In the Country of Last Things (17 page)

Every resident, as we called them, had to agree to certain conditions before being allowed to stay at Woburn House. No fighting or stealing, for example, and a willingness to pitch in with the chores: making one’s bed, carrying one’s plate to the kitchen after meals, and so on. In exchange, the residents were given room and board, a new set of clothes, an opportunity to shower every day, and unlimited use of the facilities. These included the downstairs parlor—which featured a number of sofas and easy chairs, a well-stocked library, and games of various sorts (cards, bingo, backgammon)—as well as the yard behind the house, which was a particularly pleasant place to be when the weather was good. There was a croquet field out there in the far corner, a badminton net, and a large selection of lawn chairs. By any standard, Woburn House was a haven, an idyllic refuge from the misery and squalor around it. You would think that anyone given the chance to spend a few days in such a place would relish every moment of it, but that did not always seem to be true. Most were grateful, of course, most appreciated what was being done for them, but there were many others who had a difficult time of it. Disputes among residents were common, and it seemed that just about anything could set them off: the way someone ate his food or picked his nose, the opinion of this one as opposed to that one, the way someone coughed or snored while everyone else was trying to sleep—all the petty squabbles that occur when people are suddenly thrown together under one roof. There is nothing unusual about that, I suppose, but I always found it rather pathetic, a sad
and ridiculous little farce that was played out again and again. Nearly all the residents of Woburn House had been living in the streets for a long time. Perhaps the contrast between that life and this life was too much of a shock for them. You grow accustomed to looking out for yourself, to thinking only of your own welfare, and then someone tells you that you have to cooperate with a bunch of strangers, the very class of people you have taught yourself to mistrust. Since you know that you will be back on the streets in just a few short days, is it really worth the trouble to dismantle your personality for that?

Other residents seemed almost disappointed by what they found at Woburn House. These were the ones who had waited so long to be admitted that their expectations had been exaggerated beyond reason—turning Woburn House into an earthly paradise, the object of every possible longing they had ever felt. The idea of being allowed to live there had kept them going from one day to the next, but once they actually got in, they were bound to experience a letdown. They were not entering an enchanted realm, after all. Woburn House was a lovely place to be, but it was nevertheless in the real world, and what you found there was only more life—a better life, perhaps, but still no more than life as you had always known it. The remarkable thing was how quickly everyone adapted to the material comforts that were offered—the beds and showers, the good food and clean clothes, the chance to do nothing. After two or three days at Woburn House, men and women who had been eating out of garbage cans could sit down to a large spread at an attractively set table with all the aplomb and composure of fat, middle-class burghers. Perhaps that is not as strange as it seems. We all take things
for granted, and when it comes to such basic things as food and shelter, things that are probably ours by natural right, then it doesn’t take long for us to think of them as an integral part of ourselves. It is only when we lose them that we ever notice the things we had. As soon as we get them back, we stop noticing them again. That was the problem with the people who felt let down by Woburn House. They had lived with deprivation for so long that they could think of nothing else, but once they got back the things they had lost, they were amazed to discover that no great change had taken place in them. The world was just as it had always been. Their bellies were full now, but nothing else had been altered in the least.

We were always careful to warn people about the difficulties of the last day, but I don’t think our advice ever did anyone much good. You can’t prepare yourself for something like that, and there was no way for us to predict who would balk at the crucial moment and who would not. Some people were able to leave without trauma, but others could not bring themselves to face it. They suffered horribly at the thought of having to return to the streets—especially the kind ones, the gentle ones, the people who were most grateful for the help we had given them—and there were times when I seriously questioned whether any of it was worth it, whether it would not in fact have been better to do nothing than to hold out gifts to people and then snatch them out of their hands a moment later. There was a fundamental cruelty to the process, and more often than not I found it intolerable. To watch grown men and women suddenly fall to their knees and beg you for one more day. To witness the tears, the howls, the berserk supplications. Some feigned illnesses—falling into dead swoons, pretending
to be paralyzed—and others went so far as to injure themselves on purpose: slashing their wrists, gouging their legs with scissors, amputating fingers and toes. Then, at the very limit, there were the suicides, at least three or four that I can remember. We were supposed to be helping people at Woburn House, but there were times when we actually destroyed them.

