Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (12 page)

“Listen to me,” said Magin.

The woman took a breath and rushed on.

“No: tk. Uurk, uursh.”

Magin turned away from her. His pain deafened him.

The woman hobbled quickly to the door and called out: “Ruckuck. Tk! No, no!” Magin heard the sound of people coming: a soft rustling and then the ground shaking outside his door.

The people crowded into the hut, filling it with the smell of burning wood and tobacco.

“Tk. Pshsht uuril,” said one man, softly.

Magin shrank from the crowd above him.

“Ning,” said the woman.

“No, tk, no pshtu tori,” said another man, bending over Magin and breathing on his face.

As each minute passed, Magin felt the need for silence more desperately, and his fear grew. He wanted to be alone, to think of Mary, to breathe, and to sleep.

There was almost no air left in the room. Magin's eyesight grew dim. With difficulty, he searched the faces above him for the white-haired old man and did not find him. The woman was smiling in a friendly way. He tried to lift his arm. It was too heavy. Fixing her with his eyes, he said in Trsk, “Bring me water.”

She did not understand, and stopped smiling.

A black-bearded man, standing near the bed, puffed on his pipe in quiet contemplation of Magin. Magin hardly breathed. His throat was dry and he could not swallow.

“Water,” he said again, hoarsely.

“Water,” answered several voices.

Then the black-bearded man said a few guttural words and the people began talking vigorously. “Uurk,” said a small man. “No, tsatet ruck!” shouted another. The dogs, who had come to the hut at the heels of the men, became excited and barked sharply, one after another, outside the door. Magin fainted.

 

When he regained consciousness the room was empty. He tried to think clearly, but his thoughts faded and slipped from his grasp. The pain had wrapped around him tightly. His throat burned. He looked across at the inner wall and followed the grain of the wood. It was dark and water-stained. He looked at the floor. Clumps of snow lay over the pocked dirt. His eyes turned up toward the ceiling, and found only deepening darkness over the beam. His eyes moved down over the outer wall, from stone to stone, until they fixed on the window. There, beyond the pane, was a crowd of faces, staring intently at him.

Startled, he turned away. He heard fingers moving over the sill. Snow rustled below the window. He tried to close his hands around the mattress, testing his strength, and waited for the voices to rise again.

It has been so long since she used a metaphor!

I like the students. I like their company. I like them here—if only they would remain in the indefinite future. They must be somewhere in my future or they will not be here for me, for company, where I can talk to them sometimes all day long. But that future must never come. Because it is so hard to meet them in the class itself. The problem is that in order to have the company of them here, in my imagination, I must pay the price of that future arriving, as it does, with all the difficulty of that encounter.

Then there is another sort of company in the letters I have not answered. If I answer the letters, those patient or impatient people waiting for answers are no longer present to me. If I answer the letters, I suppose I may be in some cases present to them, then. But, though not telling myself this is the reason, I don't answer these letters. And yet this is selfish, and of course impolite. I answer some, in fact. But most go unanswered for weeks, months, more than a year, several years, or forever. Several times, I have waited so long to answer a letter that the person has moved away. Once, I waited so long to answer a postcard that my friend died.

But maybe these people are no longer waiting for answers by now anyway; maybe their attention is no longer on me, and this company is only an illusion: the friendly or neutral words are still there on various sheets of paper in different envelopes, but in the minds of these people who wrote the unanswered letters the words for what they are thinking about me, if they think of me at all, are no longer friendly or neutral but unfriendly, dismissive, even disgusted. I believe I have this company, but I do not have it, unless believing this is enough, and I do in some form have this company, whatever they may be thinking.

When I answer one of these letters, true, sometimes all I receive in return, weeks later, is a brief, tired reply. But more often the reply comes quickly and is full, warm, even delighted; and then, just because it is so generous and such wonderful company, it may sit again on my bedside, or on my desk, or on my pile of correspondence, for weeks or months or longer before I answer it.

If they try to add and subtract to see whether the relationship is equal, it won't work. On his side, he is giving $50,000, she says. No, $70,000, he says. It doesn't matter, she says. It matters to me, he says. What she is giving is a half-grown child. Is that an asset or a liability? Now, is she supposed to feel grateful to him? She can feel grateful, but not indebted, not that she owes him something. There has to be a sense of equality. I just love to be with you, she says, and you love to be with me. I'm grateful to you for providing for us, and I know my child is sometimes a trouble to you, though you say he is a good child. But I don't know how to figure it. If I give all I have and you give all you have, isn't that a kind of equality? No, he says.

