Days Like Today (5 page)

In the corridor she spoke to the nurse who seemed to be in charge. First of all, she thanked her for taking care of her husband. That made a good impression. Then she said that she wondered if the hospital had some sort of chapel where she could say a quick prayer. That made an even better
impression; it was the right thing to do at such a time and it put hospital work in perspective: there was only so much the medical profession could do for anyone and after that the outcome was up to higher powers.

They did indeed have a chapel, the nurse told her, for use by all denominations.

‘And one more thing,’ Joan said: her husband might be recovering for a long time but there were colleagues of his who worked in television and you could bet anything that they’d be charging down the hallways in full cry as soon as they got wind of the story. Was there any way of keeping them out for a couple of days? One person in particular, a girl named Alice, was so persistent that you’d almost think she was intent on breaking up his marriage.

The nurse rose to the occasion. Her starched uniform seemed to expand with professional pride. She assured Joan that absolutely no one was going to get at her patient without his wife’s permission.

Joan’s anxiety receded. She wished that she could witness a clash between Alice – with her debutante affectations and international media jargon – and the tough, motherly nurse who knew how to deal with life, death and people who had no business being on her ward.

The chapel was disappointingly lacking in candles. The lighting was artificial, the stained glass was fake. All over the world people were lighting candles, as she had hoped to. And they were like her:
Thank you, God, for getting me out
of trouble, for letting me escape, for bringing me luck
. But eventually there would be something they wouldn’t be able to
avoid and there would be no point in lighting a candle for that. The material housing of everyone’s world was temporary; the eyesight would go, the accuracy of the other senses too, the strength of the muscles, the hardness of the bones. That was what God gave, as well as the people you loved. And everything else besides. And when the bad things came upon you, how could you then say:
No, thank you – why are you allowing this to happen to me?

She stayed in the chapel for as long as she could stand being away from Max. She made her pleas for his health, she promised and apologized, and asked for forgiveness. Then she waited outside the operating theater.

She was by his side as soon as he came out of the anesthetic. She was holding his hand.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘there you are. My beautiful wife.’ Later he told her that she’d looked terrified and that he’d recognized on her face the same expression of calamity that for so many years he’d seen on the victims of war.

And she saw, but never told him afterwards, that he could be weakened; he could lose the energy and inquisitiveness that made him seek danger. He could be conquered, losing everything that made him what he was. Sooner than have that happen, she’d let him go to someone else. But not yet.

She told him about the lucky charms, saying that the substitution had been a mistake.

He hadn’t known until they were sewing him up before putting him on the plane. But he was delighted. He said, ‘You know what’s so wonderful? They’re the keys to the
front door. They mean home. Nothing else could have pulled me through this. They saved me.’

Tears came into their eyes. They embraced. They rejoiced: he with the gratitude of the survivor, she with the shameless self-righteousness of the successful.

This time her prayers had worked. How long he’d be content to be safe was a question she could deal with later, the next time it came up. And how long God would remain on her side was something she’d have to stop thinking about. Loyalty from the divine was often pretty much like human fidelity – you knew about it for sure only when it changed. And by that time it was too late.

When he left for the war, he left her pregnant. As soon as she realized the state she was in, she told her parents, who disowned her; they’d always preferred the rich neighbors’ son next door and now she’d ruined her chances and theirs.

She went to his mother, who called her a lying whore and slammed the door in her face, saying, ‘My son would never have anything to do with a cheap type like you.’

She got a job in the sort of place where people didn’t mind who did what. She served alcohol and wiped tabletops and cleaned out greasy pots and pans. Her clothes and hair stank of fat, the skin on her hands split and bled. The waitresses who worked side by side with her told her where she could go to get rid of the pregnancy. But she was still in love with him.

When the time came for her to give birth, she couldn’t work any longer. The boarding house threw her out. Her friends had no money. Only one place in town was willing to take her in: the brothel. She knew about the reputation the building had but she was innocent enough to imagine that the real business was the bar and not the rooms upstairs, instead of the other way around. In any case, she expected to die in childbirth.

The woman who kept the place paid for her doctor. And
after the birth, as soon as she was well enough, expected to be paid back: for lodging and food, too.

She refused. Every time she looked into the face of her little son and fell in love with him again, she fell in love over and over again with his father, whose presence somewhere in the world was like a promise still unbroken, although he didn’t write.

She’d rather die in the gutter, she said – and take the baby with her.

‘You live here,’ the woman told her. ‘You gave birth here. You know what this place is. Everybody knows. You aren’t married – that makes you an unfit mother. And if I say that you’re one of my girls, I can get the state to claim the child for its protection. In easier times it could be adopted but nobody can afford an extra mouth now. That means the orphanage.’

For most women at the time, it was true, an unexpected child would have been a disaster even if they were married. For most; but not for all. Not for her.

She tried to fight. Four of them came at her. One of them snatched the baby from her and ran into another room. Two others held her while the fourth began to pour liquor down her throat.