The quandary is immense, however. The moment you accept the idea that there might be some good in a place like Woburn House, you sink into a swamp of contradictions. It is not enough simply to argue that residents should be allowed to stay longer—particularly if you mean to be fair. What about all the others who are standing outside, waiting for a chance to get in? For every person who occupied a bed in Woburn House, there were dozens more begging to be admitted. What is better—to help large numbers of people a little bit or small numbers of people a lot? I don’t really think there is an answer to this question. Dr. Woburn had started the enterprise in a certain way, and Victoria was determined to stick with it to the end. That did not necessarily make it right. But it did not make it wrong either. The problem did not lie in the method so much as in the nature of the problem itself. There were too many people to be helped and not enough people to help them. The arithmetic was overpowering, inexorable in the havoc it produced. No matter how hard you worked, there was no chance you were not going to fail. That was the long and the short of it. Unless you were willing to accept the utter futility of the job, there was no point in going on with it.

Most of my time was taken up with interviewing prospective residents, putting their names on a list, organizing
the schedules of who would be moving in and when. The interviews were held from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon, and on the average I spoke to twenty or twenty-five people a day. I saw them separately, one after the other, in the front hallway of the house. There had apparently been some ugly incidents in the past—violent attacks, groups of people trying to storm through the door—and so there always had to be an armed guard on duty while the interviews were taking place. Frick would stand out on the front steps with a rifle, watching the crowd to make sure the line advanced smoothly and things did not get out of control. The numbers outside the house could be breathtaking, particularly during the warm months. It was not uncommon for fifty to seventy-five people to be out there on the street at any given moment. This meant that most of the people I saw had been waiting from three to six days just for a chance to be interviewed—sleeping on the sidewalk, inching their way forward in the line, stubbornly hanging on until their turn finally came. One by one, they stumbled in to see me, an endless, unremitting flow of people. They would sit down in the red leather chair on the other side of the table from me, and I would ask them all the necessary questions. Name, age, marital status, former occupation, last permanent address, and so on. That never took more than a couple of minutes, but it was the rare interview that stopped at that point. They all wanted to tell me their stories, and I had no choice but to listen. It was a different story every time, and yet each story was finally the same. The strings of bad luck, the miscalculations, the growing weight of circumstances. Our lives are no more than the sum of manifold contingencies, and no matter how diverse they might be in their details,
they all share an essential randomness in their design: this then that, and because of that, this. One day I woke up and saw. I’d hurt my leg and so I couldn’t run fast enough. My wife said, my mother fell, my husband forgot. I heard hundreds of these stories, and there were times when I didn’t think I could stand it anymore. I had to be sympathetic, to nod in all the right places, but the placid, professional manner I tried to maintain was a poor defense against the things I heard. I was not cut out for listening to the stories of girls who had worked as prostitutes in the Euthanasia Clinics. I had no talent for listening to mothers tell me how their children had died. It was too gruesome, too unrelenting, and it was all I could do to hide behind the mask of the job. I would put the person’s name down on the list and give him a date—two, three, even four months off. We should have a spot for you then, I would say. When the time came for them to move into Woburn House, I was the one who checked them in. That was my principal job in the afternoons: showing the newcomers around, explaining the rules, helping them to get settled. Most of them managed to keep the appointments I had set for them so many weeks earlier, but there were some who failed to show up. It was never very hard to guess the reason. The policy was to hold that person’s bed open for one full day. If he did not show up then, I would remove his name from the list.

