Body & Soul (53 page)

"It's gone wrong. It's very bad luck, and Lady ran out to the car, and to tell you the truth I'd like to just go out there for a moment."

"Yes, certainly, see to your wife. There's nothing more to talk about in any case. You can explain it to her."

Claude rose. "I'm terribly sorry," he said. "I can see how upset you are."

"That girl up there has had her baby for four days. And she was ready. Now it will be weeks. Weeks if we're lucky. I'm sure you can imagine how much harder that's going to make it for her."

He slowly nodded.

"Bad luck maybe," she said. "But there's no maybe about who's going to pay for it."

In the car Lady sat stiff as a statue as they drove back to the parkway. Claude started to explain, but she held up her hand.

"I know," she said, and began to weep.

"Shall I stop somewhere?"

"I just want to go home," she said.

C
LAUDE
had his hand on the doorknob before his mind registered sign taped to the glass at the entrance of Weisfeld's Music Store: closed. He was doubly confused. First, it was the middle of the afternoon on a cold Tuesday in February, a business day. Second, the sign, with a distinctive water stain in the lower right corner, was from the door to Bergman's pawn shop. Weisfeld's did not have such a sign. He got out his key and let himself in.

He'd come for a particular book on tympani from those that remained downstairs in the studio with the Bechstein, which he still played two or three times a month, but now he went to the counter and stood tapping his fingers on the glass. The lights were out, but even in the half gloom he could see that the store was in perfect order, everything in its place. He heard the distant sound of a jackhammer from Eighty-sixth, where they were tearing up part of the sidewalk. For some time he simply stood there. The last sale on the register had been one dollar and fifteen cents.

He went to the door in back, opened it, and looked up the stairs.

"Mr. Weisfeld?"

He cocked his head but heard nothing. He waited for several minutes and then put his foot on the first step.

"Mr. Weisfeld?"

He seemed not so much to climb the stairs as to very slowly float from step to step, his hand sliding along the thin banister affixed to the
wall. Momentarily he had the sensation of being outside his body, watching himself. He moved up into wan daylight.

It was a surprisingly large room, almost empty of furniture. To his right an entire wall of books. In front of him two windows facing onto Third Avenue at the same level as the tracks of the elevated, a large desk before one window, a single overstuffed armchair before the other. To his left the north wall, upon which hung framed photographs of various shapes and sizes, forty or fifty of them covering that part of the wall best illuminated by the light from the windows. The odd emptiness of the room, the stillness, his own sense of illicitness, combined to create a feeling of unreality, as if he had entered a hallucination. Every angle, every shadow, every trick of the light, seemed charged with elusive meaning.

He crossed the bare wooden floor to the photographs, moving awkwardly because his body felt out of place here, like a loud noise in a cathedral. The photographs were old. A residential street in a foreign city, solid stone houses with granite second-floor balconies, carved pilasters around tall windows, recessed entries. A group of people in front of one particular house, posing for the camera. With a shock he recognized a young Weisfeld standing with a woman of about the same age, a five- or six-year-old girl in front of them, an older man with a large white mustache and two older women behind them.

The young woman sitting under a tree in a park, holding up an apple with an impish grin, offering it to the photographer. Dozens of pictures of her in various settings—riding a horse, holding a baby in her arms, mugging in full evening dress, kneading dough with one of the older women in a kitchen. Many photographs of the child. A shot of the old man on the steps of some large institutional building. Shots of the two older women, constantly together. Sidestepping along the wall, Claude began to understand that he was looking at three generations of a family somewhere in Europe, before the war.

He stepped back, taking in the whole display. Weisfeld's family. It was disorienting, like waking up in strange surroundings.

Now he faced the rear of the apartment. He moved into an empty hall, past a small kitchen, a bathroom, a sort of study, the door open, filled with books, musical scores, records, a large walnut radio-phonograph console, a drafting table, and an old, well-worn chaise longue. An impression of order, of meticulous neatness. He passed on to the last door, which was ajar, spilling a pale beam of yellow light, and paused before it.

"Mr. Weisfeld? It's me."

