Part Four
1
The fourth day the inspector was allowed to see her. He was a quiet gray man. He wanted her to tell the story from the beginning. She shook her head as best she could. He wanted at least certain information about her employer and the individual called Teddy. Neither of them had been found yet, he said. She didn’t react. Looking down at her he judged it was all the drugs she’d been given because of the pain and the shock. He tried again. He promised just a few questions and then he would go.
Why had her employer followed the individual known as Teddy?
Didn’t know.
Hadn’t he tried to defend her?
No.
Or at least see if she was badly injured? Try to get help?
No.
What did he do?
Went into the tunnel.
Why did he do that?
Didn’t know.
The inspector wished her a speedy recovery. As soon as they located her employer of course they would inform her.
Shouldn’t bother.
Dr Silberman came to see her every few days. The first time he brought flowers and sweets. She said with difficulty that he should eat the sweets himself. Each time there was silence or a question she didn’t want to answer she told him to take another sweet. Dr Silberman told her that no one knew where he was. The police had gone to his flat five or six times to question him about Teddy and he wasn’t there. He wasn’t at the office either. Her employer hadn’t been a stable individual even before the accident. It must have been a terrible shock for him. A terrible shock for everyone naturally.
She wasn’t listening. She wanted the names of the children’s parents. She wanted to send them money, write to them when she’d be able to, tell them how it was her fault, her idea, to hire him, something else was her fault and her fault also what had happened long ago to her father.
Help me.
He answered that of course she would get help. He, Silberman, would continue to visit her but for real help she needed a specialist. Wasn’t he a specialist? Of course, but a different specialty. He could recommend the sort of specialist she needed.
The broken bone healed. The ugly bruises on her wrist, thigh and neck yellowed and faded. Her eyes were still badly discolored and the nurse suggested wearing dark glasses for the first week or so outside. She replied that she’d prefer showing her eyes, no matter what they looked like, to hiding them. She stopped dying her hair. It was coming up real at the roots but it wasn’t the old real brown, it was grayish-brown but maybe that was the real color now. For a long time it looked strange, part grayish-brown, part blonde. She had her hair cut short. Finally it was all the old-new color. She stopped making up, using perfume. It was too much work for nothing. She stopped wearing the costume jewelry and the bracelets because of the effort and the jingling. She didn’t wear the dresses that showed the discoloration of her neck. Anyhow they didn’t go well with the growing gray of her hair and the thinness of her neck and chest. She watched her words, said what was necessary for the given situation and no more.
Dust grew deeper in the director’s apartment. The bulb in the swivel lamp on the desk burned out. The cacti stood in darkness and finally died. Ideal Poster ceased its obsessive activity. There was no notable increase in the underground graffiti. The great subterranean office was taken over by an electronics concern and used as a storage-room while waiting for the building to be razed.
She found a job as a secretary. It lasted two months. She thought the specialist she saw once a week was disappointed when she told him it hadn’t worked out, even though he hid his feelings as usual. Then she found another job. The specialist was pleased, but carefully. Also carefully pleased when she told him she was taking driving lessons. She’d told him it had always been one of her ambitions, she didn’t know why. “What for?” she sometimes asked him. He preferred her to find the answer to that question herself. Sometimes she thought of driving out to the Central Mountains. She spoke to him about it. She’d already spoken about the farm to him. The doctor asked her (he never told her anything) if she thought it was wise to think about that.
To celebrate her driving license, which she said she owed to him, she bought him a book of poetry. She mentioned in passing that next week was her birthday, not saying how old, and told herself she wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t give her anything. Then she came across the business of “transfer” (it sounded like the underground) in a book on popularized psychiatry she took out of the library and learned that it was a normal reaction.
She discussed makes of cars with him although it was expensive to talk about cars with him, even for five minutes. He gave a balanced judgment on the makes and later on she couldn’t remember which make he’d inclined to. She bought a small second hand car with too much mileage on it.
Sometimes on Sundays she drove with concentration along the west motorway on the slow lane. The slowest trucks passed her. She would go on till what she saw on either side of the motorway railings was reasonably green and wooded. Then, without leaving the motorway, she would turn into a rest area. If the weather was acceptable she ate her sandwiches at one of the green-painted concrete tables. If it was raining or too cold she would eat in the car. After, she would stroll about the rest area, looking at the trees and fields through the high wire fence. Then she would drive back.
