Chapter 8
Can’t You See It?
The men and women are allotted separate rooms, practically identical except that the women have a bidet, concealed by a folding screen. The men’s room is plunged in gloom. It looks like a disaffected jail. But there are no bars in front of the tiny window which torments them with the same view as the big corridor window.
The severe-faced middle-echelon female functionary clicks a big toggle-switch. A naked bulb dangling from the ceiling awakens reluctantly. It sheds poor light on four rusty cots with thin lumpy mattresses. There are urine stains shaped like continents on them. Graffiti is scratched all over the dingy walls.
Max sinks down in a corner and stares at the dirty plank floor between his ankles. Yawning and trembling, Seymour and Louis sway on their feet like goose-pimpled metronomes. As from a great distance they hear the female functionary droning out that they will shortly receive food and drink and appropriate clothing. The room will be cleaned and the beds made up. They had not been expected.
The naked bulb starts blinking. She strides over to a chest of drawers, yanks out a drawer and calls their attention to rows of bulbs wrapped in tissue-paper. Beneath drooping lids their eyeballs sluggishly roll in the direction indicated by her rigid forefinger. Now she points to the blinking bulb.
“When a bulb burns out it is your responsibility to replace it by a new one. There are twenty new ones here. When you get to the nineteenth bulb you must be sure to notify the relevant functionary and you will receive a new lot.”
That shocks the two men out of somnolence.
“The nineteenth!” Seymour exclaims.
“The nineteenth!" Louis exclaims. “We could be in this here place long enough to have to change nineteen burned-out electric-light bulbs?”
“How long does a bulb last?” Seymour asks.
The female functionary’s face withdraws into frigid infinite distance, as though the requested statistics are a state secret or as though she hasn’t understood the question involving the passage of time.
“Six months?” Louis ventures.
She doesn’t confirm it but she doesn’t deny it. The two men, secretly afraid the life-span of an electric light bulb is much longer than six months, choose to take her continuing silence for tacit confirmation. Six months, then. But multiplied nineteen times.
“Six months, nineteen bulbs …” says Seymour.
“Nineteen times six months amounts to …” Louis breaks off, trying to cope with the multiplication.
“Practically ten years,” says Seymour, the New York intellectual.
He turns to the impassive silent female functionary. “You mean, you actually mean that we could be imprisoned here for practically ten years?”
“You are not prisoners,” the female functionary rectifies in a scandalized tone, evading the question. “You are in Administrative Suspension, therefore imposed guests. Prisoners are locked up. Your door will remain unlocked. Unless, of course, you willfully violate regulations.” She turns to the door.
“The women now. I shall soon be back.”
True to her word, she leaves their door unlocked. The bulb rallies and recovers steady light. Seymour and Louis totter over to the beds and collapse in a cloud of dust and a discordant twang of springs. Even more than warmth and food and drink they crave sleep.
They close their eyes. Sleep almost comes. Time after time, though, on the brink of that darkness, they pull back from it, afraid sleep may be a prelude to a permanent end to cold and thirst and hunger, those painful precious things.
From where they lie they can see the window and blue sky. After a while, as though synchronized, they get up and drag themselves over to the window. Max remains huddled in his corner.
Seymour and Louis stand side by side in silence. They gaze out at the city. It’s like warmth and food and drink to them.
“By golly,” says Louis. “Hasn’t changed one bit. Same swanky shops. Same elegant carriages.”
Seymour stares. He sees the same swanky shops all right but not a single carriage, elegant or not. What he does see hasn’t changed one bit. There are the same inelegant cars he’d dodged when suicidally jay-trotting their avenues in 1951: stolid Peugeot 203s, bug-like Renault Quatre Chevaux, a Panhard Dyna, gangsterish low-slung black Citroën Tractions, plenty of gray dinky-toy Deux Chevaux, like garbage-cans on wheels, banged-up pre-war Renault Juvas and Rosalies.
The sight fills him with tremendous nostalgia and he wants the cars to be the real things out there, not the other’s carriages dating back before the birth of his ponytailed sweetheart, so meaningless. Of course, Louis rejects what Seymour claims he sees, things that hopelessly age his slim honey-blonde darling.
They start arguing about it. They agree about the buildings and the river but not about the vehicles. Not about the women either. Neat ankles, says Louis with shy admiration. Seymour sees much more leg than that. Louis is shocked when Seymour describes calves. He strikes Seymour as very strait-laced for a Marine even for an ex-Marine. They go on arguing about what they see.
