—
The woman’s apartment was not far from the pier. Vague memories of his childhood and the smell of those evenings came back to the Rat each time he visited her. He would park on the coastal road and cut through the sparse stand of pine trees planted to block the sand blowing in from the beach. The sand made a dry sound under his feet.
The apartment building was located where the fishermen’s huts had once stood. If you dug down a few meters, reddish-brown seawater came bubbling up. South American canna lilies drooped in the front garden, as if someone had trampled them. The woman lived on the second floor—when the wind blew it brushed her window with fine sand. Her neat little apartment faced south, but it was strangely gloomy. It’s the ocean, she said. It’s too damn close—the smell of the tide, the wind, the sound of the waves, the stink of fish…everything.
“You can’t smell fish here,” the Rat said.
Sure I can, she said. She pulled a cord and the Venetian blinds closed with a snap. So would you if you lived here.
Sand swept against the window.
5
When I was in college, no one in my apartment building had a phone. Hell, I doubt any of us had an eraser. There was, though, one pink pay phone, which sat outside the caretaker’s office on a low table that had been tossed out by the local elementary school. It was the only phone in the whole place. Telephone switch panels were the last thing on our minds. Ours was a peaceful world in a peaceful time.
Since the caretaker was never in his office, one of us had to answer the phone when it rang and dash off to inform the recipient of their call. Of course there were times (like when a call came in at 2 a.m.) when no one picked up. Like an elephant aware of its approaching death, the phone would ring like mad (the most I counted was thirty-two times) and then die. I use the word die literally. The moment the last ring had sailed down the long corridor and off into the black night, a hush settled over the building. It was an eerie silence. We all lay there in our beds, holding our breath, as we contemplated the dead call.
Late-night calls were always depressing. Someone would pick up the receiver and start talking in a low voice:
“Let’s drop it…No, you’ve got it wrong…What’s done is done, right?…It’s the truth. Why would I lie?…No, I’m just tired…Of course it bothers me…But you see…Yeah, I get the picture. But I need time, okay?…I can’t explain over the phone…”
Each of us had all the troubles we could carry. They rained down on us from the sky, and we raced around in a frenzy to pick them up and stuff them in our pockets. Why we did that stumps me, even now. Maybe we thought they were something else.
There were telegrams, too. A motorbike would roar up to the front door around four in the morning, followed by loud footsteps in the hallway. Then a fist would pound on someone’s door. That noise always reminded me of the Grim Reaper. Boom, boom. We were prone to so many disasters—lives lost to suicide, minds wrecked, hearts marooned in the backwaters of time, bodies burning with pointless obsessions—and we gave each other a hell of a lot of trouble. Nineteen seventy was that kind of year. Yet if you cling to the belief that the human organism is made to improve itself through some sort of dialectical process, a year as awful as 1970 can teach you something.
My room was on the first floor next to the caretaker’s office, while the girl with the long hair lived on the second floor, next to the stairs. Since she was the clear winner when it came to the number of calls received, I was stuck trotting up and down those fifteen slippery steps thousands of times to summon her to the phone. Her callers were all sorts of people. Their voices were courteous or officious, sad or arrogant. In all cases they asked for her by name. Yet I have no memory of what that name was. My only recollection is that it was heartbreakingly common.
Her voice on the phone was an almost inaudible, exhausted-sounding whisper. Her face was attractive enough, but kind of gloomy. Although we passed each other on the street from time to time, I never spoke to her. Her expression as she walked along was like that of someone riding a white elephant down a narrow jungle path.
She lived in our apartment building for six months. From the beginning of autumn to the end of winter.
I would answer the phone, climb the stairs, knock on her door, say, “Phone for you,” and a moment later she would say, “Thanks.” “Thanks” was all she ever said to me. Then again, “Phone for you” was all I ever said to her.
