Authors: Paul Auster
At some point, Kitty’s mother died, although Zimmer was unclear as to the causes or circumstances. The general was past eighty then and in failing health, but in a last flurry of concern for his youngest daughter, he arranged to have her sent to boarding school in America. Kitty was just fourteen when she arrived in Massachusetts to enter the freshman class of the Fielding Academy. Given who she was, it did not take her long to fit in and find a place for herself. She acted and danced, she made friends, she studied hard enough to get decent grades. By the time her four years there had ended, she knew that she would not be going back to Japan. Nor to Taiwan for that matter, or anywhere else. America had become her country, and by juggling the small inheritance she received after her father’s death, she had managed to cover the tuition costs at Juilliard and move to New York. She had been in the city for more than a year now and was just starting her second full year of classes.
“It sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Zimmer asked.
“Familiar?” I said. “It’s one of the most exotic stories I’ve ever heard.”
“Only on the surface. Scratch away some of the local color, and it boils down to almost the same story of someone else I know. Give or take a few details, of course.”
“Mmm, yes, I see what you mean. Orphans in the storm, that kind of thing.”
“Exactly.”
I paused for a moment to consider what Zimmer had said. “I suppose there are certain resemblances,” I finally added. “But do you think she’s telling the truth?”
“I have no way of knowing for sure. But based on what I’ve seen of her so far, I’d be pretty shocked if she wasn’t.”
I took another sip of beer and nodded. Much later, when I got to know her better, I learned that Kitty never lied about anything.
T
he longer I stayed with Zimmer, the more uncomfortable I began to feel. He footed the bill for my recovery, and while he never complained about it, I knew his finances were not so solid that he could go on doing it much longer. Zimmer received a little help from his family in New Jersey, but basically he had to fend for himself. Around the twentieth of the month, he began graduate school at Columbia in comparative literature. The university had lured him into the program with a fellowship—free tuition plus a two-thousand-dollar stipend—but even if that was a nice sum back in those days, it was hardly enough to live on for a year. Still, he went on taking care of me, dipping into his meager savings without compunction. Generous as Zimmer was, there must have been more to it than pure altruism. Going back to our first year together as roommates, I had always felt that he was somewhat intimidated by me, overwhelmed, so to speak, by the sheer intensity of my follies. Now that I had fallen on hard times, perhaps he saw it as an opportunity to gain the upper hand, to copy the internal balance of our friendship. I doubt that Zimmer himself was even aware of it, but a certain edgy superiority had crept into his voice when he spoke to me now, and it was hard not to sense the pleasure he got from teasing me. I bore with it, however, and did not take offense. My estimation of myself had sunk so low by then that I
secretly welcomed his badgering as a form of justice, as a richly deserved punishment for my sins.
Zimmer was a small, wiry person with curly black hair and a contained, upcopy posture. He wore the metal-rimmed glasses that were common among students back then and was in the early stages of growing a beard, which made him look something like a young rabbi. Of all the undergraduates I had known at Columbia, he was the most brilliant and conscientious, and there was no doubt that he had it in him to become a fine scholar if he stuck with it. We shared the same passion for obscure and forgotten books (Lycophron’s
Cassandra
, Giordano Bruno’s philosophical dialogues, the notebooks of Joseph Joubert, to mention just some of the things we discovered together), but whereas I tended to be crazily enthusiastic and scattered about these works, Zimmer was thorough and systematic, penetrating to a degree that often astonished me. For all that, he did not take any special pride in his critical talents, dismissing them as something of secondary importance. Zimmer’s chief concern in life was writing poetry, and he spent long, hard hours at it, laboring over each word as if the fate of the world hung in the balance—which is surely the only sensible way to go about it. In many respects, Zimmer’s poems resembled his body: compact, tightly sprung, inhibited. His ideas were so densely woven together that it was often difficult to make sense of them. Still, I admired the strangeness of the poems and the flintlike quality of their language. Zimmer trusted my opinions, and I was always as honest as possible when he asked for them, encouraging him as best I could, but at the same time refusing to mince words when something felt wrong to me. I had no literary ambitions of my own, and that probably made it easier. If I criticized his work, he knew it was not because of some unspoken competition between us.
