Break It Down

by Lydia Davis

  I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were there in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It’s hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, All right, I’ll take it, I’ll buy it. That’s what it is. Because you know all about it before you even go into this thing. You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn’t that you can say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that’s why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can’t measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question really is, Why doesn’t that pain make you say, I won’t do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don’t.

  So I’m just thinking about it, how you can go in with $600, more like $1,000, and how you can come out with an old shirt.

  Mr. Burdoff’s Visit to Germany

  The Undertaking

  Mr. Burdoff is lodged in Cologne for the year with a petty clerk and family in order to learn German. The undertaking is ill conceived and ill fated, for he will waste much of his time in introspection and will learn very little German.

  The Situation

  He writes to an old school friend in America with great enthusiasm about Germany, Cologne, the house he is staying in, and his lofty room with its excellent view out over a construction site to the mountains beyond. But although his situation seems novel to him, it has actually been repeated many times before without spectacular results. To his old school friend, it sounds all too familiar: the house cluttered with knickknacks, the nosy landlady, the clumsy daughters, and the loneliness of his bedroom. The well-meaning language teacher, the tired students, and the strange city streets.

  Lassitude

  Mr. Burdoff is no sooner established in what he considers a productive routine than he falls into a state of lassitude. He cannot concentrate. He is too nervous to put down his cigarettes, and yet smoking gives him a headache. He cannot read the words of his grammar book and he hardly feels rewarded even when by a tremendous effort he manages to understand one construction.

  Liver Dumplings

  Mr. Burdoff finds himself thinking about lunch long before it is time to go down to the dining room. He sits by his window smoking. He can already smell the soup. The table in the dining room will be covered by a lace tablecloth but not yet set for lunch.

  Mr. Burdoff is gazing out at the construction site in back of the boardinghouse. In a cradle of raw earth three cranes bow and straighten and rotate from side to side. Clusters of tiny workmen far below stand still with their hands in their pockets.

  The soup will be thin and clear, with liver dumplings floating in it, spots of oil on the surface, and specks of parsley under the coil of rising steam. More often than not, the soup will be followed by a thin veal cutlet and the cutlet by a slice of pastry. Now the pastry is baking and Mr. Burdoff can smell it. The sounds he has been hearing, the many different heavy engines of the cranes and bulldozers grinding down below, are muffled by the sound of the vacuum cleaner beyond his door in the hallway. Then the vacuum cleaner moves to another part of the house. At noon the machines down below fall quiet, and a moment later through the sudden silence Mr. Burdoff hears the voice of his landlady, the squeaking of floorboards in the lower hall, and then the festive rattle of cutlery. These are the sounds he has been listening for, and he leaves his room to go down to lunch.

  The Class

  His language teacher is pleasant and funny, and everyone in the class has a good time. Mr. Burdoff is relieved to see that although his comprehension is poor, he is not the slowest in the class. There are many unison drills out loud, and he joins in with gusto. He takes pleasure in the little stories the class studies so painfully: for example, Karl and Helga go on a sightseeing trip that ends with a mild surprise, and the students appreciate this with waves of laughter.

  Hesitation

  Mr. Burdoff sits beside a small Hawaiian woman and watches her very red lips as she describes with agony her travels in France. The hesitation of the members of the class as they attempt to speak is charming; a fresh innocence endows them as they expose their weakness.

  Mr. Burdoff Falls in Love

  Now Mr. Burdoff feels a growing attraction to the Hawaiian woman, who has moved to a seat directly in front of him. During each lesson he stares at her lacquered black ponytail, her narrow shoulders, and the lower edge of her buttocks which delicately protrude through the opening at the back of her chair within inches of his knees. He hungers for a glimpse of her neatly crossed legs, her ballet slipper bobbing as she struggles to answer a question, and her slim hand as it writes, regularly traveling out across the page and then withdrawing again from sight.

  He is enchanted by the colors she wears and the objects she carries with her. Every night he lies awake and dreams of helping her out of a serious difficulty. Every dream is the same and stops just short of the first kiss.

  His love, however, is more fragile than he knows, and it dies in a moment the day a tall and sumptuous Norwegian woman joins the class.

  The Advent of Helen

  As she enters the room, swinging her hips around the crowd of silent students, she seems to Mr. Burdoff magnificent and unwieldy. No sooner has she pulled in her hip to accommodate the writing arm of a chair on one side than her low-slung breast on the other side dislodges the chignon of an angry woman from Aix. The students make some effort to shift out of her way, but their chairs are bolted together in threes and they cannot coordinate their efforts. A slow flush crawls up Helen’s throat and cheeks.

  To Mr. Burdoff’s delight, she pushes past his knees and settles in the empty seat next to him. She smiles apologetically at him and at the class in general. A mingling of warm smells drifts from her armpits, her throat, and her hair, and Mr. Burdoff instantly forgets agreements, inflections, and moods, looks up at the teacher and sees only Helen’s white eyelashes.

