From the Fifteenth District (28 page)

“Do you love him?”

“No, nothing like that. I love you. But we planned this trip ages ago. I couldn’t be sure you would ever get to Paris. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. You’d like him, Potter. Honestly you would. He speaks three different languages. He’s independent – enjoys running his own business. I don’t even make a dent in his life.”

“Does he love you?”

“I keep telling you, it isn’t like that. We aren’t really lovers. I mean, not as you and I are. We sleep together – well, if we find ourselves in the same bed.”

“Try not to find yourself,” said Piotr.

“What?” She seemed as candid, as confident, as tender as always. Her eyes were as clear as a child’s. Her hand shook suddenly. What was coming now? The unloved childhood? The day her mother left her at Bishop Purse School? The
school must have provided clean sheets and warm rooms and regular meals, but she was of a world that took these remarkable gifts for granted. His wife, younger then than Laurie was now, had stolen food for Piotr when he lay in a prison infirmary absolutely certain he was about to die. She had been a prisoner, too, dispatched as medical aide and cleaner. She stopped at the foot of his cot. When she started talking she couldn’t stop. He saw that her amber eyes focussed nowhere – her “in-looking eyes” he was to call them. Because of the eyes and the mad rush of words and the danger she was calling down on them he had thought, The girl is insane. Then sanely, quietly, she said, “I have some bread for you.” You could not compare Laurie Bennett with a person of that quality. All the same, Piotr had guessed: his wife was insane, but only with him. Danger had reached him after he seemed well out of it, only to be caught on the danger a couple create for each other.

“Look, Potter,” said Laurie. “If you mind all that much, I won’t go. I’ll talk to him.”

“When?”

“Now; soon. But I’d be sad. He’s a good friend. Why would he want to take me to Venice, except out of friendship? He doesn’t need
me
. He knows all kinds of interesting people. I’d be poorer without him – really alone.” She was already making women’s gestures of leaving, straightening the spoon in its saucer, gathering in whatever belonged to her, bringing her affairs close – protecting herself. “Don’t come to the train,” she said. “Drink your coffee, read the paper. Look, I’ve even brought it along. Keep the key to my room. You’ll stay there, won’t you? As we arranged? If you mind about the concierge seeing you – not that she cares – just use the garage instead of the front door. That’s how the married ladies in the building
meet their lovers. I’ll write,” she said. “I’ll write to your hotel.”

He pushed his chair back. As he got to his feet his ankle gave way. “Oh, Potter, your poor ankle!” Laurie said. “I was on a sailing holiday when you broke it. I was at Lake Constance and I wasn’t getting my mail. I wasn’t seeing newspapers or anything, and when I finally got back to Paris someone told me there’d been this war on in the Middle East. All those dead and it was already over and I hadn’t known a thing – not about your ankle, not anything.” She smiled, kissed him, picked up her suitcase, and walked away. Without knowing why, he touched his forehead. He was wearing his beret, which Marek had implored him not to do in Paris; the beret made Piotr look like an out-of-town intellectual, like a teacher from the provinces, like a priest from a working-class parish. What did it matter? Any disguise would do to hide the shame of being Piotr.

Only a few men now were left in the café – Algerians reading want ads, middle-aged stragglers clearly hating Piotr because he was alone and demented, like half the universe. Later, he had no memory of having taken the Métro, only that when he came back up to daylight the rain had stopped. He walked on wet leaves. Like the married women’s lovers he entered Laurie’s building by way of the garage, slipping and sliding because the slope was abrupt and the soles of his shoes had grown damp. Her room was airless now, with sun newly ablaze on the shut window. He was starting a new day, the third day since this morning. His croissants were still on the table. He picked them up, thinking that it was better to leave nothing. Then he saw there was nothing much he could leave, because Laurie had packed his things. Piotr’s suitcase stood locked, buckled, next to the chair on which were folded the sheets they had slept in. Her neatness erased him. The extra
towel on the shower rail might have been anyone’s. He was wiped out by her clothes’ hanging just so, by her sweaters and shirts in plastic boxes, by the prim order of the bouillon cubes and Nescafé and yellow bowls on a shelf, by the books – presents, probably – lined up by size beneath the window. He saw the review containing his poems, still honored by its dustproof bag. What he had never noticed before was that the bag also held a thin yellow book of verse, the Insel-Bücherei edition of Christian Morgenstern’s
Palmström
poems. Piotr had once translated some of these, entirely for pleasure. When he was arrested he had had scraps of paper in his pocket covered with choppy phrases in Polish and German that became entirely sinister when read by the police. “Well, you see,” said a blond, solemn Piotr of twenty years ago, “Morgenstern was not much understood and finally he was mad, but the poems in their way are funny.”