The little gray-smocked middle-aged man who had disgraced himself on the stepladder enters the room. His filthy beret is moronically pulled down to the eyebrows and he wears a fearful chastised expression. He’s bearing a pile of clothing with names pinned to them. He places the pile on one of the beds.
He’s prepared to leave when Seymour invites him to arbitrate the quarrel. What does he see outside, carriages or cars? And how high are the women’s skirts? Can he see just their ankles or their calves too?
The man doesn’t even glance at the window. “No carriages, no cars,” he says in a hoarse whispery voice. “No ankles, no calves, no legs, no titties, no belly, no nice warm wet cunny. No women. Nothing. Just fog.”
“Fog? Look at that sunshine.”
“Fog,” the man persists.
“Look outside. You haven’t even looked.”
“Fog. It’s always fog.”
The scented fussily-dressed young functionary enters the room.
“Oh go away, disgusting old Henri,” he says. “You be careful, you. You’re not supposed to talk to Arrivals. I’ll report you if you don’t leave.”
The little gray-smocked middle-aged functionary looks scared and leaves.
“Three’s company, four’s a crowd,” the young functionary adds, in perfect mid-Atlantic English. He smiles stiffly at bare-chested Louis and explains his command of the tongue and its colloquialisms.
“Back then, outside, I had oodles of American friends, heaps of English too, plenty of Australians, the odd (not to say queer, hi-hi!) New Zealander. That was long ago, back then. Why don’t you take your towels off and put on your nice new warm clothes?”
“Don’t you see your friends any more?” says Seymour, just to change the subject and evade the invitation. The functionary’s face turns petulantly tragic.
“That was a fib I just told, pure fantasy. We don’t remember how it was before we came here. All that’s left at my echelon are fragments. It’s punishment. I don’t remember for what. I remember remembering lots of things but I don’t remember what they were. Now it’s just scraps, like eating oysters with a marvelous boy, a street at twilight, a bridge, a public garden with flowers and butterflies on them, I don’t know what color. I don’t know which public garden or the name of the boy or the street. Outside of that, it’s all fog. I talk to Arrivals like you and they tell me what it was like. I like to think I had all those handsome English-speaking friends. I woke up here God knows how long ago with my excellent knowledge of English. I’m so lonely. Be my friends, please. I’m called Philippe. That’s what they call me when they don’t call me other things. Philippe isn’t my real name. I don’t know what my real name was. But call me Philippe anyhow.”
“Why don’t you make new friends outside?” says Louis. He can’t stomach nancies but the generous impulses of his heart combat the censorious impulses of his stomach in this particular case.
The nancy seems to be on the brink of tears.
“Oh, we can’t leave the Reception Department of the Préfecture. Ever. Ever. You’ve certainly heard the old French saying: ‘The Préfecture de Police is where bad functionaries go when they exit.’”
“You mean you’ve all died too?” says Seymour. The functionary recoils.
“Don’t ever use that D-word here! Say ‘fuck’ and ‘enculer’ all you like but never that D-word, M-word in French, never here! Of course, to answer your crudely formulated question, everybody here has exited, like you. But we’ll never be transferred out there. I wish I could taste oysters again. One day if all goes well for you (though I don’t think it will) order a dozen big juicy 00 grade Marenne oysters out there, bedded on crushed ice and seaweed. Think of me here when you squeeze lemon-juice on them. Or minced shallots with vinegar, that’s even better. Enjoy yourselves while you can. After the second exit there’s no second awakening, ever, ever.”
The stern-faced female functionary returns.
“What are you doing here?” she says to the male functionary. Her distaste is undisguised. “Keeping up my English and admiring beauty,” he says impudently. She threatens to report him again for speaking to Arrivals.
In deliberate self-caricature, he pouts, flounces over to the door and addresses a limp-wristed bye-bye to Louis. Before he closes the door he sticks out a long gray tongue at his hierarchical superior’s back.
“You must dress immediately,” she commands the materialized duo. “You cannot remain here. The cleaning girl will be cleaning your rooms shortly. You will wait in the Common Room opposite this room. The Prefect has informed me that he will be coming to greet you all officially. That seldom happens. It is a great honor. Try to be worthy of it.”
She leaves.