He had been in love with the same person for the past two or three years, a girl by the name of Anna Bloom or Blume, I was never sure of the spelling. She had grown up across the street from Zimmer in the New Jersey suburbs and had been in the same
class as his sister, which meant that she was a couple of years younger than he was. I had met her only once or twice, a diminutive, dark-haired girl with a pretty face and a bristling, animated personality, and had suspected that she was probably a bit too much for Zimmer’s studious nature to handle. Earlier in the summer, she had suddenly taken off to join her older brother, William, who worked as a journalist in some foreign country, and since then Zimmer had not received a word from her—not a letter, not a postcard, nothing. As the weeks went by, he grew more and more desperate over this silence. Every day began with the same ritual of going downstairs to check the mailbox, and each time he went in or out of the building there would be another obsessive opening and closing of the empty box. This could happen at any hour, even as late as two or three in the morning, when there was no earthly chance that anything new could have arrived. But Zimmer was powerless to resist the temptation. Many times, returning home from the White Horse Tavern around the corner, the two of us half-drunk on beer, I would have to witness the painful sight of my friend fumbling for his mailbox key and then blindly reaching out his hand for something that was not there, for something that would never be there. Perhaps that was why Zimmer endured my presence in his apartment for so long. If nothing else, I was someone to talk to and to distract him from his troubles, an odd and unpredictable form of comic relief.
Still, I was a drain on his funds, and the longer he did not say anything about it, the worse I felt. My plan was to go out looking for a job as soon as I was strong enough (any job, it didn’t matter what it was) and start paying back the money he had spent on me. That didn’t solve the problem of finding another place to live, but at least I persuaded Zimmer to let me spend the nights on the floor so he could go back to sleeping in his own bed. A couple of days after we switched rooms, he started his classes at Columbia. One night during the first week, he came home with a large bundle of papers and grimly announced that a friend of his in the French department had been hired to do a rush translation
which she now realized she didn’t have time to do. Zimmer had asked if she would be willing to farm it out to him, and she had agreed. That was how the manuscript entered the house, a tedious document of about a hundred pages concerning the structural reorganization of the French consulate in New York. The moment Zimmer started telling me about it, I understood that I had found a chance to make myself useful. My French was as good as his, I explained, and since I wasn’t terribly pressed with responsibilities at the moment, why didn’t he hand the translation over to me and let me take care of it? Zimmer objected, but I was expecting that, and little by little I wore down his resistance. I wanted to square our account, I said, and doing this job was the quickest, most practical way to go about it. I would turn the money over to him, two or three hundred dollars, and at that point we would be even again. This last argument was the one that finally convinced him. Zimmer enjoyed playing the role of martyr, but once he understood that my own well-being was at stake, he relented.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose we could split the money if it’s so important.”
“No,” I said, “you still don’t understand. All the money goes to you. It wouldn’t make sense any other way. Every penny goes to you.”
I got what I wanted, and for the first time in months I began to feel there was a purpose to my life again. Zimmer would wake up early to go uptown to Columbia, and for the rest of the day I was left to my own devices, free to plant myself at his desk and work without interruption. The text was abominable, filled with all kinds of bureaucratic gibberish, but the more trouble it gave me, the more defiantly I stuck to the task, refusing to let go of it until some semblance of meaning began to shine through the clumsy, garbled sentences. The difficulty of the job was what encouraged me. If the translation had been easier, I would not have felt that I was performing an adequate penance for my past mistakes. In some sense, then, the utter uselessness of the project was what
gave it its value. I felt like someone who had been sentenced to a term of hard labor on a chain gang. My job was to take a hammer and smash stones into smaller stones, and once those stones had been smashed, to smash them into even smaller stones. There was no purpose to this labor. But the fact was that I wasn’t interested in results. The labor was an end in itself, and I threw myself into it with all the determination of a model prisoner.
