***
6
Every day the volume of his white turban was reduced. Strength was ebbing back to his left hand. Appetite triumphed over the hospital fare, which he now ate alone. He put on weight. Release from hospital was set for the beginning of the following week. As the days passed the feeling of void and longing faded. There was no return of the face of the seventh candidate and no desire to return to it. He tried to puzzle it out. Hadn’t it been some kind of hallucination? Hadn’t he imagined that face and his emotional response to it after the event with a brain disturbed by shock and drugs? He stopped thinking about it.
Nine days after the visit to the ninth cubicle the director snapped his valise shut on the bed. Sunshine flooded the room.
The electrical impulses of his brain now jumped the right way on the screen. Pulse and blood pressure were normal. All of the administrative details for release had been gone through that morning.
He looked at his watch and then at the doorway open on the corridor. On the phone he’d mentioned to his assistant, as though in passing, that he would be leaving the hospital today at three. It was quarter past now. He’d thought she would want to give him a hand with the valise, purely a symbolic hand. It was light. He took it and stepped out into the corridor. She must be down in the lobby.
In the empty room opposite his he saw a bunch of tulips left by the last patient. He made sure nobody could see him, stepped inside and took them. They were practically fresh.
He was aware that, after all, she must have taken offence. With the end of his obsession with the wall, things took on proper perspective. His assistant took on greater importance. She was the only person he had steady contact with, five days out of seven, anyhow. He’d been perhaps a trifle brusque with her sometimes, understandable given the circumstances. Since that incident just before the attempted identification of the stranger, she’d come into his room twice for dictation, jangling and tinkling with new bracelets and earrings. Although expressionless and bearing no plants or pastry, she hadn’t failed to inquire about his health and to comment on the unseasonably warm weather, if minimally. She seemed different.
The last visit had been a week before. When she left he’d gone over to the window and a few minutes later saw her emerging from the entrance. She walked briskly toward a black car, its battered obsolescence dissenting among the other shiny cars. The front passenger-door opened like a trap. A thin bare arm covered with barbaric bracelets like hers reached out and his assistant was snatched within. The door had slammed shut and the car jerked off.
As the elevator sank toward the ground floor the director toyed with the idea of inviting her to an inexpensive restaurant that very evening to celebrate his survival. After all, she’d been with the concern for – how long? – four years, it must be.
She wasn’t in the lobby. He sat down and rested for a quarter of an hour. Finally he decided that she must be with a client. He got up and walked out of the hospital.
In the sudden mid-May sunshine and ether-free air he felt a well-being he hadn’t experienced for months, years perhaps. It was good to be free of walls for a few minutes. His new glasses firmly straddled his nose and he saw the world clearly, the sane reality of green trees and yellow butterflies flitting over the hospital flower beds, and in the blue sky a pinkish piled-up cumulous cloud. His brain was purged completely of the nonsense with Number Nine. His bowels were at peace. The young visitors going up and down the steps aroused no hostile feelings in him.
As for the business, there might be a few problems in the immediate, but the newspapers said that compensation for the blast-victims was impending. Finally, he would make a peace-gesture toward his assistant, a good restaurant that very evening.
Physically there was little change as far as Lorz could make out through the taxi window. In certain stark avenues, once leafy, he saw the stumps of chestnut trees cut down to make symbolic barricades. In many streets the picturesque cobblestones, often pried up for missiles against the riot-police, had been covered over with asphalt. The smashed shop-windows had long since been replaced. On certain walls tattered posters and spray-canned slogans lingered with a defeated air, but nearly all the graffiti had been steamed and sand-blasted off the main public edifices. Only the facades of the high-rise university summoned retroactively to long-dispersed demonstrations. Occasional dark rectangles alongside the curbs commemorated the burning of cars. New militant titles blared in the newspaper stands.
At a red light a young woman with long blowing hair slapped the hood of the taxi, which encroached a few centimeters on the zebra crossing. She had bare thighs and a yellow blouse that seemed to have been sprayed on her naked torso. How could styles have changed so completely in a matter of weeks? Another woman with a minimal skirt and a radical neckline slapped the hood.
“Bitches,” muttered the old driver. He backed up.
When the director stepped inside his office his assistant looked up from a file and spoke about difficulties with an old client as though he’d been absent for no more than half an hour instead of nearly two months. She called his attention to the partially renovated office. She was partially renovated herself with her hair chopped short and stark, pale lipstick, even more jewelry, an acidulous green dress ending close to her knee-joints. The newspaper lying on her desk was one of the new radical titles.