But usually she spent her weekends reading, anything, all day in the public library on Saturdays. She spent hours over the choice of the three books to take out, then at the last moment, at closing time, grabbed anything. Once she took out a textbook on organic chemistry and at home stared for hours at the hydrocarbon linkages and the formulas. What she liked best of all were travel books and exploration accounts. She asked the doctor if that wasn’t escapism. She understood him to say that, like almost everything else, it was acceptable in moderation.
She started going to church again but ended by finding the young priest distant and stopped going after a month. She avoided the underground even to go to her office although there was a direct line. She went there by bus. It was a roundabout route involving a transfer, the other kind. When her fellow employees wondered at this she sometimes spoke of claustrophobia. They spoke of the dangers of the underground. One wasn’t safe anywhere.
One morning she saw the brief newspaper article in the lap of a passenger next to her in the bus. She felt nothing, neither pain nor satisfaction. Or maybe the two cancelled each other out. She preferred to think that all that was something that had happened a long time ago to somebody else.
The second week back home her phone started ringing in the middle of the night and she could hear faint breathing, but got no answer. This went on for a week. She took to leaving it off the hook and then since this was about the only call she got she had her phone rental cancelled for two months. It was a saving.
One Friday afternoon in early January, a holiday, she sat at her window and watched the season’s first blizzard slowly effacing the bushes, the paths, the benches in the small square opposite the council-house. By five o’clock the whiteness had turned blue and then it was night with pallor everywhere. The snow raged in the cones of light of the street-lamps. She ate a sandwich, read a few pages of a detective story, looked at cartoons on television.
At about eight there was a knock on her door. As everybody did in that dangerous suburb she asked who it was without opening the door. A man’s voice said something about keys. She looked through the wide-angled spy hole that equipped all the doors but couldn’t make out the figure in the gloom of the corridor. Why hadn’t he turned on the landing-lights? She asked him what he wanted and she heard the voice say that he wanted the keys. She fastened the stout chain and opened the door a crack. She looked and closed the door and bolted it. She left the chain secured.
He went on talking on the other side of the door. She told him to go away. He went on talking. When he got no answer he started banging on the door. She threatened to call th
e police if he didn’t go away. She took the phone as close to the door as the wire allowed and dialed without removing the receiver. She didn’t remember the number anyhow. The police would be there in ten minutes, she said. Through the door she heard him say something unintelligible about a case of self-defense. Then he returned to the keys. He wanted them. Had to have them. Where could he go without his keys?
“I have no keys,” she said to the locked door. “No keys of yours. I thought you were dead. Everybody thinks you’re dead. Aren’t you surprised I’m not dead?”
He said something about having almost died and then he asked her to open the door. What for? The keys, he repeated patiently. And also to see her. What keys? She had all the keys, he said. The keys to the Ideal office, the key to his flat and the key to his car. But there was a problem with Ideal. His voice lost its assurance, sounded bewildered.
What happened to my business? Where is Ideal? Where is the building? There’s a big hole instead of the building. And my car? It’s disappeared. Who stole my car? And you disappeared too. And I can’t get into my flat, I haven’t got the right keys. You must have them. So I came to get the keys. But of course not to the hole, I don’t know what to do about that. At least the keys to the flat, the ones you took when I was in the coma.
She said she’d given the flat keys back to him a long time ago, years ago. She didn’t know where his car was. She had spare keys to the office somewhere but since he said there was no office anymore, just a hole, there was no point looking. She hadn’t known about the building. She hadn’t been in that district for a year. More than a year. He should go away, leave her alone.
A year, he repeated in the bewildered voice. He asked what the month was. She told him. When he asked what the year was she put the phone down on the floor. She unfastened the chain and shot back the bolts and opened the door.
Instead of entering he stood there in the gloom of the landing and asked her, in a pedantic voice, to please not look at him. For reasons he would explain he wasn’t presentable. The gate had opened unexpectedly. He would explain everything but first he would appreciate it if she would let him use her bathroom. The shower, actually. She shouldn’t worry for her washrag and towel. He had everything, even soap. It was possible to buy almost anything down there. Once presentable he would explain everything.
At this she felt like closing the door on him but it was too late. He went past her, almost tripping on the phone wire. She looked anyhow. His voice and his glasses were almost all he’d held on to. The rest was like a scarecrow in winter. He was carrying a bulging valise. He opened a few wrong doors and then went into the bathroom with the valise.
