The Pegnitz Junction (23 page)

We saw Roma clinging to Bibi and we heard her sobbing, “I didn’t mean you, I meant everybody else.”

“Now they have made my daughter cry on a lovely summer evening,” said Julius, but quite casually, as if it were only one complaint on a long list of misdemeanours. But we were able to laugh, finally, because Michael, in his anxiety, had pressed all the buttons he could find, causing the gate in the driveway to slide back and forth, the garage doors to open and shut, and the pool in the garden to blink like a star. The lilies on the surface of the pool flashed negative-positive-negative. (It was thanks to an idea of Bibi’s that Julius had been able to grow the lilies; their roots feed on a chemical mixture encased in a sphere. Even with flowers the pool looks sterile. I always found the water lilies unpleasant; they attract dragonflies.) I had a vision that cramped my stomach, of Bibi face down among the negative-positive lilies, with dragonflies darting at her wet hair.

Bibi now let Roma lead her back to us. Julius poured wine as if nothing had happened, and he answered Michael’s question. He said, “An idea similar to yours was discussed, but we have decided against it.” We all let Julius have the last word.

B
ibi finally died in America, by gas. She had gone out to an American branch of Possner at her own request. She left her passport and bankbook and some loose money on her kitchen table. The money was weighed down with the marble darning
egg I had brought her from Italy years before. She named Julius as her closest living relative and Roma as her direct heir. There was also a sealed letter for Julius, which the police had opened before he arrived. Julius flew over, of course, though he was not a relative. After twenty years of Bibi we still did not know if she had any real family. In the letter she said she willed her body to a medical school, but since she also said she hoped there was enough money on the table to pay for a modest funeral, no one could tell exactly what she had wanted. Because of the circumstances there was a police autopsy. Julius brought back a photocopy of her letter – the police kept the original. Instead of telling why she had wanted to kill herself Bibi explained that she had chosen early morning so that she would be discovered at some time during the day and not after dark. She knew of accidents that had been caused by someone’s turning on a light in a room filled with gas. I said to Julius that all she needed to have done was turn off the electricity; there must have been a switch somewhere in the apartment. But no, said Julius, Bibi had probably thought of that too. What if she remained alone and undiscovered for days, as she had after that first failed mess of a try with gardénal? Some stranger might have broken down the door, tried a light, and, failing to find one, might have absent-mindedly struck a match. This sounded involved, not very sensible. Actually, she was found in broad daylight and no one was hurt.

Later, much later, on an evening when Julius was in a pleasant mood, I asked him about that girl’s diary – if he knew how it had come to be on the shelf of a linen cupboard. It took him minutes to understand what I was talking about, and then he
said the diary belonged to a silly uneducated person. He could not recall anything about a shelf. He was certain, in fact, that he had thrown the diary, unread, in a wastebasket.

“What did she mean by ‘everything’?” I said.

He did not remember.

“You can see how unimportant she was,” Julius said. “I wanted to have nothing to do with her, and so she sent me the diary so I could read about her soul. We are discussing an imaginary situation. There was no evidence that I was involved. My name was not mentioned anywhere,” Julius concluded.

We were sitting on the terrace during this conversation. Julius, not yet fifty, had been made a general, and we drank to his triumph and his life. I had the nausea and dizziness of the repeated moment, as though we had sat in exactly the same position once before and I had heard Julius explain the same portion of his past. I saw the water lilies.

“I have dreams about Bibi,” I said.

“She had an incurable illness,” he replied.

This had never been mentioned. The water lilies seemed enormous. “Was it in the autopsy report?”

“Naturally.”

Divinities invent convenient fables, but they are never mistaken. It must have been true; Bibi had an incurable illness and died to spare herself useless pain. Our conversation could have ended there, since we had no further use for it. Unfortunately I had still another question.

“That first time,” I said. “The first time you travelled over there with Bibi for company and left her and came back alone. You remember? The day you were to leave, something
happened. I was in the living room with Roma when we heard shrieks of hysterical laughter from the hall. Roma ran out ahead of me and began to scream in the same strident way. Bibi was in front of the looking glass trying on a hat. It was a hat specially bought for the journey. An ignoble hat. A disgusting and hideous hat of cheap turquoise jersey. She had no taste – any salesgirl could fob off anything. The salesgirl had told her she had a bad hairline, and this criminal hat covered her head from the eyebrows to the nape of her neck. Michael the subaltern, having already seen that you were laughing, was doubled up, yelling, outdoing himself in laughter. You said to Bibi, ‘I shall take you to a corner of the airport where the wind can blow it away.’ Roma – she was fifteen or sixteen – said, ‘Aunt Bibi looks like a little piglet dressed up as an actress.’ At that, Bibi, who had been laughing too, moved away from the mirror and said, ‘That was unkind.’ All at once you saw I was not laughing at all. You turned and knelt down to buckle a suitcase as if the scene did not concern you any more. Bibi was finished then. Michael had felt the shift of power too.
I
mattered.”

All this had been meant to lead up to a question, but I had lost it. Anyway, Julius had stopped listening almost from the beginning. He sipped his wine and looked attentive, but his thoughts were floating. In the same voice, as if continuing my boring anecdote, I said, “…  and tigers and zebras and ants and bees …”

“Yes, yes,” said Julius, pretending to hear.

“Oh, Julius, Julius,” I said in the same voice. “Now a general, tomorrow a field marshal. Last night in a dream I had you were nothing but a little dog who kept on barking, and Bibi had to thrash you to make you stop.”

Born in Montreal in 1922, Mavis Gallant left a career as a leading journalist in that city to move to Paris in 1950 to write.

Since that time she has been publishing stories on a regular basis in
The New Yorker
, many of which have been anthologized. Her world-wide reputation has been established by books such as
From the Fifteenth District
and
Home Truths
, which won the Governor General’s Award in 1982. In that same year she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, becoming a Companion of the Order in 1993, the year that she published
Across the Bridge
and was the recipient of a special tribute at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in Toronto. In 1996,
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant
was published to universal acclaim.

Gallant is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has received several honorary degrees from Canadian universities and remains a much-sought-after public speaker. In 2001 she became the first winner of the Matt Cohen Award, and in 2002 she was awarded the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

She continues to live in Paris.