No doubt about it: there was something thin, stagy, melodramatic, unreal in the opening chapter of Fragments, where Wilkomirski’s father was killed on the third page.
No sound comes out of his mouth, but a big stream of something black shoots out of his neck as the transport squashes him with a big crack against the house.
She didn’t buy it — but might she have, had Ganzfried not blown a hole in Wilkomirski’s story? Was the alloy ring in the words themselves, or was it just the wisdom of hindsight that made them sound so readily disbelievable? The childish voice felt contrived to her, as Augie’s never did. Surely no child, watching his father, would see him as so deliberately childish a stick figure? The falsity was right there in the words, she was sure of it.
She read on:
There’s a station in my memory. We have to go through a barrier, papers are shown and looked at — maybe false ones.
Sighs of relief and we’re standing on a platform and it’s sunny—
“Land lord!”
That imperious knock: him again. Letting Mr. Lee into the apartment, she did her best to make nice, lavishly thanking him for his work on the shelves.
“No problem, no problem. Got new lock for you today. Security!” He held out a chunky piece of machinery, somewhat scratched, that had obviously led a previous life in another building.
“Mr. Lee, was it you who brought the t-tulips?”
“Tertelips?”
She pointed at the vase.
“Oh, flowers, yeah. Old ones all dead and crackly.”
“Well, how kind.”
“No problem.” He trailed an orange cable across the carpet and laid out a filthy sheet beneath the door.
“Can I get you coffee? W-w-water? Tea?”
“You make coffee, Lucy. That be great. Cream, no sugar.” He waved his power drill at the kitchen area, as if to dispatch her there.
It was astonishing that the replacement of a lock could make such a racket, and the electric tools whizzed and screamed as if a complete remodeling of the apartment was under way. When she took the coffee to him, he waved at her from behind a churring saw. She tried to return to Fragments, but the din made it impossible to read a line. In a momentary pause he called, “Good coffee, Lucy. How I like it — strong.”
“I’d better remember that,” she said.
“Don’t drink tea,” he said over the whine of a bared screwdriver.
It took him the best part of an hour to finish the job; then he made her try the lock.
“Terrific,” she said. “Fantastic.” What could one say about locks? “Very solid.”
“Keep you safe.”
“Thank you.”
He made no move to clean up his stuff and go, but just sat down on one of the chairs around the dining table. “So you a rider, Lucy. What kind of riding you do?”
“Oh…articles, mostly, for newspapers and magazines. I’m working on one now. Against a tight d-d-deadline, so I’m afraid—”
“Whaddaya write about?”
“People, places.”
“What people?”
“Sometimes celebrities, sometimes p-people nobody’s ever heard of.”
“I like to read. How ’bout you give me something to read what you wrote?”
Desperate to get rid of him and back to Wilkomirski, she scanned the heaps of old magazines in the corner, where all her published stuff was filed, though nothing there could make much sense to a Chinese parking-lot tycoon. She said, “I wrote a piece about Bill Gates once, a long time ago.”
“Bill Gates, huh? Lemme see.”
She rummaged through a toppling stack and pulled out the old New Yorker from very near the bottom. She stuck a Post-It on the page where her piece began, and handed him the magazine. “There you are. Now—”
But he remained sitting and started to read, scowling at the mass of small print, his lips moving. The piece, even in its eviscerated state, ran to nearly seven thousand words; at this rate, he’d be sitting there forever.
“Wah!” he said, half shout, half whistle. “It say here, ‘Gates told me that…’ You meet Bill Gates?”
“Well, yes, twice. I always meet my subjects.”
“Bill Gates! You mean you talk to Bill Gates like you talk to me?”
“I spent an hour with him in his office. Then another time he showed me his house.”
“What tips he give you?”
“Tips?”
“Like business tips.”
“We weren’t really talking business. It was more like personal.”
The landlord shook his head slowly in reproach. She’d evidently missed her great opportunity. “How much they pay you to write this?”
“Not enough,” Lucy said in what she hoped was a briskly deterrent tone.
“Like they pay by the hour?”
“No. By the p-p-piece.”
“No benefits?”
“I wish.”
“You ought to read some books.” Now he sounded severe.
“I do.” She gestured at the shelves he’d fastened to the wall.
“Nah. Not storybooks. Good books. You ever read Who Moved My Cheese? That’s a good book. Kind of like a storybook, but different. Lot of tips. Maybe I give you it sometime.”
“That would be nice. Now, please, Mr. Lee…”
At last she succeeded in budging him from his perch. He folded his dirty sheet, gathered his tools into their canvas bag, picked up the New Yorker, and at the door tapped the new lock. “You’re safe now, Lucy.”
“Thank you for taking all this trouble, Mr. Lee.”
“No trouble. Enjoy.” Smiling weirdly, tools in one hand, magazine in the other, he made a stiff little bow, and left.
Fast running out of time, Lucy lunched on a yogurt that was past its sell-by date and returned to the seemingly unconscious fraudster Binjamin Wilkomirski, finding the book increasingly irksome as she plowed through his disordered ragbag of false memories. She was at the point of giving up on it altogether when, in Chapter 12, an odd passage caught her eye. The boy Wilkomirski, now supposedly in a concentration camp, saw a “mountain” of naked women’s corpses. One appeared to have a bit of life in it: a sudden twitchy movement of the stomach.
Now I can see the whole belly. There’s a big wound on one side, with something moving in it. I get to my feet, so that I can see better. I poke my head forward, and at this very moment the wound springs open, the wall of the stomach lifts back, and a huge, blood-smeared, shining rat darts down the mound of corpses. Other rats run startled out of the confusion of bodies, heading for open ground.
I saw it, I saw it! The dead women are giving birth to rats!
The author, who’d spent years in psychotherapy, was clearly on overly familiar terms with Freud, and Lucy saw his disgusting rat story, or rat dream, as evidence only of his distinct talent for morbid fantasy. Yet the passage immediately recalled a bit in Augie’s book. Of course, everything was different: no mountain of bodies, just one male body, naked except for a woolly hat and one sock, sprawled face-down in a German street after a night raid by RAF bombers. Augie wrote that he’d seen a small, wet rat wriggling out of the cleft in the man’s buttocks like an agile four-legged turd.
Where there was war, there were bodies; where there were bodies, there were rats. It was no more than that. Lucy was just new to its ghastly everyday vernacular.
IN MATH CLASS, all Alida could think of was how wrong her algebra was — her human algebra. She’d had little sleep, whiling away the long dark hours first with Agatha Christie, then with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, unable to lose herself in either. The equation involving her, Tad, and her mom had suddenly, terrifyingly, come apart. Isolate the variable: the variable, the big x, was obviously Augie, though Alida couldn’t begin to figure why. Get every term containing the variable on one side of the equation; then get any term that doesn’t contain the variable on the other side of the equation. Which was a lot easier said than done, because somehow Tad was tied to x, and so were she and her mom. The obvious solution was to eliminate x, but she couldn’t do that because her mom was writing an article about him, and it looked like x would be in their lives for weeks and weeks. She eventually maddened herself to sleep with fruitless variations on this theme, and woke up with a, b, c, and x still jostling furiously in her mind.