The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (110 page)

There, you see, M. Wroblewski would tell his friend. There are chinks of light.

This is a soft autumn, moist and mild. Between showers the broad boulevards fill up with people strolling as though it were summer. He sits in the Atelier, the new place just next door to the Select, composing and rejecting an answer to his friend. His hat and stick are on a chair; his dog, an obedient one, lies under it. The Atelier opened in the eighties, but he still thinks of it as “the new place.” It seems to have been in Montparnasse forever. The table mats depict a mature model posing for a life class some three generations ago. Newspapers are on wooden holders, in the old way. The waiters are patient, except when a customer’s reaction to a slopped saucer is perceived as an affront. Across the street the mirrored walls of the building that now rises above the Coupole reflect an Île-de-France sky: watered blue with a thin screen of clouds. If you sit at the front row of tables you may be pestered by foreign beggars, some of them children. M. Wroblewski keeps loose change in his pocket, which he distributes until it runs out. There have been many newspaper articles warning him not to do this: The money is collected for the brutal and cynical men who put the children on the street.

His friend in Warsaw is completely alert, with an amazing memory of events, sorted out, in sequence. If he were here, at this moment, he would find a historical context for everything: the new building and its mirrors, the naked model, the beggar girl with her long braid of hair and the speck of diamond on the side of her nose. Who, after hearing the voice of an old man over the radio, could sit down and compose a threat? All M. Wroblewski can see are a man’s hunched shoulders, the back of his thick neck. But no, his friend might say: I have seen his face, which is lean and elegant. What do you still hope for? What can you still expect? So much for your chinks of light.

And so they would exchange visions through the afternoon and into the evening, with the lights inside the café growing brighter and brighter as the trees outside become part of the night. Perhaps his friend would enjoy meeting someone wholly new, remote from the dark riddle of the man and the death letter. Unfortunately, most of M. Wroblewski’s Paris acquaintances have vanished or moved away to remote towns and suburbs (everything seems far) or retired to a region of the mind that must be like a twisted, hollow shell. When he reads his wife a letter from Canberra he takes care to translate the English expressions Teresa puts in as a matter of course. Magda used to understand English, but even her French is fading now. Before he reaches the end of the letter she will have asked four or five times, “Who is it from?”—although he has shown her the signature and the bright Australian stamps. Or she may surprise him with a pertinent question: “Are they coming home for Christmas?” There is no telling what Magda means by “home.” She may say to him, “Does my father like you?” or even, “Where do you live?”

She uses his diminutive, says “Maciek and I,” but knows nothing about him. She can play a game of cards, write a letter—it is never clear to whom—and he pretends to stamp and post it. By the time he has invented a plausible address, the incident has dissolved. She stares at the envelope. What is he talking about? She is poised on the moment between dark and light, when the last dream of dawn is shredding rapidly and awareness of morning has barely caught hold. She lives that split second all day long.

This morning, when he brought in her breakfast tray, he found a new letter astray on the carpet. Her writing is larger than before, easy to read:

Everything in the letter is true, if you imagine that today is unwinding some forty-five years ago. He said, “What a nice letter. Is it for Teresa?”

She sat up in bed, accepted tea. “What is Prussia?”

The Prussia question is new. Perhaps in one of the shredded dreams someone called out “Prussia!” in a dream voice that turned words and names into dramatic affirmations. She looked toward the window, sipped her tea. She could see (if she was taking it in) the big garage at the corner and at least one of the trees on Boulevard Raspail.

“They’ve cut some trees down,” she remarked not long ago, walking with him around the block. She was right: It was he who failed to notice the gaps, even though he goes along the boulevard every day of his life.

Unless you try to keep a conversation alive, nothing shows. When he takes her out in the afternoon for tea and a slice of fruitcake, she looks finer and more self-possessed than most of the old ladies at other tables. They make a mess with crumbs, feed piecrust to their unruly lapdogs, pester the waiter with questions as repetitive and tedious as any of Magda’s: Why is that door open? Why doesn’t someone shut the door? Well, why can’t you get somebody to fix it? The trouble about Magda is only that one can’t leave her alone for a minute or she will be out in the street, trying to climb on a bus, on her way to teach a solfège class in a Polish school that no longer exists.