“Why a German?” The sarcasm of the illiterate. “Aren’t there enough mad Poles?”

“There soon will be,” said Piotr, to his own detriment.

Now, in Laurie’s room, even the yellow binding seemed to speak to him. Where had it come from? Someone, another doting Potter, had offered it to her, thinking, Love something I love and you are sure to love me. Who? The flyleaf said nothing. He turned the pages slowly and, on the same page as a poem called “The Dreamer,” came upon a color snapshot of two people in an unknown room. Piotr recognized Laurie but not the man. The man was fair, like Piotr, but somewhat younger. His hair was brushed. He wore a respectable suit and a dark-red tie. What Piotr saw at once about his face was that it was genuinely cheerful. Here, at last, caught by chance, was the
bon naturel
Piotr had hopelessly been seeking from woman
to woman. Laurie, naked except for her wristwatch, sat on the arm of his chair, with her legs curled like the tail of a mermaid. One hand was slipped behind the man’s neck. She held a white shower cap, probably the very cap now hanging on a tap in the next room.

A casual happiness suffused this picture. Piotr was looking at people who did not know or really understand how lucky they were. A sun risen for the lovers alone shone in at the window behind them and made Laurie’s hair white and sparkling, like light seen through an icicle. Those were Piotr’s immediate, orderly thoughts. He sensed the particular eroticism of the clothed man and the naked girl and only then felt the shock, like a door battered in. The door collapsed, and Piotr saw whatever he had been dreading since he had dared to fall in love – solitude, cruelty, the loneliness of dying: all of that.

Laurie had deliberately left the picture for him to find. She had gone to a foreign bookshop, perhaps the place in the Rue du Dragon that she had pointed out to him, saying she once worked there for a week before they realized she spoke nothing but English, and chose the very book that was bound to catch his eye. She had then staged the picture. Piotr’s wife, in
her
calculated dementia, had recorded her own lovemaking with another man on a tape on which Piotr had been assembling the elements of a course in Russian poetry. Recalling this, he remembered that where his wife had been frantic Laurie was only heedless. The book and the picture were part of the blithe indifference of the two lovers, no more.

He was suddenly overcome with a need to shut his eyes, to be blessed by darkness. He lay flat on the bed and said to himself, What can I give her? I am never here. When he rose and looked at the picture again, it seemed to him it was not
where he had left it. Also, in the neat row of clothing he saw a hanger askew. Where there had been only Piotr’s croissants on the table there was now, as well, an enamel four-leaf-clover pin, open, as if it had parted from its wearer unnoticed. The door had to be locked from within;. he tested the handle and saw he had forgotten to turn the key. Anyone might have entered while Piotr had his eyes shut and examined the snapshot and put it in the wrong place. Laurie, he now saw, had a coarse face, small, calculating blue eyes, and a greedy, vacuous expression. What he had mistaken for gaiety had been nothing but guile. The man seemed more sympathetic somehow. For one thing, he was decently dressed. He looked sane. There was nothing
wrong
with that man, really, except for the peculiar business of having set up a camera in the first place. He was a Western European by dress, haircut, expression. He was not a Latin. Nor was this an English face. Piotr sensed a blunt sureness about him. He would be sure before, during, and after any encounter. He would not feel any of Piotr’s anxiousness over pleasing Laurie and pleasing himself. He might have been a young officer of solid yeoman origins, risen from the ranks, in the old Imperial Army – a character in a pre-1914 Viennese novel, say. He became then, and for all time, “the Austrian” in Piotr’s mind.

Piotr replaced the picture where he now thought it must have been, next to a poem called “Korf in Berlin.” No one had entered the room – he knew that. The clover pin had fallen from Laurie’s tunic. It was normal for a hanger to be askew when someone even as neat as Laurie had packed in a hurry.

He went out the front door this time, brave enough to confront the concierge and give up Laurie’s key.

“Bennett,” he said, and on receiving no answer said it again.

