***
10
When the pain awoke him he returned to the chaos of the office for the pills in his desk drawer. Lying among the debris of her desk he saw her expensive-looking diary with the twining pink flowers on the blue linen cover and the tiny heart-shaped brass lock. Near a broken pencil and a scattering of paper clips there was the tiny brass key. He picked them up and went over to his desk.
He switched on the lamp and without hesitation unlocked the heart-shaped clasp. He was too numb to feel guilt at the intrusion. He didn’t have the conscious thought that within the pretty flowered covers there might be an explanation for the destruction that had placed the diary in his hands. He leafed through it.
He came upon the sketches at once. There was an uninspired but recognizable ink head of Theo. Also, even less successful, Theo again, practically nude on his ladder, painting the office. She was poor at male anatomy. A few pages further his own face shocked him. It covered the whole page. It was badly done, more an unsuccessful caricature than a portrait. Or was that how she saw him? He looked like a blind man with those opaque glasses. She’d drawn something tiny in each lens with a fine-pointed pencil. He had to turn the diary upside-down to make it out, recognizably, as herself, great-eyed, one in each lens. On other pages there were long lists. Numerous grocery lists, mainly tinned and frozen food. Lists of fruit trees, apples and pears.
The farm was a major subject. She’d sketched the roughest of maps of the route there. He observed National Highway 18, saw the turn-off and the road that wiggled into childish representations of mountains with no names. On the next page she’d sketched the farmhouse. There was a kitchen garden and a field filled with lollypop representations of trees labeled as peach. How was that possible? She’d said only apples came there. But he’d heard of protected situations, windbreaks, south-exposed walls. His horticultural knowledge, picked up in the encyclopedia, was fragmentary.
He turned his attention to her notes. The relative importance (to her) of an entry was disclosed at a glance by the size of the writing, the use of capitals and exclamation marks. There were adolescent-style self-admonitions in big caps: “I do it too much. Stop doing it!!!” “Did it again.” “Oh, hopeless.” “Leave it all.” “Leave everything.” Lorz concentrated on the last twenty or so pages.
June 15. Jon last night. Much much better than Max. More gentle.
There were numerous notes on other men, their strong points and shortcomings, perhaps psychological. The director thought of the claimed bluebirds long ago and the belled goats. Then he encountered a reference to “Peter” and her indignation at what he’d told her at the restaurant: that he liked “older women.” The presence late in the diary of “Peter” removed his doubts. He, the director, could vouch for the authenticity of Peter: the fat cross-eyed job inspector. It gave authenticity to the other men friends. She’d made no secret of her “freedom” as they called it. What exactly did she “tell him not to do”?
On the next page, June 30, he saw the huge capitalized words: !!!! Read Teddy’s lips finally. He said my name. Over and over, my name. Not said really but you could see it was that: Do-ro-the-a. Here the director pictured Theo’s lips, gigantic in his mind, as he’d seen them that night in the underground and tried to impose “D-or-o-the-a” on the movements. The syllables fitted more or less except for the initial labial. But “Basic White” fitted better. “Ed-mond” clearly didn’t fit at all. He went on leafing though the diary.
July 12. He did it again. I wish he would stop it.
Who was the “he”? Peter? Jon? Joseph? Others? Stop what?
A few pages further there was a giant exclamation mark down the whole of the left margin.
August 4. !!! Teddy spoke to me. Looked straight into my eyes and said something. Didn’t understand. Asked him to repeat. He didn’t. Foreign language? Tell E. about it?
August 5. !!! Understood this time. !!! Almost fainted. Of all things for his first words! Comic, almost. Answered no, of course. Never tell E. about it.
August 8. Again. Said no again. Told him my age. Lied a little. As if he couldn’t see! Asked him who he was, real name. Said same thing. No, I said, no. Not now.
August 9. Says nothing. Won’t even look at me. Later, maybe, I said.
August 11. Wouldn’t accept the sweets. I cried. Hand on shoulder. Yes, later, I said. Everything all right.
August 12. Oh God, I must be crazy. Crazy, crazy. Almost killed. Gentle, gentle, I said.
The director stared at the entry. He took out his address book and looked at the calendar. August 12 was a Sunday. There was little doubt where they had been.
The director heard shuffling footsteps in the corridor outside the office door, coughs and a key in the lock. Quickly he closed the diary, locked it and placed it and the key back in the chaos where he had picked them up. It was bald tubercular-looking Number 4, followed by fat twitchy-faced Number 10, so 5:00am. Ten past five, they were always late. He’d slept longer than he’d thought.