It was not possible, and yet it happened; and not suddenly, but very slowly, not a miracle, but a very natural thing, though it was impossible. A girl in our town turned into a stone. But it is true that she had not been the usual sort of girl even before that: she had been a tree. Now a tree moves in the wind. But sometime near the end of September she began not to move in the wind anymore. For weeks she moved less and less. Then she never moved. When her leaves fell they fell suddenly and with a terrible noise. They crashed onto the cobblestones and sometimes broke into fragments and sometimes remained whole. There would be a spark where they fell and a little white powder lying beside them. People, though I did not, collected her leaves and put them on the mantlepiece. There never was such a town, with stone leaves on every mantlepiece. Then she began to turn gray: at first we thought it was the light. With wrinkled foreheads, twenty of us at a time would stand in a circle around her shading our eyes, dropping our jaws—and so few teeth we had among us it was something to see—and say it was the time of day or the changing season that made her look gray. But soon it was clear that she was simply gray now, just that, the way years ago we had to admit that she was simply a tree now, and no longer a girl. But a tree is one thing and a stone is another. There are limits to what you can accept, even of impossible things.

1

The younger sister is bored in the shop and rings the bell. The older sister comes slowly down the stairs and asks the younger sister why she rang the bell.

The reason is simple: to see her come down. Because she is so fat and moves so slowly; the stairs buckle and creak under her, she has trouble breathing, she holds the banister as if it were still her father's hand, her plump knees knock against each other. It is very amusing to the younger sister and breaks the tedium of the morning.

She says none of this out loud. Out loud she says, “There has been a mistake in yesterday's figures.” But of course the older sister cannot find the mistake, though she goes over the figures many times. Her dress is tight under her arms and her ankles are swollen from standing so long.

The younger sister cannot play this trick very often, or she would be found out. But that makes it all the more exciting to her.

2

The two sisters, no longer young, are forced to sleep in the same bed. They dream of different things and carefully hide their dreams from each other in the morning. Sometimes they touch by accident in the bed and fly apart as though they had been burned. They do not sleep well and are not refreshed in the morning. One wakes early, goes to the toilet, and would like to resume sleeping. But there is no joy in going back to bed when her sister lies there already sweating like a sow in the early heat.

3

My sister with thighs like pillars. She eats her potatoes as though she would make a revolution among them, as though they were the People. No, then what is this passion of hers? It is terrifying to see her cloudy eyes become sharp when my dinner is put on the table. I am afraid she will devour not only the dinner but me and my poor life too. Beside her laughter, mine is like the cheeping of a bird in the ivy. No, she never laughs. I never laugh. Her silence, though, is so much greater than mine that mine is like a wisp of smoke in a raincloud.

4

One day the younger sister smacked the older sister in the face. She did it out of frustration and boredom with her life. She regretted it immediately. Not because she had hurt her sister, who stood paralyzed, her hand to her cheek and her hat rolling over the floor, but because now her sister would weep and moan and speak of the incident for months, to the younger sister's shame and anger. She had wanted to diminish her sister in some way, even destroy her, but instead she had given her new dignity.

5

Two sisters, like stone, who do not speak to one another. They have nothing in common but their parentage. One rises early and the other late; one will not eat animal products and the other will not eat whole grains; one has a rash in the summertime and the other cannot wear wool; one will not go to the movies for fear of strange men and the other will not watch television; in every election their votes cancel one another, and they are as no one. Only in their mutual distrust are they alike.

My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother. Sometimes she abruptly stops what she is saying to me, I hear a noise in the background, she says my name, and waits. Then I know my father has come into the room during her conversation and asked who she is talking to. Sometimes, at that point, he interjects a question for me, but often he asks her something that has nothing to do with me, while I wait at the other end of the phone. After she and I have gone on talking, he may come into the room again, having thought of something else he wants to say. When I hear his voice in the background I stop whatever I am saying to my mother and wait.

Sometimes she forces him to get on the phone. “Tell her yourself,” she says. He gets on the phone and without saying hello tells me what it is he wants me to know and then gets off without saying goodbye. Back on the phone, she says, “He's gone.”

Although he has never liked to talk on the phone, he has always liked to write letters. He usually prefers to write a letter that includes some kind of instruction, or at least a transmission of what he thinks will be new information. For a while, we carried on a correspondence whose regularity was unusual for my family, in which very little has ever been regular or systematic. Then I didn't hear from him for some weeks. Maybe I was the one who did not answer his last letter. I told my mother to tell him I would like to hear from him, and he then sent me some clippings from the Crime Beat section of their local paper. In the top margin he had written: “The underside of Cambridge life.” Some entries he had marked with a dark line of ink down the side margin.

“…A Jefferson Park man entered the dispute, slashing the teen just below the right eye with an unidentified weapon. While this happened, the Jackson Circle man stole the bike. Later, police found a Jackson Street man riding the bike. Police arrested the Jackson Circle man, Jackson Street man and Jefferson Park man and charged them with assault with a dangerous weapon (knife) and armed robbery.”