For three days she was too drunk to get out of bed. They washed her and changed her clothes, combed her hair and gave her more alcohol while the men lined up in the hallway. A year later, when she came to an arrangement with a dentist from a neighboring town, she found that several of her teeth had been cracked in that initial struggle.

Her lover’s mother set about establishing legal claims to the child as soon as it was born. Since the baby was illegitimate, there was no proof either way as to who the father was, but the authorities decided that a decent home of any kind was better than life in a brothel. They took the baby They gave him to the grandmother.

She was drunk all the time after that until the other girls let her know what had happened to some of their friends: a certain amount of drink could get you in the mood, but if you were falling down every night, you could find yourself out on the street with your ears and nose cut off.

She followed orders, obeyed requests and demands. She became a slave. Behind her mask of compliance, every thing in her was dead except the thought of her child. Whenever she had any time off, she wandered near the house where her lover’s mother lived with the baby. Occasionally she’d walk by the place, looking in quickly at one of the windows and going past without breaking stride. She was afraid that the woman would report her.

She needn’t have worried. As soon as the child was old enough, it became a stranger in a way she hadn’t anticipated – a way similar to that by which she had been made into what she was.

One day she saw both of them out walking in the park: the child toddling, rushing and stumbling while holding on to his grandmother’s hand.

She approached the spot where they were and then stood back, as still as one of the trees, to drink in the sight of her child. In a few moments the boy seemed to notice that
someone was staring at him. He stopped moving. He looked at her and smiled, making a little chirping sound of pleasure. He put his free hand into his mouth.

The grandmother turned her head. Her anger must have caused her to clench her fingers; the boy took his hand from his mouth, waved it in the air and began to whine.

‘Look,’ the grandmother said. ‘There’s the bad woman.’ She pointed. ‘What do we say when we see her?’

The boy looked up for confirmation and pointed, copying exactly the direction of the gesture. ‘Whore,’ he said.

‘That’s right, darling. Whore.’

The child laughed. ‘Whore-whore-whore,’ he chanted. He began to jump up and down with excitement. His grandmother joined him: laughing, hopping, shouting and still holding his hand so that the two of them resembled a mismatched team of theatrical entertainers.

The tears ran down her face. She watched her child until the grandmother began to egg him on to make malicious faces, teaching him to stick out his tongue. The next step would be throwing stones.

She was younger and – despite everything she’d been through – stronger than the other woman. But her child’s taunts robbed her of the ability either to attack others or to defend herself. She turned around and walked away.

She waited for her lover, not hoping for much. Victories and defeats followed each other so quickly, and the borders were altered so often that nobody could be certain who was dead or alive in the areas where fighting was going on. No one she knew of had had a letter. That was a small price to
pay for their good fortune; neither the town, nor any part of their district, had yet been occupied by the enemy; nor even by front-line troops in retreat, which could also be bad, although at least only the enemy burned everything down when they left.

She prayed for his survival and, as she prayed, she dreaded the possibility of her dearest wish coming true. She shrank from the thought that he’d believe his mother; she’d had a dream in which he was the one who held the child by the hand as they both called her a whore. If the dream came true, she thought, she’d hang herself.

The war lasted almost another two years. As far as anyone could tell, they had won. Or, at least, they hadn’t lost.

He came back in a gang of men he hadn’t known before he’d joined up. Some of them had been from his school but not in the same class. Some had looked like children when they’d marched off in their clean, new uniforms. Now it seemed to him that they resembled professional criminals and that that was probably an accurate way of describing all of them, including himself.

There was supposed to be a parade from the railroad station and down the main street of town to the park, where there would be speeches, applause and the presentation of flowers.

He and his friends had no desire to win approval or keep up appearances or to stand still while pictures were taken of them shaking hands with dignitaries who weren’t worth the saving and ugly women who for five years had been viciously insistent that their boys get out there and fight.

They broke off from the parade as it passed the bar. A mob of them burst through the doors, shouting for something to drink. And, they wanted to know, where were the girls?

Three of the girls came downstairs from where they’d been looking out of the windows at the crowd down in the street. One joined the barman behind the counter. ‘Beer’s on the house,’ someone called out. The soldiers cheered.

He tossed back half his drink and was going through the doorway into one of the smaller, less crowded downstairs rooms when he came face to face with her.

‘Yes, it’s me,’ she said. And before he could ask her what she was doing in a place like that, she told him. She described her parents’ reaction to the pregnancy; and then his mother’s. She explained how she’d ended up in the brothel and how his mother had legally stolen the child. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘she’s taught him – whenever he sees me – to shout “Whore” at me. What your mother’s done to me is worse than anything the enemy ever did to my country.’

‘Come here,’ he said.

She went up close to him and stood obediently while he inspected her.

He tipped up his glass, drained it and threw it into the corner, where it smashed into pieces. He ordered her to come with him. As he shouldered his way through the crowd and out into the open air, she followed.

The streets were empty of people and littered with flowers, confetti and scraps of paper wrappings, advertisements and posters. She walked behind him, wondering
whether they were going to the park to search among the crowds. He began to walk faster and faster. She had to skip and break into a run every so often in order to keep up. He led her to his mother’s house.

