The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories (10 page)

Listening

He had been walking up Fifth Avenue for about ten minutes when the cat fell. He had been walking along, minding his own business, not looking about him—though it was a beautiful day, the first of spring, with a warm, keen wind ruffling the vapor trails in the sky and dislodging the pigeons from cornices where they sat sunning. He was preoccupied, to tell the truth, worrying over what he could ever find to say about Mrs. Schaber’s lesson, which he was on his way to observe.

Listening, she taught. “What in God’s name is
listening?
” he had asked Mark Calvert, who worked in the same department. “Oh, it’s a form of musical appreciation—
little Schaber
’s a bit of a nut, but she’s quite a fine musician, too, in her way.” He had not even met her, so far as he was aware—she was just another of the two-hundred-odd faceless names on the college faculty list. So now he had to give up his free day, this beautiful mild, melting, burgeoning day, to go and invigilate her class and decide whether or not she was able to teach kids to listen. Is there a craft about listening—an art that has to be learned?—he wondered. Don’t we begin listening from the very moment we are born?

At that moment the cat hit. He was approaching the Twenty-eighth Street intersection when he heard the horribly distinctive sound—a loud, solid smack, accompanied by a faint, sharp cry; indeed he had
seen
it also, he must have seen about the last six inches of its fall, as he glanced up from his moody stride, and so was able to verify that cats do
not
always land on their feet—this poor beast, which must have come from about twenty floors up, landed flat on its side and then lay twitching. Its eyes were open but it must, please heaven, be on the point of death—ought he to
do
something about it? What
could
one do?

In no time a small crowd had collected.

“It fell from
way
up there,” a woman kept saying hysterically. “I saw the whole thing—I was just crossing the street—”

“Do you think we should take it to a vet?” someone suggested.

“Oh, what’s the use? The poor thing’s dying anyway.”

“Tell the super in the block? That looks like a valuable cat—”

“Lucky it didn’t land on somebody—could probably kill a person—”

As they discussed it, the cat twitched again. Its eyes closed definitively.

“Oh, its poor owner. She’ll wonder what
happened
to it—”

“Shouldn’t have left her window open if you ask me—”

He left them and walked on. He was going to be late if he didn’t hurry. It
had
looked like a valuable cat. Its fur was a rich mixture of browns and creams in which dark chocolate predominated, its eyes a wild fanatic blue. It seemed to belong to the luxury class, along with costly monogrammed luggage, gold accessories and jeweled watches: objects of conspicuous expenditure. And yet, poor thing, it had been alive, had its own nature—that faint piteous cry still hung in his ears, an expostulation against undeserved agony.

He
had
seen Mrs. Schaber before, it turned out; he recognized her as soon as he entered the classroom. She was the odd little woman whom he had passed one day in the main lobby while she was deep in conversation with a deaf and dumb student. He had been much struck by her at the time, two or three months back. She was quite short, only about five foot, with her dark hair coiled in a bun low on her neck. She wore jeans, a flannel shirt, a sweater tied by the arms around her waist, espadrilles; she looked like a student. But her face was that of a woman in her mid-forties—somewhat lined, especially around the mouth. Her eyes were large, brownish green, almond shaped, set wide apart; and her face was long and oval, with a particularly long jaw and upper lip, and a lower lip that extended, sometimes above the upper one, giving her a look of comical pugnacity. But what had attracted his attention on that occasion was the extreme vivacity of her face—dozens of expressions chased each other across it: sympathetic, hilarious, grave, intent, sorrowful, ecstatic, ferocious—while her hands, meanwhile, twinkled away with unbelievable speed, flicking their soundless deaf-and-dumb-language to the student she was addressing.

“Is
she
deaf and dumb too?” he had asked Charlie Whitney, with whom he had been walking on that occasion.

“Schaber? Lord, no! Talk the hind leg off a mule!”

She was doing so now, addressing her students in a flood of loquacity. But she broke off to greet him with a rather constricted smile.

“Oh—
Professor Middlemass
—good morning! Would you like to sit here? Or would you rather walk about? Please do just what you want—make yourself at home! I was—I was beginning to explain to the students that this morning I am going to play them tapes recorded on my trip to Europe and Africa last year. I shall analyze the background of each tape before I play it. Then, later in the lesson, I shall demonstrate the relation of the sounds they have heard to musical patterns and structures and explain how this in its turn demonstrates the relevance of music to language.”