The operators didn’t look confused at the presence of their employer. They gave no more than an unconcerned glance at the wrecked desk. The rest of the morning shift straggled in, bleary-eyed, yawning and unshaved, also uncurious about the chaos in the office, making no comments about the mangled locker in the storeroom. They took their knapsacks and ladders and shuffled out of the office.
Lorz locked the door behind them. He went through his drawers in search of the ineffectual pills for the burning, back again after so long. He turned off the lights in the office, went into the storeroom, filled a glass with water and gulped down two yellow capsules. He took his shoes and jacket off, turned off the light and lay down on the cot. He feared the worsening pain in his bowels would keep him awake but he fell asleep at once.
The glaring light from the office awoke him. Or perhaps it had been the key in the lock. He heard her say, “My God” repeatedly and heard her stirring about the ruins of her desk. She stopped at the threshold of the storeroom and saw him on the cot. She was holding the flowered diary in her hand. She hadn’t seen the violated giant locker yet. It was 7:45am. She switched on the storeroom lights. “What are you doing here? My God, what happened to my desk? And the typewriter? What were they looking for? Were you here when it happened?”
“No,” he replied, glasses still facing the ceiling. He had his hands clasped behind his head and had removed his shoes. He looked comfortable and unconcerned.
“Why don’t you get up and help me with the desk?” she almost shouted.
Glue the pieces together? He was too tired to make the sarcasm. Then she saw the gutted locker. She must have made all the connections all at once because she made another little “Oh” sound like the day before. He heard her sitting down. His eyes were still shut against the light. After a while she asked in a weak voice: “Did Teddy do that?”
“Unless there was a second burglar with a key to the office. Count yourself fortunate. It could have been you instead of your desk.”
He heard her say that now at long last he’d have to buy her another desk, a new modern one, metal this time, they stood up better than wooden ones. And of course a typewriter, electric this time. She mentioned different makes, quoted prices. Lorz saw his mother in the gutted flat, with her husband just dead, intent on pasting together the pieces of the smashed Chinese vase. Now his assistant was saying that she wanted him to buy another locker, much more solid this time with a fool-proof lock and that when Teddy came back at 12:30pm he wouldn’t be given the chemicals, ever again. He agreed absently.
She returned to it again and again. No chemicals, ever again, did he hear?
Finally to make her stop he said that Theo wouldn’t be coming back for quite some time. Wasn’t that obvious? He had what he wanted.
After a long silence she wondered why it had to be their chemicals, their paint, any white paint instead of Basic White could have done. He could so easily have bought it. When would he be back?
&n
bsp; The director said he didn’t know why it had to be Basic White and why theirs. Secretly he thought he did. He said that he’d be back, theoretically, when he ran out of Basic White. When? Say a liter of Basic White a day. Those rectangles and squares were a drain on the paint. He’d taken four hundred liters. It was a problem for six-year-olds. “A year and a half,” she said after a while. “One year, four months and two weeks,” he corrected in his curiously distant uninvolved voice. “But so many things can happen before then.”
Now the director spoke in a low tone of voice as to himself. The supplier had to be contacted, at least two thirty-liter drums to tide them over the week. The desk was beyond repair. So was the typewriter. A second hand machine and desk had to be picked up, it shouldn’t be too dear. They had to get the stolen drums back: not just because of the cost of the paint, considerable, but to cut off his supply. If they told him the Commission or even the police would be informed he’d bring them back. Probably. It was a possibility at least.
No problem getting hold of him, the director went on. The only place he could possibly have stored those bulky drums of paint was in his flat. He had to be there at this very moment. He’d worked (sabotaged, rather) all day long till past midnight in the underground. He must have been dead tired even before the burglary.
He ignored her interruption (“He’s not a burglar!”) and grappled with the enigmas surrounding the theft, maybe to put off facing the full implications of the twisted empty locker and the smashed desk.
The burglary must have taken place between 12:30am and 3:30am. He’d glimpsed the boy at 12:15am in the May 23 station. How had he been able to manage it? The second shift arrived at 9:00pm, picked up their chemicals in their padlocked lockers. They returned at approximately 12:30 and would have noticed the burglary, left a note. So Theo had operated after 12:30. But the underground shut down at 1:30am. This gave Theo barely an hour to transport almost half a ton of Basic White. From Central Station (the nearest station to Ideal) to Theo’s flat required at least twenty-five minutes. Only one trip was possible. How had he managed that half a ton? One thing was certain: he would return to the flat for supplies.
The director resumed his reflections in his detached voice, more to the ceiling than to her. Theo had certainly been exhausted when he finished hauling (how?) the last of the drums of Basic White to his flat, he said. He must have pitched into his bed and gone to sleep. He had to get sleep sometime. He turned his head and looked at her. Theo was asleep in his bed right now, he said. No chance he’d wake up for hours. So in an hour’s time, he’d go over and wait till Theo came out of the building. Oh yes, he knew where it was located. He’d make him bring the paint back. An ultimatum.
