I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well

by Norman Levine

  On a cold morning I walked into a district of large houses, wide lawns, a small park. Icicles were hanging from the roofs. And on the lawns the snow had a frozen crust. It was garbage day. The garbage cans, and the tied black-green plastic bags, were on the snow at the edge of the lawns. In the road steam was rising from the manholes.

  Because of the ice I was walking slowly through the park when I saw a red bird fly to a young tree. This small red bird in this frozen landscape looked exotic. I was watching this bird when three large dogs appeared. They attacked the garbage cans, ripped the plastic bags, and foraged. They did this, from lawn to frozen lawn, without making a sound. Then went away leaving garbage scattered and exposed.

  Some days I gave myself destinations.

  One afternoon I decided to walk to the Art Gallery of Ontario. At a busy intersection I had to wait for the lights to change. I looked up and saw a black squirrel on a telephone wire slowly crossing above the crowded street. No one else seemed to take any notice.

  Because I saw the squirrel get across and because the sun was shining, I said to the man waiting beside me, “Isn’t this a lovely day?”

  “You too,” he replied.

  Late on a Saturday, I went and bought a paperback of Heart of Darkness, then walked back through fresh snow to the apartment. As the elevator started it began to vibrate. At the top it stopped. The door remained shut. I pressed the number seven button again. It went to the bottom. And stopped. The elevator door still wouldn’t open. I tried all the buttons, the switches. Nothing happened except the lights went out. It was then that I realized I was trapped.

  I began to call out.

  I don’t know how long I was there. The air had become stale. I thought: how awkward it will be if I die here. Finally someone did hear me. “OK fellah,” I could hear him on the other side. “Don’t worry. I’ll get the fire department. They will have you out in a matter of minutes.” And they did. They forced the door open. I was at the bottom of the shaft. And climbed out into the light and the cold air.

  That’s how I met Nick, the superintendent of the apartment. He was standing with the firemen. He looked distressed. “Not my fault. I start work yesterday. I no work weekend. Not my fault.”

  “Of course it’s not your fault,” I said.

  After that Nick and I talked whenever we saw each other. His wife had left him. He had custody of their son. When he left for school in the morning, I watched them wave and smile until the boy finally turned the corner. Nick told me he was Yugoslavian. That he grew up with the Germans in his country. “I see people die. I see people hang. These things I cannot forget.”

  “I work for the two sisters. They need to fix here plenty. But they no like to spend money.”

  The two sisters came from France after the war and spoke English with a French accent. They owned the apartment and ran it from an office on the second floor. Every morning—Monday to Friday at ten—I’d go down to see if I had any mail. And be greeted by smiles and good mornings from one of the sisters. “Please sit down. A cup of coffee?”

  Edith, the older one, despite her straight grey hair, looked the younger. She was tall, slim, with dark eyes deeply set. She had a long, intelligent face. But there was something awkward about her presence. Both sisters were generous, sociable. And both were elegantly dressed.

  “These shoes,” Edith said, stepping out of one and going easily back into it. “I went to Paris to get them.”

  “I too go to Paris for my clothes,” said Miriam. She was stocky: blue eyes, black hair, a round face. She smiled a lot and liked to talk. But often when she started to tell a story she would forget the ending and stop in mid-sentence with a startled look.

  Edith was separated with two children. Miriam was divorced with two children. They thought I was too much on my own.

  “You won’t meet people staying in,” Miriam said, “or going for walks by yourself. Go to dances. Go to political meetings. Join something-” She forgot what she was going to say. Then in a flat voice said. “In this business you can tell a lot about a person from their luggage.”

  At the end of March I met Mrs. Kronick. She lived on the floor below. A small Jewish woman, seventy-eight, a widow. She came with her husband from Poland after the First World War. He died ten years ago. She had a son, a doctor, in Vancouver. But he rarely came to see her. Mrs. Kronick was still a striking woman, very independent. And she looked after herself. Every time I saw her she wore a different hat. But she couldn’t tolerate the cold. I was in the lobby, waiting for the elevator, when she walked in from the outside. Her face was pale, her eyes watering.

  “It’s a Garden of Eden,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “A Garden of Eden.”

  “What have you been doing, Mrs. Kronick?”

  She was silent. Then quietly said, “Sewing shrouds.”

  “It’s an honour,” she added quickly. “Not everyone gets asked.”

  Next morning Edith knocked on the door of my apartment.

  “Did you see what they did in the elevator?”

  “No.”

  “Come, I’ll show you.”

  On the inside of the elevator I saw, scratched on the metal, a badly drawn swastika. And on the inside of the elevator door: Kill Jews.

  “They don’t like us,” she said.

  Edith’s student-daughter told me, “My mother wears dresses from Dior. She has a woman to help her in the house. But she can’t throw away a small piece of cheese. She will wrap it up and save it. She also saves brown paper bags that she gets from shopping—to use again. It’s because of what happened to her in the war.”

  Both sisters were delighted with Nick.

  “He is so much better than the last one,” Miriam said. “He never stops working.”

