Foreign Bodies
FOREIGN BODIES
Fiction by Cynthia Ozick:
Dictation
Heir to the Glimmering World
The Puttermesser Papers
The Shawl
The Messiah of Stockholm
The Cannibal Galaxy
Levitation: Five Fictions
Bloodshed and Three Novellas
The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories
Trust
CYNTHIA OZICK
First published in the United States in 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Cynthia Ozick, 2010
The moral right of Cynthia Ozick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84887 735 1
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 362 8
eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 583 7
Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic Books
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ
www.atlantic-books.co.uk
Table of Contents
But there are two quite distinct things—given the wonderful place he’s in—that may have happened to him. One is that he may have got brutalized. The other is that he may have got refined.
—Henry James,
The Ambassadors
July 23, 1952
Dear Marvin,
Well, I’m back. London was all right, Paris was terrible, and I never made it down to Rome. They say it’s the hottest summer they’ve had since before the war. And except for the weather, I’m afraid there’s not much else to report. The address you gave me — Julian left there about a week ago. It seems I just missed him by a few days. You wouldn’t have approved, a rooming house in a rundown neighborhood way out toward the edge of the city. I did the best I could to track him down — tried all the places you said he might be working at. His landlady when I inquired turned out to be a pure blank. All she had to offer was an inkling of a girlfriend. He took everything with him, apparently not much.
I’m returning your check. From the looks of where your son was living, he could certainly have used the $500. Sorry I couldn’t help more. I hope you and (especially) Margaret are well.
Yours,
Beatrice
I
N THE EARLY FIFTIES
of the last century, a ferocious heat wave assaulted Europe. It choked its way north from Sicily, where it scorched half the island to brownish rust, up toward Malmö at the lowest tip of Sweden; but it burned most savagely over the city of Paris. Hot steam hissed from the wet rings left by wine glasses on the steel tables of outdoor cafés. In the sky just overhead, a blast furnace exhaled searing gusts, or else a fiery geyser, loosed from the sun’s core, hurled down boiling lava on roofs and pavements. People made this comparison and that — sometimes it was the furnace, sometimes the geyser, and now and then the terrible heat was said to be a general malignancy, a remnant of the recent war, as if the continent itself had been turned into a region of hell.
At that time there were foreigners all over Paris, suffering together with the native population, wiping the trickling sweat from their collarbones, complaining equally of feeling suffocated; but otherwise they had nothing in common with the Parisians or, for that matter, with one another. These strangers fell into two parties — one vigorous, ambitious, cheerful, and given to drink, the other pale, quarrelsome, forlorn: a squad of volatile maundering ghosts.
The first was looking to summon the past: it was a kind of self-intoxicated theater. They were mostly young Americans in their twenties and thirties who called themselves “expatriates,” though they were little more than literary tourists on a long visit, besotted with legends of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. They gathered in
the cafés to gossip and slander and savor the old tales of the lost generation, and to scorn what they had left behind. They rotated lovers of either sex and played at existentialism and founded avant-garde journals in which they published one another and bragged of having sighted Sartre at the Deux Magots, and were proudly, relentlessly, unremittingly conscious of their youth. Unlike that earlier band of expatriates, who had grown up and gone home, these intended to stay young in Paris forever. They made up a little city of shining white foreheads; but their teeth were stained from too much whiskey and wine, and too many powerful French cigarettes. They spoke only American. Their French was bad.
The other foreign contingent — the ghosts — were polyglot. They chattered in dozens of languages. Out of their mouths spilled all the cadences of Europe. Unlike the Americans, they shunned the past, and were free of any taint of nostalgia or folklore or idyllic renewal. They were Europeans whom Europe had set upon; they wore Europe’s tattoo. You could not say of them, as you surely would of the Americans, that they were a postwar wave. They were not postwar. Though they had washed up in Paris, the war was still in them. They were the displaced, the temporary and the temporizing. Paris was a way station; they were in Paris only to depart from Paris, as soon as they knew who would have them. Paris was a city to wait in. It was a city to get away from.
Beatrice Nightingale belonged to neither party. She had been “Miss Nightingale” — in public — for twenty-four years, even during her marriage and certainly after the divorce, and had sometimes begun to think of herself by that name, if only to avoid the accusatory inward buzz of Bea. To Bea or not to Bea: she was one of that ludicrously recognizable breed of middle-aged teachers who save up for a longed-for summer vacation in the more romantic capitals of Europe. That these capitals, after the war, were scarred and exhausted, drained of all their well-advertised enchantments, did not escape her. She was resilient, intelligent, not inexperienced (marriage itself had taught her a thing or two). She was, after all, forty-eight years old,
graying only a little, and tough with her students, high school boys sporting duck-tail haircuts who laughed at Wordsworth and ridiculed Keats: when they came to “Ode to a Nightingale” they went out of their way to hoot and leer — but she knew how to tame them. She was good at her job and not ashamed of it. And after two decades at it, she was not yet burned out.
