“What did you say to her?” Alpha asked him
“Say?” said Alfred. “Nothing. She was across the street on the other sidewalk.”
Trying to imagine an impossibility hurts the head. Having failed to envisage Alfred falling over a stroller that was on the other sidewalk, Alpha chose to assume that she had missed or misunderstood some part of what he had told her.
Alfred came to remember not what had happened but what he said had happened. The unspoken words he owed the widow displaced themselves into his chest and gave him heartburn.
Night Conversation
“Celie left a casserole. Alfred fell into Maggie’s stroller,” Ilka reported to the Shakespeares, when they called that night.
Leslie said, “Eliza says, What did Alfred say?”
“He slapped his forehead the way you’re supposed to slap your forehead when you remember something you’ve forgotten—and ran across the street to the other sidewalk. Poor Alfred! He’s so beautiful.”
Eliza took the phone from Leslie. “Why ‘poor Alfred’ when he’s behaving like a heel?”
Ilka said, “Because Jimmy’s death is making him shy of me. He thinks it’s impolite of him to be standing upright.”
Eliza said, “The good lord intended Alfred to be your basic shit, and Alfred went into medicine in the hope of turning into a human being.”
“Doesn’t he get points for hoping?”
“Why can’t you just be offended?”
“Don’t know,” said Ilka again. “I mean people can’t help being shits.”
“You sound like Jimmy,” said Eliza. Ilka listened and heard the sound, over the telephone, of Eliza weeping for Ilka’s husband.
Inviting the Widow
Nancy said, “We’ll have her in when we have people over. The Stones are coming Sunday. Only, you think she wants to be around people?”
“Call her and ask her,” said Nat.
“You call her and ask her.”
“
I’m
not going to call her. You call her.”
“She’s
your
colleague,
you
call her.”
“I’m not well.”
“I don’t think she wants to be around people,” Nancy said. “And her mother is staying with her.”
Dr. Alfred Stone
Dr. Alfred Stone continued to mean to say to the widow what, as a doctor—as the doctor who had been on the scene of the accident—he ought and must surely be going to say to her. He always thought that by the next time he was face to face with her he was going to have found the appropriate words and blushed crimson when he walked into the Shakespeares’ kitchen and saw little
Maggie sitting on a high chair and Ilka crawling underneath the table. She said, “Hi, Alfred. Look what Maggie did to poor Eliza’s floor. And now Bethy is going to take Maggie to play in the yard so the grown-ups can sit down in peace and quiet. O.K., Bethy. She’s all yours.”
Bethy had grown bigger and bulkier. The bend of Bethy’s waist, as she buttoned the baby into her sweater, cried out to her parents, to her parents’ friends: Watch me buttoning the baby’s sweater! Bethy’s foot on the back stair into the yard pleaded, This is me taking the baby into the yard. Notice me!
Murphy’s Law seated Dr. Alfred Stone next to the widow. While the conversation was general, he tried for a sideways view of her face which was turned to Eliza on her other side. Alfred was looking for the mark on Ilka, the sign that her husband had been thrown from a burning car and had broken his neck. Alfred studied his wife across the table. Would Alpha, if he, Alfred, broke
his
neck, look so regular and ordinary? Would she laugh at something Eliza said?
As they were leaving, Alpha asked Ilka to dinner and Ilka said, “If I can get a sitter. My mother has gone back to New York.” Jenny Bernstine offered Bethy.
After that and for the next weeks, the friends and colleagues invited Ilka to their dinners. She always said yes. “I’m afraid,” she told the Shakespeares, “that my first No, thank you, will facilitate the next no and start a future of noes.” Then, one day, as she was driving herself to the Zees’, Ilka drove past their house, made a U-turn, and drove home. She insisted on paying Bethy for the full evening.
“We missed you,” Leslie said on the telephone.
“How come it gets harder instead of easier? You put on your right stocking and there’s the left stocking to still be put on, and
the right and left shoe . . .” Ilka heard Leslie tell Eliza what Ilka said.
In the morning, Ilka called Maria to apologize and Maria said, “Don’t be silly!”
“A rain check?”
“Absolutely,” said Maria. “Or you call me.”
“Absolutely,” said Ilka. But Ilka did not call her, and Maria did not call Ilka. One’s house seemed more comfortable without Ilka from Calamity.
