A morning concert struck up on the radio next to me, and I looked for something—an appreciation, a reaction to the music—in their eyes, but they had already begun pushing each other and laughing, and I knew that the music would soon be overlaid by a second chorus, from me, “Don’t touch. Don’t tease the dogs,” all of it negative and as bad for them as for me. I turned down the music and said, “Come and see the birthday present that came in the mail this morning. It is a present from my brother, who is your uncle.” I slipped on my reading glasses and spread the precious letter on the counterpane. “It is an original letter written by Dr. Sigmund Freud. He was a famous doctor, and that is his handwriting. Now I shall teach you how to judge from the evidence of letters. The writing paper is ugly and cheap—you all see that, do you?—which means that he was a miser, or poor, or lacked aesthetic feeling, or did not lend importance to worldly matters. The long pointed loops mean a strong sense of spiritual values, and the slope of the lines means a pessimistic nature. The margin widens at the bottom of the page, like the manuscript of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’ You remember that I showed you a photograph of it? Who remembers? Ulrich? Good for Ulrich. It means that Dr. Freud was the same kind of person as Keats. Keats was a poet, but he died. Dr. Freud is also dead. I am sorry to say that the signature denotes conceit. But he was a great man, quite right to be sure of himself.”
“What does the letter say?” said Igor, finally.
“It is not a letter written to me. It is an old letter—see the date? It was sent about thirty years before any of you were born. It was written probably to a colleague—look, I am pointing. To another doctor. Perhaps it is an opinion about a patient.”
“Can’t you read what it says?” said Igor.
I tried to think of a constructive answer, for “I can’t read German” was too vague. “Someday you, and Robert, and even Ulrich will read German, and then you will read the letter, and we shall all know what Dr. Freud said to his colleague. I would learn German,” I went on, “if I had more time.”
As proof of how little time I have, three things took place all at once: My solicitor, who only rings up with bad news, called from Lausanne, Maria-Gabriella came in to remove the breakfast tray, and the dogs woke up and began to bark. Excessive noise seems to affect my vision: I saw the room as blurry and one-dimensional. I waved to Maria-Gabriella—discreetly, for I should never want the children to feel de trop or rejected—and she immediately understood and led them away from me. The dogs stopped barking, all but poor blind old Sarah, who went on calling dismally into a dark private room in which she hears a burglar. Meanwhile, Maître Gossart was telling me, from Lausanne, that I was not to have one of the Vietnam children. None of them could be adopted; when their burns have healed, they are all to be returned to Vietnam. That was the condition of their coming. He went on telling it in such a roundabout way that I cut him off with “Then I am not to have one of the burned children?” and as he still rambled I said, “But I want a little girl!” I said, “Look here. I want one of the Vietnam babies, and I want a girl.” The rain was coming down harder than ever. I said, “Maître, this is a filthy, rotten, bloody country, and if it weren’t for the income tax I’d pack up and leave. Because of the income tax I am not free. I am compelled to live in Switzerland.”
Maria-Gabriella found me lying on the pillows with my eyes full of tears. As she reached for the tray, I wanted to say, “Knock that fish off the table before you go, will you?” but it would have shocked her, and puzzled the boys had they come to learn of it. Maria-Gabriella paused, in fact, to admire the fish, and said, “They must have saved their pocket money for weeks.” It occurred to me then that poisson d’avril means a joke, it means playing an April-fool joke on someone. No, the fish is not a joke. First of all, none of them has that much imagination, the fish was too expensive, and, finally, they wouldn’t dare. To tell the truth, I don’t really want them. I don’t even want the Freud letter. I wanted the little Vietnam girl. Yes, what I really want is a girl with beautiful manners, I have wanted her all my life, but no one will ever give me one.
IN TRANSIT
After the Cook’s party of twenty-five Japanese tourists had departed for Oslo, only four people were left in the waiting room of the Helsinki airport—a young French couple named Perrigny, who had not been married long, and an elderly pair who were identifiably American. When they were sure that the young people two benches forward could not understand them, the old people went on with a permanent, flowing quarrel. The man had the habit of reading signs out loud, though perhaps he did it only to madden his wife. He read the signs over the three doors leading out to the field: “ ‘Oslo.’ ‘Amsterdam.’ ‘Copenhagen.’ … I don’t see ‘Stockholm.’ ”
She replied, “What I wonder is what I have been to you all these years.”
