The Liar's Wife (19 page)

When the lights go down, the beam from the projector traps smoke; it hangs like a heavy cloud, and then disperses, climbing to the high ceilings. This room is also a gymnasium; the smoke makes its way through the orange rims, the grayish netting of the baskets through which boys (Aaron one day?) throw those big ugly brown balls.

Mlle Weil lights a cigarette. Joe's friend begins playing the piano. “Smile though your heart is aching. Smile even though it's breaking.”

She has lost her father, her mother, her country, but her heart has not been broken. If she loses Howard, it will break. And Laurent. And Aaron … she will not even think of it. But so many have had their hearts broken in this war.

The images appear on the screen. First sheep, being blindly herded. Then workers getting out of the subway. Then they are in a factory. She finds the equipment is rather lovely, in the way that the Empire State Building is lovely: modern, clean, free from the irregularities of natural life. But there he is, the tramp, and soon everyone can see that it is all too much for him, much too much, the boss, who can see everywhere (the eye of God?), keeps insisting that the assembly line go faster and faster. Who can keep up? Now he is in the mechanism of the gears. Now they have the machine that will make lunchtime unnecessary. The machine shoves food in his mouth, spills soup on him, covers his face with whipped cream. There is one mechanism that is meant to serve as a napkin. Every few seconds it wipes his mouth, and every time that happens, she laughs, thinking no, it won't happen again, but it does, again and again, and Genevieve covers her mouth with her hand, afraid that her laugh is too loud and someone (her dead mother?) will be embarrassed. But Mlle Weil is not laughing. She is smoking; she is eating up the screen with her weak eyes.

Mlle Weil's presence is distracting. Genevieve doesn't want to be thinking about her; she just wants to watch the movie. She just wants to enjoy it, to enjoy herself. She wants to be happy for the tramp and the lovely young girl, with whom, she wants to believe, he can be happy. Why is she always barefoot, this beautiful young girl? Perhaps Paulette Goddard has very beautiful feet. When he falls, Genevieve wants to believe he won't be hurt. When he's in jail, she wants to believe that his cell is comfortable. When he sings in his made-up language, she wants to believe she understands him. For a little while, she doesn't want to be thinking about the War, and the lives of everyone in France, she doesn't want to be wondering what has become of her friends who may have been taken God knows where. Does God know? Just for a little while, she wants to laugh with these other people who are laughing, in the
dark; she wants to be taken up in this cloud of cigarette smoke and the heat of the machine, a cloud which allows her to leave her worries on the doorstep as Joe's song suggested. She doesn't want the lights to go on, because then Mlle Weil will begin talking. She hasn't laughed once.

She feels a tightness in her breasts and a spurting, and she worries: Will I leak through my clothes, will I become an embarrassment? She touches the front of her blouse. Dry. Thank God she put two handkerchiefs into each cup of her bra. Does this mean Aaron is crying for her, crying for his mother, who is sitting in the dark, laughing? Now she can't wait for the movie to be over so she can rush home. And she is distracted worrying what she can serve everyone when they get home. Crackers and some pickles. Better than nothing.

Mlle Weil of course does not take a cracker or a pickle. She starts talking as soon as she has sat down.

“You know that I have worked in several factories,” she says, refusing, for the second time, the plate that Lily is passing. “I felt I had no business speaking about the rights of workers if I hadn't worked as they had worked.”

“What did you do?” Lily asks, and Genevieve is surprised because Lily rarely enters conversations.

“You must help me translate,” she says to Genevieve and Laurent. “I don't know the words for ‘metal press' and ‘bobbins.' ”

“Bobbins,” Genevieve says, and Lily says, “What kind of bobbins? Like for sewing?” Genevieve doesn't know what Mlle Weil means by “bobbins” but she probably wouldn't have asked.

“When I was working on the bobbins there was a time I didn't know how to avoid the flames, and for several months, I was marked by burn scars. I often exasperated the people I worked with because I made many mistakes, partly because I am not well coordinated, and then my hands, I've been told, are unusually small.”