  Mr. Burdoff Takes Helen behind a Statue

  Helen succumbs to Mr. Burdoff on their very first date, after an evening spent struggling in the wet grass behind a statue of Leopold Mozart. If it is not hard for Mr. Burdoff to lead Helen to the park in the first place, it is more of a problem to roll her damp girdle up around her waist and then to persuade her, after all the heaving and grunting is over, that she has not been seen by an authority figure or a close friend. Once she is easier on that score, her remaining question to Mr. Burdoff is: Does he still respect her?

  Mr. Burdoff during Tannhäuser

  Much against his own wishes but out of love for Helen, Mr. Burdoff agrees to attend a Wagner opera at the Cologne opera house. During the first act, Mr. Burdoff, accustomed as he is to the clarity of the eighteenth century, becomes short of breath and is afraid he may faint in his hard seat at the top of the hall. Schooled in the strict progressions of Scarlatti, he cannot detect any advance in this music. At what he considers an arbitrary point, the act ends.

  When the lights go up, Mr. Burdoff examines Helen’s face. A smile hovers around her lips, her forehead and cheeks are damp, and her eyes glow with satiety, as though she has eaten a large meal. Mr. Burdoff, on the other hand, is overcome by melancholy.

  During the rest of the performance, Mr. Burdoff’s mind wanders. He tries to calculate the seating capacity of the hall, and then studies the dim frescoes on the underside of the dome. From time to time he glances at Helen’s strong hand on the arm of her seat but does not dare disturb her by touching it.

  Mr. Burdoff and the Nineteenth Century

  Late in their affair, by the time Mr. Burdoff has sat through the entire Ring cycle and The Flying Dutchman, as well as a symphonic poem by Strauss and what seem to him innumerable violin concertos by Bruch, Mr. Burdoff feels that Helen has taken him deep into the nineteenth century, a century he has always carefully avoided. He is surprised by its lushness, its brilliance, and its female sensibility, and still later, as he travels away from Germany on the train, he thinks of the night—impor
tant to the progress of their relationship—when he and Helen made love during her menstruation. The radio was broadcasting Schumann’s Manfred. As Mr. Burdoff climaxed, sticky with Helen’s blood, he confusedly sensed that a profound identification existed between Helen’s blood, Helen herself, and the nineteenth century.

  Summary

  Mr. Burdoff comes to Germany. Lives in a rooming house from which he can see construction. Looks forward to lunch. Eats well every day and gains weight. Goes to class, to museums, and to beer gardens. Likes to listen to a string quartet in the open air, his arms on the metal tabletop and gravel under his feet. Daydreams about women. Falls in love with Helen. A difficult and uncomfortable love. Growing familiarity. Helen reveals her love of Wagnerian opera. Mr. Burdoff unfortunately prefers Scarlatti. The Mystery of Helen’s Mind.

  Helen’s child falls ill and she goes home to Norway to nurse him. She is not sure she won’t continue her marriage. Mr. Burdoff writes to her at least once every day. Will she be able to return before he leaves for America? The letters she writes back are very brief. Mr. Burdoff criticizes her letters. She writes less frequently and communicates nothing Mr. Burdoff wants to hear. Mr. Burdoff, finished with his course of study, prepares to leave for America. Alone on his way to Paris, he looks out the train window, feels weak, incapable. Helen sits by her sleeping child, gazes toward the bedroom window, thinks of Mr. Burdoff. Is moved to remember earlier lovers, and their cars.

  What She Knew

  People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

  The Fish

  She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her—there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

  Mildred and the Oboe

  Last night Mildred, my neighbor on the floor below, masturbated with an oboe. The oboe wheezed and squealed in her vagina. Mildred groaned. Later, when I thought she was finished, she started screaming. I lay in bed with a book about India. I could feel her pleasure pass up through the floorboards into my room. Of course there might have been another explanation for what I heard. Perhaps it was not the oboe but the player of the oboe who was penetrating Mildred. Or perhaps Mildred was striking her small nervous dog with something slim and musical, like an oboe.

  Mildred who screams lives below me. Three young women from Connecticut live above me. Then there is a lady pianist with two daughters on the parlor floor and some lesbians in the basement. I am a sober person, a mother, and I like to go to bed early—but how can I lead a regular life in this building? It is a circus of vaginas leaping and prancing: thirteen vaginas and only one penis, my little son.

  The Mouse

  First a poet writes a story about a mouse, in moonlight in the snow, how the mouse tries to hide in his shadow, how the mouse climbs up his sleeve and he shakes it down into the snow before he knows what it is that is clinging to his sleeve. His cat is nearby and her shadow is on the snow, and she is after the mouse. A woman is then reading this story in the bath. Half her hair is dry and half of it is floating in the bathwater. She likes the story.