Philippe Perrigny, who understood English, turned around, pretending he was looking at Finnish pottery in the showcases on their right. He saw that the man was examining timetables and tickets, all the while muttering “Stockholm, Stockholm,” while the woman looked away. She had removed her glasses and was wiping her eyes. How did she arrive at that question here, in the Helsinki airport, and how can he answer? It has to be answered in a word: everything/nothing. It was like being in a country church and suddenly hearing the peasant priest put a question no one cares to consider, about guilt or duty or the presence of God, and breathing with relief when he has got past that and on to the prayers.
“In the next world we will choose differently,” the man said. “At least I know you will.”
The wild thoughts of the younger man were: They are chained for the rest of this life. Too old to change? Only a brute would leave her now? They are walking toward the door marked AMSTERDAM, and she limps. That is why they cannot separate. She is an invalid. He has been looking after her for years. They are going through the Amsterdam door, whatever their tickets said. Whichever door they take, they will see the circular lanes of suburbs, and the family cars outside each house, and in the backyard a blue pool. All across northern Europe streets are named after acacia trees, but they may not know that.
Perrigny was on his wedding trip, but also on assignment for his Paris paper, and he assembled the series on Scandinavia in his mind. He had been repeating for four years now an article called “The Silent Cry,” and neither his paper nor he himself had become aware that it was repetitious. He began to invent again, in the style of the Paris weeklies: “It was a silent anguished cry torn from the hearts and throats …” No. “It was a silent song, strangled …” “It was a silent passionate hymn to …” This time the beginning would be joined to the blue-eyed puritanical north; it had applied to Breton farmers unable to get a good price for their artichokes, to the Christmas crowd at the Berlin Wall, to Greece violated by tourists, to Negro musicians performing at the Olympia music hall, to miserable Portuguese fishermen smuggled into France and dumped on the labor market, to poets writing under the influence of drugs.
The old man took his wife’s hand. She was still turned away, but dry-eyed now, and protected by glasses. To distract her while their tickets were inspected he said rapidly, “Look at the nice restaurant, the attractive restaurant. It is part outside and part inside, see? It is inside and outside.”
Perrigny’s new wife gently withdrew her hand from his and said, “Why did you leave her?”
He had been expecting this, and said, “Because she couldn’t concentrate on one person. She was nice to everybody, but she couldn’t concentrate enough for a marriage.”
“She was unfaithful.”
“That too. It came from the same lack of concentration. She had been married before.”
“Oh? She was old?”
“She’s twenty-seven now. She was afraid of being twenty-seven. She used to quote something from Jane Austen—an English writer,” he said as Claire frowned. “Something about a woman that age never being able to hope for anything again. I wonder what she did hope for.”
“No, he died. They hadn’t been married very long.”
“You did leave her?” said the girl, for fear of a possible humiliation—for fear of having married a man some other woman had thrown away.
“I certainly did. Without explanations. One Sunday morning I got up and dressed and went away. I came back when she wasn’t there and took my things away—my tape recorder, my records. I came back twice for my books. I never saw her again except to talk about the divorce.”
“Weren’t you unhappy, just walking out that way? You make it sound so easy.”
“I don’t admire suffering,” he said, and realized he was echoing his first wife. Suffering was disgusting to her; the emblem of dirt was someone like Kafka alone in a room distilling blows and horror.
“Nobody admires suffering,” said the girl, thinking of aches and cramps. “She had a funny name.”
“Yes, terrible. Shirley. She always had to spell it over the phone. Suzanne Henri Irma Robert Louis Emile Yvonne. It is not pronounced as it is spelled.”
“Were you really in love with her?”
“I was the first time I saw her. The mistake was that I married her. The mystery was why I ever married her.” “Was she pretty?”