The Woburn House supplier was a man named Boris Stepanovich. He was the one who brought us the food we needed, the bars of soap, the towels, the odd piece of equipment. He showed up as often as four or five times a week, delivering
the things we had asked for and then carrying off yet another treasure from the Woburn estate: a china teapot, a set of antimacassars, a violin or picture frame—all the objects that had been stored in the fifth-floor rooms and that continued to provide the cash that kept Woburn House running. Boris Stepanovich had been on the scene for a long time, Victoria told me, ever since the period of Dr. Woburn’s original shelters. The two men had apparently known each other for many years before that, and given what I had learned about the doctor, it surprised me that he should have been friends with such a dubious character as Boris Stepanovich. I believe it had something to do with the fact that the doctor had once saved Boris’s life, but it might have been the other way around. I heard several different versions of the story and could never be sure which one was true.

Boris Stepanovich was a plump, middle-aged man who seemed almost fat by the standards of the city. He had a taste for flamboyant clothes (fur hats, walking sticks, boutonierres), and in his round, leathery face there was something that reminded me of an Indian chief or Oriental potentate. Everything he did had a certain flair to it, even the way he smoked cigarettes—holding them tightly between his thumb and index finger, inhaling the smoke with an elegant, upside-down nonchalance, and then releasing it through his bulky nostrils like steam from a boiling kettle. It was often difficult to follow him in conversation, however, and as I got to know him better, I learned to expect a good deal of confusion whenever Boris Stepanovich opened his mouth. He was fond of obscure pronouncements and elliptical allusions, and he embellished simple remarks with such ornate imagery that you soon got lost
trying to understand him. Boris had an aversion to being pinned down, and he used language as an instrument of locomotion—constantly on the move, darting and feinting, circling, disappearing, suddenly appearing again in a different spot. At one time or another, he told me so many stories about himself, presented so many conflicting accounts of his life, that I gave up trying to believe anything. One day, he would assure me that he had been born in the city and had lived there all his life. The next day, as if having forgotten his previous story, he would tell me that he had been born in Paris and was the oldest son of Russian émigrés. Then, shifting course yet again, he would confess to me that Boris Stepanovich was not his real name. Owing to some unpleasant difficulties with the Turkish police in his youth, he had taken on another identity. Since then, he had changed his name so many times that he could no longer remember what his real name was. No matter, he said. A man must live from moment to moment, and who cares what you were last month if you know who you are today? Originally, he said, he had been an Algonquin Indian, but after his father died, his mother had married a Russian count. He himself had never married, or else he had been married three times—depending on which version served his purpose at the moment. Whenever Boris Stepanovich launched into one of his personal histories, it was always to prove some point or other—as if by resorting to his own experience he could claim final authority on any given subject. For that reason he had also held every imaginable job, from the humblest manual work to the most exalted executive position. He had been a dishwasher, a juggler, a car salesman, a literature professor, a pickpocket, a real estate broker, a newspaper editor, and the
manager of a large department store that specialized in women’s fashions. I am no doubt forgetting others, but you begin to get the idea. Boris Stepanovich never really expected you to believe what he said, but at the same time he did not treat his inventions as lies. They were part of an almost conscious plan to concoct a more pleasant world for himself—a world that could shift according to his whims, that was not subject to the same laws and bleak necessities that dragged down all the rest of us. If this did not make him a realist in the strict sense of the word, he was not one to delude himself either. Boris Stepanovich was not quite the conniving blowhard he appeared to be, and underneath his bluff and heartiness there was always a hint of something else—an acumen, perhaps, a sense of some deeper understanding. I would not go so far as to say that he was a good person (not in the sense that Isabel and Victoria were good), but Boris had his own set of rules and he stuck to them. Unlike everyone else I had met here, he managed to float above his circumstances. Starvation, murder, the worst forms of cruelty—he walked right by them, even through them, and yet always appeared unscathed. It was as though he had imagined every possibility in advance, and therefore he was never surprised by what happened. Inherent in this attitude was a pessimism so deep, so devastating, so fully in tune with the facts, that it actually made him cheerful.