On another clipping he had underlined certain sentences:

“Police officers recovered two martial arts swords and a meat cleaver.”

“At 10 pm an employee of the Cantab Lounge reported that a suspect who had been shut off at the bar assaulted her by throwing a glass at her.”

“A Cambridge resident reported that he was assaulted with a fingernail clipper by a suspect who was throwing trash around the doorway at Eddy's Place.”

“A Rindge Avenue resident reported that her daughter hit her over the head with a glass.”

“A Rindge Avenue resident reported that she was assaulted with a large pin by two other neighborhood residents.”

In the top margin of this clipping he had written: “Strange weapons dept.”

After this he sent me an article he had written. He occasionally wrote an article or a letter to a newspaper about something that had come up in connection with the Bible or some other religious topic. The articles and letters were clever, and by now I was interested in the Bible and religious topics myself.

This one, on circumcision, was called “The Unkindest Cut” and opened with a sentence about the “male organ.” In his thin, shaky handwriting, he had noted in the margin at the top of the article that I shouldn't feel I had to read this, nor should my husband feel he had to read it. He was sincere, but he often attached disclaimers to the articles and letters he sent and I generally disregarded them.

Yet when I tried to read the article, I found it hard to read so much about the male organ as written by my father. I asked my husband if he would read it and tell me the gist of it but he did not really want to read it either. I did not know what to do about this situation, since it would have been awkward even to mention it to my father, but in time, as I took no action, I began to forget it. My father had probably forgotten it long before, since his memory has become more and more undependable, as he and my mother both point out.

But the letters he was sending me for a while were about the household he grew up in: besides his mother and father, there were two grandmothers and a grandfather who was slightly mad, maids, cooks, and cleaning women who came and went, and his grandmothers' female nurse-companions and his grandfather's male nurse-companions, who also came and went. His father's mother owned the house and dominated it, to his mother's annoyance. I have seen this house, which still stands in a street not far from where they live, and it looks to me surprisingly modest to have held such a number and variety of people. The last time it was sold, he read about the sale in the paper and wrote to the new owners, explaining that he had been born in the upstairs front room and had played in the hayloft of the small barn. The new owners were pleased to hear from him and sent him photographs of the house.

He would write to me in some detail and in the midst of it apologize, saying that what lay immediately ahead would be tedious and that I could read fast or skim if I liked. He said he was trying to recover facts that he had not thought of for most of a century. But I would write back asking for even more detail, because I wanted to come as close as I could to a way of life that seemed to me precious for several reasons, one being simply that even the memory of it was slipping away, because fewer and fewer people were alive who had experienced it.

Most recently we had gotten into a correspondence about the furnace in the house where he grew up. He said that while he lived there, changes had occurred, but they were all additions, and what was there to begin with remained. For instance, a gas stove was installed in the kitchen alongside the coal stove. His grandmother felt that for certain things the coal stove was more economical. A new oil furnace was added in the basement, but the huge old coal furnace remained. At some point electricity was added to gas for lighting. His grandmother kept both because in a storm, she warned them, the electricity might fail.

He remembered how one of the cleaning women used to comb her long hair in the kitchen at the end of the day, so that she could go forth suitably neat. She would then extract the hairs from the comb and put them, not in the stove, which required the effort of lifting one of the iron covers, but on top of the stove, where they burned to an ash that remained visible until someone thought to remove it.

In the early days, he said, a “furnace man” would come at about seven in the morning to shake down the big furnace, remove ashes and clinkers, and shovel more coal in from one of the two big bins whose board sides projected into the cellar, resting on the cellar floor. An early furnace man was named Frank and his grandmother continued to call subsequent ones “Frank” as her memory for names weakened. The furnace was a matter of constant concern in very cold weather. Even when his father was home, his grandmother would go down to investigate, and then, in order to force his father to act, would do something deliberately noisy to it. He would shout “Mother, Mother,” pounding on the floor with his foot, and rush down the cellar stairs. She was not supposed to go down them, for they had no banisters, and there was a drop on either side to the cellar floor below. The only lighting came from the open door of the kitchen, from tiny dirty outdoor windows at ground level, and from a gas pipe that came down from the ceiling and supplied the same kind of feeble, naked flame that his mother used in her room to heat her curling iron.

On ash collection days the furnace man lifted the barrels up the steps of the bulkhead. In winter, a boardwalk was put down from the street in front to the bulkhead. Along this, or in the soft gravel when the walk was not in place, the furnace-man, on the days of the city collection, rotated the tilted ash barrels. To bring the coal in, along the same boardwalk, required a two-man team: one man would shovel the coal into a container on the back of the second man, who would carry it into the yard, unshoulder it with a twist of his body, and dump it down the chute. Coal delivery was by horse and wagon when my father was a child. He said on a normal working day there would be at least three horses and wagons on his street, delivering ice, coal, milk, groceries, fruits and vegetables, or express packages, or peddling, or buying old newspapers or old iron. There was also a horse-drawn hurdy-gurdy.

