Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

“That’s what I tried to do,” she said. “I tried to forget him, but I couldn’t. I was always afraid he would appear, knock at my door just as it was getting dark, when we were sitting down to supper or when it was just getting light and the air was cold, and I would be left alone with him because everyone would leave me, even you, not my child but maybe even her, and my friends, my few friends. He’d knock and I’d open the door and I’d see his face again, his face that never knew how it looked to the world. It’s about him, even if it’s just for myself to see, because now he breaks my heart.”

  “Ilona.” He came no closer. She wanted him to come closer but he stayed where he was, across the room. “Ilona, can you see me that way? Not like everybody else sees me. Not like you see me now. You think I’m blessed, you think Somebody out there loves me, and sometimes I go along with that because it feels good. But I’ll tell you something. Someday I’m going to be back with everybody else again, you won’t be able to tell me apart. Me, just a lowly human being again, maybe even lowlier than the rest, and what if I knock at your door, the real Martin Vandersen, Old Mortal Martin? Would I break your heart?”

  When he came to her she put her hands over her face to hide her desire for him. He kissed her hands hiding her face and led her back down the hall that was not wide enough for two abreast, and drew her down onto her bed. She had imagined herself far in his past, faded from his memory, and she was engaged, day and night, in a desperate rescue of herself, a rescue by thought, by words, but all the time she had known the rescue required something more—his body over hers, his hands over her, his mouth over her, his desire moving over those secret places where proof of love seems to lie.

  Apart, each facing upward in that rapt position memory places you in years later: “Ilona, did I tell you I dreamed about you? The other night? You knew where underground rivers ran and where trees could be planted and thrive.”

  Nights to come, when she was to be wakened by her fear of belonging nowhere, by despair over who she was, so lacking in the virtues that make your presence, your time on earth so precious to some others, it was to calm her like a deep persuasion of his love.

  At dawn when the phone rang she was lying against his back, curved to him as she had been curved to him countless times before, and in the first moments of waking the loss of him had not yet come about. Wrapping his shirt around her—it was closest to hand—she ran down the hall, praying that all was well with everyone.

  The sound of distance like little waves, and within the waves a voice asking to speak to Ilona Lewis.

  “That’s me,” she said. “I’m here.”

  Washed over by distance, the voice—a man’s voice or the grainy voice of an elderly woman clerk—told her that her brother, Albert Lewis, had died at six that morning. A voice in a vast hospital told her that her brother had been brought there in the night, suffering a heart attack.

  “I’ll come on the earliest plane,” she said, and when she put down the phone her cries were the ones her brother kept down in his throat that last morning when he came to the bedroom door to beg her to allow him to protect her from the world.

  Martin sat on the rim of the tub and bathed away the sheen over her body. He drove her to the airport and, waiting in line to board the plane, she rested her head against his chest and he kissed her on the brow, and to everyone else he must have appeared to be someone who would be waiting for her when she returned.

  14

  A glass door to a dim vestibule, and the landlady peering out at the woman on the porch who had pressed the bell so early in the morning.

  “I’m Albert’s sister.” At last. And when she was let in she said it again, repeating it to exonerate herself from the years of her denial of it.

  A second, inner vestibule, dim also, a black pay phone on the wall and a black leather discard chair before it. So this was where he sat waiting for her to call at the time they had agreed upon by letter, and always he had waited half an hour in advance, afraid he would miss her call or another tenant would have claimed the phone. So this was the small space wherein he waited for her voice.

  “Come in. You like cuppa tea?” I have a Greek landlady who knows how to make repairs like a man.

  Ilona followed her into the flat and down the long hallway and into the kitchen. The presence of the night still lay heavily in the rooms off the hallway, they were so solidly crowded with massive furniture and the drapes were closed, but the light of day came through the kitchen window.

  “Your brother a nice guy. Nice guy. He always like cuppa tea. Sit down.”