“I noticed that,” Lily says. “It's the kind of thing I notice, the number of manicures I've done.” She takes Mlle Weil's hand and Mlle Weil recoils, pulling her hand back as if Lily were the furnace whose flames had scarred her. Genevieve sees tears coming to Lily's eyes.

“The curse of the modern factory is that the worker has no idea what the end result of his task might be. He doesn't know what he produces, so he has the sense not of having produced but of being drained dry. Everything is simply a following of orders. From the moment you're clocked in to the moment you clock out, you have to be ready at any instant to take an order. Like an inert object that anyone may move about at will. And all these orders come from the mouth of a creature called the Boss; they are a product of his unpredictable will, a combination of caprice and brutality.”

Caprice and brutality caprice and brutality caprice and brutality.
The words drum themselves into Genevieve's brain, more terrible for being yoked than they would be if they were separate. And only Mlle Weil would yoke them. Only Mlle Weil speaks the unbearable truth, the glimpse of which no one else even knows to look for. But Genevieve wishes she would stop. Now she will have to wonder with every object she takes into her hand: How much brutality and caprice have gone into the making of this?

“When you are a worker you become reliant on orders; you even long for them because to eliminate them is to imagine an unbroken succession of identical moments. It is like visualizing a monotonous desert. A desert peopled with a thousand petty incidents is, to the mind, preferable to the prospect of an unalleviated present of monotony. What is most terrible about factory work is the combination of boredom and anxiety, because you could hurt yourself, or you could damage the machine. And this is killing.

“This is why I love Chaplin, like a brother, because only he has communicated the full reality of the factory's oppression with speed. Not only excessive speed, but speed without any human rhythm. Any beautiful movement implies moments of pause, that it gives the impression of leisureliness, even when very rapid. Consider the runner, who seems to glide home slowly while his rivals, lagging behind him, seem to move faster. Think of the peasant, swinging his scythe while the onlookers have the impression that he is ‘taking his time.' Compare that,” she says, “to the wretched spectacle of a man with a machine.”

“Consider the runner …” “Think of the peasant …” Is she speaking to friends, in an ordinary room, or is she lecturing? Genevieve
begins to resent being lectured at. And yet she knows she is in the presence of great thought.

Mlle Weil takes her glasses off, and wipes them on the hem of her shirt.

“When you are a worker you know that you are both an object and a slave. It takes everything that you think of as yourself, all your bases for personal dignity, and shatters them. Everything upon which I based myself, respect was radically destroyed within two or three weeks. And after a year in the factory I was in pieces, body and soul. It killed my youth. I knew quite well that there was a great deal of affliction in the world. I was obsessed with the idea, but I hadn't had prolonged and firsthand experience of it. As I worked in the factory, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. I had really forgotten my past, and I looked forward to no future. I found it difficult to even imagine the possibility of surviving the fatigue. What I went through there marked me so that still today, whenever anyone, whoever is in it and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I can't help having the impression that there must be a mistake.

“I woke each morning with anguish; I went to the factory with dread. I worked like a slave; the noonday interruption was like a laceration, then went home at quarter to six, worried about getting enough sleep, which I never did, and getting up early enough. The fear, the dread of what was to come pressed down on me constantly … until Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. But Sunday evenings! Sunday evenings were the worst. When the prospect that presented itself was not one day but a whole week of such days. I had to try to make myself refuse to think. Because futurity itself became something so terribly bleak, so tremendously overwhelming that thought could only sink back trembling in its lair.”

“Sunday evenings were the worst.” Genevieve hears these words and, to her shame, recollects her childhood dread of Sunday nights: the prospect of a new week of school. But what was the source of her dread? She was not a slave, she was not brutalized, she was a privileged recipient of the learning of, on the whole, well-disposed teachers, who, however harsh, could not be called brutal and, however capricious, did not make demands that killed her soul. But Mlle Weil has invoked it—
Sunday-night dread—and Genevieve is a child again, on those Sunday nights when the sun sets too early, a doom sentence, and although she is embarrassed to link herself to Mlle Weil and the brutalized workers, she has become them, both Mlle Weil and the workers, because Sunday night is Sunday night and dread is dread. She knows that Mlle Weil would not agree with her, and she would, no doubt, be right.