Lorz didn’t dare offer her the tulips he’d taken from the hospital room. They’d wilted badly. He placed them on his desk, a present to himself, then. There were no other flowers there for his return. How much did a bouquet cost?
But true to his resolution, he did invite her to a restaurant, an expensive one (he named it), that very evening. To celebrate survival, he said, fond of his formulation, and to thank her for all she’d done.
She wasn’t free. She thanked him. She wasn’t free the day after and thanked him. She didn’t know when she would be free and thanked him again.
Conversation on her part was limited to business now. Once, to break a long silence, he asked her about her farm. She replied, “Oh the farm …” without looking up from what she was doing.
Another time, he made a rare attempt at confidence. “Sometimes I wish I lived on a farm myself. When I was about fifteen I wanted to live in South America. Instead, here I am down here.”
“South America,” she said. “That’s like the farm. That’s escapism.” The word didn’t fit her, wasn’t hers. It was like the jewelry and the hairdo.
She received private phone calls now, unthinkable before. Her voice was almost a whisper. Once, he overheard: “I will, I will, I promise you I will.”
She no longer had lunch in the office. For years the custom had been that each brought sandwiches and munched away, often while working, at their respective desks. Now at precisely one she left and returned at precisely two, like an ordinary employee.
During one of those absences he picked up the woman’s magazine she’d left on her desk. It was a post-event title called New Eve. The cover-photo was no longer the habitual wholesome smiling blonde but a low-cut brunette with rebellious hair. Sullen-lipped, she glowered at the viewer as though measuring his sexual capacity, clearly judged deficient on sight alone. Lorz’s experience with women’s magazines was limited to what he leafed through in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms. He seemed to recall a cackle of diets, knitting-codes, recipes, child-rearing techniques, dress-patterns, occasional moralizing pieces on marital infidelity, supposedly true-life dramas of intimate transgression.
Things had changed. On every other page in this magazine he saw bare breasts, detailed maps of “pleasure-zones,” seduction techniques, apologies for license, the proclamation of the right to orgasm and abortion. Was this the sort of thing his assistant read?
His attention was caught by a self-evaluation test entitled, “Are You in a Rut?” because his assistant had visibly evaluated herself (with a violet-inked No. 3 ballpoint pen). There were twenty questions with a choice of answer
s. The reader was invited to identify herself spontaneously with one of four animals. His assistant saw herself not as cat (a), swan (c), tigress (d) but as mouse (b). She let herself be trampled upon. She daydreamed not often but constantly. She cried “far too often.” Etc. Etc. She’d totaled up her results, slightly better than Lorz’s, and found herself objectively in the profoundest depths of rut. The comment spoke of self-amendment through positive thinking and urged reading the article on page 87. Lorz put the magazine back on her desk in its original position.
Then he picked it up again and turned to page 87. She had conscientiously checked the article paragraph by paragraph. It was entitled: “Yes, You Too Can Change!” Lorz found nothing helpful. It was easier for women what with their fundamental exteriority. Diets, perfume, bolder hair-dos, brighter and scantier clothing were enough to pull the trick for them, apparently. There was a before-and-after photo. “Before” in dumpy depressed black-and-white. “After” in color, the woman leaping lithe with explosive breasts. But wasn’t it obvious that they were two different models? It was gross cheating. Feeling contempt (but also residual jealousy) for the gullible readers of such periodicals, the director placed the magazine back on his assistant’s desk.
Another day she came back from lunch twenty minutes late. She’d never been as much as a minute late before. She wasn’t flustered or even apologetic. She explained that she’d been at the hospital.
“The hospital? I’m back.”
“I still go there once a week.”
“Oh yes, Number Nine.”
When she didn’t react, he amended: “Teddy.”
She nodded, sat down at her desk and examined the typewriter keys. She reached for the brush. He asked her if she’d been praying again. It was just to break the silence but after he said it he realized it could be interpreted as an indiscreet question. Also, it sounded sarcastic as well as ungrateful since he himself had been the subject of her prayers according to what she’d once said. Naturally, he hadn’t meant it that way. She nodded again and started cleaning the typewriter keys.
Again to break the silence, he asked her if she thought that it did “Teddy” any good.
Without looking up from the typewriter keys, she said:
“It does me good, anyhow. When he sat down in the back of the office that morning I wanted to tell him to join the others up front and I didn’t.”
This gave the director the opportunity to say something generous, to make up for his unfortunate remark about her prayers.
“I wouldn’t blame myself for that any more than for calling me to the back to look at his poster.”
