Georg Letham (17 page)

But La Forest was a good organizer. He spent nights at the office. He was not performing his subordinates' tasks himself but devising a work calendar that would allow absolutely nothing to be overlooked. He did not reprove any of his unruly colleagues and subordinates but merely set up his agenda and carried it out.

My father had failed. He went back to the chessboard for his next move. He gave La Forest new tasks that he hoped would be beyond him. He knew that someone like La Forest would never back out, but would take the assignment as a commendation, and he anticipated that
La Forest's ambition would exceed his ability. “You can set your own deadline.” The task was indeed too large for one person to cope with alongside his regular duties. But La Forest found help, I surmise his brother, the priest, who would come to class deathly pale and utterly exhausted during that period and was now unable to give any of his pupils “private” attention. The two of them did what was necessary. From that point he (the priest) treated me with extreme reserve, limiting himself to his duties as a teacher and no more.

My father made his third move. He gave La Forest an assistant, a known careerist (and a regular frog). “You ought to have a lighter load, you need to take better care of yourself,” he said with his friendly smile. “Don't you think?” La Forest was to see himself reduced to a figurehead. The consequences were easy to predict. And yet my father was mistaken; for La Forest never resented the man, he stuck to business, neither pushed himself forward nor gave any reason for conflict. He was so levelheaded that he pulled off the most difficult stunt and even made a friend out of the ambitious frog. When my father learned of this, he tossed the frog back into the lower depths, transferring him to an insignificant rural post with no possibility of advancement.

La Forest was strong. My father made a fourth move.

He provoked him. He annoyed him. He found fault, made pointed comments without justification, disparaged La Forest's work before he had looked at it.

“But you haven't read my reports yet,” La Forest objected.

“Please let me make the decisions,” my father responded patronizingly. He made vicious personal remarks, mollified him in the same breath, belittled him, used sarcasm, so that anyone else would have exploded in anger.

“Today he nearly pounded on the table,” he said to me, to whom he reported all the phases of this bureaucratic duel, “nearly! Unfortunately I was called to the minister's office just then, and La Forest was in good spirits again by the time I came back. He offered
me
a cigarette.”

“Did you take it?” I asked.

“Why not?” said my father. “But I'll write in his file, ‘La Forest regrettably often lacks the reserve necessary between subordinate and supervisor.' I'll leave the dossier in an easily accessible drawer, seemingly by mistake, and then we'll see if he reads the document marked ‘strictly confidential' in the folder with his name on it.”

The idea never crossed La Forest's mind. He never read other people's mail, private files meant nothing to him, and “strictly confidential” did not tempt him at all.

My father tried another move. He invited La Forest to our house. I finally saw what he looked like. I found him extraordinarily appealing. My father had intentionally kept him waiting, and the man came up to me. He was a disconcertingly ugly, extremely taciturn person, but very clever with his hands, and he helped me repair an electrically operated toy that was broken. He knelt down on the floor with me and held the screwdriver between his teeth. Everything was in working order in half an hour. The expensive toy had never worked before and every repairman had given up on finding the hidden defect. La Forest was so methodical that he succeeded.

My father had intentionally left him alone with me for a long time. I asked La Forest all sorts of questions, including ones about his brother, the priest. He answered unselfconsciously, it seemed, without the least embarrassment, and treated me like someone his own age, which always pleases young people.

Now my father tried excessive praise. My father buttered him up so much that I was ashamed of him. But my father believed that a little butter never hurt anyone. Everybody could handle any amount of praise. But my father was reckoning on a specific effect of this fulsome praise, that the subordinate would start taking his recognized competence for granted and commit some blunder, or, even more abominably, overstep his limits, his authority. My father even went so far as to report La Forest's extraordinary competence, so as to be able to say to His Excellency when the anticipated failing came, “I expected
so much
of this man, as Your Excellency knows–how generous I was with him, and how shamefully we were deceived.”

But, as strange as it sounds, my father met his Waterloo in this case. La Forest did not overstep the bounds of his position, however elevated it was now. He did his work; as a person he was modest, self-effacing, and cheerful. Both he and his brother had methodically worked their way up, overcoming great difficulties, and the result was that La Forest was recommended by the minister himself to the head of a large industrial concern that was seeking an organizer of unusual abilities. The perquisites of the position–percentages of profits, a house, a car, seats on the boards of other companies, etc.–were so extraordinary that it rankled my father that he had not been considered. Why hadn't he at least been offered the position? He would have said no (rich man that he was, power attracted him even more than money), but he would have liked to pose as the public-spirited, self-sacrificing high official who passes up a lordly salary in order to spend his life slaving on a comparatively meager wage for the sake of honor and country!

The priest was going along to organize the benefits system in the factories. He said his good-byes to us, all of us deeply moved, and gave
each of us a book (approved by the estimable episcopal press office), which, when I brought it home, my father immediately hid in the back row, the second, dark row, of the bookcase. The cleric pressed the hand of each of us in turn, his eyes moist, and exited. I never heard anything about either of the brothers again–no, my father did tell me once that La Forest planned to return to the civil service. Whether that was because an effort had been made to bring him back or because he had soon had his fill of the overstuffed, indigestible sandwich of industry, my father did not say, nor did I ask. My father never found a replacement for him.

“Ah, La Forest,” he would often sigh when he came home from work in a foul mood. La Forest was always a sore spot with him. “Never again!”

Why these old memories? They are besieging me. For the first time in a long while. If I had my choice, I'd tell the story of how the rats were defeated. But there's no time for that now.