She mopped up the puddle of water and melting snow before the door where he’d been standing, also the wet shoe-prints that led to the bathroom door and the wrong ones. She heard the hiss of the shower. She shut the living room door and returned to the television program. There was still the hiss of the shower. She turned the sound up. It was a cartoon with loud music and sound effects for the cat and the mouse ceaselessly overcoming destruction: dynamite, bear-trap, sledge-hammer, steamroller.
Other cartoons followed. In one of the pauses she listened. She couldn’t hear the hiss of the shower any more. She went back to the detective novel. Occasionally she glanced up at the screen when the sound announced super-catastrophe.
At nine she switched off the TV. She went into the kitchen and prepared another sandwich and a cup of coffee. Finally she opened the living room door on the corridor. There was no sound. She opened the bathroom door. The mirror was steamed up. His dirty clothes lay in a neat heap in a corner. On the glass shelf above the washbasin there was a safety razor, blades, shaving cream, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste and a plastic cup. They shared the shelf with her own things although a space separated them.
The valise was on one side of her bedroom door. She pushed the door open. The ceiling light was on. He was lying on her bed snoring slightly. He was wearing a wrinkled blue-striped shirt with a dark tie, a dark jacket and trousers, both badly creased. His newly shined black shoes were carefully aligned on the carpet next to the bed. Even asleep he wore his glasses. One of the lenses had been broken and was mended with scotch-tape. The dirt was gone from his face. It looked worse that way. His neck bore a purple-green bruise.
She shook him. “Get off my bed.” His lips moved. He settled back into sleep. She shook him much harder. He cried out, propped himself up on his elbows, still crying out. The dark lenses faced the ceiling. He stopped the noise and collapsed into his original position. She couldn’t tell if his eyes were open. “Get out of my flat,” she said in a loud voice. He snored slightly. She left the bedroom.
She put on her coat, scarf and boots. She opened the door on the landing and then closed it and went back. She took her alarm clock and set the alarm for eleven. She found a sheet of paper and a pen. Still in her coat and boots she sat down at the kitchen table and printed in big characters: “Leave my flat. When I come back in an hour if you are still here I will phone the police. This is a solemn promise.”
She should have stopped there but with her face screwed up ferociously against any possible surprise attack of tears she went on and on, listing the unforgivable things of those six years. It was all there in her memory. She’d forgotten nothing, needed a second sheet then a third.
The alarm clock rang. She stopped it, reset it for midnight, and returned to the sheet. Not really finished, she stopped anyhow. She went into her bedroom, placed the alarm clock like a bomb centimeters from his ear and the sheets of paper alongside it.
Opening the door on the landing again, she remembered she hadn’t numbered the sheets and almost went back. But then she thought that he could begin anywhere, it didn’t matter, there was no beginning and no end to what he had done and hadn’t done.
Normally at that hour nobody dared venture out. But with the blizzard even the thugs and rapists would be indoors behind bolted doors. The floors rose without halt in the elevator-window. The elevator jolted still and opened on the empty lobby.
She had to push the plate-glass main door with all her might against the wind, which blasted into the lobby with swirls of snow. She pulled the hood over her head and fought her way down the cement lane that ran before Buildings C and D, past ash cans and prone Christmas trees with shreds of tinsel still in the yellowing branches. She crossed the street and went into the square. She had to guess at the path. The wind dashed snow into her face. Underfoot ankle-deep it crunched. She decided to walk around the square fifteen times. The fifth time around in the midst of her own previous footsteps her teeth started chattering. She shuddered violently and couldn’t stop. What was she doing here, evicted and shuddering in the cold?
She followed her earlier footprints back to the lobby and sat down on the bench near the radiator. It was ten to midnight. In ten minutes it would go off in his ear. She saw him propped up on his elbows, crying out. Wasn’t it sometimes dangerous to be awakened like that? She leaned against the radiator and dozed off. She woke up violently at exactly midnight as though the alarm had gone off in her own ear. Then she fell asleep again.
She was awakened by the elevator jolting to a halt and the doors sliding apart. He stepped out with his blind-man’s glasses and the bulging valise and the shiny black shoes. The shelf above the washbasin had been cleared too, she imagined. Didn’t he see her sitting there on the bench? He’d said he’d explain. He went over to the plate-glass door and opened it. She felt the icy draft where she was seated. Where was he going? The lobby was more or less heated. Why didn’t he sit on the bench till tomorrow morning? Why was he going out into the blizzard like in a melodrama? She hadn’t said that. What he was doing now was something new to add to the third sheet next to the alarm clock. Had he read them?