She had signed up for London, Paris, and Rome, but gave up on Rome (even though it was included in the agent’s package deal) when she read, in her noisy hot hotel room off Piccadilly, of the dangerous temperatures in the south. London had been nearly bearable, if you kept to the shade, but Paris was hideous, and Rome was bound to be an inferno. “That ludicrously recognizable breed” — these were her mocking words to herself (traveling alone, she had no one else to say them to), though likely parroted from some jaunty guidebook, the kind that makes light of its own constituents. A more conscientious guidebook, the one sequestered at the bottom of her capacious bag — passport, notepad, camera, tissues, aspirin, and so on — was not jaunty. It was punishingly painstaking, and if you were obedient to its almost sacerdotal cartography, you would come away exalted by pictures and sculptures and historic public squares redolent of ancient beheadings.
On this July day the page she was consulting in her guidebook was bare of Monets and Gauguins and day-trip chateaus. It was captioned “Neighborhood Cafés.” All afternoon she had been walking from café to café, searching for her nephew. A filmy smear greased her vision — it was as if her corneas were melting — and her heartbeat either ran too fast or else meant to run out altogether, with small reminding jabs. The pavements, the walls of buildings, blew out torrid vibrations. Paris was sub-Saharan, she was being cooked in a great equatorial vat. She fell into a wicker chair at a burning round table and ordered cold juice, and sat panting, only half recovered, with her blurry eye on the
garçon
who brought it. Her nephew was a waiter in one of these sidewalk establishments, this much she knew. It was difficult to think of him as her nephew: he was her brother’s son, he
was too remote, he was as uncertain for her as a rumor. Marvin had sent her a photograph: a boy in his twenties, straw hair, indeterminate expression. How to sort him out from the identical others, with their wine-spattered white aprons tied around their skinny waists? She supposed she could spot him once he opened his mouth and revealed himself as an American: she had only to say to any probable straw-haired boy, Excuse me, are you Julian?
—
Pardon?
— I’m looking for Julian Nachtigall, from California. Do you know him, does he work here?
—
Pardon?
—
Un Américain
. Julian.
Un garçon. Est-il ici?
—
Non, madame
.
Doubtless there was a more efficient way of finding him. Marvin had written out, in those big imperious letters as loud as his big imperious voice, his son’s precise address. Three times, so far, she had climbed the broken front steps of the squat brown house in the broken brown neighborhood her fastidious guidebook mentioned only to warn its readers away. A bony landlady erupted from a door at the top of the stoop; the boy, she said in a garble as broken as her teeth, lived overhead, one flight up, only no, he was not home, he was not home already four days.
Oui, certainement
, he worked in one of the cafés, what else was a boy like that good for? At least she got the rent out of him.
Dieu merci
, he has a rich father over there.
So! A wild goose chase, useless, pointless, it was eating into her vacation time, and all to please Marvin, to
serve
Marvin, who — after years of disapproval, of repudiation, of what felt almost like hatred — was all at once appealing to the claims of family. This fruitless search, and the murderous heat. Retrograde Europe, where you had to ask bluntly for a toilet whenever you wanted a ladies’ room, and where it seemed that nothing,
nothing
was air-conditioned — at home in New York, everything was air-conditioned, it was the middle of the twentieth century, for God’s sake! Her guidebook showed no concern for the tourist’s bladder, and in its fervid preoccupation with
the heirlooms of the ages never dreamed of cooling off. It recommended small quaint boutiques in fashionable neighborhoods — if you cared for something American-style, it chided, stay in America. But she had had enough of the small and the quaint and the unaffordably fashionable, and more than enough of that asinine wandering from café to café: what she needed was air-conditioning and a toilet, and urgently. She walked on through the roasting miasma of late afternoon, and when she saw before her a tall gray edifice with a frieze incised above its two stately doors, for a moment she supposed it was yet another historic site smacking of Richelieu. But there were letters in the stone:
GRAND MAGASIN LUXOR
. A department store! The cold air came rushing at her with its familiar saving breath. The ladies’ room was very much like what she might have found in, say, Bloomingdale’s, all mirrors and marble sinks. Call it American-style, condemn it for its barbarous mimicry, Louis XIII on the outside, New York on the inside — the place was life-giving.