The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (57 page)

With all this behind me, the Christmas memories of my life, what could I say except, “What else is there?”

“Try not to think at all,” said Uncle Theo, grinning with nervousness and his anxious little bandit’s eyes darting everywhere. “Bandit” is perhaps too much; he never had a gram of civic feeling, let us say. “I have tickets to
The Gypsy Baron,”
he said. So that was what he had come to tell me!

“What do you mean, Uncle Theo?”

“For the four of us, the day after Christmas.”

“Out of the question,” I said.

“Now, why, Hilde? The girls like music.”

“Use your head, Uncle Theo. I can’t talk now.”

What did he mean,
why?
It was out of the question, that was all. First, the flu epidemic. People were coughing and sneezing without covering their faces.

“I wanted you to have two days to think it over,” said Uncle Theo. He gave me the impression that he was sliding, crawling. I don’t know why he is so afraid of me.

It seemed so evident: It is wrong to take them out to the theater, or anywhere in the cold. It disturbs their habits. They are perfectly happy with their television. They have their own warm little theater in our parlor. My mother is always allowed to choose the program, as you may imagine. She settles in with a bowl of walnuts on her lap. My aunt never sees the beginning of anything, because she walks round examining her plants. She sits down finally, and the others tell her the plot, when there is one. Uncle Theo drinks white wine and laughs at everything. One by one they fall asleep in their chairs. I wake them up and send them off to bed while the late news predicts the next day’s weather. Why drive them out in the cold to see an operetta? And then, how are we supposed to get there? The car has been put away for the winter, with the insurance suspended and the battery disconnected. Say that we get it out and in running order—where does Uncle Theo expect me to park? I suppose I might go earlier in the day, on foot, and pick out the streets near the theater where parking might be allowed. Or we could
all
go very early and sit in the car until the theater opens. But we would have to keep the engine running and the heater on, and we would be certain to have blinding headaches within the hour. We might walk, but these old persons get terribly warm in their overcoats, and then they perspire and catch chills and fever. I am surprised that the city is letting the play be produced at this time.

All this I explained to Uncle Theo in the calmest voice imaginable.

He said, “I had better turn the tickets in.”

“Why?” I said. “Why do that? As you say, the girls like music. Why deprive them of an outing? I only want you to realize, for once, the possible results of your actions.”

Why is it that everyone is depressed by hearing the truth? I tell the office manager about Hausen reading newspapers in a desk drawer. His face puckers. He wishes I had never brought it up. He looks out the window; he has decided to forget it. He will forget it. I have never said a thing; he is not obliged to speak to Hausen, let alone sack him. When my brother married a girl with a chin like a Turkish slipper, I warned him what his children would be like—that he would be ashamed to have them photographed because of their ugly faces.

I say to my mother, “How can you giggle over nothing? One son was killed, the other one never comes to see you, and your husband left you for another woman at the age of sixty-three.” Half an hour later, unless someone has hurt her feelings, or changed the television program without asking, she has forgotten her own life’s story. The family say Uncle Theo is a political hero, but isn’t he just a man who avoided going to war? He was called up for military service after Stalingrad. At the medical examination he pointed out his age, his varicose veins, his blood pressure, but none of that helped. He was fit for service—for the next wholesale offering, in Uncle Theo’s view. He put on his clothes, still arguing, and was told to take a file with his name on it to a room upstairs. It was on his way up that he had his revelation. Everything concerning his person was in that file. If the file disappeared, then Uncle Theo did, too. He turned and walked straight out the front door. He did not destroy the file, in case they should come round asking; he intended to say he had not understood the instructions. No one came, and soon after this his workroom was bombed and the file became ashes. When Uncle Theo was arrested it was for quite another reason, having to do with black-market connections. He went first to prison, then, when the jail was bombed, to a camp. Here he wore on his striped jacket the black sleeve patch that meant “antisocial.” It is generally thought that he wore the red patch, meaning “political.” As things are now, it gives him status. But it was not so at the time, and he himself has told me that the camp was run by that antisocial element. It was they who had full control of the internal order, the margarine racket, the extra-soup racket, the cigarette traffic. Uncle Theo was there less than a month, all told, but it changed his outlook for life.

Now consider my situation: eighteen years with the Civic Tourist and Travel Bureau, passed over for promotion because I am female, surrounded at home by aged children who can’t keep their own histories straight. They have no money, no property, no future, no recorded past, nothing but secrets. My parents never explained themselves. For a long time I thought they kept apple juice in our cellar locker. After my father left us I went down and counted eighteen bottles of white wine. Where did it come from? “Tell me the truth,” I have begged them. “Tell me everything you remember.” They sit smiling and sipping wine out of postwar glasses. My mother cracks walnuts and passes the bowl around. That is all I have for an answer.

Sometimes on my way home I take the shortcut through the cemetery. The long bare snowy space is where Russian prisoners used to be buried. When the bodies were repatriated, even the gravestones were taken—all but two. Perhaps the families forgot to claim the bodies; or perhaps they were not really prisoners but impostors of some kind. Whatever the reason, two fairly clean stones stand alone out of the snow, with nothing around them. Nearby are the graves of Russian prisoners from the 1914 war. The stones are old and dark and tipped every way. The more I think of it the more I am certain those two could not have been Russians.

Yesterday in the cemetery, at six o’clock, there were lovers standing motionless, like a tree. I had to step off the path; snow came over the tops of my boots. I saw candles burning in little hollows on some of the graves, and Christmas trees on the graves of children. What shall I do when I have to bury the family? Uncle Theo speaks of buying a plot, but in the plot he has in mind there is no room for me and he knows it. I should have married, and when I died I’d be buried with my in-laws—that is what Uncle Theo says to himself. When you speak about dying he looks confused. His face loses its boiled-egg symmetry. Then he says, “Cheer up, Hilde, it can’t be so bad or they would have found a way to stop it by now.”