Bethy Bernstine
The Bernstines and the Shakespeares were the true friends. Ilka loved them and missed Jimmy because he was missing Eliza’s beautiful risotto and Leslie’s wine that yielded taste upon taste on the tongue. Ilka held out her glass, watched Joe’s hand tip the bottle and thought, Joe will die, not now, not soon, but he will die. Ilka saw Jenny looking at her with her soft, anxious affection and thought, Jenny will die. “Will you forgive me,” Ilka said to them, “if I take myself home?” Of course, of course! Leslie must drive Ilka. “Absolutely not! Honestly! You would do me the greatest possible favor if you would let me go by myself.” “Joe will drive Ilka.” “Let me drive you!” said Joe. “No, no, no!” cried Ilka. They could see that she was distraught. “Let Ilka alone,” said Leslie. “Ilka will drive herself. Ilka will be fine.”
Leslie and Joe came out to put Ilka into her car. She saw them, in her rearview mirror as she drove away, two old friends standing together, talking on the sidewalk. There would be a time when both of them would have been dead for years.
Bethy was curled on the couch, warm and smelling of sleep, her skin sweet and dewy. Cruel for a sixteen-year-old to be plain—too much chin and jowl, the little, pursed, unhappy mouth. Ilka woke
Bethy with a hand on her shoulder. She helped the young girl collect herself, straighten her bones, pick her books off the floor. Ilka walked her out and stood on the sidewalk.
Maggie was sleeping on her back, arms above her head, palms curled. In her throat, and behind her eyes, Ilka felt the tears she could not begin to cry. Ilka feared that beast in the jungle which might, some day, stop the tears from stopping.
When Leslie called to make sure she had got home, Ilka said, “I’ve been doing arithmetic. Subtract the age I am from the age at which I’m likely to die and it seems like a hell of a lot of years.”
Though the words Dr. Alfred Stone had failed to say to Ilka had become inappropriate and could never be said, he tended, when they were in the same room, to move along the wall at the furthest remove from where Ilka might be moving or standing or sitting.
The Howling
REVERSE BUG
“
L
et’s get the announcements out of the way,” said Ilka toto her students in Conversational English. “Tomorrow evening the institute is holding a symposium. Ahmed,” she asked the Turkish student with the magnificently drooping mustache, “where are they holding the symposium?”
“In the New Theater,” said Ahmed.
“The theme,” said the teacher, “is ‘Should there be a statute of limitations on genocide?’ with a wine and cheese reception . . .”
“. . . In the lounge . . . ,” said Ahmed.
“. . . To which you are all invited. Now,” Ilka said in the too-bright voice of a hostess trying to make a sluggish dinner party go, “what shall we talk about? Doesn’t do me a bit of good, I know, to ask you all to come forward and sit in a nice cozy clump.”
Matsue, an older Japanese from the university’s engineering department, sat in his place by the window; Izmira, the Cypriot doctor, had left the usual two empty rows between herself and Ahmed, the Turk. Juan, the Basque, sat in the rightmost corner and Eduardo, the Spaniard from Madrid, in the leftmost. “Who would like to start us off? Somebody tell us a story. Everybody likes stories. Tell the class how you came to America.”
The teacher looked determinedly past the hand, the arm, with which Gerti Gruner stirred the air—death, taxes, and Thursdays, Gerti Gruner in the front row center. Ilka’s eye passed mercifully over Paulino, who sat in the last row, with his back to the wall. Matsue smiled pleasantly at Ilka and shook his head. He meant “Please, not me!” Ilka looked around for someone too shy to self-start who might enjoy talking if called upon, but Gerti’s hand stabbed the air immediately under the teacher’s chin, so Ilka said, “Gerti wants to start. Go, Gerti. When did you come to the United States?”
“In last June,” said Gerti.
Ilka corrected her, and said, “Tell the class where you are from, and, everybody, please speak in whole sentences.”
Gerti said, “I have lived twenty years in Uruguay and before in Vienna.”
“We would say,
‘Before that I lived
’,” said Ilka, and Gerti said,
“And
before that
in Vienna.”
Ilka corrected her. Gerti’s story bore a family likeness to the teacher’s own superannuated, indigestible history of being sent out of Hitler’s Europe as a child.
Gerti said, “In the Vienna train station has my father told to me . . .”
“
Told me
.”
“
Told me
that so soon as I am coming to Montevideo . . .”
Ilka said, “
As
soon as I
come
, or more colloquially
get
to Montevideo . . .”
Gerti said, “
Get
to Montevideo, I should tell to all the people . . .”