  That night she can’t sleep and goes into the kitchen to read another book by the same poet. She sits on a stool by the counter. It is late and the night is quiet, though now and then at some distance a train passes and hoots before a crossing. To her surprise, though she knows it lives there, a mouse comes out of a burner from under a pot and sniffs the air. Its feet are like little thorns, its ears are unexpectedly large, one eye is shut and the other open. It nibbles something off the tray of the burner. She moves and it flashes back in, she is still and in a moment it comes out again, and when she moves again it flashes back into the stove like a snapped elastic. At four in the morning, though she is still wide awake, reading and sometimes watching the mouse, the woman closes her book and goes back to bed.

  In the morning a man sits in the kitchen on a stool, the same stool, by the counter, and cradles their young cat in his arms, holding her neck in his broad pink hands and rubbing the crown of her head with his thumbs, and behind him the woman stands leaning against his back, her breasts flattened against his shoulder blades, her hands closed over his chest, and they have laid out crusts of bread on the counter for the mouse to smell and are waiting for the mouse to come out, blindly, and for the young cat to get it.

  They stay this way wrapped in nearly complete silence, and they are nearly motionless, only the man’s gentle thumbs move over the cat’s skull and the woman sometimes lays her cheek down against the man’s fragrant soft hair and then lifts it again and the cat’s eyes are shifting quickly from point to point. A motor starts up in the kitchen, there is the sudden flare of the gas water heater, the swift passage of some cars on the highway below, and then a single voice in the road. But the mouse knows the company that is there and won’t come out. The cat is too hungry to keep still and reaches forth one paw and then another and frees herself from the man’s light hold and climbs up on the counter to eat the bread herself.

  Often, whenever she can get into the house or is let into the house, the cat crouches sleepily on the counter by the stove, her eyes pointed at the burner where the mouse is likely to appear, but she is not more vigilant than that, half asleep, as though she likes just to place herself in this situation, hunting the mouse but perfectly motionless. Really she is keeping the mouse company, the mouse vigilant or sleeping inside the stove, the cat nearby outside. The mouse has had babies, in the stove, and the cat, too, is carrying kittens in her body, and her nipples are beginning to stand out in the downy fur of her belly.

  The woman often looks at the cat and sometimes remembers another story.

  The woman and her husband lived in the country in a large empty house. The rooms in this house were so large that the furniture sank into the empty spaces. There were no rugs and the curtains were thin, the windowpanes cold in the winter, and the daylight and the electric lights at night were cold and white, and lit the bare floor and the bare walls but did not change the darkness of the rooms.

  On two sides of the house, beyond the yard, were stands of trees. One woods was deep and thick and climbed away up over a hill. At the bottom of the hill was a marshy pond in the trees where the water had been caught by the railroad embankment. The tracks and ties were gone from the embankment, and the mound of it was overgrown with saplings. The other stand of trees was thin and bordered a meadow, and deer crossed through to sleep in the meadow. In the winter the woman could see their tracks in the snow and follow where they leaped in from the road. When the weather grew cold the mice would start coming into the house from the woods and the meadow, and run through the walls and fight and squeak behind the baseboards. The woman and her husband were not troubled by the mice, except for the little black droppings everywhere, but they had heard that mice would sometimes chew through the wires in the walls and start fires, so they decided to try and get rid of them.

  The woman bought some traps at the hardware store, made of bright brassy coils of metal and new raw wood printed with red letters. The man at the hardware store showed her how to set them. It was easy to get hurt because the springs were very strong and tight. The woman had to be the one to set them because she was always the one who did things like that. In the evening before they went to bed, she set one carefully, afraid of snapping her
fingers, and put it down in a place where she and he would not be likely to walk on it when they came into the kitchen in the morning forgetting it was there.

  They went to bed and the woman stayed awake reading. She would read until the man woke up enough to complain about the light. He was often angry about something and when she read at night it was the light. Later in the night she was still awake and heard the sound like a gunshot of the trap springing but did not go downstairs because the house was cold.

  In the morning she went into the kitchen and saw that the trap had flipped over and there was a mouse in it and blood smeared around on the pink linoleum. She thought the mouse was dead, but when she moved the trap with her foot she saw that it was not. It started flipping around on the linoleum with the trap closed on its head. Her husband came in then and neither of them knew what to do about this half-dead mouse. They thought that the best thing would be to kill it with a hammer or some other heavy thing but if one of them was going to do it, it would be her and she did not have the stomach for it. Bending over the mouse she felt sick and agitated with the fear of something dead or nearly dead or mutilated. Both of them were excited and kept staring at it and turning away from it and walking around the room. The day was cloudy with more snow coming and the light in the kitchen was white and cast no shadows.