It was a lonely season for me as well. When I returned to my room and undressed at the end of the day, my bones threatened to burst through my skin and fly away. As if some mysterious internal force were propelling me in the wrong direction, leading me toward another world.
The phone calls made me think. Someone was trying to get through to someone else. Yet almost no one ever called me. Not a single person was trying to reach me, and even if they had been, they wouldn’t have said what I wanted to hear.
Each of us had, to a greater or lesser degree, resolved to live according to his or her own system. If another person’s way of thinking was too different from mine, it made me mad; too close, and I got sad. That’s all there was to it.
It was the end of winter when I fielded her last phone call. A clear Saturday morning in early March. Mid-morning anyway, ten o’clock, with bright winter sunlight probing every corner of my small room. When I became aware of the ringing, I was sitting on my bed looking out the window at the cabbage field next door. Glistening patches of snow were scattered across the black soil like puddles of water—all that remained of the last snow of the final cold snap of the year.
The phone rang ten times without anyone picking up. Then five minutes later it started again. That ticked me off, but I threw a cardigan over my pajamas and went to get it.
“Is Miss…there?” asked a man. His voice was flat, elusive. Mumbling something noncommittal, I trudged up the stairs and knocked on her door.
“Phone for you.”
“Thanks.”
I went back to my room, lay down on the bed, and studied the ceiling. I could hear her coming down the steps, and then that whispery voice. It was an unusually short conversation for her. Maybe fifteen seconds. I heard her hang up and then there was a protracted silence, no footsteps, nothing. A moment later, I heard footsteps slowly approaching my door, followed by two knocks. There was a pause for as long as a deep breath, then another two raps.
When I opened the door she was standing there in a bulky white sweater and jeans. I thought for a moment I had made a mistake, that the call had been for someone else, but she said nothing, just stood there shivering with her arms folded and her eyes fixed on me. She looked like someone in a lifeboat watching the ship go down. Or maybe the other way around.
“Can I come in? It’s freezing out here.”
I was taken off guard, but I let her in and closed the door. She sat down in front of my gas heater to warm her hands and looked around.
“This room is awfully bare, isn’t it?”
I nodded. There really was nothing. Just a bed next to a window, and that was it. A bed too big for one, and too small for two. I hadn’t bought it. Rather, an acquaintance had given it to me. Why he had given it to a virtual stranger was beyond me. We seldom talked. A rich kid from the middle of nowhere, he had quit school after he was beaten by members of an opposing political group who kicked him in the head with their construction boots, damaging his eyesight. It had happened in the quad, and he had sobbed all the way from there to the school infirmary, to my great disgust. A few days later he told me he was leaving school. And gave me the bed.
“Is there anything warm to drink?” she said. No, I answered, shaking my head. No coffee, no tea, not even a proper kettle. Just a saucepan to boil water in the morning when I shaved. Wait here, she said with a sigh. She stood up and left the room, returning five minutes later with a cardboard box in her hands. Inside was a good six months’ supply of tea bags and green tea, two bags of cookies, granulated sugar, a basic set of pots and plates,
and two Snoopy glasses. Setting the box down on the bed, she pulled out a pot and began to boil water.
“How do you get by? You live like Robinson Crusoe!”
“It’s not that much fun.”
“I guess not.”
We drank our black tea in silence.
“You can have all this,” she said.
I choked on my tea. “Why would you do that?”
“It’s my way of saying thanks. For all the times you answered the phone.”
“But won’t you need it?”
She shook her head. “I’m moving out tomorrow. It’s of no use to me anymore.”
There must have been something to explain this new train of events, but I couldn’t imagine what.
“Did something good happen? Or was it something bad?”
“Not too good, I guess. I mean I’m dropping out of school and going home.”
The winter sunlight that filled the room dimmed for a moment, then brightened again.
“But you don’t want to hear about it, do you? I sure wouldn’t. Who’d want to use the dishes of someone who’d bummed them out!”