Ilka corrected her. Gerti said, “. . . tell all the people to bring out my father from Vienna before come the Nazis and put him in concentration camp.”
Ilka said, “In
the
or
a
concentration camp.”
“Also my mother,” said Gerti, “and my Opa, and my Oma, and my Onkel Peter, and the cousins Hedi and Albert and Roserl. My father has told, ‘Tell to the foster mother, “Go, please, with me, to the American consulate.’ ””
“My father went to the American consulate,” said Paulino, and everybody turned and looked at him. Paulino’s voice had not been heard in class since the first Thursday, when Ilka had got her students to go around the room and introduce themselves to one another. Paulino had said his name was Paulino Patillo and that he was born in Bolivia. Ilka was charmed to realize it was Danny Kaye of whom Paulino reminded her—fair, curly, middle-aged, smiling. He came punctually every Thursday—a very sweet, perhaps a very simple man.
Ilka said, “Paulino will tell us his story
after
Gerti has finished. How old were you when you left Europe?” Ilka asked, to reactivate Gerti, who said, “Eight years,” but she, and the rest of the class, and the teacher herself, were watching Paulino put his right hand inside the left breast pocket of his jacket, withdraw a legal-size envelope, turn it upside down, and shake out onto the desk before him a pile of news clippings. Some looked new, some frayed and yellow; some seemed to be single paragraphs, others the length of several columns.
“And so you got to Montevideo . . . ,” Ilka prompted Gerti.
“And my foster mother has fetched me from the ship. I said, ‘Hello, and will you please bring out from Vienna my father before come the Nazis and put him in—
a
concentration camp!” Gerti said triumphantly.
Paulino had brought the envelope close to his eye and was looking inside. He inserted a forefinger, loosened something that was stuck, and shook out a last clipping. It broke at the fold when
Paulino flattened it onto the desk top. Paulino brushed away some paper crumbs before beginning to read: “La Paz, September 19.”
“Paulino,” said Ilka, “you must wait till Gerti is finished.”
But Paulino read, “Señora Pilar Patillo has reported the disappearance of her husband, Claudio Patillo, after a visit to the American consulate in La Paz on September 15.”
“Go on, Gerti,” said Ilka.
“The foster mother has said, ‘When comes home the Uncle from the office, we will ask.’ I said, ‘And bring out, please, also my mother, my Opa, my Oma, my Onkel . . .’ ”
Paulino read, “A spokesman for the American consulate contacted in La Paz states categorically that no record exists of a visit from Señor Patillo within the last two months . . .”
“Paulino, you really
have
to wait your turn,” Ilka said.
Gerti said, “ ‘Also the cousins.’ The foster mother has made such a desperate face with her lips so.”
Paulino read, “Nor does the consular calendar for September show any appointment made with Señor Patillo. Inquiries are said to be under way with the consulate at Sucre.” And Paulino folded his column of newsprint and returned it with delicate care into the envelope.
“O.K., thank you, Paulino,” Ilka said.
Gerti said, “When the foster father has come home, he said, ‘We will see, tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘And will you go, please, with me, to the American consulate?’ and the foster father has made a face.”
Paulino was flattening a second column of newsprint on the desk before him. He read, “New York, December 12 . . .”
“
Paulino
,” said Ilka, and caught Matsue’s eye. He was looking expressly at her. He shook his head ever so slightly and with his right hand, palm down, he patted the air three times. In the intelligible language of charade with which humankind might have frustrated God at Babel, Matsue was saying, “Let him finish.
Nothing you can do is going to stop him.” Ilka was grateful to Matsue.
“A spokesman for the Israeli Mission to the United Nations,” read Paulino, “denies a report that Claudio Patillo, missing after a visit to the American consulate in La Paz since September 15, is en route to Israel . . .” Paulino finished reading this column also, folded it into the envelope, unfolded the next column and read, “U.P.I., January 30. The car of Pilar Patillo, wife of Claudio Patillo, who was reported missing from La Paz last September, has been located at the bottom of a ravine in the eastern Andes. It is not known whether any bodies were found inside the wreck.” Paulino read with the blind forward motion of a tank that receives no message from the sound or movement in the world outside itself. The students had stopped looking at Paulino; they were not looking at the teacher. They looked into their laps. Paulino read one column after the other, returning each to his envelope before he took the next, and when he had read and returned the last, and returned the envelope to his breast pocket, he leaned his back against the wall and turned to the teacher his sweet, habitual smile of expectant participation.