Nodding vaguely—she had rattled this out so fast that he hardly took in her meaning—he settled down to listen, observing that eighteen out of her nineteen students were present, and that they were watching her with expressions that ranged from indulgent amusement through skepticism and mild boredom to absorbed devotion. Only one boy looked wholly bored: he was stretched back in his seat with his blond hair stuck out in front, his head bowed forward. He appeared to be studying his shoelaces through the strands of his hair.

The tapes, when Mrs. Schaber began to play them, were a bit of a surprise: they were so extremely quiet. She had been allotted a soundproof music studio for her demonstration, and this was just as well, for some of the sounds were just barely audible. “Now, this is the Camargue: you can hear grasses rustling and, very far off, the noise of the sea. And after five minutes you will notice a faint drumming in the distance. That is the sound of hoofs: the wild horses. They never come very close; you will have to listen carefully.

“Now this recording was taken in Denmark, in the bog country: you can hear reeds and dry rushes; the sound is not dissimilar to the tape of the Camargue that I played you earlier, but this one was taken inland; there was a different quality to the air; it was less resonant. Also, after about three minutes of tape, you will hear a stork shifting about in its nest; I was standing close to a cottage that had a stork’s nest on its roof.”

Mrs. Schaber went on to describe in some detail what materials storks used in building their nests and then played her tape. As she listened to it herself, her face wore a recollecting, tranquil, amused expression.

Gradually, while the lesson proceeded, Middlemass observed how the students were becoming polarized by her exposition. The ones who had looked indulgent or bored at the start were now gazing drearily at the ceiling, picking their noses or their teeth, chewing gum, manifesting exasperation and tedium; others were watching Mrs. Schaber with fanatical attention. The blond boy still stared at his feet.

Toward the end of her batch of tapes came some that had been recorded in the Congo rain forest. Middlemass had always been fascinated by the thought of the jungle, ever since reading Duguid’s
Green Hell;
he had not the least intention of ever walking into a jungle himself, but he occasionally liked to imagine doing so. Now he listened with careful interest to the rich silences, the ticking, cheeping, chirring, shrilling, buzzing, scraping sibilances that Mrs. Schaber had collected; for the first time he began to feel some groping acceptance of what she was proffering. He noticed, also, that the blond boy had taken his hands out of his pockets and had his head cocked in an attitude of acute attention.

During the second half of the lesson, Mrs. Schaber proceeded to play short snatches of music and demonstrate their resemblance to vocal patterns and to some of the natural sounds that she had presented earlier. This, Middlemass thought, was really interesting; the whole lesson began to cohere for him, and he changed his mind about what he would say in his report, which, half-phrased in his head already, had not been particularly enthusiastic. “Too divorced from reality—students did not seem very engaged—Mrs. Schaber has a gift, but it seems devoted to inessentials—” Now he resolved to say something more favorable.

At this point there came an interruption to the lesson. A secretary tapped at the door to say that Mrs. Schaber was wanted in the main office. “The police have just called up from your home, Mrs. Schaber; I’m afraid your apartment has been broken into, and they want you to go home and say what has been taken.”

“Oh my god!” The poor little woman looked utterly stricken; her expressive face changed to a Greek mask of tragedy, mouth wide open, eyes dilated.

“Shall I go with you to the office?” Middlemass offered, touched by compassion because he had been filled with rather disparaging thoughts about her during the first half of her lesson and because she did seem as if she had sustained a mortal blow. The blond boy had already risen to his feet, moved compactly forward, and taken her arm. But Middlemass accompanied them anyway; he felt the need somehow to demonstrate his friendly feeling and sympathy.

While Mrs. Schaber talked on the phone in the secretary’s room, it became plain that matters were even worse than she had feared.

“Oh no, not all my
tapes?
” she cried out. “What could they want those for? Smashed—
wrecked
—oh,
no!
”—pressing her clenched fist against her thin chest as if she were trying, forcibly, to push her anguished, expanded heart back into position. Wordlessly, the secretary went to fetch her a cup of coffee. The blond boy stood silent with his eyes fixed on her face. When she had laid the receiver back in its rest and was staring across the room, quite dazed, with fixed, sightless eyes, Middlemass asked her gently:

“Is it very bad?”