Morning is the slow time, when she refuses to understand the first thing about buttons, zippers, a comb, a toothbrush. Marie-Louise, who was born in Martinique, arrives at nine o’clock, five days a week. She knows how to coax Magda out of bed and into her clothes. (A bath can take three-quarters of an hour.) At last, neatly dressed, holding hands with Marie-Louise, she will watch a program of cartoons or a cooking lesson or a hooded man sticking up an American bank. Still clutching Marie-Louise, she may say, in Polish, “Who is this woman? I don’t like this woman. Tell her to go away.”

Marie-Louise is sent by the city’s social services and costs them nothing. The rules are firm: Household tasks are banned, but she may, as a favor, start the washing machine or make a compote of apples and pears for Magda’s lunch. In the meantime, he does the shopping, walks the dog. If Marie-Louise says she can stay until noon he walks up to Montparnasse and reads the newspapers. The white awning and umbrellas at the Atelier bring to mind the south, when Nice and Monaco were still within his means and not too crowded. He and Magda went down every Easter, traveling third class. He can retrace every step of their holiday round: beach in the morning, even when Easter fell in March and the sea was too cold for wading; a picnic lunch of bread, cheese, and fruit, eaten in deck chairs along the front; a rest;
a long walk, then a change into spotless, pressed clothes—cream and ivory tones for Magda, beige or lightweight navy for him. An apéritif under a white awning; dinner at the
pension
. (In the dining room the Wroblewskis kept to themselves.) After dinner, a visit to the casino—not to gamble but to watch the most civilized people in Western Europe throw their money around. You would have to be a millionaire to live that way now.

In Montparnasse, the other day, a woman sitting by herself turned on a small radio. The music sounded like early Mozart or late Haydn. No one complained, and so the waiters said nothing. Against the music, he tried to calculate, in sums that have no bearing on money, his exact due. He would have sworn before any court, earthly or celestial, that he had never crawled. The music ceased, and a flat, cultured voice began describing what had just been played. The woman cut the voice and returned the radio to her handbag. For a few seconds the café seemed to have gone dead; then he began to take in conversations, the clink of spoons, footsteps, cars going by: sounds so familiar that they amounted to silence. Of course he had begged. He had entreated for enough to eat, relief from pain, a passport, employment. Shreds of episodes shrugged off, left behind, strewed the roads. Only someone pledged to gray dawns would turn back to examine them. You might as well collect every letter you see lying stained in a gutter and call the assortment an autobiography.

There must have been some virtues, surely. For instance, he had never tried to gain a benefit by fraud. Some people make a whole life out of trickery. They will even try to wrangle a box of the chocolates that the mayor of Paris distributes at Christmastime. These would-be swindlers may be in their fifties and sixties, too young to be put on the mayor’s list. Or else they have a large income and really ought to pay for their own pleasures. Actually, it is the rich who put on shabby clothes and saunter into their local town hall, waving a gift voucher that wouldn’t fool a child. And they could buy a ton of chocolates without feeling the squeeze!

The Wroblewskis, neither prosperous nor in want, get their annual gift in a correct and legal way. About four years ago, a notice arrived entitling Magda Zaleska, spouse Wroblewska, to the mayor’s present. She was just beginning to show signs of alarm over quite simple matters, and so he went in her place, taking along her passport, a lease of which she was the cosigner, and a letter of explanation that he wrote and got her to endorse. (Nobody wanted to read it.) He remembers how he trudged upstairs and down before
coming across a hand-lettered sign saying
CHOCOLATES—SHOW VOUCHER AND IDENTITY
.

The box turned out to be staggering in size, too large for a drawer or a kitchen shelf. It remained for weeks on top of the television set. (Neither of them cared for chocolate, except now and then a square of the bitter kind, taken with strong black coffee.) Finally, he transferred half the contents to a tin container that some Polish friends in England had used to send the Wroblewskis a gift of shortbread and digestive biscuits, and dispatched it to a distant cousin of Magda’s. The cousin had replied that she could find chocolate in Warsaw but would welcome a package of detergent or some toilet soap that didn’t take one’s skin off.