‘Wait here,’ he said. He tried to open the door, and couldn’t. He stepped back and kicked out hard until the lock gave and the door flew open. He went inside.

She tiptoed up to the window, where she could see the back of his mother’s dress, moving away.

His mother ran to him with open arms. He stopped her in her tracks by shouting at her, ‘Where’s the boy you’re living with?’

‘Boy?’ she whimpered. ‘Oh. I’m taking care of a little orphan child. Didn’t I write to you?’

‘I haven’t had a letter in four years,’ he said. ‘And I haven’t had time to write one. I was busy saving your neck. Where’s the kid?’

‘He went out to play,’ she told him. ‘Sit down and have something to drink, my darling. How I’ve longed for this day.’

He pushed her away, ready to look through the house room by room. He didn’t have to go far. At the end of the hallway stood the boy, who had heard the voices and had come to see what was going on.

‘Go back to your room, honey,’ the grandmother said. ‘We have to talk.’

‘Soldier,’ the boy said happily

The moment he looked at the child he could see that he was the father. And he recognized even more clearly that
the mother was the ruined girl he’d left behind.

‘She’s gotten her story in first, hasn’t she?’ his mother spat at him. ‘The liar. The bitch. My God, there she is outside. Here, sweetheart, there’s the bad woman again. What do we say when we see her?’

The boy ran to the window. ‘Whore-whore-whore,’ he shouted.

‘I’m your dad,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? Daddy: that’s me.’

The boy turned around.

‘Your father, who’s been fighting in the war. And now I’m back. Would you like to come with me? Let’s go for a walk.’

The boy held out his hand to be led but the soldier picked him up and sat him on his shoulder. The grandmother screamed, ‘It isn’t true. That slut has had bastards by every man in this town.’

He ducked to pass under the door frame, and walked out into the street. As soon as the boy saw his mother, he began to chant ‘Whore-whore-whore’ again.

She fell into step beside her lover. At the end of the street he set the boy down. ‘Listen to me, sonny,’ he said in a quiet little voice. ‘I’m your father and this is your mother and that’s a dirty word you’ve been taught: whore. If I catch you saying that word again, I’ll wash your mouth out with soap. Do you hear me?’

The boy looked down. His fear electrified the silence between the three of them, which continued for a long time; no one knew how to break it. At last she said, ‘If we can ever afford to waste soap that way.’

He gave a snort of laughter. She turned her head against his shoulder, her face brushing his neck. ‘How I love you,’ she whispered. He kissed her, the first time in four years. The boy, guessing from which direction harm or help might come, nudged forward and pulled on her skirt, his hands pressed to her thighs through the fabric. Like the sudden flickering of a light in darkness, warmth sprang from the center of her body, flying up to her heart and outward – igniting every part of her with a feeling of life that had nothing to do with the past and made all of it powerless against her: as if no one except her lover and her child had ever touched her.

‘Fertility,’ her friend commented, hearing her tell the story twenty years later.

‘Love,’ she declared.

‘Don’t split hairs.’

‘Fertility doesn’t know the difference between one love and the next.’

‘Maybe,’ said the friend, who was a doctor. ‘And maybe not. Fertility leads to motherhood. Motherhood can take people in different ways.’

‘Exactly. Love is different. And anyway, he wouldn’t have believed my side of it if he hadn’t loved me.’

‘Let’s just say that there’s a time for everything.’

‘Love doesn’t have set times.’

‘I meant,’ the doctor explained, ‘that there’s a time to be a mother and a time to be a grandmother. And they aren’t always the same.’

‘Oh, her,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean her. I understand that.’
She took up her work again, washing dishes in a bowl and then rinsing them under the spigot.

She refilled the bowl with water and started on the next batch. After a while she said, ‘I’ve heard so many stories about those times. A lot of people went through much worse than anything that happened to me. I know that. You can’t imagine the things I’ve heard. So, in one way I just think: I can forget about this or that – those things weren’t important. But what I can’t understand – in fact, I still can’t accept it – is why my own parents would have wanted to treat me that way. Strangers, maybe: but your family should stand by you.’

‘You were the last thing left in their world over which they had some control. As long as you behaved according to the rules they’d laid down, they felt secure. When you stopped being the girl they’d trained you to be, they couldn’t recognize you as theirs.’

‘Um,’ she murmured.

The doctor went on, ‘I have a colleague who says everything that happens in the world is entirely impersonal and it’s brought about by large astronomical upheavals. You know, there are times when the sun shoots up fiery gases like geysers – some of them are so high that they alter the weather here on earth: crops grow better, the woods produce more lumber and – a whole generation in advance – the ratio of male to female births changes dramatically so that soldiers, who are going to be killed in a war that hasn’t yet begun, will be replaced by another generation of men. Do you see what I mean? Everything that’s essential happens on a huge scale and over vast periods of time. It takes centuries
before you can see that a general direction has been established or that something new is being worked out. But that’s what really drives us: biology. Everything else is superficial.’