrying to finish with this piece of nonsense before Martin came back. She rummaged in the china cabinet and brought out a silver napkin ring – left behind by the vanished tenants, probably. The name on it was “Meta” – no one we knew. “Bow to the moon and hold it and make your wish,” she said. “Quickly.”

  “You first.”

  She wished, I am sure, for my brother. As for me, I wished that I was a few hours younger, in the corridor of a packed train, clutching the top of the open window, my heart hammering as I strained to find the one beloved face.

  1974

  In Youth Is Pleasure

  MY FATHER died, then my grandmother; my mother was left, but we did not get on. I was probably disagreeable with anyone who felt entitled to give me instructions and advice. We seldom lived under the same roof, which was just as well. She had found me civil and amusing until I was ten, at which time I was said to have become pert and obstinate. She was impulsive, generous, in some ways better than most other people, but without any feeling for cause and effect; this made her at the least unpredictable and at the most a serious element of danger. I was fascinated by her, though she worried me; then all at once I lost interest. I was fifteen when this happened. I would forget to answer her letters and even to open them. It was not rejection or anything so violent as dislike but a simple indifference I cannot account for. It was much the way I would be later with men I fell out of love with, but I was too young to know that then. As for my mother, whatever I thought, felt, said, wrote, and wore had always been a positive source of exasperation. From time to time she attempted to alter the form, the outward shape at least, of the creature she thought she was modelling, but at last she came to the conclusion there must be something wrong with the clay. Her final unexpected upsurge of attention coincided with my abrupt unconcern: one may well have been the reason for the other.

  It took the form of digging into my diaries and notebooks and it yielded, among other documents, a two-year-old poem, Kiplingesque in its rhythms, entitled “Why I Am a Socialist.” The first words of the first line were “You ask …’ ” then came a long answer. But it was not an answer to anything she’d wondered. Like all mothers – at least, all I have known – she was obsessed with the entirely private and possibly trivial matter of a daughter’s virginity. Why I was a Socialist she rightly conceded to be none of her business. Still, she must have felt she had to say something, and that something was “You had better be clever, because you will never be pretty.” My response was to take – take, not grab – the poem from her and tear it up. No voices were raised. I never mentioned the incident to anyone. That is how it was. We became, presently, mutually unconcerned. My detachment was put down to the coldness of my nature, hers to the exhaustion of trying to bring me up. It must have been a relief to her when, in the first half of Hitler’s war, I slipped quietly and finally out of her life. I was now eighteen, and completely on my own. By “on my own” I don’t mean a show of independence with Papa-Mama footing the bills: I mean that I was solely responsible for my economic survival and that no living person felt any duty toward me.

  On a
bright morning in June I arrived in Montreal, where I’d been born, from New York, where I had been living and going to school. My luggage was a small suitcase and an Edwardian picnic hamper – a preposterous piece of baggage my father had brought from England some twenty years before; it had been with me since childhood, when his death turned my life into a helpless migration. In my purse was a birth certificate and five American dollars, my total fortune, the parting gift of a Canadian actress in New York, who had taken me to see Mayerling before I got on the train. She was kind and good and terribly hard up, and she had no idea that apart from some loose change I had nothing more. The birth certificate, which testified I was Linnet Muir, daughter of Angus and of Charlotte, was my right of passage. I did not own a passport and possibly never had seen one. In those days there was almost no such thing as a “Canadian.” You were Canadian-born, and a British subject, too, and you had a third label with no consular reality, like the racial tag that on Soviet passports will make a German of someone who has never been to Germany. In Canada you were also whatever your father happened to be, which in my case was English. He was half Scot, but English by birth, by mother, by instinct. I did not feel a scrap British or English, but I was not an American either. In American schools I had refused to salute the flag. My denial of that curiously Fascist-looking celebration, with the right arm stuck straight out, and my silence when the others intoned the trusting “… and justice for all” had never been thought offensive, only stubborn. Americans then were accustomed to gratitude from foreigners but did not demand it; they quite innocently could not imagine any country fit to live in except their own. If I could not recognize it, too bad for me. Besides, I was not a refugee – just someone from the backwoods. “You got schools in Canada?” I had been asked. “You got radios?” And once, from a teacher, “What do they major in up there? Basket-weaving?”