“They have taken a whole
lot
of stuff,” she muttered, “and all the rest they have destroyed—smashed up. Everything—”

Inattentively, she gulped at the coffee the secretary had handed her.

“I keep wondering whether I forgot to lock the door—when I went out this morning—the super found it open, that was why he phoned the police—I was so nervous—in a hurry—
did
I forget to lock it?”

“Oh, no!” Middlemass exclaimed, horrified. “You don’t mean to say that you were nervous because of
me
—because your lesson was going to be observed—that on account of
that
you might have forgotten to lock up—?”

“Of
course
I was nervous!” she said. “Naturally I was nervous! Excuse me—they want me right away—I must go back to the classroom and collect my things—”

“I am most sorry this has happened,” he said, following her back along the corridor, wondering if his words were getting through to her at all. “I had been enjoying your lesson so much—it seemed to me one of the most interesting and original discourses that I have ever listened to—”

In his own ears, his voice sounded horribly forced and insincere. He wondered if
that
was one of the things he had learned from her lesson. How to detect the falsity in human utterance? And yet what he had said was the truth—
meant
to be the truth, he told himself. He noticed the blond boy’s eyes on him, assessing, skeptical.

“I’m going to give you a very good report,” he told poor Mrs. Schaber, as she began collecting her gear in the classroom. “If that helps to cheer you up at all—”

“
Well
—thank you—of course it does,” she answered distractedly, shoveling tapes into a big worn woolen bag, filled already with a mass of untidy odds and ends. It was evident that she heard him only with a single thread of attention; the rest of her mind was elsewhere. “It’s like having lost a whole continent, a whole
world
,” she murmured. “Years and years of work.”

“Well, you’ve still got the Congo forest, because you had it here,” the blond boy reminded her, and at that she suddenly gave him her flashing urchin grin, thrusting forward the long lower jaw and lower lip, nodding her head up and down.

“That’
s true! One forest left
—perhaps it will seed itself. But there’s not all that amount of
time
left.”

When Mrs. Schaber had gone, Middlemass walked out of the college. He felt too disturbed to want to eat in the cafeteria and talk to colleagues; he wanted a long period of time and solitude to settle his feelings. Poor little woman, so stricken and bereft—he thought of her returning to her wrecked apartment, like a bird to its robbed nest. And the worst of it was the anxiety as to whether it had been her own carelessness that had invited the thieves; he knew how such an idea would haunt
him
, if he had been the victim. He imagined her trying and trying again to resurrect the process of her departure in the morning, to discover whether she had in fact let the door unlocked—had she taken the key out of her purse, had she put it back—as if it could make any real difference to the disaster itself.

Walking along Fifty-seventh Street, Middlemass tried to calm his mind by wandering into a number of art galleries, at random, looking first at a show of nineteenth-century portrait photographs, then at some watercolor landscapes, then some classic Matisses, magically soothing, then some semiabstract sculpture, recognizable articles broken into fragments and reunited into strange disjointed forms—then a show of cartoons—a collection of Japanese prints—one of book illustrations from the ’nineties. He was moving westwards all the time; he thought he would presently buy a sandwich and eat it in the park. The day was still idyllically fine and warm.

In a small room adjoining the exhibition of book illustrations there was a show by a minor artist whose name was unknown to him; the title of the exhibition was simply “Collages.” Through the open door he caught a glimpse of quiet, restful black and white forms. He stepped inside, meaning to give the show a quick two minutes and then go in search of his sandwich.

The collages, contained inside plain wood frames, were made up from all kinds of materials—fabrics, press cuttings, bits of wood, of metal, of oilcloth, tar cloth, wire netting, string, bent wire, gauze, clay, foam rubber—all dyed or stained either black or white. They had been assembled, molded, pressed, organized into shapes that were vaguely human, vaguely monstrous in outline: straining bodies were suggested, extended limbs, odd movements of exuberant dance, of cowering terror, of sad, limp resignation. The titles, on labels beside the frames, were all single words: Waiting; Fearing; Hoping; Expecting; Exulting.

Despite a general feeling of distaste for what he considered rather pretentious, facile stuff, without the merit of true creativity, Middlemass found himself oddly struck by these forms—they seemed to touch on some nerve in him that was not normally affected but had, perhaps, been bruised already that day. He walked slowly around the room, considering the occupant of each frame in turn—as if they had been creatures in cages, he told himself.