There was no answer. He placed his fingertips on the door and slowly pushed it open, his heart racing so fast he could hear his pulse in his ears.

Mr. Weisfeld lay fully clothed on a narrow bed, a book open on his chest, his thin hands illuminated by a reading lamp. As Claude moved closer he saw Weisfeld's pale face, eyes closed, the skin gleaming with sweat, mouth slightly open, and heard his shallow breathing. There was a wooden chair next to the bed, and Claude sat down just as he felt his knees go weak.

Weisfeld opened his eyes. They seemed unnaturally bright. "So here you are," he said.

"What's happening? You look sick, you look very sick. You look like you need a doctor."

"I am sick."

"My God," Claude whispered.

"The doctor has come and gone. One of many over a great many years. He left pills."

"What's wrong with you?"

"Did you see the pictures? In the front?"

"Yes, but—"

"That was my family. Father, mother, my aunt, my wife, and Freida, my little girl. We all lived together in Warsaw. It was a beautiful city then."

Claude started to speak, but Weisfeld cut him off by raising his hand. "Let me tell you the story." His hand fell back. "You're a man now. I can tell you the story. This is the right time." He paused, staring down at the book, which he removed from his chest. Claude saw him wince as he did this.

"Does it hurt? What hurts?"

"My father was a doctor. He also taught at the university. A distinguished man, a leader in the community—you see the way he stands in the pictures. Upright. Proud. Also very rich from his father, who owned mines. My wife had been one of his students. Freida was seven years old. My mother and her sister ran the house—both houses, although we had more servants in the country. Everything was wonderful, and I had never known anything else. I was spoiled, really, I have to say. A young artist all wrapped up in music and taking everything for granted." He raised his chin and looked off into space. When
he spoke his voice was choppy, coordinated with his breathing. "So strange. It was so far-fetched, so impossible, there was a single tiny second just as I saw the blur, just before it happened, when I felt an urge toward something like laughter. I can't explain that." He reached up and rubbed his stubbled chin. "September first, 1939. There'd been an air raid in the morning. Nothing serious, just a few scattered bombs, nobody hurt. A symbolic gesture since they'd started the invasion, which we didn't know about. Just a show, but to be on the safe side we decided to go to the country house. We had a big car, a big, black Daimler as big as a tank, plenty of room for everybody. I drove, north along the river. Freida saw airplanes in the sky up ahead and I remember my father saying they were ours, they were Polish planes, so she shouldn't worry." Now he pushed himself up a little higher in the bed, wincing again, and reached for a glass of water on the bedside table. He drank slowly. A bead of sweat ran from his hair down over his temple. "We were on the outskirts of town when my father realized he'd forgotten his cigars. So I watched for a tobacconist and pulled over and ran across the street to get him some. I got the cigars and stepped out onto the sidewalk. A roar as two or three airplanes came from the south. I stepped off the sidewalk. I could see their faces through the windows of the Daimler. Freida was laughing at something. And then I saw the blur, like the faintest shadow line in the air to the roof of the car. You understand, it was not the shadow of the plane, it was the bomb itself. There was an explosion. It must have blown me all the way back, because I remember using the wall to get up. The Daimler was gone. There was a crater in the street." He turned his head to find Claude's eyes. "Now you see it. Now you don't."

Claude swallowed hard. Weisfeld's gaze seemed to paralyze him.

"You see what I mean?" Weisfeld said. "Impossible. A freak."

"What did you do?" Claude managed to find his voice.

"I don't know. I can't remember. But I can reconstruct what I must have done—not at that moment, but later. I must have walked home."

"You were in shock."

"No doubt. But I left the next day with a suitcase on the back of my bicycle. And those photographs were in the suitcase, so I must have put them there."

"My God ..."

"I'm glad you came up here. You came up here all by yourself, so I don't have to feel guilty about it." He gave a wry smile.

"I should have come up here a long time ago." Claude pulled his chair closer to the bed. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't tell anybody." He thought for a moment. "Well, I told Bergman. He had worse. Believe me, two or three years later it was a lot worse. Him, I could tell."

"I don't understand," Claude said. "You could have told me."

