Bobcat and Other Stories (5 page)

I got my jacket, and the two of us stepped into the night. The snow had arranged itself in curling waves on the Mellby lawn, and stuck in it were hundreds of silver forks, which, in a flood of early-evening testosterone, the freshman boys had placed in the earth, a gesture appropriate to their sexual frustration and also to their faith in the future. Stasselova and I stepped between them. They looked spooky and lovely, like tiny silver gravesites in the snow. As we walked across campus, Stasselova produced a golden brochure from his pocket and handed it to me. On the front it said, in emerald-green letters, “Ninth Annual Symposium on Language and Politics.” Inside, under “Keynote Student Speaker,” was my name. “Margaret Olafson, ‘The Common Harvest.’ ” I stopped walking. We paused at the top of the stairs that floated down off the campus and into the town. I felt extremely, inordinately proud. Some winter lightning, a couple of great wings of it, flashed in the north. Stasselova looked paternal, grand.

THE AIR AT THE
party was beery and wildish, and the house itself—its many random rooms and slanting floors—seemed the product of a drunken adolescent mind. At first we could not spot Solveig, so Stasselova and I waited quietly in the hallway until a guy in a baseball cap came lurching toward us, shouting in a friendly way over the music that we could buy plastic glasses for the keg for two dollars apiece. Stasselova paid him and then threaded through the crowd, gracefully for such a large man, to stand in the keg line. I watched him as he patiently stood there, the snowflakes melting on his dark shoulders. And then Hans was on my arm. “What on earth?” he said. “Why are you here? I thought you hated these parties.” He’d been dancing, apparently. He was soaked in sweat, his hair curling up at his neck.

I pointed to Stasselova.

“No kidding,” Hans said.

“He showed up at my dorm as I was leaving to get Solveig.”

“He came to Mellby?”

“Yes.”

“God, look at him. I bet they had a nickname for him, like the Circus Man or something. All those old fascists had cheery nicknames.”

Stasselova was now walking toward us. Behind him the picture window revealed a nearly black sky, with pretty crystalline stars around. He looked like a dream one might have in childhood. “He is not a fascist,” I said quietly.

“Professor!” Hans raised his glass.

“Hans, yes, how are you? This is a wonderful party,” Stasselova said, and it actually was. Sometimes these parties could seem deeply cozy, their wildness and noise an affirmation against the formless white midwestern winter surrounding us.

He handed me a beer. “So,” he said rather formally, lifting his glass. “To youth.”

“To experience,” Hans said, smiling, and lifted his glass.

“To the party.” Stasselova looked pleased, his eyes shining from the soft lamplight.

“The Party?” Hans raised an eyebrow.

“This party,” Stasselova said forcefully, cheerfully.

“And to the committee,” Hans said.

“The committee?”

“The Committee for Political Responsibility.”

In one of Stasselova’s lectures he had taken great pains to explain to us that language did not describe events, it handled them, as a hand handles an object, and that in this way language made the world happen under its supervision. I could see that Hans had taken this to heart and was making lurching attempts in this direction.

Mercifully, Solveig appeared. Her drunkenness and her dignity had synergized into something quite spectacular, an inner recklessness accompanied by great external restraint. Her hair looked the color of heat—bright white. She was wearing newly cut-off jeans and was absently holding the disassociated pant legs in her hand.

“The professor,” she said, when she saw Stasselova. “The professor of oppression.”

“Hello, Solveig.”

“So you came,” she said, as if this had been the plan all along.

“Yes. It’s nice to see you again.”

“You as well,” she said. “Why are you here?”

The whole scene looked deeply romantic to me. “To take you home,” he said.

“Home?” she said, as if this were the most elegant and promising word in the language. “Yours or mine?”

“Yours, of course. Yours and Margaret’s.”

“Where is your home again?” she asked. Her eyes were glimmering with complexity, like something that is given to human beings after evolution, as a gift.

“I live downtown,” he said.

“No, your real home. Your homeland.”

He paused. “I am from Poland,” he said finally.

“Then there. Let’s go there. I have always wanted to go to Poland.”

Stasselova smiled. “Perhaps you would like it there.”

“I have always wanted to see Wenceslaus Square.”

“Well, that is nearby.”