  Ilona sat at the table, in the chair where her brother had sat. A large dog dropped a red ball at Ilona’a feet and backed away, head cocked, a bright anticipation in the corners of its eyes. Its black and white fur lay in tidy, tended layers.

  “Your brother, he like Hector. He always throw the ball. Nice guy.”

  The sister, too, threw the ball. She threw it the length of the hall and the dog was back in no time, dropping the ball at her feet again. She threw the ball again, keeping her eyes on the dog to avoid the landlady’s eyes. This woman’s two sons, both in their teens when her brother moved in, became doctors while her brother went on living in the same room, observing their transformation with a tenant’s pride.

  “He talk alla time about his sister. Come in, have cuppa tea, I say. He say, Thank you, thank you, and talk alla time about his sister. He want you to come here so he can take care of you. You got no husband?”

  “Not now.”

  “How you make a living?”

  Not very well—she could say that if the time were appropriate to smile. Not very well, but enough of a living to keep a roof over herself and her child, and the pitcher of milk was always full, surprisingly, as if by a benediction, the same as that bestowed on the couple in the myth whose wine jug or milk jug was miraculously full for the rest of their lives because they’d shared their meager fare with a couple of strangers.

  “Albert tells me you write alla time.”

  “That was a long time ago”—lying to clear away the scornful curiosity trembling in the landlady’s eyes, the derision of this sister who failed to attend to reality. But some lies, like riptides, sweep you out into a dangerous truth. If she had hoped to go on dreaming up enough stories to keep the pitcher full or partway full for the rest of her life, that hope, fragile anyway, must have left her when Martin left.

  “The sweet ladies, you know about them? Bernice and Harmonia? Oh, they got sweet voices. Lady angels. They come to visit him, they take him for nice rides. They tell me Albert loves the Lord. They talk alla time about Lord Jesus. They smile at me like I got a pain.”

  “He told me.” His voice a loud whisper, he had told her about the two ladies. Though it was unthinkable, his whisper implied, the ladies might be closer to God than she was. Sunday dinners at their house, reading aloud from the Bible, each taking a turn, and she had imagined his voice—portentous, hollowy, shaky with awe.

  Ilona, like a bird that leads the predator away from her nest, eluded the landlady’s eyes prying after an incontrovertible sign of sorrow. The sweet ladies had borne him in their angel arms, but where was his sister? The sister had kept her distance, hoping that her sorrow over him, already deep when she was a child, when she had no name for it, would serve as her presence near him, and knowing that it would not.

  “Where’s Al now?”

  She mistook it for a superstitious query and looked into the woman’s eyes to see where her brother was in the woman’s own scheme of the world. Did this landlady think he was still in this room where he drank his tea and threw the ball and talked about his sister?

  “What you going to do with his body?”

  She had always to gather her strength to answer any questions, the ones asked and the ones unasked, and this one required of her a strength to overcome the shame of her failure to appear before he became only a body. “Yesterday afternoon,” she began, knowing the landlady was listening to the shame stumbling a
round in her voice and not to the words, “as soon as the plane got in I went out to the hospital and tried to find the doctor who was on duty when he was brought in. Somebody said he’d be back soon and I waited but he didn’t come back and then I walked for miles up and down the corridors, trying to find somebody who could tell me how to get my brother out of there.” Up and down the corridors—it had the sound of pity for herself, but she had felt none. Some fault of hers, like a lack of foresight, kept her in narrow corridors, unable to escape, unable to suggest a way of escape for anybody she might run into there.

  “What you going to do with him?”

  The same question. It had to be answered with a word of such terrible finality she could barely hear herself saying it. But the landlady heard.

  “The Greeks, we bury our dead.”

  It must seem to this woman that what she, the sister, was to do with her brother’s body would be her final failing of him—this complete vanishing as if he had never lived. But the ancient Greeks built pyres, didn’t they? Isn’t that what all peoples did, in ancient times? And the ones who became ashes were remembered, weren’t they? The millions who vanished into ashes in the concentration camps were remembered, weren’t they, and the ones everywhere in the world who were dragged away in the night were remembered, weren’t they, though they disappeared without a trace? Each one by someone or all by someone?