On days when the weather was good, I would sometimes go out for a brief stroll around the neighborhood to clear my head. It was October now, the best month of the year in New York, and I took pleasure in studying the early fall light, watching how it seemed to take on a new clarity as it slanted against the brick buildings. It was no longer summer, but winter still felt a long way off, and I savored this balance between hot and cold. Everywhere I went during those days, the streets were filled with talk of the Mets. It was one of those rare moments of unanimity when everyone was thinking about the same thing. People walked around with transistor radios tuned to the game, large crowds gathered in front of appliance store windows to watch the action on silent televisions, sudden cheers would erupt from corner bars, from apartment windows, from invisible rooftops. First it was Atlanta in the playoffs, and then it was Baltimore in the Series. Out of eight October games, the Mets lost only once, and when the adventure was over, New York held another ticker-tape parade, this one even surpassing the extravaganza that had been thrown for the astronauts two months earlier. More than five hundred tons of paper fell into the streets that day, a record that has not been matched since.
I took to eating my lunches in Abingdon Square, a little park about a block and a half east of Zimmer’s apartment. There was a rudimentary playground for children in there, and I enjoyed the contrast between the dead language of the report I was translating and the furious, hell-bent energy of the toddlers who stormed and squealed around me. I found that it helped to focus my concentration, and on several occasions I even took my work out there
and translated while sitting in the midst of that bedlam. As it turned out, it was on one of those afternoons in mid-October that I finally saw Kitty Wu again. I was battling my way through a sticky passage, and I did not notice her until she had already sat down on the bench beside me. This was the first time I had seen her since Zimmer’s lecture in the bar, and the suddenness of the encounter caught me with my guard down. I had spent the past few weeks imagining all the brilliant things I would say when I saw her again, but now that she was there in the flesh, I could barely get a word out of my mouth.
“Hello there, Mr. Writer,” she said. “It’s good to see you up and about again.”
She was wearing sunglasses this time, and her lips were painted a bcopy shade of red. Because her eyes were invisible behind the dark lenses, it was all I could do not to stare directly at her mouth.
“I’m not really writing,” I said. “It’s a translation. Something I’m doing to earn a little money.”
“I know. I ran into David yesterday, and he told me about it.”
Bit by bit, I found myself relaxing into the conversation. Kitty had a natural talent for drawing people out of themselves, and it was easy to fall in with her, to feel comfortable in her presence. As Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone. A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws. That’s what Kitty did. She kept lobbing the ball straight into the pocket of my glove, and when I threw the ball back to her, she hauled in everything that was even remotely in her area: jumping up to spear balls that soared above her head, diving nimbly to her left or copy, charging in to make tumbling, shoestring catches. More than that, her skill was such that she always made me feel that I had made those bad throws on purpose, as if my only object had been to make the game more amusing. She made me seem better than
I was, and that strengthened my confidence, which in turn helped to make my throws less difficult for her to handle. In other words, I started talking to her rather than to myself, and the pleasure of it was greater than anything I had experienced in a long time.
As we went on talking there in the October sunlight, I began trying to think of ways to prolong the conversation. I was too excited and happy to want it to end, and the fact that Kitty was carrying a large shoulder bag with bits of dance paraphernalia sticking out from the top—a leotard sleeve, a sweatshirt collar, the corner of a towel—made me worry that she was about to get up and rush off to another appointment. There was a hint of chill in the air, and after twenty minutes of talking on the bench, I noticed her shiver ever so slightly. Plucking up my courage, I made some remark about how it was getting cold, and perhaps we should go back to Zimmer’s apartment where I could make us some hot coffee. Miraculously, Kitty nodded and said she thought that was a good idea.