What he said about his furnace and all the trappings of the furnace made me go down and look more carefully at our own furnace. Our house is either a hundred years old or a hundred and fifty, depending on which town historical document we believe. This furnace was converted to gas from coal probably forty years ago. The trappings were still there, a coal hod on the floor of the coal bin and, hanging on the wall, pronged iron bars for opening the hatches. I looked up and saw two long, stout boards stowed above the coal bin. Now that I had read what my father wrote about the men bringing the coal in across the snow, I had no doubt these boards were put down for the coal delivery here too. I was excited to discover this.

I wrote back to my father about what I had discovered, knowing that for several reasons he would be less interested in my coal furnace than his memories of his own. It is natural for an old man to be engrossed in his memories and less interested in the present. But he has always been more interested in his own ideas than anyone else's.

Although he likes to have conversations with other people and hear what they say, he does not know what to do with an idea of someone else's except to use it as a starting point from which to produce an even better idea of his own. His own ideas are certainly interesting, often the most interesting in a given situation. He has always been interesting at a dinner party, even though as he aged, a time came when he would have to leave the table part of the way through and go lie down for a while.

Dinner parties were an important part of the life my mother and father had together from the very beginning. There was a skill to taking part in a dinner party, and a technique to giving one, especially to guiding the conversation at the table. There was an art to encouraging a shy guest, or subduing a noisy one. My mother and father are still sociable, but they are handicapped by their age now and limit what they do. Now they have people in for tea more often than dinner, and at a certain point during the tea, also, my father leaves the room to go lie down.

Though my mother still goes out to concerts and lectures, my father rarely does. One of the last events they went to together was a grand birthday party held in a public library. Four hundred guests were invited, coming from around the world. My mother told me about it, including the fact that during the party my father fell down. He was not hurt. She was not in the same room with him when he fell.

He is unsteady on his feet, and has fallen or come close to falling quite often in the last few years. I was present when a health technician came to give advice about rearranging the apartment so that it would be safer for the two of them. The health technician observed my father there in the apartment for a while. My father's head is large and heavy and his body is thin and frail. The technician said he noticed that my father tended to toss his head back, and this threw him off balance. The technician said he should try to change that habit and also use his walker in the house. Although the technician was friendly and helpful, he was very energetic and spoke in a loud voice, and toward the end of the visit my father became too agitated to stay in his company any longer and left to go lie down. After that visit, my mother told me, my father tried to remember to use his walker but tended to leave it here and there in the apartment and then had to walk around without it to find it again.

If I ask my mother, on the telephone, how my father is, she often lowers her voice to answer. She often says she is worried about him. She has been worried for years. She is always worried about some recent or new behavior of his. She does not seem to realize that this behavior is not always recent or new, or that she is always worried about something. Sometimes she is worried because he is depressed. For a while she was worried because he so often became hysterically angry. Not long ago she said he seemed to take an unnatural interest in their Scrabble games. After that she said he was losing his memory, did not remember incidents from their life together, kept referring to one family member by the name of another, and sometimes did not recognize a name at all.

He had to stay in a rehabilitation hospital for a while after his last fall, to have some physical therapy. To my mother's astonishment, he did not mind playing catch with the other patients in the physical therapy group, or tossing a beanbag in a contest. She said this was not like him: she wondered if he was regressing to a childish state. She suspected that he had enjoyed the attention there, and the food. Since his return home, she told me, he had not been eating very well. She was upset because he did not seem to like her cooking anymore. On the other hand he did finish a piece of writing he was working on.

A year ago, when my mother herself was in the hospital with a serious illness, he and I went out to look for a restaurant where we could have supper before going back to sit with my mother. It was a cold, windy night in May. We were downtown in the city, in a neighborhood of hospitals, tall well-lighted buildings all around us. There were walkways over our heads, and underground garages opening on all sides, but no restaurants that I could see. Stores were closed, not many cars went by on the streets and almost no people walked on the sidewalk. My father was unsteady on his feet and I was watching for every curb and uneven piece of pavement. He was determined to find a restaurant where he could have an alcoholic drink. At last, we entered a passageway in one of the tall buildings, walking into what looked from the outside to be a deserted mall. Going down an empty corridor and past some empty store windows and up some steps, we found a restaurant with a bar and an amount of good cheer and number of lively customers surprising after the empty streets outside. We sat down at a table and talked a little, but my father's mind was on his drink and he kept looking for the waiter, who was too busy to come to our table. I was thinking that this dinner was likely to be the last one I would have in a restaurant with my father, and certainly the least festive.