  “Alla time, your brother walk, walk alla time,” the landlady said. “Restless, always walk. I tell him he going to wear out all those shoes he got. He laugh at me, he tell me he got enough shoes to last one hundred twenty years.”

  With the key to her brother’s room in her hand, a dimestore key that might open any door in this place except the landlady’s door, Ilona climbed the rubber-tread stairs to the second floor, passed along a gray-walled hallway, by several doors close together, and unlocked her brother’s door. She left the door open, to breathe.

  The room was a cell and the smallness gripped her heart, confirming for her, once and for all, how small it had always been, her heart. She had imagined the room larger, of course. You always imagine comforts for someone you fail to comfort. Above his cot a cardboard sign, printed with blue pencil:

  Turquoise Bulletin Board

  Third Revised Notice

  as of May 14, 1969

  In an Emergency Please

  Notify my Sister

  Ilona Lewis

  Over the erasures of previous numbers, her present phone number was printed in red.

  If the above number proves to be

  in error, the correct number can

  be located in my wallet.

  Signed, Albert L. Lewis

  The odor of sweat, the lingering odor of life. The cot and dingy blankets, a kitchen chair, a dresser, and half the cell, the back part, taken up by clothes on hangers hooked over lines that stretched from wall to wall. Only the top of a grimy window and the upper part of a closet door were visible above the lines of clothes. Always, his desire for clothes imbued with the lives of other men, garments that must have been, for him, like gifts left for a son by many kindly fathers, left for a nephew by generous uncles. He must have imagined them watching over him from high windows, so pleased their clothes were being put to further use by this sensible and grateful man.

  Long gray underwear over the back of the chair, and on the seat of the chair a box filled with ties in a snakepit twining. Under the dresser, oxblood oxfords, black moccasins, a pair of white buck shoes that must have belonged to a church-going man, three hundred pounds. She remembered his slender bare feet, the tendons, the tension, the unpredictability of those bare feet on the bare floorboards at night.

  “Throw everything over the railing.”

  With an armload of plastic bags the landlady moved swiftly around her, dropping the bags on the cot, and, into one, stuffing the tenant’s long underwear, a large bundle of socks from the dresser drawer, the ties, a suit and four sweaters along with their wire hangers, exposing behind the first row of clothes a portion of the second row.

  “Follow me.”

  Down the narrow hallway and out onto a railed porch, a balcony of sorts. The stairs down to the yard were boarded up, the drop to the earth, to the damp, bare yard was twenty feet or so. The landlady lifted the heavy bag to the rail and gave it a push. Over and down. The bag split on impact with the hard earth and the clothes leaped forth. A shoe kicked out, a sleeve and a pantsleg jerked once.

  “Throw everything over. Is okay. I go down and make a pile.”

  Briskly the landlady went back along the hall toward the front of the house. On the ground floor there would be a rear door to her flat and she would emerge into the yard. In an unknowable maze you have to imagine an exit.

  Under the cot, four pairs of overshoes, elaborately large and all readily available for the coming winter that he was not to enter. She gathered them up from the strings of dust and placed them in the bottom of a plastic bag. Flannel pajamas, thin as gauze in spots, from the foot of the cot, and from the first row of hanging clothes an apple green cardigan sweater, a stained winecolor robe, steelgray trousers crudely darned, three gaudy shirts that once belonged to a racetrack buff, and three suits for summer. The bag was too heavy to lift from the top. She lifted it from the bottom and carried it down the hallway to the porch.

  Below in the yard the landlady was gathering the scattered clothes into a pile. Seen from above, she was even more plump, shorter, and the weak sunlight showed the black dye in her twisted-back hair. She looked up to see if the sister had appeared, their eyes met, and the quick, wavering light in the landlady’s eyes was an accusatory question: Since you failed to come and see him, can you see at all? Ilona rested the bulging bag on the rail and pushed it over.