He was a guard in the prisoner-of-war camp. I forgot to mention that. In fact that was how he got out of his own camp; they were so desperate that they asked for volunteers from among the antisocial element—the thieves, the pimps, the black marketeers. Most of them went to the Eastern front and died there. Uncle Theo, undersized and elderly, became a guard not too far from home. Even there he got on well, and when the Russian prisoners broke out at the end, they did not hang him or beat him to death but simply tied him to a tree. They told him a phrase he was to repeat phonetically
if Russian troops got there before the others. Luckily for him the Americans turned up first; all he has ever been able to say in a foreign language is
“Pro domo sua,”
and he must have learned that phonetically, too. He hardly went to school. Uncle Theo was able to prove he had once been arrested, and that turned out to be in his favor. Now he has a pension, and is considered a hero, which is annoying. He was never a member of any party. He does not go to church.
“Pro domo sua,” he
says, closing an eye.

Uncle Theo applied for war reparations in 1955. He offered his record—destruction of porcelain factory, unjust imprisonment, pacifist convictions, humane and beloved guard in prisoner-of-war camp—and in 1960 he received a lump sum and a notice of a pension to follow. He immediately left for India, with a touring group composed mostly of little widows. But he decided not to marry any of them. He brought us a scarf apiece and a set of brass bowls. It was after his return that he wrote “O Lasting Peace.”

One last thing: Without my consent, without even asking me, Uncle Theo advertised for a husband for me. This was years ago, before he had his pension. He gave my age as “youthful,” my face and figure as “gracious,” my world outlook as “modern,” and my upbringing as “delicate.” There was too much unemployment at the time, and so no one answered. Eleven years later he ran the same notice, without changing a word. The one person who answered was invited—by Uncle Theo—to call and see if he wanted me. I saw the candidate through a fog of shame. I remember his hair, which sprang from his forehead in a peculiar way, like black grass, and that he sat with his feet turned in and the toe of one shoe over the other. He was not really a fool, but only strange, like all persons who do not really intend to go through with the wedding. My aunt, my mother, and my uncle stated my qualities for me and urged him to eat fruitcake. My mother had to say, “Hilde has been so many years with the tourist office that we can’t even count them,” which knocked out the “youthful” bit, even if he had been taken in by it. It was a few days after a Christmas; fresh candles were lighted on the tree. The candidate turned his head, swallowing. Everyone wanted him to say something. “Won’t the curtains catch fire?” he asked. I’m sure Uncle Theo would have picked up the tree and moved it if he had been able, he was that excited by his guest. Then the man finished eating his cake and went away, and I knew we would not hear about him again; and that was a good riddance.

“You are so anxious to have this apartment to yourselves,” I said to my family. “You have made yourselves cheap over a peasant who sits with one foot on the other. How would you pay the rent here without me? Don’t you understand that I can’t leave you?” At the same time, I wanted to run out on the balcony screaming, “Come back!” but I was afraid of knocking the flowerpots over. I’ve forgotten why I wanted to mention this.

M
y daughter wept when the news reached us here in Cologne that Bibi had died. It was the first loss by death she had ever experienced, except for that of our old brown poodle, and it affected her to the point of fantasy. She accused me of having murdered Bibi; of having treated her like a servant; of having been jealous of her brains and her beauty (her beauty?); and, finally, of having driven her out of our house with my capricious demands, my moods, and my coldness.

Everyone knows what it is like now to be judged by spoiled, ignorant children. Of course we never considered Bibi a servant! That is a pure invention. From the very beginning—when we were, in fact, her employers—she ate at our table and called us Julius and Helga. There were hundreds of thousands of girls like Bibi in those days, just as poor and alone. No person was ever considered to blame for his own poverty or solitude. You would never have dreamed of hinting it could be his own fault. You never knew what that person’s past might be, or what unspoken grudge he might be hiding. There was also a joint past that lay all around us in heaps of charred stone. The streets still smelled of terror and ashes, particularly after rain. Every stone held down a ghost, or a frozen life, or a dreadful secret. No one was inferior, because everyone was. A social amnesty had been declared.

Bibi must have been in her early twenties then. She was a refugee, from Silesia. In the town she named as her birthplace everyone had died or run away. She had no friends, no family, and no money, but she must have been given some sort of education at one time, because she had been accepted in high school here, in the terminal class. How she got in is a mystery.
There was no room for anyone, and students were selected like grains of sand. People of all ages were trying to go to school—middle-aged men, prisoners of war coming back and claiming an education. In those days, so many papers and documents had been burned that people like Bibi could say anything they liked about themselves. Still, she had passed some sort of entrance examination—she must have. She had also found a place to live, and she supported herself doing sewing and ironing and minding babies—whatever she could find. We had her Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, for housework; three evenings a week. Her dinner was part of her wages, but as the evening meal was nothing but soup she did not have to give up her ration tickets. After she had been with us for a while, one of her teachers told Julius that Bibi was brilliant. Yes, brilliant. Without any real culture, without … but brilliant all the same. As soon as Julius was certain it was true, he found a part-time job for Bibi in the first research laboratory they were establishing then at Possner. Possner was looking for bright young people with a promising future and no past. It was an incredible stroke of fortune for someone in Bibi’s situation. She stayed at Possner on that part-time basis until she published her thesis in 1955. (Possner sent her to the university.) After that she went on to a much, much better job. From the time she met Julius, Bibi had nothing but luck.