But he was too tired for that now. In half an hour she should wake him up, he told her. He turned toward the wall.
He woke up an hour later. The office was empty. She’d left a note on the table. She would be back that afternoon.
At almost 9:30am night seemed to be closing in. The sky was black with thunderclouds. The long-announced rain was almost upon the capital after months of drooping roses and marigolds in the public squares. The atmosphere was stagnant.
Lifting his face as the first fat drops pattered down he saw a strange glow in the fourth-story window as though an old fashioned roller-shade intercepted the light within. Drops exploded on his uplifted lenses. The last time he’d looked out of wet lenses a few hours ago he’d seen real chaos and taken it for an optical illusion. This time the distortion of the wet lenses produced a ghostly smiling face superimposed on the fourth-story shade, a genuine optical illusion this time, harmonious instead of chaotic. The light inside the room, at least, was no illusion.
He’d been right. Theo was there. Theo hadn’t even had the energy to switch the lights off before collapsing onto his bed.
Luck was with him. A mason burdened with tools and a sack of plaster came and started struggling with the street door. Lorz held it open for him. The man fingered the code buttons for the corridor door. Lorz was helpful again. Once the mason had disappeared up the stairs he slipped inside. He encountered no one in the gloomy staircase. When he reached the fourth floor he saw two doors on the short landing. One was curiously boarded up. A key dangled from the lock of the other door. It was ajar. He pushed it open.
No neutral refuge for his eyes except the floor. They were plastered everywhere else in rigorous order on the walls and the ceiling: laughing children, tender-eyed dogs, pine-rimmed lakes, starry skies, piled-up clouds, fondled cats, snow-capped mountains, smiling Helena on her swing, russet forests, blue skies, flower-spangled meadows, vineyards, surf on the beach where Helena strolled, sailing-boats with pregnant sails, geometric gardens, patchworks of tilled fields, hand-in-hand couples in the forest, sea gulls, roses, wheat fields, birds on flowered boughs, herds of zebras, old bridges, celebrated towers, weddings, blue bays.
Lorz knew them all. Leaving at 7:00pm, Theo had often been given batches of the posters that lined the office walls to dump in the ash can. All that insistent harmony stuck strictly side by side on the walls, the doors, the window, the ceiling (everywhere except the carpeted floor) without the buffer of the soiled white tiles as in the underground produced the worst of chaos, a war of colors, a conflict of lines. You couldn’t go on looking. It reminded him of the effect his mother’s room produced with the mirrors, except here it was worse, you couldn’t sanely reduce the myriad images to a few pieces of furniture, an overhead light, a dozen Christs.
She was standing stricken in the middle of the room beneath the overhead light looking about her as though seeing them for the first time. Thunder began faintly and built up. Now the noise was astonishingly close. It resolved into the El train going past the opaque window. Then the real thunder came, like inconceivable towers toppling. The rain dashed against the pane where Helena, smiling, blocked vision. Seen from the street below, filtered by the thickness of the pasted poster-paper, he had taken her for another optical illusion.
Lorz looked in the bathroom and the closets. Then he stretched out on the bed.
“I had to lie down too,” she said.
The thunder subsided to mutterings. A quarter of an hour later he got up and they left. She locked up. The stolen half-ton of Basic White wasn’t in the flat. It was still another enigma to busy his mind with as they went down the stairs. The rain was coming down too violently for them to walk to the underground station. She flagged down a taxi. In the back seat next to her the odor of her perfume and sweating body built up. He cranked down the window even though rain dashed in on his arm and lap. He felt like sticking his head outside the window in the rain and wind. He asked her where she’d got the key to his flat. She replied that she’d had a spare cut for him, in case he lost the original. While she was at it she’d asked for another in case of emergencies. Like this one.
Lorz asked if his flat had looked like that the last time she’d been there.
She answered quickly that there’d been no last time. The key was for emergencies. Today was the first emergency.
When they got out of the taxi in front of the Ideal building they found Dr Silberman standing in the doorway in rubbers and a rolled-up dripping umbrella. He was wearing a bright yellow raincoat and a floppy rubber fisherman’s hat of the same color.
“I thought I would finally keep that promise to drop in some day,” he said blandly, shaking hands with them. “I seem to have chosen the wrong day, doubly so.”
The director apologized for the rain and for their absence: a work-emergency, he said. They went down the staircase and entered the office. She switched the lights on.