She went on cleaning the keys in silence.
Three weeks following his release from hospital Lorz received a letter which she placed unopened on his desk with the other, opened, mail. It announced her resignation, effective in two weeks following receipt of the present.
He received the news with the echo of the last hammer-strokes of the workmen on the chipboard partition which replaced the demolished plaster wall. The damage to the ceiling and the floor had already been repaired. She’d also seen the old clients and persuaded most of them to continue with Ideal. She’d even picked up a new one. The ship was still off-keel and leaking badly but the pumps were operating at top speed. It was as though she were determined to efface all of the sequels of the explosion before leaving.
He stared down at her letter. It was as if the walls of his office had announced their resignation. He got up, took his chair, placed it alongside hers and sat down.
“What’s this, Dorothea?” he asked gently, calling an almost compassionate smile to his lips, as though dealing with somebody who had just announced her intention to leave for a distant galaxy. It was the first time he’d ever called her by her first name.
“My resignation, sir. I’m getting married. Probably.”
Married, Miss Ruda? Why “probably”? One did or one didn’t. Why did she always call him “sir”? He had a name.
“Why is it ‘sir’ all the time, Dorothea? That’s all I’ve ever heard from you for four years.”
“Five, sir,” she corrected.
Suppressing anger, Lorz pointed out that they’d been collaborators for five years, more than a third of their lives together during that time, and it was still “sir”. He was beginning to realize the enormity of the impending loss: the bookkeeping, the telephone, the correspondence, the lessons for the applicants, the surveillance of the operators, the canvassing which she did so well. But beyond this, how could she, Dorothea Ruda, do this to him, Edmond Lorz? There was the human dimension. And at such a moment, with debts piling up and clients dwindling. It was the coup de grace as much by what it betokened as by its predictably disastrous consequences.
The ship was sinking.
“I know you must think the ship is sinking,” he said.
“I’m not a rat,” she retorted.
It was the first time she’d ever retorted, not counting what happened, briefly, three times a year. Lorz felt great relief at the thought that, of course, this was another of her episodic disguises, only much longer than the others. Tomorrow or the day after, she’d be back without jangling costume jewelry and in loose attire, contrite, her true self again.
“I intended quitting for a long time,” she added.
He cast about for arguments.
“Married women work too, don’t they, in this century? A married woman has the right to choose.”
It sounded, he knew, like the rhetoric of old-style waiting-room women’s magazines, but he couldn’t come up with anything better.
“We’ll be leaving the city. I’m sick of the city.”
He stared at her mournfully. “If it’s a raise you want, Dorothea, it’s granted. On the spot.”
“It’s true my salary wasn’t very generous for all the work I did,” she replied, offensively, he thought. The use of the preterit wasn’t a good sign either. “But it’s not money. It’s what I said. I need a change. I’m tired.”
“A twenty percent increase. As of today. Long overdue, I’ll admit.”
He waited for a reply. What did her silence signify? Was it a bargaining tactic?
“I might see my way to twenty-five percent,” he proposed after a while. God alone knew where the money was going to come from. “Retroactive to January,” he added.
She’d returned to the customer-file. Now she reached over for a marker. In the process she swiveled her chair in that direction. She maintained the chair in its new position, her back to her employer, presenting him with her hair hacked short over her neck vertebras, an unknown part of her.
After a minute’s silence he offered her double her present salary, also retroactive to January.
She went on with the marker.
Two weeks later Dorothea Ruda was gone. On leaving she placed the slipcover, like a gray shroud, over her typewriter. She went over to his desk and gave him back the keys. She shook hands with him like a man and wished him continued good health and good luck. She renewed the proposal she’d already made in her letter of resignation to introduce an acquaintance of hers, a very competent lady, to replace her.
Her extremist girl friend, the one with the battered car and the barbaric bracelets? Lorz thanked her coldly but did accompany her to the door. He stood there watching her climbing up the gloomy staircase past mewing cats towards the daylight beyond the door. At that moment he recalled the question he’d wanted to ask her about the injured candidate: what he had looked like to her.
The question didn’t matter anymore, no more than the candidate himself did. Yet the director moved forward toward the stairs, eyes fixed on the door she was opening above him.
There was a sickening crunch underfoot and he nearly slipped and fell.
The door above closed on her back and a sliver of sunlit tree.
The director removed his shoe, hopped back into his now empty office and methodically removed the oily scraps of sardine-skins fro
m the sole. Then he dumped the fragments of the dish into the metal oil-drum.
No more of that, anyhow.