"I know," Weisfeld said, but he did not explain further. "Ooof. I have to take a leak." In a series of careful procedures he sat up, shifted to the edge of the bed, and swung his legs over. "Could you get up for a second? I need the chair."

Claude sprang from the chair and started to reach out, ready to help.

"No, no. It's okay," Weisfeld said, grasping the back of the chair and pulling himself to his feet. "It takes a while, that's all." He moved slowly, one step at a time, pushing the chair in front of him for support.

"What is it? Do you know what's wrong with you?" Claude followed him into the hall.

"Yes. I know." He went into the bathroom and closed the door behind himself.

After some time Claude could hear him urinating, and heard as well a couple of short, tight gasps: "Ah. Ah." Claude put his hands against the wall and bowed his head, trying to think what he should do. Maybe Bergman was in his shop, maybe he...

The door opened and Weisfeld reached for the chair. "You can't win," he said. "Either it hurts because you can't take a leak, or it hurts because you can." He made his way back to the bed. As he lowered his head onto the pillow he closed his eyes. "Just give me a minute," he said, and instantly fell asleep.

Toward evening, when Weisfeld had again drifted off, Claude sat in the armchair in the front room, staring at the el. It was now closed, the entrances down at street level boarded up. "I knew I'd miss the trains," Weisfeld had said that afternoon. "Once in a while somebody would wave, you know, or a kid would give me the finger while I'm sitting at the desk. Ha!" Claude was wound up very tight, his fingers digging into the upholstery, his whole body gathered in tension as if about to receive some powerful, painful blow. He jumped as he heard the sound of someone coming up the stairs.

It was Bergman, carrying a cream soda and what appeared to be a container of soup. "Good," he said. "Very good. Is he awake?"

"I don't think so. He goes off every hour or so. How long has he been like this?"

"This bad? It started yesterday, maybe the night before."

"What's wrong with him?"

Bergman sat at the desk. "Tuberculosis."

Claude felt a kind of shifting or sliding inside his body, as if something hot had been released from the base of his throat. "How can that be? He doesn't cough! He hasn't coughed once!"

"It's not in his lungs. There are other kinds."

"What? What kinds?"

"His kidneys. His kidneys for a long time. It can hide there. But now Dr. Vogel says also maybe his heart."

"His heart?" Disbelief.

"I know, I know. You can have tuberculosis of the heart, it seems." Claude looked out the window, seeing nothing. "We have to get him to a hospital."

"Sure." Bergman nodded. "That's a good idea. We should talk to him."

"I can't believe this," Claude said, his voice breaking.

"He thinks it goes back all the way to
1939,
maybe. He got from Warsaw to the Baltic on a bicycle in the middle of the war. Some trip. Months. A miracle, you could say. In Sweden they thought he had typhus, but maybe that was it, and when he got better it went into hiding."

They heard a sound from the back. They got up simultaneously and went into the room. Weisfeld had propped himself into a sitting position.

"Soup, soup," he said, "wonderful soup. Soup of the evening..." He accepted the container and a spoon.

"Turtle it's not," said Bergman, placing the cream soda within reach on the table. "You seem in a good mood. Feeling better?"

"Claude has cheered me up." He took a taste.

"Claude thinks you should go to the hospital," Bergman said from the foot of the bed. Weisfeld frowned as Claude sat down beside him. "Yes, right away," Claude said.

"So now it's unanimous," Bergman said. "Me, Dr. Vogel, and Claude. Everybody agrees."

"I understand, but no thanks."

"Aaron ...," Bergman began.

"Look!" Weisfeld pointed the spoon at his breastbone. "What am I pointing at?" He used the tone of a schoolteacher. "Me, right? My body, right?" He stared at Bergman. "Who gets to say what happens to this body? Me, that's who. Do I have to explain to anybody? No, I do not." He ate a little more soup and put the container aside. "Next case."

"Maybe they can help you," Claude said. "Maybe you'd be more comfortable."

"You think so?" Weisfeld said gently. "It's good to be optimistic. I appreciate it, but all the same I'm staying here."

Mr. Bergman sighed and shook his head.