—
The next morning, a cold rain began to fall. It was a fine rain that managed to seep through my raincoat and soak the sweater beneath. Everything—the big trunk I was lugging and the suitcase and shoulder bag she carried—was dark with moisture. The taxi driver snapped at us not to put any of it on the seat. The cab was hot and stuffy with stale tobacco smoke, and a traditional ballad was blaring from the car radio, a tune as old-fashioned as a semaphore indicator. The dripping branches of the leafless trees lining both sides of the road looked like underwater coral.
“I didn’t like Tokyo the first time I laid eyes on it,” she said, “and I still don’t.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The soil is too black, the rivers are filthy, there aren’t any mountains…How about you?”
“I’ve never thought about the scenery.”
She sighed. “That’s why you’re going to survive this place,” she said with a smile.
We reached the platform and put down the bags.
“Thanks for everything,” she said. “I can take it from here.”
“Where’s home?”
“Way up north.”
“I bet it’s cold.”
“That’s okay. I’m used to it.”
When the train started moving she waved to me from the window. I raised my hand to the level of my ear, but when the train went out of sight, I felt awkward all of a sudden and stuffed it in the pocket of my raincoat.
It rained all day and on into the night. I bought two bottles of beer at the local liquor store and drank them in one of the glasses she had given me. I was freezing cold. The glass had a picture of Snoopy and Woodstock playing on top of Snoopy’s doghouse with a balloon that read, “Happiness is a warm friend.”
The twins were fast asleep when I opened my eyes. Three a.m. The autumn moonlight outside the bathroom window was unnaturally bright. I sat on the edge of the kitchen counter next to the sink, drank two glasses of water, and lit a cigarette on the gas burner. The layered voices of thousands upon thousands of insects rose from the moonlit golf course.
I picked up the switch panel leaning against the counter and examined it with care, turning it this way and that. It was just a meaningless board, grimy and old, no matter how you looked at it. Giving up, I put it back where it had been, wiped the dirt from my hands, and took another puff on my cigarette. Everything looked pale in the moonlight. Devoid of value, meaning, or direction. Even the shadows were indistinct. I stubbed out my cigarette in the sink and lit another.
Would I ever find a place that was truly mine? Where might it be? I thought and thought, yet all that came to me was the cockpit of a twin-seater torpedo plane. But that was sheer idiocy. I mean, those things went out of date thirty years ago, right?
I went back to bed and squeezed in between the twins. They lay curled with their heads angled toward the outer edges of the bed, breathing peacefully. I pulled the blanket to my chin and studied the ceiling.
6
The woman stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. The sound of the shower followed soon after.
The Rat struggled to control his feelings. He raised himself on the sheets, grabbed a cigarette, and put it between his lips. But his lighter wasn’t on the table or in the pocket of his trousers. He didn’t even have a match. He poked around in the woman’s bag, but no luck there either. Giving up, he switched on the light and rifled through his desk drawers until he turned up an old book of matches with the name of some restaurant on it. He lit his cigarette.
Her stockings and underwear were folded with care and piled on one of his rattan chairs, her tailored mustard-colored dress draped over its back. On the bedside table lay her tiny watch and her La Bagagerie bag, no longer new but well maintained.
The Rat sank down in the opposite chair and stared out the window.
From his mountainside perch, the Rat could see the signs of human activity scattered across the hillside below. Sometimes he stood there for hours, hands on hips, focusing on the scene below like a golfer at the top of a downhill course. The slope descended at a gentle angle, gathering in the scattered lights of the houses. There were dark groves of trees, small hills, and, here and there, private swimming pools glaring white under mercury lamps. Where the slope began to level off, the highway snaked across the landscape like an illuminated waistband; from the base of the mountain to the shore half a mile away, the town sprawled flat and monotonous. The ocean beyond melted into the dark sky, while the orange light from the small beacon flashed, disappeared, and flashed again. And cutting through all these layers of terrain, dividing them neatly in two, ran the dark fairway.