“She had lovely hair, like all the American girls, but she was always cutting it and making it ugly. She had good legs, but she wore flat shoes. Like all the Americans, she wore her clothes just slightly too long, and with the flat shoes … she never looked dressed. She was blind as a mole and wore dark glasses because she had lost the other ones. When she took her glasses off, sometimes she looked ruthless. But she was worried and impulsive, and thought men had always exploited her.”
Claire said, “How do I know you won’t leave me?” but he could tell from her tone she did not expect an answer to that.
Their flight was called. They moved out under COPENHAGEN, carrying their cameras and raincoats. He was glad this first part of the journey was over. He and Claire were together the whole twenty-four hours. She was good if he said he was working, but puzzled and offended if he read. Attending to her, he made mistakes. In Helsinki he had gone with her to buy clothes. Under racks of dresses he saw her legs and bare feet. She came out, smiling, holding in front of herself a bright dress covered with suns. “You can’t wear it in Paris,” he said, and he saw her face change, as if he had darkened some idea she’d had of what she might be. In a park, yesterday, beside a tall spray of water, he found himself staring at another girl, who sat feeding squirrels. He admired the back of her neck, the soft parting of her hair, her brown shoulder and arm. Idleness of this kind never happened in what he chose to think of as real life—as if love and travel were opposed to living, were a dream. He drew closer to his new wife, this blond summer child, thinking of the winter honeymoon with his first wife. He had read her hand to distract her from the cold and rain, holding the leaf-palm, tracing the extremely shallow head line (no judgment, he informed her) and the choppy life—an American life, he had said, folding the leaf. He paid attention to Claire, because he had admired another girl and had remembered something happy with his first wife, all in a minute. How would Claire like to help him work, he said. Together they saw how much things cost in shopwindows, and she wrote down for him how much they paid for a meal of fried fish and temperance beer. Every day had to be filled as never at home. A gap of two hours in a strange town, in transit, was like being shut up in a stalled lift with nothing to read.
Claire would have given anything to be the girl in the park, to have that neck and that hair and stand off and see it, all at once. She saw the homage he paid the small ears, the lobes pasted. She had her revenge in the harbor, later, when a large group of tourists mistook her for someone famous—for an actress, she supposed. She had been told she looked like Catherine Deneuve. They held out cards and papers and she signed her new name, “Claire Perrigny,” “Claire Perrigny,” over and over, looking back at him with happy, triumphant eyes. Everything flew and shrieked around them—the seagulls, the wind, the strangers calling in an unknown language something she took to mean “Your name, your name!”
“They think I am famous!” she called, through her thick flying hair. She smiled and grinned, in conspiracy, because she was not famous at all, only a pretty girl who had been married eight days. Her tongue was dark with the blueberries she had eaten in the market—until Philippe had told her, she hadn’t known what blueberries were. She smiled her stained smile, and tried to catch her soaring skirt between her knees. Compassion, pride, tenderness, jealousy, and acute sick misery were what he felt in turn. He saw how his first wife had looked before he had ever known her, when she was young and in love.
O LASTING PEACE
Though my Aunt Charlotte, my sad mother, my Uncle Theo, and I all live together, and can see each other as often as we need to, when Uncle Theo has something urgent to tell me he comes here, to the Civic Tourist and Travel Bureau. He gets in line, as if he were waiting to ask about the Bavarian Lakes and Mountains Program or the Ludwig the Second Bus Circuit. He slides close to the counter. I glance over, and suddenly have to look down; Uncle Theo is so small he is always a surprise. He grins, scared to death of me. He is totally bald now, not a hair to stretch sideways. He looks like a child’s drawing of two eyes and a smile. After a furtive trip to Berlin last summer he edged along the queue to say he had called on my father, who is his brother and Aunt Charlotte’s brother, too.
“Hilde, everything has gone wrong for him,” said Uncle Theo, gripping the counter as if that might keep me from sending him away. “Do you remember how he couldn’t stand cigarette smoke? How none of you could smoke when he was around?” Do I remember? It was one of the reasons my younger brother cleared out, leaving me to support half the household. “Well, she smokes all the time,” said Uncle Theo. “She blows smoke in his face and so do her friends. She even eggs them on.”
