Relatives Read online

  And then, lastly, there was Africa. One city sat alone on its fiery sands. One city, filled with refugees and a strange mongrel population, guarded that massive continent. Beyond that single city, built in some forgotten age by an unknown people for unimaginable purposes, beyond the high wooden gates that shut in the crazy heat and locked in the broken citizens, there was only death. Without water, the continent was death. Without shade, the parching sharaq winds were death. Without human habitation, the vast three thousand miles of whispering sands were death for anyone mad enough to venture across them. Only in the city was there a hollow travesty of life.

  Ernst Weinraub sat at a table on the patio of the café de la Fée Blanche. A light rain fell on him, but he did not seem to notice. He sipped his anisette, regretting that the proprietor had served it to him in such an ugly tumbler. The liqueur suffered. M. Gargotier often made such disconcerting lapses, but today especially Ernst needed all the delicacy, all the refinement that he could buy to hold off his growing melancholy. Perhaps the Fée Blanche had been a mistake. It was early, lacking some thirty minutes of noon, and if it seemed to him that his flood of tears was rising too quickly, he could move on. To the Respirette or the Cecil. But as yet there was no need to hurry.

  The raindrops fell heavily, spatting on the small metal table. Ernst turned in his chair, looking for M. Gargotier. Was the man going to let his customer get drenched? The proprietor had disappeared into the black interior of his establishment; Ernst thought of lowering the striped canopy himself, but the shopkeeper image of himself that the idea brought to mind was too absurd. Instead, he closed his eyes and listened to the water. There was music when the drops hit the furnishings on the patio. There was a duller sound when the rain struck the pavement. Then, more frequently, there was the irritating noise of the drops hitting his forehead. Ernst opened his eyes; his newspaper was a sodden mess and the puddle on his table was about to overflow into his lap.

  Ernst considered the best way to deal with the accumulating water. He could merely cup his hand and swipe the puddle sideways. He dismissed that plan, knowing that his hand would be soaked; then he’d sit, frustrated, without anything on which to dry it. He’d end up having to seek out M. Gargotier. The confrontation then, with the proprietor standing bored, perhaps annoyed, would be too unpleasant. Anyway, the round metal top of the table was easily removed. Ernst tipped it, revealing the edges of the white metal legs which were sharp with crystal rust. The water splashed to the paved floor of the patio, loudly, inelegantly. Ernst sighed; he had made another compromise with his manner. He had sacrificed style for comfort. In the city, it was an easy bargain.

  “It is a matter of bodies,” he said to himself, as though rehearsing bons mots for a cocktail party. “We have grown too aware of bodies. Because we must carry them always from place to place, is that any reason to accord our bodies a special honor or affection? No, they are sacks only. Rather large, unpleasant, undisciplined containers for meager charges of emotion. We should all stop paying attention to our bodies’ demands. I don’t know how.” He paused. The idea was stupid. He sipped the anisette.

  There were not more than twenty small tables on the Fée Blanche’s patio. Ernst was the only patron, as he was every day until lunchtime. He and M. Gargotier had become close friends. At least, so Ernst believed. It was so comforting to have a place where one could sit and watch, where the management didn’t eternally trouble about another drink or more coffee.

  Bien sûr, the old man never sat with Ernst to observe the city’s idlers, or offered to test Ernst’s skill at chess. In fact, to be truthful, M. Gargotier had rarely addressed a full sentence to him. But Ernst was an habitué, M. Gargotier’s only regular customer, and for quite different reasons they both hoped the Fée Blanche might become a favorite meeting place for the city’s literate and wealthy few. Ernst had invested too many months of sitting at that same table to move elsewhere now.

  “A good way to remove a measure of the body’s influence is to concentrate on the mind,” he said. He gazed at the table top, which already was refilling with rainwater. “When I review my own psychological history, I must admit to a distressing lack of moral sense. I have standards gleaned from romantic novels and magistral decree, standards which stick out awkwardly among my intellectual baggage like the frantic wings of a tethered pigeon. I can examine those flashes of morality whenever I choose, though I rarely bother. They are all so familiar. But all around them in my mind are the heavy, dense shadows of events and petty crimes.”