  “The last one was too old,” said Edith. “He came from the Ukraine. After forty years here—he was still in the Ukraine.”

  “You must come and meet our friend Henry,” Miriam said. “He is very intelligent. Come for brunch next Sunday.” And wrote an address and drew a simple map. “Do you think you will be able to find your way?”

  “In the war,” I said, “I found my way to Leipzig.”

  On Sunday I took the subway north and travelled as far as it could go. Then began to walk. I had not seen a Canadian spring in thirty years and I had forgotten how colourful the trees were. The flowering crab-apple’s pink and crimson; the horse chestnut with its miniature white Christmas trees. And all kinds of maples.

  I was walking through a suburb, several cars were beside each house, but no sidewalks.

  I walked on the road.

  A car drove up, on the opposite side, and stopped. A man got out. He stared at me. Perhaps because I was walking. As I came opposite I called out, “Why didn’t they build sidewalks?”

  “I’ll only be a minute,” he said nervously. And ran inside the nearest house.

  “This is Hannah,” Miriam said.

  And I was introduced to a handsome woman in her late fifties: thinning red hair, brown eyes, high cheekbones, a pleasant face, but there was a certain arrogance.

  The man opposite was Henry, a professor of Russian at the university. He was wearing jeans and a blue sports shirt. I felt overdressed in a grey suit. Miriam had on an expensive-looking sack dress in pastel colours. Edith had gone to New York for the weekend. In the other room the table was set.

  We were sitting in the adjoining room. A blue Chagall of flowers was on the wall. And faded photographs of young women with attractive faces in old-fashioned clothes.

  Henry was around my age. He spoke English with an accent. I told him that he looked very fit.

  “I go jogging every morning. I play tennis. I swim. You realize you are the only Canadian here. Hannah comes from Poland. She came just after the war. I came a few years later. What Russian writers do you like?”

  “Ch
ekhov and Turgenev.”

  He smiled. “And what modern ones.”

  “Babel, Mandelstam, Akhmatova.”

  “Yes,” he said and kept smiling.

  I felt my credentials were being examined.

  “I have not long come back from Moscow,” he said. “The status of a writer in Russia today is determined if he is allowed to visit the West. It is the highest accolade. It is higher than getting your book published.”

  And I remembered a Russian writer who came to see me in England. He was hitchhiking. And it was pouring with rain.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “Right now, I’m doing an article on suicide in Dostoevsky. Then I will lecture on it.”

  We went to the other room and sat around the table. In front of each plate there were wine glasses and tall thin glasses with a yellow rose in them.

  Miriam came in with a platter of bagel and croissants.

  “Don’t let them get cold,” she called out, “they are delicious.”

  I sat next to Hannah. She told me she was leaving tomorrow for Israel. “I know a lot of people but I don’t like staying with friends or relatives. I will stay in a hotel. My mother told me: guests and fish stink after three days.”

  Miriam poured wine into the glasses.

  “Why,” Hannah asked, “is it so difficult at our age to find another person?”

  “Once you have been married,” Henry said, “when you meet someone who has also been married, you are both carrying trailers with you. It is this that makes it difficult.”

  “But people do marry again,” Miriam said.

  Then Hannah told us how someone she knew got out from Eastern Europe. “He was running across the border when he heard a whistle. He didn’t turn around. He kept running. Then he heard the whistle again. He kept running. He expected shots. When he got to the other side he heard the whistle again. And saw it was a bird.”

  Hannah took a croissant.

  “I don’t know why,” she said, “but people from Europe that I meet in Canada seem to be smaller. I don’t mean in size.”

  “Because in Europe,” Henry said, “things are small and intimate, therefore the importance of a person is exaggerated. And over there people talk better.”

  Miriam brought in ice cream with a hot chocolate sauce. Then waited until she had everyone’s attention. “Today,” she said with a smile, “I would like us to talk about happiness.”

  “You cannot generalize about happiness,” Henry said. “What is true for one person is not true for another.”

  “With the truth you can go around the world,” Hannah said. “My mother told me that.”

  “What is happiness for you?” Miriam asked.

  “Moments,” I said. “You’re lucky when they come.”

  “For me,” said Miriam, “it is getting to know another person.”

  “But Miriam, don’t you agree,” I said, “that it is impossible, really, to know anyone else at all. At the most it is just speculation.”

  “It’s living with another person,” Hannah said. “That’s what people can’t do without. Once you’ve had that you want it again.”

  “On a visit to a mental hospital,” I said, “I met a patient. She was in there a long time. She was in there because she was always happy. If someone she liked died, she laughed.”

  Miriam suddenly stood up. “Such a nice day,” she smiled. “Why don’t we go for a walk.”

  So we did, the four of us. We walked on the road in the sunshine. Then Hannah said she had to leave as she had to pack. And Henry became restless. He said to me: “Can I drive you to where you live?”

  When he had gone to get the car Miriam said, “Henry must be lonely. He is always the last one to leave a party.”