“Her friends,” I repeated, writing it down. My expression was open but reserved. To anyone watching, Uncle Theo is supposed to be a client like any other.
“Low friends,” said Uncle Theo. “Low Berliners in shady Berlin rackets. The kind of people who live in abandoned stores. No curtains, just whitewashed windows.” At the word “shady” I did look as if I had seen my uncle somewhere before, but he is one more respectable survivor now, a hero of yesterday. “Ah, your poor father’s kitchen,” he went on lamenting. “Grease on the ceiling that deep,” showing thumb and finger. “They’re so down they’ve had to rent the parlor and the bedroom. They sleep on a mattress behind the front door.”
“He’s got what he wanted.”
“Well, it had been going on between them for a long time, eh?” Embarrassment made him rise on his toes; it was almost a dance step. “After fifteen years she and your mother joined up and told him to choose. Your mother didn’t understand what she was doing. She thought it was like some story on television.”
My father left us five winters ago, at the age of sixty-three. I still have in mind the sight of my mother in a faint on the sofa and my Aunt Charlotte with an apron over her face, rocking and crying. I remember my Uncle Theo whispering into the telephone and my Aunt Charlotte taking the damp corner of her apron to wipe the leaves of the rubber plant. I came home from work on a dark evening to find this going on. I thought my Uncle Theo had been up to something. I went straight to my mother and gave her a shake. I was not frightened—she faints at will. I said, “Now you see what Uncle Theo is really like.” She opened her eyes, sniffling. Her nylon chignon, which looks like a pound of butter sometimes, was askew on the pillow. She answered, “Be nice to poor Theo, he never had a wife to look after him.” “Whose fault is that?” I said. I did not know yet that my father had gone, or even that such a thing might ever happen. Now it seems that my mother had been expecting it for fifteen years. A lifetime won’t be enough to come to the end of their lies and their mysteries. I am the inspector, the governess, the one they tell stories
to. And yet they depend on me! Without me they would be beggars, outcasts! Aunt Charlotte and my mother would wash windows in schoolhouses; they would haul buckets of dirty water up the stairs of office buildings; they would stand on vacant lots selling plastic combs and miniature Christmas trees!
My Uncle Theo began describing her—that other one. His face was as bright as if he were reciting a list of virtues: “I never did understand my brother. She has no taste, no charm, no looks, no culture, no education. She has a birthmark here,” touching the side of his nose.
“I’m busy, Uncle Theo.”
“We must send him money,” he said, getting round to it.
“Well?” I said to the person next in line, over Uncle Theo’s head.
“Hilde, we must send the poor old man money,” he said, hanging on the counter. “A little every month, just the two of us.” Uncle Theo thinks everyone else is old and poor. “Hilde—he’s a night porter in a hospital. He doesn’t like anything about the job. He can’t eat the food.”
Sometimes Uncle Theo will come here to intercede for our neighbors, having heard I have started legal action again. We have East German refugees in the next apartment—loud, boorish Saxons, six to a room. They send everything through the wall, from their coarse songs to their bedbugs. Long ago they were given a temporary housing priority, and then the city forgot them. The truth is these people live on priorities. They have wormed their way into everything. Ask anyone who it is that owns the laundries, the best farmlands, the electronics industry; you will always get the same answer: “East German refugees.” At one time a popular riddle based on this subject went the rounds. Question: “Who were the three greatest magicians of all time?” Answer: “Jesus, because he turned water into wine. Hitler, because he turned Jews into soap. Adenauer, because he turned East German refugees into millionaires.” Very few people can still repeat this without a mistake. Only 2 percent of the readers of our morning paper still consider Hitler “a great figure.” My own sister-in-law cannot say who Adenauer was, or what made him famous. As for Jesus, even I have forgotten what that particular miracle was about. A story that once made people laugh now brings nothing but “Who?” or “What?” or even “Be careful.” It is probably best not to try to remember.
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant Page 42