He had reached the end of the cement lane. Now he was in the street. She caught up with him and pulled his sleeve. She asked him where he was going.
To the underground.
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br /> To go where?
To the underground.
The nearest underground station was two kilometers away, she said. The busses weren’t running at that hour. By the time he got there on foot the underground would be closed, she said, trying to steer him back to Building C. He should return to the lobby and tell her about it.
There wasn’t time, he said. Walking fast he could make it to the station. You could stay inside at closing time (if you knew the trick) but you couldn’t get in once it was closed.
At least sit in the lobby till the blizzard let up, she said. It was better than sleeping on an underground bench.
She heard the old superiority in his voice as he said that he’d never slept on the benches with the beggars. Never once. He had his storeroom, cleaned and furnished. No more spiders. Just crickets. They were almost company. It sounded like the countryside.
Crickets in the underground? Tell me about it in the lobby. Have you eaten? Plenty of food in the storeroom, he said with the old superiority.
She sneezed violently three times. We’ll both catch pneumonia, she said. Walk me back to the lobby at least. I’m scared to by myself. It’s dangerous here. I know you wouldn’t want anything to happen to me.
When they reached the lobby she steered him toward the elevator. She pushed the elevator button and started sneezing again. She said she was going to have a plate of hot soup to head off the cold. He could have some too if he wanted. “Yes, of course, that’s why I came,” he said.
In the slowly rising elevator the dark disks of his glasses were aligned with her eyes. If he was really looking at her it must have been the first time since he came. She felt like pulling the hood down further to conceal her face. Her hair was already concealed.
She’d changed back to the old days, he said. The same as on the photo. He’d often looked at her where he had been. It had been a great help at certain moments. It was like having company when the crickets stopped. He dug out a creased photograph from his wallet and showed it to her. She looked at the black-and-white identity-photo for a second and then handed it back to him.
The elevator jolted to a halt. She opened the door and told him to sit down for a few minutes in the living room.
She called him into the kitchen. He slowly approached the formica table where the two dishes were steaming next to the waxed package of pre-sliced bread. His face was alive for the first time. He must be starving. He stood over the soup without sitting down. “But this is bean soup,” he said in the same bewildered tone he’d used asking about the key and the hole and the year. “Tinned bean-soup.” She’d left the empty tin in the sink. She went over and dropped it in the garbage-pail.
“If I’d known you didn’t like bean soup I’d have asked you what kind, like in a restaurant.” She sat down and started eating. He stood there. When she finished she said: “Do you want the soup or don’t you?”
“Yes, but not that soup.”
“No problem,” she said and poured the second plate of bean-soup into the sink. It was for the gesture since she’d have to remove the beans one by one from the filter. “You can sleep on the sofa. It’s because of the weather. Tomorrow morning you leave. If you don’t have any money I’ll give you a little.”
In the night he came to her. She pushed him away (and in the movement discovered that his forehead was burning) but of course it wasn’t that. His lips were near her to talk. He was kneeling alongside her bed. He whispered that he was a changed man. He apologized “for everything.” For what? she challenged, to see how much he remembered. He mentioned the things he apologized for.
He hadn’t remembered a tenth of it. He hadn’t read her three sheets after all. He did remember the last, big, thing but couldn’t remember why he’d done that. He said that probably it was because the harm had already been done on the platform. Theo could have done it again on other platforms, in other corridors. It was the pills. He had to be given the pills. He had to be found. But he didn’t find him, not till last week. He didn’t know where he disappeared to in the tunnel. So he went back to the storeroom in the other station and waited. He never came. He looked for him. He had the pills, still had them. He didn’t dare take them for himself. He went on writing messages in all the stations. That’s what he’d been doing all those weeks, months, maybe.
She hadn’t understood a word. How could you live in the underground that long? she asked, wondering whether if pressed for impossible details he’d come out with the truth which she thought she now knew but which he refused to know: where he’d really been and had escaped from.
He said it wasn’t hard to stay there for a month or so as he’d done (maybe a little longer because the passengers changed from shirt-sleeves to scarves and after the bathing suits on the posters there was Father Christmas in the sleigh with a nude woman and ribboned bottles of whisky). There were clothing shops and shoe polish and bookshops in Central Station. He had his credit card for the cash dispensers in the hub-stations until the screen refused to honor the card. During the dead hours of closing time there were the toilets with washbasins to keep clean and to wash the clothing. Food was no problem: sandwiches from the vending machines and food stands under the mercury tubes as long as the money lasted. Then there was food thrown away, unimaginable scandalous waste, and toward the end people had often been kind to him and of course there’d been the hidden storerooms for sleeping. You could spend weeks or months in the underground without once coming up and out. You could spend a whole lifetime there, although coming up and out was better if you were able to, if you knew where to go as he did now.