“I heard you.” She seemed blurred and hostile. He had to narrow his eyes to keep her in focus. The trees in the Luxembourg Gardens were indistinct, as if seen through tears. He found himself caught in a crocodile of schoolboys. A harridan in a polo coat screamed at them, at Piotr, too, “Watch your step, keep together!” Piotr began to search for something that could protect him – trees in a magic ring around a monument might be suitable. As soon as he had selected a metal chair not too close to anyone the sun vanished. A north wind came at him. Leaves rolled over and over along the damp path. He sat on the edge of a forbidden grass plot, staring at a bust he at first took to be Lenin’s. He still wore his reading glasses – the reason the concierge had seemed undefined. The bust was in fact a monument to Paul Verlaine.

The grass had kept its midsummer green; when the sun came out briefly the tree shadows were still summer’s shadows. But the season was autumn, and he saw a gleaming chestnut lying among the split casings. He would have picked it up, but someone might have seen.

Laurie had escaped from her locked room. It was not her face, not her hair, but her voice and her voice in her letters that pursued Piotr.
He. We. I. “He
always takes me somewhere for my birthday.” “
We
took the tellypherique and walked down from the reservoir.” “
I
was on a sailing holiday at Lake Constance.” It had been
we
in the Italian Tyrol – “We take lovely picnics up behind the hotel, you can hear bells from the other valley.”
We
turned up again in Rome, at Crans-sur-Sierre, at a hotel in Normandy.
We
were old friends – James and Nancy, Mike and Sylvia, Hans and Heidi.
We
existed in a few letters, long enough to spin out a holiday, then fell over Laurie’s horizon. Piotr’s only balm was that
he
was wiped out.
There was a big X over his ugly face. Laurie, or
I
, had been alone for at least the time it took to remember Piotr and write him an eager, loving letter full of spelling mistakes. Piotr had been with her in Portugal, in Switzerland; she had generously included him by making herself, for a few minutes, alone and available. Perhaps Laurie had been alone in her mind, truly loyal to Piotr –
he
meanwhile in the bar of the hotel? In the shower? Off on some disloyal pretext of his own so that he could slip an
I
message to his wife?

She was a good girl, all the same, for she had always taken care to give Piotr a story so plausible he could believe it without despising himself. Now that she had told him the truth, he was as bitter as if she had deceived him. Why shouldn’t Laurie be taken for holidays? Did he want her alone, crabbed, dishevelled, soured? The only shadow over her life that Piotr knew of had been Piotr himself. Her voice resumed: “I am taking the car and driving …” Whose car, by the way? Piotr moved his feet and struck his suitcase. His ankle made a snapping sound. There was no pain, but the noise was disconcerting, as if the bones were speaking to him. She had left him at the airport; she had not known where she would be sleeping that night. “That time you broke your ankle … I was on a sailing holiday at Lake Constance.” Yes, and something else, about a war in the Middle East. The fragments were like smooth-grained panels of wood. The panels slid together, touched, fitted. Her wild journey to forget Piotr had only one direction: to Lake Constance, where someone was waiting.

There were aspects of Laurie’s behavior that, for the sake of his sanity, Piotr had refused to consider. Now, sitting on a cold metal chair, eyes fixed on a chestnut he was too self-conscious to pick up, he could not keep free of his knowledge; it was like
the dark wind that struck through the circle of trees. She had used him, made an audience of him, played on his feelings, and she was at this moment driving to Venice with – the element of farce in every iniquity – Piotr’s Polish birth-control pills. Moreover, she had entirely forgotten Piotr. His grief was so beyond jealousy that he seemed truly beside himself; there was a Piotr in a public park, trying hard to look like other people, and a Piotr divorced from that person. His work, his childhood, his imprisonment, his marriage, his still mysterious death were rolled in a compact ball, spinning along the grass, away from whatever was left of him. Then, just as it seemed about to disappear, the two Piotrs came together again. The shock of the joining put him to sleep. His head fell forward; he pulled it up with a start. He may have slept for a second, no more. No one had noticed – he looked for that. The brief death had cleansed him. His only thought now was that his memory was better than hers and so he knew what they were losing. As for Laurie’s abuse of him, it was simply that she did not know the meaning of words, their precision, their power – why, she could not even spell them. She did not realize when she was lying, because she did not know what words were about. This new, gentle tolerance made Piotr wonder: what if his feeling for Laurie was no more than tenderness, and what if Piotr was incapable of love other than the kind he could give his children? His wife had said this – had screamed it. She did not want his friendship, his loyalty, his affection, his devotion, his companionship. She wanted what he had finally bestowed on Laurie; at least, he thought he had.