“Excellent. Let us go.” And Solveig swung open the front door and walked into the snow in her shorts and T-shirt. I kissed Hans good-bye, and Stasselova and I followed her.

Once outside, Stasselova took off his coat and hung it around Solveig. Underneath his coat he was wearing a dark jacket and a tie. It looked sweet and made me think that if one kept undressing him, darker and darker suits would be found underneath.

Solveig was walking before us on the narrow sidewalk. Above her, on the hill, hovered Humanities—great, intelligent, alight. She reached into the coat pocket and pulled out, to my astonishment, a fur hat. The hat! The wind lifted, and the trees shook off a little of their silver snow. Humanities leaned over us, interested in its loving but secular way. I felt as sure about everything as those archaeologists who discover a single bone and can then hypothesize the entire animal. Solveig placed the hat on her head and turned to vamp for a moment, opening and closing the coat and raising her arms above her head in an exaggerated gesture of beauty. She looked like some stirring, turning simulacrum of communist and capitalist ideas. As she was doing this, we passed by the president’s house. It was an old-fashioned house, with high turrets, and had a bizarre modern wing hanging off one end of it. Solveig studied it for a moment as she walked, and then suddenly shouted into the cold night, “Motherfucker!”

Stasselova looked as if he’d been clubbed again in the back of the head, but he kept walking. He pretended that nothing had happened, didn’t even turn his head to look at the house, but when I turned to him, I saw his eyes widen and his face stiffen with shock. I said “Oh” quietly and grabbed his hand for a moment to comfort him, to let him know that everything was under control, that this was Minnesota. Look—the president’s house is still as dark as death, the moon is still high, the snow sparkling everywhere.

His hand was extraordinarily big. After Hans’s hand, which I’d held for the past few months, Stasselova’s more ordinary hand felt strange, almost mutant, its five fingers splayed and independent.

THE NEXT NIGHT, IN
the cafeteria, over a grisly neon dish called Festival Rice, I told Hans about the hat. “I saw the hat,” I said. A freshman across the cafeteria stood just then and shouted, in what was a St. Gustav tradition,
“I want a standing ovation!”
The entire room stood and erupted into wild applause and hooting. Hans and I stood as well, and as we clapped, I leaned over to yell, “He’s been telling the truth about that night overlooking Warsaw: I saw the hat he was wearing.”

“What does that mean? That means nothing. I have a fur hat.”

“No,” I said. “It was this big Russian hat. You should have seen it. This big, beautiful Russian hat. Solveig put it on. It saved his life.”

Hans didn’t even try to object; he just kind of gasped, as if the great gears of logic in his brain could not pass this syllogism through. We were still standing, clapping, applauding. I couldn’t help thinking of something Stasselova had said in class: that at rallies for Stalin, when he spoke to crowds over loudspeakers, one could be shot for being the first to stop clapping.

I AVOIDED MY PAPER
for the next month or so, until spring crashed in huge warm waves and I finally sought it out, sunk in its darkened drawer. It was a horrible surprise. I was not any more of a scholar, of course, than I had been six months earlier, when I’d plagiarized it, but my eyes had now passed over Marx and a biography of Stalin (microphones lodged in eyeglasses, streams of censors on their way to work, bloody corpses radiating out of Moscow) and the gentle Bonhoeffer. Almost miraculously I had crossed that invisible line beyond which people turn into actual readers, when they start to hear the voice of the writer as clearly as in a conversation. “Language,” Tretsky had written, “is essentially a coercive act, and in the case of Eastern Europe it must be used as a tool to garden collective hopes and aspirations.” As I read, with Solveig napping at the other end of the couch, I felt a thick dread forming. Tretsky, with his suggestions of annexations and, worse, of
solutions,
seemed to be reaching right off the page, his long, thin hand grasping me by the shirt. And I could almost hear the wild mazurka, as Stasselova had described it, fading, the cabarets closing down, the music turning into a chant, the boot heels falling, the language fortifying itself, becoming a stronghold—a fixed, unchanging system, as the paper said, a moral framework.