He had used some of last year’s chocolates as an offering for the concierge, packing them attractively in a wicker basket that had come with a purchase of dried apricots. She removed the ribbon and flowered paper, folded them, and exclaimed, “Ah! The mayor’s chocolates!” He still wonders how she knew: They are of excellent quality and look like any other chocolates you can see in a confectioner’s window. Perhaps she is on the list, and sends hers off to relatives in Portugal. It hardly seems possible: They are intended for the elderly and deserving, and she is barely forty. Perhaps she is one of the schemers who has used deceit—a false birth certificate. What of it? She is a worthy woman, hardworking and kind. A man he knows of is said to have filed an affidavit that he was too badly off to be able to pay his yearly television tax and got away with it: here, in Paris, where every resident is supposed to be accounted for; where the entire life of every authorized immigrant is lodged inside a computer or crammed between the cardboard covers of a dossier held together with frayed cotton tape.

When he brings Magda her breakfast tray he looks as if he were on the way to an important meeting—with the bank manager, say, or the mayor himself. He holds to his side of the frontier between sleeping and waking, observes his own behavior for symptoms of contagion—haziness about time, forgetting names, straying from the point in conversation. He is fit, has good eyesight, can still hear the slide of letters when the concierge pushes them under the door. He was ten months in Dachau, the last winter and spring of the war, and lost a tooth for every month. They have been replaced, in an inexpensive, bric-a-brac way: better than nothing. The Germans give him a monthly pension, which covers his modest telephone bill, with a bit over. He is low on the scale of atonement. First of all, as the German lawyer who dealt with the claim pointed out, he was a grown man at
the time. He had completed his education. He had a profession. One can teach a foreign language anywhere in the world. All he had to do when the war ended was carry on as before. He cannot plead that the ten months were an irreparable break, with a before and an after, or even a waste of life. When he explained about the German pension to a tax assessor, he was asked if he had served with the German Army. He feels dizzy if he bends his head—for instance, over a newspaper spread flat—and he takes a green-and-white capsule every day, to steady his heart.

As soon as Marie-Louise rings the front doorbell, the dog drags the leash from its place in the vestibule and drops it at his feet. Hector is a young schnauzer with a wiry coat and a gamesome disposition, who was acquired on their doctor’s advice as a focus of interest for Magda. He is bound to outlive his master. M. Wroblewski has made arrangements: The concierge will take him over. She can hardly wait. Sometimes she says to Hector, “Here we are, just the two of us,” as if M. Wroblewski were already among the missing. Walking Hector seems to be more and more difficult. Parisians leave their cars along the curbs without an inch of space; beyond them traffic flies by like driven hail. When Magda, of all people, noticed that those few trees were missing, he felt unreasonable dismay, as if every last thing that mattered to him had been felled. Why don’t they leave us alone? he thought. He had been holding silent conversations with no one in particular for some time. Then the letter came and he began addressing his friend. He avoids certain words, such as “problem,” “difficulty,” “catastrophe,” and says instead, “A state of affairs.”

The Nansen passports are being called in. Three people he knows, aged between eighty-one and eighty-eight, have had letters from the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs: The bureau that handles those rare and special passports is closing down. Polish political refugees do not exist any longer. They have been turned into Polish citizens (this is the first they’ve heard of it) and should apply to their own embassy for suitable documents. Two of the new citizens are an engraver, who still works in an unheatable studio on the far side of Montmartre, and another artist, a woman, who once modeled a strong, stunning likeness of Magda. She could not afford to have it cast, and the original got broken or was lost—he can’t remember. It was through a work of art that he understood his wife’s beauty. Until then he had been proud of her charm and distinction. He liked to watch her at the piano; he watched more than he listened, perhaps. The third is a former critic of Eastern European literature who at some point fell into a depression and gave up bothering with letters.