by Susan Daitch
Locking up for the night, I passed Julius’s office. His light was still on, so I approached soundlessly. The door was ajar, and I looked in again. Packing boxes lay strewn about, he was still sleeping the heavy sleep of the drugged, head on his desk, deaf to everyone, staking his claim to the few square inches where ear and cheek met wood laminate.
The notice in the paper was small. An unidentified man had been found dead in an apartment building near the Brooklyn Bridge. There was nothing remarkable about one more death in a city where many died every day, but his death was noted because it was attributed to negligence on the part of his landlord. There had been a sudden cold snap, the temperature had plummeted, and the man had apparently turned on the gas because his building had no heat. This is illegal, and according to the paper, the landlord was already under indictment for other violations. The address was given. A disabled tenant was quoted as saying the landlord should be forced to live in one of his own buildings. The victim of the accident was unidentified and unknown. My impression of Jack was that he was the kind of person who would turn on the gas, and although sitting in front of the oven, would have been sure to have taken the precaution of opening the window beforehand. I opened the blinds and looked out the window at a vacant lot. Snow fell on an empty overturned shopping cart, the only object in it. Death makes random selections, freak accidents occur, someone is trampled by a crowd, hunted with deliberation, death is foreshadowed by salvos from a man unknown or missiles from a girl who lives down the road. The hunter who shoots at a dash of fur or antlers gets his mark, and that’s it. He gives the finger to cars with animal rights bumper stickers as he passes them. Zola had died of asphyxiation in his house on rue de Bruxelles on a cold night when there was no heat. The door had to be broken down, but by the time they found him he was dead. Dreyfus supporters believed he was murdered. Those Zola had charged with invention in his j’accuse letter years earlier dismissed his death as suicide. I imagined Jack playing tricks on me. Look, you think I’ve disappeared, but I’ll be back. I have a copy of the film in my coat pocket, and I plan to look at the end again.
The Ordinary Track
Paris 1968
The American students play their music too loudly. The Vietnamese cook who lives below them complains in broken, hesitant French; the salesman from Marseilles who occupies the room next door complains loudly to himself and with passion. I bang on their door, and they turn the volume down sometimes. They live here because it’s cheap. Even I have begun to understand the English words, or at least been able to guess at the meaning of their records, they play them over and over. Just before they return to America they’ll take my picture in front of the building. This old woman is like the super or the building manager, they’ll write on the back. In May they’ll join the riots or retreat, baffled, this kind of thing doesn’t happen at home, or maybe it does. I’ve never left my city and have no images of their New Yorks, Washingtons, Clevelands, you name eet buddee.
Last night a friend of one of the Americans fell into a closet that faces the courtyard. Heaving himself up and singing all the while, I could hear him throwing things out of it. Buckets, screwdrivers, bottles of cleaning fluid, mops, and brooms were scattered as if a wind had swept through only this very small space. I went out into the courtyard and asked him what he thought he was doing, waking up half the building. He looked at me with bleary eyes as he clung to a doorjamb and answered that he was searching for some papers.
“What kind?”
“Dictée. Écriture.”
His mouth was open as if he was about to be sick but nothing came out. I called the police while he chanted mar-toonies, mar-toonies in a singsong voice. He was a harmless, blind-drunk foreigner, but I had to have him and his friend thrown out, reprimanding them sharply, rapidly in a language they barely understood. The Vietnamese in blue trousers looked out of their doorway down into the courtyard, as if watching a kind of theater performance, fastening the black frogs on their jackets while leaning over the railing. The salesman from Marseilles came downstairs in a scarlet bathrobe and yelled at the Americans and at the police. The very drunk one staggered into him and pinched his cheek, a cartoon drunk, before he was hauled off. “Quel drame!” he said, making a drinking motion. Above our heads Madame Nguyen laughed. Jean Auric, my retired salesman, tied his robe tighter and scowled up at her.
“The Americans used to be identified by their very short hair and baggy suits. Now they have slightly longer hair,” he said, “but they are still the same.” It had rained, and the courtyard was so damp that sweeping was useless. We put away brooms, threw buckets of water on pools of soap powder. Bubbles poured out into the street. The Vietnamese children ran down the stairs to chase them into the middle of the night. I called them back; I needed to lock up. I told Auric I was perfectly all right, and I would finish the mopping myself. He insisted that I was too old, I must need help, but I preferred that he go back to his rooms. Cleaning at midnight isn’t like drinking alone, the fumes of cleaning fluid provide more nausea than intoxication, but I enjoy the solitude of the courtyard. I don’t want to hurt Auric’s feelings. Once in a while he takes it upon himself to be helpful, and he has a pushy tenant’s way of sometimes taking charge that I occasionally encourage out of laziness and lack of enthusiasm, but there are times when I want to be left alone.
“Who cleans at midnight? No one.” He asks and answers his own question.