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY I WAS
on my way to Stasselova’s office, but not before my mother called. The golden brochures had gone out in the mail. “Sweetie!” she said. “What’s this? Keynote speaker? Your father and I are beside ourselves. Good night!” She always exclaimed “Good night!” at times of great happiness. I could not dissuade her from coming, and as I fled the dorm, into the rare, hybrid air of early April, I was wishing for those bad, indifferent parents who had no real interest in their children’s lives. The earth under my feet as I went to him was very sticky, almost lugubrious, like the earth one sometimes encounters in dreams. Stasselova was there, as always. He seemed pleased to see me.

I sat down and said, “You know, I was thinking that maybe somebody else could take my place at the symposium. As I reread my paper, I realized it isn’t really what I meant to say at all.”

“Oh,” he said. “Of course you can deliver it. I would not abandon you at a moment like this.”

“Really, I wouldn’t take it as abandonment.”

“I would not leave you in the lurch,” he said. “I promise.”

I felt myself being carried, mysteriously, into the doomed symposium, despite my resolve on the way over to back out at all costs. How could I win an argument against somebody with an early training in propaganda? I had to resort finally to the truth, that rinky-dink little boat in the great sea of persuasion. “See, I didn’t really write the paper myself.”

“Well, every thinker builds an idea on the backs of those before him—or her, in your case.” He smiled at this. His teeth were very square, and humble, with small gaps between them. I could see that Stasselova was no longer after a confession. I was more valuable if I contained these ideas. Probably he’d been subconsciously looking for me ever since he’d lain on the muddy banks of the Vistula, Warsaw flaming across the waters. He could see within me all his failed ideals, the ugliness of his former beliefs contained in a benign vessel—a girl!—high on a religious hill in the Midwest. He had found somebody he might oppose and in this way absolve himself. He smiled. I could feel myself as indispensable in the organization of his psyche. Behind his head, in the sunset, the sun wasn’t falling, only receding farther and farther.

THE DAYS BEFORE THE
symposium unfurled like the days before a wedding one dreads, both endless and accelerated, the sky filled with springtime events—ravishing sun, great winds, and eccentric green storms that focused everyone’s attention skyward. And then the weekend of the symposium was upon us, the Saturday of my speech rising in the east. I awoke early and went to practice my paper on the red steps of Humanities, in whose auditorium my talk was to take place. Solveig was still sleeping, hung over from the night before. I’d been with her for the first part of it, had watched her pursue a man she’d discovered—a graduate student, actually, in town for the symposium. I had thought him a bit of a bore, but I trusted Solveig’s judgment. She approached men with stealth and insight, her vision driving into those truer, more isolated stretches of personality. I had practiced the paper countless times, and revised it, attempting to excise the most offensive lines without gutting the paper entirely and thus disappointing Stasselova. That morning I was still debating over the line “If we could agree on a common language, a single human tongue, perhaps then a single flag might fly over the excellent earth, one nation of like and companion souls.” Reading it now, I had a faint memory of my earlier enthusiasm for this paper, its surface promise, its murderous innocence. Remembering this, I looked out over the excellent earth, at the town below the hill. And there, as always, was a tiny Gothic graveyard looking peaceful, everything still and settled finally under the gnarled, knotty, nearly human arms of apple trees. There were no apples yet, of course: they were making their way down the bough, still liquid, or whatever they are before birth. At the sight of graves I couldn’t help thinking of Tretsky, my ghostwriter, in his dark suit under the earth, delightedly preparing, thanks to me, for his one last gasp.

By noon the auditorium had filled with a crowd of about two hundred, mostly graduate students and professors from around the Midwest, along with Hans and Solveig, who sat together, and, two rows behind them, my long-suffering parents, flushed with pride. I sat alone on a slight stage at the front of the room, staring out at the auditorium, which was named Luther. It had wooden walls and was extremely tall; it seemed humble and a little awkward, in that way the tall can seem. The windows stretched its full height, so that one could see the swell of earth on which Humanities was built, and then, above, all manner of weather, which this afternoon was running to rain. In front of these windows stood the reformed genius of martial law himself, the master of ceremonies, Stasselova. Behind him were maple trees, with small green leaves waving. He had always insisted in class that language as it rises in the mind looks like a tree branching, from finity to infinity. Let every voice cry out! He had once said this, kind of absently, and water had come to his eyes—not exactly tears, just a rising of the body’s water into the line of sight.