  The book came out and the publisher arranged a promotion tour. Everywhere I was taken to be interviewed there was a young rabbi ahead of me. He was being interviewed because he claimed to be “an authority on Death.” There was also a singer making the same tour. In Vancouver she said, “I love Vancouver. In Calgary, I love Calgary, I love Ottawa, I love Montreal . . . it’s beautiful, beautiful.” A man from the States said: “I fell in love with Canada. I changed my nationality. I’m going to die here.” People were going around saying “I . . . I . . .

  I . . .” At the end of the week I felt I had given enough radio and TV interviews to satisfy a minor head of state. But when an article appeared in the Globe I had a phone call.

  “Do you remember Archie Carter from McGill?”

  “Of course,” I said, recognizing his voice and seeing a tall man with dark straight hair, thin lips, a sharp nose, a sharp jaw. He used to be an athlete, then something happened, for he had a limp. In our last year at McGill, Archie Carter started a small recording business. He got me to interview visitors as if they were visiting celebrities. Then they would buy the record to take home. In return Archie let me make recordings of the poems of Thomas Hardy.

  “Can you come and see me. Or are you busy?”

  “Of course I’ll come.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes.”

  He gave me his address.

  It brought me to an expensive high-rise opposite a grove of young birches. A doorman, his war medals on a pale blue uniform, saluted me.

  I pressed the button outside Archie’s door. He called out: “Prepare yourself for a shock.”

  “I’m not the same either,” I shouted back. When he opened the door I didn’t recognize him. He was bald. He had put on weight. All those sharp features were gone. Only his voice was the same. And I wondered what he was seeing in my face.

  We shook hands. He led me into a room with a glass wall overlooking the birches. He limped more than I remembered.

  “What would you like to drink? I only have Italian wine. But it’s a good one.”

  He came back from the kitchen with two glasses of red wine. We drank in silence.

  “I have three daughters,” I said. “When they were small a friend from London, a painter, would come to see us once a year. When he arrived he would give the three of them five pounds in separate envelopes. The last time he came he only had two envelopes. He had forgotten the youngest. So he quickly asked me for an envelope and a piece of paper. As I went to get them the youngest ran into another room. I could hear her crying. I thought she was crying because he had forgotten her. So I went in to tell her that people often forget . . . But the tears were trickling down her face. And she was sobbing. He’s got old. He’s got old.”

  “I’m not a failure,” Archie said.

  “In the end, Archie, we’re all failures.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Do you like the wine?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m in love with Italy,” he said. “The food, the climate. Everything. I go there every two years . . . I got this foot in Italy. I was leading my company. A mortar bomb hit me. They had to remove the ankle.”

  “What happened after McGill?”

  “I taught English for a while. Then I began to paint. I’ll show you the paintings later.” He paused. “Of course I’m mad.” And paused again to see what I would say. I said nothing. “When it’s bad it’s just boring. It was the pain from the wound that brought it on. The first time was in the hospital ship going back from Italy to England. The next time was fifteen years ago.”

  “What happened—?”

  He hesitated. “It’s because I have an economic theory that I believe will cure the world’s economic problems.” He hesitated again and smiled. He had a pleasant smile. “I believe we wouldn’t have inflation or unemployment or high prices—things would be more abundant and we would be a lot happier—if people didn’t gyp one another.”

  “Did they put you into a mental hospital for that?”

  “I went to Lakefield,” he said, “before
McGill. Some of my friends are ambassadors—people like that—scattered all over. I called up Cairo, Amsterdam, London—and told them about this theory.”

  “That still doesn’t seem bad enough to be put away.”

  “But I called them at two in the morning. Some of them became concerned and called the police. It was the police who brought me in . . . I thought at this point I was a genius. The hospital I was in was full of people who thought they were geniuses.”

  He filled the glasses with more wine.

  “A nurse in the hospital tried to make me pee. She got a jug full of water and emptied it into an empty jug. So I could see and hear it. She kept repeating this. I still couldn’t go. But the other patients, who had been watching, all wet their beds.

  “I have invented a word game that I intend to put on the market. I still think I’m not a failure, you know. But I must not forget. I must call this number.” And he took out an envelope. And dialled very determinedly. “There is a studio going. And I must get this woman before she lets it to someone else.”

  He let the phone ring a long time before he hung up.

  “What was I saying?”

  “What happened after you came out of the hospital?”

  “I began to paint. My shrink quite likes them.” He brought several small canvases from his bedroom. They were gentle landscapes of fields and trees by a river. “What do you think?”

  “I like the colours.”

  “I better phone that woman or else that studio will go. And I need a studio.”

  He dialled. No response.

  “Remind me to try again.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s good you are in Toronto. We have lots to talk about.”

  “I’m going to England,” I said.

  He looked disappointed.

  “But I’m coming back.”

  I got up. “I’ll ring when I get back.”

  “Fine. I better call that woman again.”

  He took out the envelope. We shook hands. And I left him dialling the number.

  On the way back I saw Mrs. Kronick.

  “What have you been doing?” I asked.