“About India?”
“Have you ever been there?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s the trouble,” he said. “You study, but India is something else.”
“There’s probably more than one India.”
“More than one India… no, there’s only one. There’s only one Chesa, one Nedra, and one Harry Pall. I wish there was another one, with two livers.”
“Have you been to Tunisia?”
“Don’t ever have anything to do with Arabs.”
“Why?”
“Just believe me. Believe me,” he murmured. “You don’t have to worry, you’re not that young, they don’t even care how young you are. They’re a sick people.”
“Desperately poor.”
“They’re not so poor. I was poor. Look, I don’t care what you do, they’ve always been like that, they’re not going to change. You can give them schools, teachers, books, but how do you keep them from eating the pages?”
He had the bill brought to him and signed it in a scrawled, illegible hand. “Carlo,” he called.
“Yes, Mr. Pall.”
“Carlo,” he rose to his feet, “will you arrange for Mrs…. Berland,” he finally remembered, “to be taken to Davos.” He turned to her. “We’ll meet tomorrow on top,” he said, “for lunch. I’m too drunk at the moment to entertain you further.”
His eye fell on the glass of brandy. He drank it down as if it were medicine. It seemed to revive him, a sudden, false wave of composure came over him.
“Nedra, good night,” he said very clearly and left the room in a firm, deeply preoccupied walk, as if rehearsing. He fell on the entrance steps.
“Shall I call you a taxi?” the headwaiter asked her.
“In a few minutes,” she said.
She felt confident, a kind of pagan happiness. She was an elegant being again, alone, admired. She had a drink at the bar with friends of his. She was to meet many others. It was the opening of the triumph to which her bare room in the Bellevue entitled her, as a schoolroom entitles one to dazzling encounters, to nights of love.
3
FRANCA WORKED AT A PUBLISHER’S, it was a summer job. She answered the telephone and said, “Miss Habeeb’s office.”
She typed and took messages. People came to see her—that is to say, employees, boys in the mail room, young editors passing by. She was the girl for whom, in a sense, the whole house suddenly existed. She was twenty. She had long, dark hair which she parted in the middle and, as is sometimes the case with breath-taking women, certain faintly male characteristics. How often one is stunned by a girl who runs swiftly, a back slim as a farmboy’s or a boyish arm. In her case it was straight, dark brows and hands like her mother’s—long, useful, pale. Her face was clear, one could almost say radiant. She was not like the others. She smiled, she made friends, in the evening she disappeared. The sacred is always remote.
Outside the streets were burning, the air heavy as planks. A city without a tree, without a green fountain, even the rivers were invisible from within it, even the sky. She found it thrilling, its crowds, its voices, the heads that turned as she passed. She talked to the writers who came to the office and brought them tea. Nile was one of these.
He was wearing the clothes of a man released from prison—of two men, in fact, since nothing matched. His shirt was from a surplus store, his tie was loose. He had the confidence, the cracked lips of someone determined to live without money. He was a man who would fail any interview.
“How did you get this job?” he asked. He had picked up a book and was turning the pages.
“How? Well, I just applied.”
“You applied,” he said. “Funny, when I apply…” His voice trailed off. “They usually ask you a lot of questions. Did you have to go through that?”
“No.”
“Of course not.”
“I’m sure you can answer all the questions.”
“It isn’t that easy,” he said. “I mean, you never know what they’re driving at. They ask you, Do you like music? What kind of music? Well, I like Beethoven, Mozart. Beethoven, uh huh. Mozart. And what about reading, do you like to read? What books do you read? Shakespeare. Ah, he says, Shakespeare. So he writes down—you can’t see it, the cover of the folder is up: Talks only about dead people.” He turned the pages as if looking for something. “You’ve heard about the cannibal?”
“No.”
“He said to his mother: I don’t like missionaries. She said: Darling, then just eat your vegetables.” He turned more pages. “Is this one of your books? I mean, did you publish it?”
She looked to see.
“It’s meaningless,” he continued. “Listen, this is a conversation I had with a friend; this is not a joke. We were talking about a couple who’d had a baby. He said: What are they naming it? I said: Carson. Carson, he said, is it a boy or a girl? A boy, I told him. So, he said, that’s interesting, so they named the kid Carson… Well, I told you it’s not a joke. It’s just a… What do you suppose is going on?” he interrupted himself. “I’m filled with this great urge to talk to you.”
He was clever, he was helpless. At that time they were publishing his stories in the Transatlantic Review. He was the son of a woman who worked as a psychologist and who had been divorced since he was three. She had no illusions about her son: the thing he was most afraid of was succeeding, but one would have to know him very well to understand that. The impression he gave was of weakness, a voluntary weakness like certain vague illnesses. But after a time these illnesses cry out to be legitimatized, they insist on being treated as a natural condition, they become one with their host.
He knew everything; his knowledge was vast. He was like the irreverent student who passes any examination. His eyes were dark, the muddy brown of a Negro. His cuffs were soiled. Many of his sentences began with a proper noun.
“Gödel was at Princeton,” he said. “He was walking down the hall one day, apparently deep in thought, when a student passed and said: ‘Good morning, Dr. Gödel.’ Gödel looked up suddenly and said: ‘Gödel! That’s it!’ ”
During their first meal together as he questioned her leisurely, he learned of her house in the country. “Ah,” he said. “I knew it. I knew you had a house like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I imagined it. It’s a large house, yes? Where is it? Is it near the river?”
“Yes.”
“Quite near,” he guessed.
“Quite.”
“As near, in fact, as one would expect such a house to be.”
“Yes,” she said. “Just that near.”
He was elated. “There are trees.”
“Bird-thronged,” she said.
“This is meaningless,” he exclaimed.
“Why?”
“Your life,” he said. “Because there is no pain in it. After all, what is life without a little sorrow now and then? Will you show it to me?” he asked. “Will you take me there?”
She thought of her house. Suddenly, though she had grown up living inside it and knew it in every weather, she longed to go back as one longs to hold a certain book again though knowing every phrase, as one longs for music or friends. In her life, which had become more fortuitous, brushed by other lives like kelp in the ocean, in the city which was the great, inexplicable star toward which her suburb with its roofs and quiet days had always faced—suddenly this well-loved house reentered her thoughts through the words of a stranger. Like ancient churchyards in the heart of commerce, it was suddenly inextirpable.
There had been many changes. Her mother had gone. The house existed without her as clothes exist, photographs, misplaced rings. It was part of these memories, it contained them, gave them breath.