I walked upstairs with Jean Auric, and we looked into the small room just vacated by the American students. It is the smallest room in the building, and was cluttered with their things. Copies of the Herald Tribune lay on the floor, a dying plant by the window. Boumedienne Suspends Constitution. Establishes Revolutionary Council. Auric shook his head at the American mess and climbed the rest of the way without me. He was a nuisance with a hound-dog face. I wanted to say, why don’t you just find Madame Brigitte and leave me alone, but I knew he couldn’t. When he was out of sight I shut the door. In one corner a wooden crate they had used as a chair had been overturned. I sat on it and put on one of their records, very softly so that no one would hear.
I once knew someone who swept through corridors and antechambers with some idea of self-importance, hoarding the crumpled detritus of other people’s dark rooms. The more abandoned, the better. The more destitute, the more welcoming.
When my mother found Auguste Bastian, we put her in this room, and she lived here for a few months. Before she came to stay with us, the room had been unoccupied, used for storing pieces of wood, tools, somebody’s army uniform. I knew old schoolbooks lay in a battered trunk with a false bottom, and I’d hoped to find other things in it but never did. Since Auguste’s departure the room has nearly always been occupied, but she was its first tenant, and she didn’t pay.
I had been sitting in the courtyard singing to myself, poking into rat holes with a stick. My hair had just been cut short, and I could feel a breeze on my neck for the first time. The breeze seemed to tickle the room keys hung on a board near where my mother sat. Otherwise the afternoon was soundless until one of our tenants began to yell. Shutters knocked open against courtyard walls, faces and bare arms appeared in windows smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, laundry was suddenly pulled in. I thought the tenant might have seen a rat, but her voice came from just outside the building. Those rats weren’t our province. My mother ran out, and I followed, but I had no idea what the shouting could mean. I saw nothing unusual on the street, there was only an old woman sitting near our entrance. The woman had called out as if in pain, and my mother told one of our tenants, Madame Gilberte, who had been out walking her terrier, to fetch some water. The old woman’s face was very red, and her nose was running, but my mother leaned close to her, put her mouth next to the woman’s ear, and then put her ear to the woman’s mouth. I could see the surprised expression on my mother’s face and found it troubling, a premonition of disorder. My mother, who was tall, helped the woman to her feet and guided the rag pile into our bu
ilding. When I saw the two of them enter, I felt uneasy. I didn’t like the idea of yet another stranger in a building already full of demanding near-strangers. I snapped my rat stick in two and stood in the entrance, a useless midget sentinel.
My mother nudged me with her elbow to move me out of the way.
“This woman is a national heroine. She must have gotten lost. Someone will come to fetch her.”
I didn’t recognize any national heroine in the old bag. Joan of Arc. Madame Curie. Sarah Bernhardt. If my mother thought the woman was a goldmine, or a goldmine waiting to happen, her identity was obscure, deeply buried treasure.
She whispered to me, “This one is rich, miserly perhaps, but she’ll reward us for taking her in.” I thought my mother was out of her mind.
A girl was quickly hired from the bakery next door to help clean out the storage room while I watched from the courtyard. My mother had pulled the lump of rags in off the street as if it were no more animate than something that had rolled off a delivery truck on its way to the wax museum. I was always suspicious of my mother’s largesse and of its recipients; the murkiness of these altruistic transactions often spelled trouble. Soon piles of rusted equipment, wooden boards, empty bottles, the trunk full of books, all of it was carted away in clouds of dust. I arched backwards, the sky was gray, and I wanted it to rain on my naked neck while everyone else was chasing rubbish. Other tenants emerged from their rooms to get a look at whatever was going on before they went to their night jobs. I squatted nearby and watched the small feet and large hands sticking out from the pile of rags. It was about to rain, but I didn’t go into our apartment
“Eh, what do they call you?” I pulled on a yellow-striped rag.
The pile groaned or grunted. It was a woman, but she had a mannish face. “What’s your name, thing?”
“Auguste Bastian.”
That was the name the police had given her. We never knew her real one. Rain began to hit the courtyard. Auguste and I ignored it, only staring at each other with mutual contempt as if she were waiting for me to taunt her bastards Bastian, and I was waiting for my mother to become so absorbed in the ragged woman’s upkeep that I would be compelled to go around hungry and ignored. While we silently assessed the harm one might do to the other, Madame Gilberte returned from the bakery, throwing crumbs around the courtyard for birds. She often fed them during the rain.
“It’s only rats that you’re feeding, you know.” I kicked a heel of bread, and it scudded into a puddle.
“Little girls should know when to come out of the rain.” She waved her black umbrella, inadvertently spattering me with extra drops. The terrier barked at us, and she sniffed at the pile of rags as if she, Madame Gilberte, could move to another place anytime.
“I’m going to tell your mother that the walls of my apartment are infested with bugs. They crawl over everything; they bathe in my coffee. Since you people came this building has gone to the dogs.”
I wanted to kick her ugly little terrier, but the animal, I reasoned, was an innocent.
“Then why don’t you find another place to live?”
We both knew she wouldn’t.
“I saw a rat!” I yelled at Madame Gilberte.
“I smell one.” This retort came not from Gilberte, but from the sonambulent Bastian.
“Yeah, and I think it’s you.” I kicked her, not hard, but still a kick.
