Wassilly’s immobility: In midwinter, Wassilly’s brother died. His father asked him to go to the apartment and sort through his brother’s things. Wassilly’s brother had lived alone in the city. Wassilly had never visited him there, because for some years his brother had not wanted to see him.
The door of the apartment had many locks and Wassilly did not know which were closed and which open, so it took him some time to get inside. Once inside, he was taken aback by the squalor and nakedness of the apartment: it looked like the home of a very poor man. There was nothing on the walls or floors. The furniture was shabby, and there was very little of it.
Wassilly walked through the rooms. Signs of his brother were everywhere. In the bathroom, a web of black fingermarks surrounded the light switch. There was a ring in the tub, and a crust of dirt in the basin and the toilet. In the kitchen glass bottles and jars were crowded into one corner. Sheaths and roots of garlic buds covered the table like a light snow. It was as though his brother would be coming back at any moment.
Wassilly walked into the living room, where the only furniture was a desk, a cupboard, a few chairs, and the unmade bed from which his brother had been taken to the hospital. On the floor under the window, piles of papers and notebooks collapsed out into the room. Wassilly poked through them and found nothing. He pulled a folding wooden chair out into the middle of the room and sat down. He looked out the window at the brick walls of the apartment buildings which abutted this one, enclosing a courtyard and a spindly locust tree.
Wassilly tried to think about his brother — the stooped, thick figure, the slow speech, the hesitations. But again and again his mind wandered. The room was dark, even though the sun shone on the buildings nearby. A neighbor banged something against the wall behind the kitchen stove and immediately afterwards a door slammed in the hallway. Wassilly began to doze off, his chin on his overcoat lapel.
Startled awake by the silence, he looked around the room, so unfamiliar to him. The sun now shone across one wall. Wassilly and his brother had been far apart in age. Wassilly’s earliest memories concerned his brother’s leaving, returning, and leaving again. Silently he came home, silently left. And Wassilly always at the window, itching with excitement. It was years before Wassilly’s admiration withered. By then his brother had no desire to see him anyway.
Wassilly stood up from the folding chair and unbuttoned his overcoat. He had begun to feel slightly nervous. Was this a responsible way to behave? he asked himself. He had come to sort out his brother’s things: by now he should have been nearly finished. Yet for an hour he had been sitting in the same position. What would his brother have done in his place? he wondered. His brother would not have come to the apartment at all. He would not even have gone to the funeral.
Wassilly thought of taking off his overcoat but did not. He went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and put all the tubes and bottles into a cardboard box for his own use. He felt like a thief. He pulled the towels off the racks and mats off the floor and stuffed them into a large laundry bag. When it came to throwing away his brother’s toothbrush, he felt sick and could not go on.
A week later, Wassilly woke up in the right frame of mind, he thought, to do the job. He returned to his brother’s apartment. Yet he accomplished no more this time than the last. Something in the very air of the apartment immobilized him. After a few hours he left, carrying away a framed photograph of his grandfather which he had found face down on the mantelpiece. When he got home he wrote to his sister and asked her to do the job for him.
He lay back on his bed that evening, his dog beside him on the floor, and stared over at the photograph of his grandfather, whose eyes twinkled at him out of a dark corner. He could not move, as though the despair of his family life sat on his chest. Layer upon layer of sadness held him down — that he had not seen his brother more, that he had not liked him, that his brother had died alone, that a member of his family should have lived in such squalor. But if his brother had been a stranger, what did the rest matter? Not for the first time, he puzzled over the curious nature of families — that family bonds tended to keep together people who had little in common.
He would never have chosen the members of his family as friends. He thought it was odd that he should have been obliged to go to the apartment of this dirty stranger and handle his things. He looked over at his grandfather’s face, with its suppressed smile and carefully folded cravat. He himself had no desire to start a family. Heavily, he rose from his bed and went down to the kitchen. He returned to bed with several thick sandwiches, which he ate until he was too drowsy to keep his eyes open any longer. As he slept and suffered mild nightmares, his dog crept up beside him and wolfed down what remained of the food.
City Employment
All over the city there are old black women who have been employed to call up people at seven in the morning and ask in a muffled voice to speak to Lisa. This provides work for them that they can do at home. These women are part of a larger corps of city employees engaged to call wrong numbers. The highest earner of all is an Indian from India who is able to insist that he does not have the wrong number.
Others — mainly old people — have been employed to amuse us by wearing strange hats. They wear them as though they were not responsible for what went on above their eyebrows. Two hats bob along side by side — a Homburg high up on an old man and a black veiled affair with cherries on a little woman — and under the hats the old people argue. Another old woman, bent and feeble, crosses the street slowly in front of our car, looking angry that she has been made to wear this large cone-shaped red hat that is pressing down so heavily on her forehead. Yet another old woman walks on a difficult sidewalk and is cautious about where she sets her feet. She is not wearing a hat, because she has lost her job. People of all ages are hired by the city to act as lunatics so that the rest of us will feel sane. Some of the lunatics are beggars too, so that we can feel sane and rich at the same time. There are only a limited number of jobs available as lunatics. These jobs have all been filled. For years the lunatics were locked up together in mental hospitals on islands in New York Harbor. Then the city authorities released them in large numbers to form a reassuring presence on the streets.
Naturally some of the lunatics have no trouble holding down two jobs at once by wearing strange hats as they lope and shuffle along.
Two Sisters
Though everyone wishes it would not happen, and though it would be far better if it did not happen, it does sometimes happen that a second daughter is born and there are two sisters.
Of course any daughter, crying in the hour of her birth, is only a failure, and is greeted with a heavy heart by her father, since the man wanted sons. He tries again: again it is only a daughter. This is worse, for it is a second daughter; then it is a third, and even a fourth. He is miserable among females. He lives, in despair, with his failures.
The man is lucky who has one son and one daughter, though his risk is great in trying for another son. Most fortunate is the man with sons only, for he can go on, son after son, until the daughter is made, and he will have all the sons he could wish for and a little daughter as well, to grace his table. And if the daughter should never come, then he has a woman already, in his wife the mother of his sons. In himself he has not a man. Only his wife has that man. She could wish for a daughter, having no woman, but her wishes are hardly audible. For she is herself a daughter, though she may have no living parents.