My companion and I are at the head of the line. We have to board the ship. Here as with everything else in the world there is only
one
practical method. I have figured it out by carefully observing the others, while most of the convicts in the pontoon, beset by hunger, were staring as though hypnotized at the gulls eating the refuse from the ship. In the eyes of many of the convicts can be read a literally burning hunger. They envy the birds even a scrap of garbage.

While thinking about my father and La Forest, I have worked out the best way to climb the accommodation ladder safely and practically, the best way to avoid slipping. Slipping would mean falling and falling would mean perishing. Or does anyone imagine that life preservers
would be tossed to two convicts fighting for their lives in the waves, that a boat would be lowered for them? Sadly, I am sure the authorities would not put themselves out that far just to make sure the prisoners are fully accounted for.

But not to worry. The two of us will scale the thing like squirrels. The man whose right hand is free (me) will climb in front. With his right hand he will hold fast to the right rope, with his left foot he will pull himself from the gunwale of the pontoon onto the first rung. He will carry his possessions squeezed between his left arm and left hip. He will not look down, but only at the next rung, always taking great pains to make sure someone higher up does not step on his hand. His companion will follow two or three rungs below him and to one side, doing everything in the opposite order and not tugging too much on the arm of the other man shackled to him.

Does this need to be worked out in such pedantic detail? Let the reader of these lines try this. Improvise some fetters and bind yourself to your brother or friend or to your father. Climb up something with him, even a paperhanger's ladder that is not swaying back and forth or almost invisible in the twilight. Then consider that the joints of prisoners have grown stiff from disuse, that each man is carrying all his things, bedclothes and bags, everything that he believes essential for survival on the other side and will not part with voluntarily even at the risk of his life.

Now we climb up. Five rungs or fifty, we do not count them. The pontoon, the convicts in it gazing upward, their faces pale, sinks farther and farther away. Halfway up I feel a shooting pain in my left wrist. What is it? The fringe of my woolly coat has gotten caught in the handcuff ring
and is rubbing the skin raw. Should I stop? Calmly straighten everything out? No way to do that when one man after another is pressing upward from below! And how to push that unruly sleeve back with my right hand? When I need my right hand to hold on to the rope? My companion could easily do it–not just for my sake, but for his own, too: I'll take him along with me if I fall. And he does it! Was it a considered action? Or was it out of pity? To thank me for my samaritanly help on the dock? In the same instant he has taken hold of me with his left hand and gently freed me while gripping the ladder more tightly between his knees. For with his right hand he has no choice but to hang on to his bags.

We brace ourselves with our knees and manage to get a grip on the rail. Covered with sweat and out of breath, at last we crawl on deck. A junior officer is standing there; finally, finally, he removes our manacles. He keeps a running tally as he tosses the handcuffs one after another into a basket.

What does everyone do with hands that are now free? It would not be believed! Many cross themselves.

The pontoon has gradually discharged its load. It pushes off. It is going for the rest of the convicts waiting on the dock. The oars dip metronomically. It is as steady as a child's toy, a wooden duck, perhaps, gliding on its four little wheels as the child pulls it across the smooth floor of the nursery, still playing after he has said his prayers, recited them for his pious father before bedtime.

The convicts are not allowed to sleep yet. They are still waiting. Most of them are chewing something. They smack and belch mightily. But they do not achieve satiety. Satiety of any kind slows and deepens respiration. But these men breathe quickly and shallowly like dogs being
chased or giving chase. Even the feeling of a full belly is a kind of peace. There is no peace here.

It does not smell good. The tart aroma of the open sea, produced by seaweed and salt, is mixed with the warm smell of grease coming up from the engine room. But there is also an odor from still deeper down, perhaps from the uncleaned bunkers below, where livestock was once penned. It is a mingling of mildew, mustiness, latrine–no, it is none other than the true sharp, rank, stale smell of rats, a smell that decrepit old prisons and asylums have and (I recognize it now) that the beloved house of my childhood had, even though it was not an overcrowded coop for felons but a rambling villa on the edge of a city, its garden bordered by a sluggish river.

The house where I grew up had just this one flaw, that the rats were more at home there than people were. As I said earlier, rats had played an important role in my father's life. So he wanted to have the loathsome animals (loathsome to him, still more so to his wife, and most of all to us children) close at hand until such time as he was able to take his revenge on their kind. He did. Belatedly, but he did! That day I became an adult. Has it been worthwhile? I am not going to ask. I look at my companion. Could he become a comrade in the times to come, a substitute for the brother who is dead for me? I say nothing. My companion says nothing. Two mutes meet.

The night is starry. Very cool. Most of the men have unlashed their bedclothes and overcoats on the deck and wrapped them as tightly as possible around their limbs; many have even pulled them over their heads, Franciscan-style. Just the eyes, and what eyes! peep out from under the hoods of these strange monks. But each man acts for himself.
They do not associate. And yet two wrapped up together in two blankets, huddled close, would be twice as warm. As it is, much chattering of teeth can be heard.

The evening meal does not come. Many men grumble, curse wrathfully in the crudest language. But they lick their chops at the slightest provocation. When a junior officer comes near, they cravenly fall silent and bow their heads between hunched shoulders.

A lamp, its calm reflection on the water, glides toward us from the harbor: the navigation lantern of the pontoon with the last stragglers. And we hear that the
Mimosa
will be making another stop to take on more convicts. Now the men appear on board, one of them dragging a wet jacket; it leaves a damp trail on the deck, like blood. He and his companion, two wizened little old men, meekly hold out their thin wrists for the junior officers to unshackle. And what do they do then? With his freed hand, the older man, a mummy-like, yellow-faced figure, reaches under his shirt as though going after fleas. But all he does is bring out the rosary that hangs on his shaggy chest. He says his beads over and over, mumbling with loose lips.