“Yes … Yes …” said Dr Silberman looking around at the office. “The bare essentials, I’m afraid,” said the director. “Purely functional.” His assistant helped the doctor off with his bright raincoat. She draped it over a chair. Little pools gathered on the floor beneath it. The doctor wiped the raindrops off his pince-nez. He started wandering about the office. He seeme
d particularly interested in the piles of posters that lined the walls. The director asked him if he didn’t want to sit down and have a cup of coffee with them. Silberman didn’t seem to hear. He went on moving about ponderously, back turned to them, looking at the posters. He was like a visitor in a shabby art-museum conscientiously inspecting oddly presented pictures.
“Yes,” he said again. Obviously it had no relation to the director’s invitation. He turned about. “I believe Mysels rang you up a few days ago concerning Teddy. We haven’t seen him for over two weeks now.”
“So he told me,” the director replied.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Teddy?” said the director’s assistant. “Yesterday evening at 6:30pm of course. As usual. And before that at 12:30pm, the usual time. He’s very punctual with us.”
The doctor sat down before the director’s desk. “I couldn’t trouble you for a cup of coffee, could I? Drive the damp out of my bones.”
She stared insistently at her employer. “I’ll be right back,” she assured the doctor, as though her presence were indispensable. She almost ran into the storeroom.
“Yes, we’ve been having difficulties contacting Teddy,” said Silberman, leaning back in his chair.
“Mr Mysels told me about that, how you couldn’t get into his flat,” said Lorz as his assistant appeared in the doorway, holding the jar of instant-coffee.
“Oh, there was no difficulty getting into his flat,” said the doctor. “We have a key, of course. The difficulty was that he was never there. And there were certain … indications that Teddy isn’t doing too well. Not well at all.”
“Certain indications?”
“Signs, let’s say.”
Signs. Icons. Lorz wondered if Theo had already started in on the ceiling or the window the last time they’d let themselves in.
“You’re quite certain that Teddy has been acting in a normal way – a reasonably normal way – with you?” Dr Silberman asked.
“One hundred percent normal,” said the director’s assistant from the doorway. The kettle began whistling faintly behind her. Dr Silberman continued looking at the director.
“Teddy’s work and behavior with Ideal have been entirely satisfactory,” said the director.
“Yes, I remember, those were the exact words you checked on the job report. But that was months ago.” He turned to the director’s assistant.
“Does he take his medicine regularly?” He had to raise his voice. The whistle was shrill now.
“Regular as clock-work. 6:30pm. I make sure.” She disappeared and came back a few seconds later with the kettle, steam billowing from the spout.
“Yesterday evening, for instance?”
The director recalled that Theo hadn’t taken the pills the evening before. There had been too much drama.
She placed a decorated tile on the desk and the kettle on the tile.
“Of course, yesterday evening,” she said. “Regularly at six-thirty when he comes back. Closer to seven, actually.”
“I ask because we looked for him yesterday afternoon in Crossroads.”
“We?” said the director. “You and somebody else?”
“Not personally. Crossroads is hard on the feet. I avoid it whenever I can. No, representatives of the hospital, I meant. They couldn’t find him this time.”
“This time?” she asked.
“A few days before, a … representative of the hospital did find him in Crossroads, working very hard, apparently. He tried to convince him to come back with him to the hospital for a check-up. Teddy was very very reluctant to, it seems. Yesterday the two of them couldn’t find him anywhere. He’s easy enough to recognize, though. But if you say you picked him up at 6:30 …”
Silberman broke off and looked at the jar of instant coffee.
She smote her forehead theatrically and rushed back in the storeroom, all the while insulting her brains loudly so that, the director guessed, nothing would be said during her absence. She came back with the cups and saucers, the sugar and biscuits and served them. They drank in silence. Silberman placed his empty cup in the saucer.
“I asked about his medicine because his prescription has to be renewed. If he’s been taking the medicine regularly as you say he has, there’s enough for just two more days. It would be dangerous for him not to continue.” Dr Silberman got up, went over to the chair and the puddle. He struggled into his raincoat.
“I imagine one of you will be here in the office tomorrow at six,” he said, smiling. He tugged down the brim of the floppy fisherman’s hat to the pince-nez. “We’ll come then, if you agree. Teddy comes back at about seven, I believe you said. There’ll be no problem.”
The director didn’t have to ask who the “we” were this time. He knew one of them already: the dead doctor’s squat detached shadow. Accompanying the doctor to the door, Lorz asked in the most casual of voices: “Am I wrong? I had the idea that Teddy’s medicine was the same as mine.”
“It is. But the dosage is much stronger. Your cases can’t be compared.” He opened the door and then turned about. “You do take yours regularly, I hope. It would be unwise to interrupt the treatment.”
“Oh I see that he does,” said his assistant. “As long as I’m around there’s no reason to worry.”