Why didn’t you then? Why didn’t you leave the underground since that’s where you say you were all this time?
He’d tried to come up. He tried to tell it to her, how time after time he’d tried. At the sight of the skies – one blue, the other overcast, the third or fourth storm-rent – he’d been paralyzed. Unable to breathe. Could breathe only when he went back down the steps into the safety of the underground. So he stayed underground and searched, wrote messages everywhere. When he didn’t search he stayed in the room with the trains thundering past. You never really got used to them because the rails were just outside. When they became too bad there was the other gigantic space. Because there was another iron door and a passageway with no air, the flame was constantly going out. But once, he reached it and threw himself against it all his might and lost consciousness and logically should have died of suffocation. But when he awoke there was a draft of damp air coming from the cleft. The rusty padlock had burst and the iron door – the third iron door: was she following? – was open on the cleft. And beyond the cleft there were the passageways with the vaulted ceilings and the naked bulbs. After, he often walked there. Sometimes he got lost in the maze of passageways. It happened again last week. He had to sleep there and thought he’d never get out. Finally he heard the sound of the trains and he returned, closing the iron doors behind him. Waited then till the trains stopped and the underground was empty. Then went out on the ballast and the rails as he did every night. Walked to the next station, put up the messages, then the tunnel beyond again and a new station, as he’d done so many times for nothing. But that night he found him. Didn’t find him. Was found by him.
Suddenly he was crying, like harsh hiccups. You make me nervous whispering in my ear like that, she said as a diversion, pulling her head away. She was horrified. She couldn’t associate those sounds with her ex-employer. It was as though a total stranger were in the dark next to her. To make amends for the cruelty of this thought she told him to lie down on the bed, not under the sheet, under the blanket. He should take his shoes off. He obeyed.
She got up and went into the bathroom. She came back with four aspirins and two glasses of water. He was still talking, hadn’t realized she’d been gone for a minute. She’d missed the beginning, just got the fragment: so another message on a poster with the distant meeting-place proposed in red paint before some panel or other but sudde
nly the meeting-place was there, the powerful arm, his neck in the crook of it, he clutching for the dagger at his belt (he’d learned how to carry it there) and stabbing wildly, some stabs in his own body but others deeper still in the body of the other and then he lost consciousness. When he awoke, bleeding badly, he saw other gouts of blood leading to the stairs and before he could follow them, it was opening-time, the blue-uniformed underground employees were coming and he got down on the ballast and hid in the tunnel all day long and part of the night in a niche till the trains stopped.
He broke off. After a while his breathing became regular in the dark next to her ear. Didn’t he ever read the papers down there? she asked. (She thought: maybe they don’t let them read papers there and then thought of the ugly bruise on his neck and finally didn’t know what to think). It was true, she said, that it was tucked away in an inside page. If she hadn’t seen it, accidentally, in the bus she wouldn’t have known herself. She reached over and grasped his arm, shook him a little to make sure he heard what she was saying. Whoever had attacked him and he had stabbed in perfectly legitimate self-defense (she would have done the same) it wasn’t him, couldn’t be: not stabbed but electrocuted by the third-rail in a tunnel, not yesterday like he said but months and months ago. It had been in the papers.
He was snoring slightly. She dozed off and when she woke a little he was saying something about woods, a kitchen garden, an orchard, three peaks. It sounded vaguely familiar. She tried to remember if it wasn’t one of the thousands of posters they’d corrected in the old days. She dozed off and awoke half-a-dozen times to his monotonous voice. Once she heard him say it was what saved him. From the start down there he’d seen it when he couldn’t sleep in the storeroom because of the trains. She’d been in it. At first a small figure in the orchard with the three mountains behind her. Then she stood behind the closed gate. He was on the other side. Sometimes it rained. More often there was sunshine. The gate was always closed. But that night, the bleeding finally stopped and she’d opened the gate. He saw everything there. In the darkness of her room he tried to tell about it. He went on. She fell asleep again.
She returned to hear his monotonous voice saying that he’d known that this time he could so he packed his things in the valise. He got up and walked the rails and when the station opened got up on the platform and took the escalator up to the stairs leading out. And sure enough he could. It was starting to snow. He climbed up and out. He’d gone to the building that wasn’t there, a hole, and to his flat with the wrong keys – or had someone changed the lock? – so that didn’t work, but as soon as she gave him the keys to the car they could go.