“Did you make any friends in the factory?” Laurent asks.

“This was a great disappointment. I had thought there would at least be moments of fraternity. But the pressure to produce more and more at greater and greater speed, that very pressure that makes the person an object, also makes it impossible that you take notice of the person next to you. I thought that after the day was over the workers would commiserate, on the way home. But they would not meet each other's eyes, especially the women. It is their pervasive sense of shame and humiliation that makes them withdraw into themselves, far from any possibility of comradeship. I cannot explain how strong this sense of exile is. We all felt ourselves exiles, because of our hatred and loathing for the factory, the place where we were forced to spend our days.

“Once I saw some women standing in the pouring rain rather than taking shelter in the factory before the whistle blew. I'm sure that these same women would enter any home to keep out of the rain. But they felt they had no right to enter the factory before the whistle blew. Before they punched their time cards.”

She looks at her watch, and jumps up in alarm. “Speaking of time cards,” she says, “I must get home. My mother will be frantic.” She runs out the door, not even saying goodbye.

Lily begins crying.

“Lily,” Genevieve says. “Please don't be offended by Mlle Weil's acting as she did when you took her hand. It's just that she doesn't like to be touched by anyone.”

“That's not why I'm crying. It's that she's so frail; when I felt the bones in her hand, even for a few seconds, I could see how frail she was. She won't live long,” Lily says, “even without the War, she wouldn't live long. I could see it in her hand.”

Joe is unhappy. He never wants Lily to be distressed. “So now you're a palm reader. Okay, my little gypsy, let me take you upstairs and you can show me your golden earrings.”

Genevieve is glad to be alone with Laurent, because she needs him to help her understand what Mlle Weil has just been talking about.

“We have to understand what Mlle Weil doesn't understand, that her experience in the factory wasn't typical,” Laurent says. “That she was always under a kind of strain that they weren't, the strain of having not to think. I'm sure that the men in the factory met for a drink from time to time, celebrated the birth of a child, the wedding of a sister, maybe shared cigarettes. I wonder if she thought to share her cigarettes. We have to understand that her story is not a worker's story, but the story of an intellectual in a factory. What would the workers have thought if they knew she was applying aesthetic theories to the way they operated their machines?”

“Don't talk like this, Laurent. She's taken all her learning, all her philosophy, her love of poetry, and applied it to factory work. She's taken the most abstract contemplation of time and brought it to the world of metal presses, of bobbins, of men who have never even heard of Plato, for whom the concept of metaphysics is as alien as life on the moon. She's brought the desert to the factory, and made both real. She is the great poet of workers' lives. I am humbled to have her in my home. Whatever else she did, she put her body on the line, as we have not.”

And Genevieve wishes she hadn't said it, because of course it isn't a thing he could ever have done.

NOVEMBER 4, 1942

Mlle Weil rings the bell. The weather is unpleasant. Genevieve has always disliked the month of November; she dislikes it particularly in New York. The blackout shades make everything worse; cutting out all the light, when so little light has been offered. Or more quickly snatched away. Daylight saving time—a wonderful idea, she thought—has been randomly revoked: so daylight is no longer saved but squandered. The brilliance of an American autumn is completely gone now, the angel's
torch, the spilt sugar, all long gone. The brown leaves pile up, dry, lifeless; the bare branches speak too clearly about death, which is what is always in the backs of everyone's minds in these terrible days of war. She has begun to wake in fear now, not knowing whether she will see Howard again, imagining him coming home an invalid, imagining herself having the care of not one but two crippled men. She does not pray, but she allows herself to make bets with fate: I am willing to tend two crippled bodies, just send my husband home alive.