My mother leaned over the rail, yelling at me and hurrying downstairs. She apologized to Auguste and guided the large delicate ball up to her new room. I followed, anxious to look into the future goldmine’s closet of a space. As far as I could tell peering around the two of them, one tall, the other round, Auguste’s room contained only a narrow bed, a chair, and a small table. Auguste pointed at me, said something unintelligible, and my observation period was cut short. The door was shut, and my mother yanked me back downstairs to her station. The building was suddenly quiet. Everyone had gone to work or disappeared behind shutters. I followed closely, leaning against my mother, thinking a display of affection might ward off blows. It began to rain heavily. Keys jangled in the thunder. My mother hit me with the back of her hand. I didn’t cry. Another stranger had come between us. It had happened before.
“Who is she?”
“Madame Bastian,” she lit the stove, “used to clean the German embassy on the rue de Lille. She was known for going through the garbage collected from wastebaskets and mail slots.”
I didn’t understand how this would give anyone a bit of notoriety. Had she found a lottery ticket in one of the bins, stuck between a sausage end and slivers of sauerkraut? The leap between what I saw and what my mother promised was too great. “She looks as if she lives in an alley. Why should she want to stay with us? How did she get rich from cleaning?” This seemed impossible to me. Nobody could become rich from cleaning, or my mother would be the first to keep our building tidy.
“She had her job for about ten years, I think, but a long time ago, before the 1900 Exposition.” I had only the dimmest memories of the exposition, and knew of it mainly through a few old postcards stored in the basement and souvenir paperweights my mother had placed in a corner near the stove as if the miniature monuments were huddled in a conference there.
Auguste had the mien of a someone used to going unnoticed, but as a presence in this or any other building, she also stood her ground, a man’s felt hat jammed on her head and bags clutched in her hands.
“You might try to be nice to her. You might learn something from her.” She cut potatoes with impatience as if each one represented my intransigence. I dropped a few pieces in hot oil. A tenant rang, and I tried to think of a way to change the subject because the topic of my behavior toward Madame Bastian was a cul de sac with no hope for me in it, and my mother still hadn’t explained exactly how this lunatic would make us rich.
“Tell me about the desert,” I asked when she returned. Because her family had been sent to the colonies, my mother had spent her childhood in Algiers, finally leaving for Paris when she was a young woman. She didn’t speak about her family. I was under the impression they were long dead. Algeria was an imaginary geography, site of half-buried memories; I had few pictures of it. If she told me about the palms and cafés on the boulevard d’Alger or the vaulted caves of the rue de Impuisance I might understand why a lump of semianimate rags should be treated as if the thing might turn out to be some kind of holy man. In other words, I might discover why my mother believed some things weren’t exactly what they appeared to be. As a child I had full confidence in the concept of trusting appearances, and if the appearance of the clod Auguste was clear cut, why not believe she was just as she presented herself? A beggar. A mooch. What was my mother’s problem? The answer might lie in having grown up in a place of constant bargaining, where value was relative and never as stated. Paupers might turn out to be rich men in disguise, and so the offer of shelter could be well rewarded in turn.
“I was ready to leave the heat and shut-in hours behind,” she began.
When woken and pestered in the middle of the night by a drunk customer looking for Madame Gilberte, my mother would reminesce about Algiers as a place of great decency where a prostitute’s clients wouldn’t ever make the mistake of knocking on her door. Even with the tenth or twentieth telling, even if an anecdote I hadn’t heard before was added, that bank of images that meant so much to her — the sound of the muezzin calling, cardamom seeds cracking between your teeth, dwellings with no ceilings, and dreams of heat — eluded me. I myself was fairly glad to be where I was, especially when I saw people living under bridges and inside cardboard boxes, but my mother never felt entirely at home in northern cities.
When people complain of not being comfortable, I want to ask them, how does anyone ever feel comfortable anywhere? Please explain.
“We were in the city and couldn’t go out alone. The streets were as narrow as corridors and wound around each other, sometimes ending in steeply inclined stairs, worn slippery an
d formidable. Some streets covered by crowded terraces were as dark as caves.”
“Did you ever become lost?”
Even though my mother was sitting in front of me, it was impossible to think of those streets without the idea of her becoming lost in them. This terrified me.
“I had to remain close to an adult. If I went out I couldn’t run around as you do. Sometimes you felt as if you lived on top of a mesa, should you want to run away, you couldn’t. It would be the end of you. We looked out at the street from behind window screens. Even children drank coffee so thick you could turn the cup upside down and none would spill.”
She overturned a cup so that coffee spilled into the sink as if to demonstrate how pedestrian life had become for her.
“I would go crazy.”
“Yes, you would.”
“Didn’t you ever get out of the city?”
“I rode camels a few times, learning to sway back and forth as I held my breath. It’s difficult to stay on.” She imitated riding on a camel, swaying back and forth in her chair. She looked like a crane. “We used to go on outings to look at the ruins near the Mediterranean. I thought they looked like limbless parts of a dead giants. Columns were legs, a blasted arch was a kind of crown.”
