***
9
So she returned to Ideal. But his gaudy new assistant had nothing in common with the black-and-white timidly smiling identity-photo that he’d removed from her desk an hour before her return and had placed, for want of a better place, in his wallet. At the beginning, each time he pushed open the door of Ideal in the morning, he half expected to see his familiar assistant there, the crisis over, her old self again, free of the absurd disguise, timidly smiling as before.
But there was no return to the old relationship between them. Her face was still radically done up and she’d made no concessions regarding dress, costume-jewelry and perfume. She continued to generate cancerous clouds of cigarette-smoke. Even the position of her desk had changed. It was the first thing she’d demanded on returning. She refused to let him help her move it. She waited for a husky operator to come back from his shift and did it with him. Lorz looked on, faintly humiliated.
Before, their desks had faced, even though from opposite ends of the office. Now she had hers moved to a spot where he could see her only out of the corner of his eye. She commanded an effortless view of his profile. He also discovered after a week that a wall-mirror, hanging askew alongside old calendars and a bulletin board, provided her with a second view of him. He felt constantly spied on, thanks to that mediating rectangular surface. Their gazes sometimes met and fled on it. At such times he thought he read in her face incompatible things, sometimes what he took for distaste, sometimes concern. But you couldn’t really tell with that painted mask of hers.
The term he finally found for her attitude toward him was “cold solicitude,” something he’d never encountered outside of hospitals. She missed nothing from her strategic position with her ally, the mirror that outflanked him. It seemed to him that each time he initiated a movement to get up from his desk (for example, to go to the toilet) he would hear her new incisive voice: “What is it you want? I’ll get it for you.” She never said “Sir” or “Mr Lorz” now.
Apart from business matters and his candidate, their longest conversations concerned his pills which he was supposed to take at three. He was lax about it. “It’s five past three,” she would announce. After he understood what the announcement was about he would say, “Good” or “Yes” or “Really?” or nothing at all. A few minutes later she was sure to say: “Don’t you take your pills at three?” He would reply: “Five minutes more or less don’t matter.” Never looking up from whatever she was doing, quick hands never pausing, she would announce the time at regular intervals. Once she said she wasn’t his nurse.
Most of the time, to avoid the implicit nagging, he took his pills before three. Sometimes, to provoke the nagging, which was a kind of exchange anyhow, he’d let three go by.
On sunny days she suggested he should take a walk in the square, she’d take care of things. After lunch she urged the cot upon him. She’d take care of things. Once, he said: “I’m not an invalid. Do I look that bad?” He was careful to counterbalance his irritation – which he felt to be the querulousness of an invalid – with a slight smile. He got no answer in any case.
Mainly as a gesture of good will he once inquired about her farm, intending to ask about soup out of stinging nettles, a trivial enigma which in the solitary months following her resignation had sometimes briefly occupied his mind. Once again she used the word “escapism.”
Sometimes he found her attitude almost insulting. But he was careful to say nothing that risked imperiling his business. It was convalescent and needed her care. She could quit the job any moment. She made that clear by often leaving her new extremist paper on her desk, open on the help-wanted section. Certain ads were underlined. It even happened that she openly made calls in answer to them. She scrupulously placed coins in the cash-box for these as well as for other more private calls, signaled by a swivel of her chair, which gave him a mirror-view of the back of her absurd hairdo, by a lowered voice and sometimes by soft exclusive laughter. All he overheard was, once, “It’s not forever. I’m still looking,” and, another time, “Jobs aren’t that easy to find. But soon, I promise.”
He knew who it was, of course. Her new extremist woman-friend called her up at least once a day. When it was the director who picked up the receiver he was able to identify her by the click and buzz that cut his “hello” in two. Once, the matter must have been too urgent and she condescended to communicate with him. Without the bourgeois hypocrisy of “hello” or “please”, her metallic voice commanded: “Dorothea.” The director obeyed. He didn’t dare make an issue of it. Any more than he dared make an issue of the extremist literature that invaded the office. Twice he even found a leaflet on his desk. This was going too far and on both occasions he didn’t hesitate, during her absence, to ball the hysterical thing up and shoot it into the wastepaper basket.