  The bag plummeted in an instant, smacking the hard earth and flying apart. Up to that moment her abandonment of her brother had been a secret unknown in its extent even to herself. Now it became a public act, though no one looked out from the windows of the tenement next door, not from any grimy window of the four stories nor from the basement windows whose sills were level with the earth. No face stared out from the shreds of curtains. She knew the place had tenants, she had seen pale children playing in the entrance. But no one came to a window to see someone’s earthly possessions strike the ground. Only the goad, the landlady, saw.

  Up and down the hall, carrying out to the rail bags filled with sweaters, shirts, towels, brushes, combs, empty coin purses, half a hundred of them filled only with hope, and carrying over her arms suits for summer and suits for winter, and when all the hanging garments were cleared away and the clotheslines taken down, the closet was accessible.

  Someone in an adjacent room was watching television or listening to the radio; she heard the boxed-in voices. The man struck the air; she heard the rustle of his arm and the shout of rage. Other persons so close around her brother—had their sounds comforted him, even the sound of someone endangered by his own self?

  On the closet floor, her father’s black leather suitcase, familiar as a repetitive dream. Along with the cardboard boxes tied with twine, the suitcase had gone aboard the mailman’s truck, then aboard the train to Seattle, and when their aunt died it was loaded aboard the train to Chicago. He had gone east when everyone else was going west. He had gone back into the city of his mother’s childhood, transforming it into the city of his future, imagining his mother a little girl again in a doorway not far from his own. What a sight he must have been on that train! Trembling with courage, loudly sociable with the person next to him in the coach like a jocular, seasoned traveler. The passengers must have been warily entertained by him, by his voice, by his clothes, by his anxious, excited face, by the way he bent low over his meal, guarding it from the covetous. If she had accompanied him on that train, obliged by her heart to sit next to him, her dear, dread companion, how she would have longed to sit far away from him, denying him even a brief acquaintance, her face turned toward the passing sights.

  Down o
n her knees she opened the suitcase. The figured paper lining was a dry brown like the manuscript pages before they flamed up. The world atlas, here again, already old when she was a child, its maps even then in wrong shapes, and here again was his geography textbook, and the arithmetic textbook, and the grammar, and the dimestore tablet over which he had bent his head so low, his face so close to his hand erasing an error, erasing one small letter into extinction, leaving a hole where the offender had been. Over the tablet pages his pencil, sent along the blue lines at his father’s command, pressed factual information of extreme importance to the world:

  The earth turns on its axis from west to east once every twenty-four hours, giving us the impression that the sun moves around the earth from east to west. The earth completes one rotation of 360 degrees in a day; hence in one hour it must rotate of 360 degrees or 15 degrees.

  The Bible, here again, in its flexible leather cover, with its red silk cord to slip between the pages. They belonged to no church, no temple, but their father had made them read the Bible, and was it to blame for her delusion that everything that happened on earth was taken into a divine memory? There was no memory like that.

  Objects both strange and familiar, the way sacred objects seem. The gray photograph folder, here again, embossed with the name of the studio and Chicago. If she opened it she’d find a full-length portrait of a young woman before she became their mother. The pale, pure oval face, the eyes bravely meeting the camera’s eye, dark hair drawn up and her dress outgrown, lace cuffs barely concealing thin wrists. If she were to look into that face would she find there the secret disquiet that must have come later to the mother’s face, the forbidden wondering over the end of her children’s lives—when and where? Here again, the pocket planetarium her father had invented, a square of cardboard folded in sections and tied with a string. If she were to unfold it, the sun and the planets would spring into existence, surprisingly white on the black background of space. Once or twice he had mused over a desire to visit Einstein, and when he died away from home she wondered if he were on his way to pay that visit and to unfold his modest design of the heavens under that great man’s gaze. They were small enough, these possessions, to fit into her purse and small enough to be hidden away when she got home, where she would promise them to take them out later.