The river.
The Rat had first met the woman in early September, when the sky still retained a trace of summer radiance.
He had found an electric typewriter listed in the Used Goods section of his local newspaper among ads for playpens, Linguaphones, tricycles, and whatnot. The young woman who answered the phone sounded very businesslike: the typewriter had been used for a year with a year left on its warranty; cash up front (no monthly payments); he had to come get it himself. They struck a deal, and he drove to her apartment, paid, and picked up the typewriter. It cost nearly as much as what he had earned from his part-time summer job.
She was small and slender and wore an attractive sleeveless dress. Leafy plants of various shapes and colors were lined up in pots at the apartment’s entranceway. She had pleasant features, and her hair was tied up at the back. The Rat couldn’t tell her age. He would have found anything between twenty-two and twenty-eight believable.
Three days later, she phoned to say that she had half a dozen typewriter ribbons she would be happy to give him for free. When the Rat picked them up, he asked her out to J’s Bar, where he treated her to cocktails to thank her for the ribbons. They didn’t click right off the bat, though.
The third time they met was four days later, at the local indoor pool. He drove her back to his apartment and they made love. Why did it turn out that way? The Rat had no idea. Did he make the first move or did she? They had simply gone with the flow.
After a few days, the Rat could feel the tangible reality of their relationship swelling within him, as if a soft wedge were being driven into his everyday life. Little by little, something was getting through. His long-forgotten gentler, sweeter side seemed to expand each time he thought of her slender arms wrapped around his body.
The Rat could see that she was trying to establish a kind of perfection in her small world. He was well aware that required an extraordinary degree of determination. She wore only the most modest yet tasteful dresses over fresh, clean undergarments, applied an eau de cologne with the fragrance of a morning vineyard to her body, took great care in choosing her words, asked no pointless questions, and appeared to have practiced smiling in the mirror. Yet these things only added to
the Rat’s sadness. After a number of meetings he guessed her age to be twenty-seven. That turned out to be spot on.
Her breasts were small, and though her trim body was beautifully tanned, it was a reluctant rather than a boastful tan, as if it had been acquired without her approval. Her angular cheekbones and thin lips spoke of her good upbringing and resolute core, but there was something naive and vulnerable beneath the surface, which showed in her subtle shifts of expression.
She had studied architecture in an art college, she said, and now worked in an architect’s office. Her birthplace? Nowhere near here, she replied. I came to this area after I graduated. She went to the pool once a week and took the train to her viola lesson every Sunday night.
The two of them got together once a week, on Saturday night. Then the Rat spent Sunday in a haze while she practiced playing Mozart.
7
I missed three whole days of work with a cold, and when I got back, I was swamped. My mouth was gritty, and my body felt as if it had been scrubbed with sandpaper. Piles of documents—pamphlets, manuscripts, booklets, magazines, etc.—rose like anthills around my desk. My business partner stopped by to mumble a few words of what sounded like sympathy and went back to his room. The girl left the usual coffee and two rolls on my desk, then she disappeared as well. I had forgotten to buy cigarettes, so I bummed a pack of Seven Stars from my partner, popped the filter off one, turned it around, and lit it. The sky outside was gray and hazy—you couldn’t tell where the air ended and the clouds began. The smell of smoke was in the air, as if someone were trying to burn wet leaves. But that may have been my fever.
I took a deep breath and set to work on the anthill closest to me. Everything in it was stamped Urgent, with the deadline written below in red felt pen. Luckily, it was the only anthill marked Urgent. Even luckier, none of the documents was so urgent it had to be completed in the next two or three days. All the deadlines were one or two weeks away, so chances were I could get everything done in time if I sent half out to our part-timers for rough translation. I picked up the documents one by one and arranged them in the order I would work on them. This made the anthill much less stable than before: now it was shaped like a newspaper graph indicating the Cabinet’s approval rating by gender and age. The mix of topics, though, really turned me on.