They went on visiting his candidate, separately. One Sunday afternoon he stood in the corridor before the closed door and caught fragments of what she was saying to the other. He pieced them together into the things she’d told him, Lorz, for years but not anymore. He guessed she was inches from his candidate’s face, looking into his eyes and imagining miniscule acknowledgement of three blue peaks, beech woods, the pond and the orchard.
He himself had much less to say to his candidate. He’d sit down facing him, not nearly as close, and sometimes observe that the boy’s polo shirt was a different color. That was the only change he ever noticed in him until his last visit there.
At first there was no basic change either in what Lorz said to him. He would say his name and say that they’d known each other and ask him what his name was. He said it over and over monotonously. Sometimes he’d switch the sentences around or rephrase them.
After a few weeks he realized that it was absurd to hope for words. He reduced his expectations and asked him over and over to make a sign with his hand. His candidate’s hands remained palms upward and limp on his lap. It was absurd to hope for movement. Lorz would also take his glasses off and repeat the irrational weaving approach and retreat. What sharpened into focus with approach was always the stunned brutality of his candidate’s present face.
Lorz didn’t dare imitate his assistant and peer for signs of comprehension in the boy’s eyes until 3:10 in the afternoon of September 2 which (but he didn’t know it at the time) was his last visit before his candidate vanished again.
He glanced at the door to make sure it was closed. He took the pillow off the bed and placed it alongside the wheelchair, then tugged his trousers up slightly to spare the crease and kneeled. He took his glasses off, reached across his candidate’s torso and gripped the further armrest for support.
With the microscopic vision of uncorrected myopia, he was able to approach his face toward the dark blue eyes far closer than she’d done. The boy’s eyes filled his field of vision completely. He could hear his shallow irregular breathing. He became aware of the odor of his body beneath her flowers.
He recited the formula over and over. Who are you? Do you remember me? He found himself imploring response.
Suddenly he got response, not a tiny shrinking of the pupil but a tremendous sign of recognition, which, for a second he reacted to with joy. The dead eyes awoke with intelligence and the boy’s face pressed against his.
But now fear as the great torso toppled forward like a wall against him. His hands fended off the heavy weight and he was thrown off balance.
He fell on his back and saw the other foreshortened above him, slumped forward in the armchair. His eyes, empty again, stared down at him. He was still slack-jawed. In his lap his left hand was still limp but his right hand was clenched into a fist now.
The mannish head-nurse with the hacked iron hair was filling out sheets in her office. She looked up briefly as he told her about the sudden movement, intelligence in his eyes, the fist. He imposed calm on his voice.
“Spasms,” she said gruffly, returning to her sheets.
“Spasms?”
&nbs
p; “Involuntary muscular contractions,” she said, without looking up.
He insisted. Impatiently she got up and accompanied Lorz to the room. She raised his candidate upright against the backrest and examined him for a moment.
“Spasms,” she said and went back to the office and her sheets.
By the time Lorz reached his office he had doubts about what had happened. He’d been holding onto the armrest. He may have shifted his weight and transferred the movement to the armchair, jolting his candidate forward on to him. Or it may have been spasms. He tried to drive out of his mind the fear he’d experienced as the other’s body had pressed down on him.
Two days later, a Saturday, he received a blue official-looking envelope, which he instantly assumed contained bad news.
He read the letter a dozen times and then dialed his assistant’s home number. The line was busy. He tried over and over. Who could she be talking to that long?
When she finally answered he said he’d been trying to reach her for a quarter of an hour. So had she, she said, been trying to reach him for a quarter of an hour, dialing and dialing. He told her he had news, the greatest of news. So had she, she said, greater than the greatest. Not as great as mine, he replied and told her that the compensation money had at last been cleared and would be paid into their bank account before the end of the month. They were saved. He named the sum and said he’d counted the zeros five times to make sure. A miracle, he said. She asked if it was a miracle he’d prayed for and told him she’d just come from the hospital. On her way back she’d bought a bottle of white wine. He shouldn’t pay attention to anything she might say except this: after five months and twenty-five days Teddy had come out of the coma. He was going to be all right, as she’d always said.
***