“Go where?”
“To the farm.”
“What farm?”
“Your farm of course. I don’t know any other.”
“Go there in winter? Now?”
“Winter or summer. Spring or autumn. What does that matter?”
“We’d never get there, for one thing. The roads are icy.”
“I’m a careful driver.”
“Who says I’d let you drive my car?”
“You have no car.”
“Don’t I? Oh don’t I? Anyhow the last time I saw it, most of the windowpanes were broken. The house, I mean. The house was practically falling to pieces. And that was a long time ago.”
“We’ll put new panes in. We’ll repair everything that needs repair.”
“Anyhow I work on Monday. It’d take two days to get there and back.”
“We won’t be coming back.”
“We won’t be going, you mean. I won’t, anyhow. Not in a blizzard. Let me sleep.”
The sounds from the living room awakened her. The bed was empty. He was puttering about in the living room. She went in, squinting against the light. He had his shoes on again, also his jacket. He was squatting in front of the valise, neatly placing his razor and toothbrush in it.
He stood up. “I knew you had the keys,” he said triumphantly, holding her car keys high by the metal tag. Then he made a fist about them.
“They’re my keys,” she said indignantly. He wasn’t going to begin with the keys again at past 3:00am. She shouldn’t have left them on the table.
“You don’t drive,” he said with what she took to be contempt. At that she felt rage rising, part of it at her stupid weakness for having invited him back in the flat, most of it aimed at him. It was as though by taking her car keys, doubly stealing them by denying they could possibly be hers, he was depriving her of something precious, her space of independence, her almost secret dissipation (only the doctor knew about it), the semi-monthly drive down the motorway to the rest-area and back. She tried to keep the anger down and reason with him.
“But if you can’t find your car for God’s sake what good are the keys even if they were yours which they aren’t, they’re mine? What good are the keys?”
He stared at her, still making a fist about her keys. Finally it got through.
“Yes … Yes, that’s true. I have the keys to my car. You’re right. It’s the car itself I haven’t got. I’m very tired. I can’t think.” He stared at the keys and the name of the make on the metal tag. “These aren’t my keys,” he said indignantly. She could imagine that behind the lenses his eyes were glaring at her. “I’ve never owned an Italian car. Wouldn’t dream of an Italian car. They must be your keys,” he tried to convince her. He handed them back. He looked at her with grave satisfaction.
“You have a car. And apparently you know how to drive. Everything’s all right, then. I wanted to drive you there in my car. Now you’ll drive us there in yours. It’s the same thing. We’ll leave tomorrow.”
“Drive you where?” she asked in a small voice, very tired. After the keys the other thing would start up.
“To the farm, Dorothea, your farm.” He said it patiently as though making allowances for her slow comprehension.
“When spring comes round, maybe.”
“I can’t wait that long. It’s the same above as below, everything colored dots, except you and the farm. I’ll find my car. I didn’t look in the right spot.”
He picked up the valise. The door shut behind him. She moved forward and tripped over the wire of the phone she’d placed on the floor to open up to him hours ago. By the time she picked herself up and opened the door the landing was empty and the elevator-motor whining.
She ran into her bedroom and struggled into her coat and boots. She ran back and saw that the elevator had stopped at the ground floor. By the time she called it back and got down he’d be gone. She ran back into her bedroom, wrenched aside the curtain and opened the window.
Snow blew in. She saw him coming out of the building. He was tiny below.
She yelled his name. The wind whipped the words away. He didn’t hear. She yelled till her lungs ached. He was going. She seized the table-lamp, yanked the plug free and with both hands heaved it out into the night. My God, not there. It would hit him, kill him. It smashed on the snow-covered pavement centimeters from his left foot.
He started, stopped, turned round, looked up, saw her. Windows were lighting up left and right. Yellow squares were punctuating the dark mass of Building G. She waved. “Come back!” she cried. Did he understand it had been to attract his attention, not meant to kill him as she almost had? Had almost killed him.
She smiled till it hurt with her arms outstretched, her hands making quick beckoning movements toward the room behind her. With her arms and hands like that she had the impression of being a bird ready to fly up and out leaving the sullen suburb behind. The snow blew in on her harder. They started shouting at her from the other windows and balconies.
“Come back,” she cried. “We’ll go tomorrow.” It was 3:56am: already tomorrow.