  With a quick motion, Ernst emptied the table top once more. He sighed. “There was Eugenie. I loved her for a time, I believe. A perfect name, a lesser woman. When the romance began, I was well aware of my moral sense. Indeed, I cherished it, worshipped it with an adolescent lover’s fervor. I knew and needed the constraints of society, of law and honor. I could only prove my worth and value within their severe limits. Our love would grow, fed by the bitter springs of righteousness. Ah, Eugenie! You taught me much. I loved you for it then, while my notion of purity changed, bit by bit, hour by hour. Then, when I fell at long last to my ardent ruin, I hated you. For so many years I hated you for your joy in my dismay, for the ease of your robbery and betrayal, for the entertainment I provided in my youthful terror. Now, Eugenie, I have my reward. I would not have understood, in those days. But I am revenged upon you: I have achieved indifference.

  “How sad, I think, for poor Marie, who came after. I loved her from a distance, not wishing ever again to be wounded on the treacherous point of my own affection. I was still foolish.” Ernst leaned back in his chair, turning his head to stare across the small expanse of vacant tables. He glanced around; no one else had entered the café. “What could I have learned from Eugenie? Pain? No. Discomfort, then? Yes, but so? These evaluations, I hasten to add, I make from the safety of my greater experience and sophistication. Nevertheless, even in my yearling days I recognized that la belle E. had prepared me well to deal not only with her successors but with all people in general. I had learned to pray for another’s bad fortune. This was the first great stain on the bright emblems of virtue that, at the time, still resided in my imagination.

  “Marie, I loved you from whatever distance seemed appropriate. I was still not skillful in these matters, and it appears now that I judged those distances poorly. You gave your heart and all to another, one whose management of proximity was far cleverer than mine. And I prayed fervently for the destruction of your happiness. I could not rejoice in your good fortune. I wished you and him the most total of all disasters, and I was denied. You left my life as you entered it—a cold, distant dream; but before you left, you rehearsed me in the exercise of spite.”

  He took a sip of the liqueur and swirled it against his palate. “I’ve grown since then, of course,” he said. “I’ve grown and changed, but you’re still there, an ugly spatter against the cleanness of what I wanted to be.” With a sad expression he set the tumbler on the small table. Rain fell into the anisette, but Ernst was not concerned.

  This morning he was playing the bored expatriate. He smoked only imported cigarettes, his boxed filters conspicuous among the Impers and Les Bourdes of the natives. He studied the strollers closely, staring with affected weariness into the eyes of the younger women, refusing to look away. He scribbled on the backs of envelopes that he found in his coat pockets, or on scraps of paper from the ground. He waited for someone to show some interest and ask him what he did. “I am just jotting notes for the novel,” he would say, or “Merely a sketch, a small poem. Nothing important. A transient joy mingled with regret.” He watched the hotel across the square with a carefully sensitive expression, as if the view were really from the windswept cliffs of the English shore, or the history-burdened martial plains of France. Anyone could see that he was a visionary. Ernst promised fascinating stories, secret romantic insights; but, somehow, the passersby missed it all.

  Only thoughts of the rewards for success kept him at M. Gargotier’s table.
Several months previously a poet named Courane had been discovered while sitting at the wicker bar of the Café en Esquintand. Since then, Courane had become the favorite of the city’s indolent elite. Already he had purchased his own café and held court in its several dank rooms. Stories circulated about Courane and his admirers; exciting, licentious rumors grew up around the young man, and Ernst was envious. Ernst had lived in the city much longer than Courane. He had even read some of Courane’s alleged poetry, and he thought it was terrible. But Courane’s excesses were notorious; it was this that no doubt had recommended him to the city’s weary nobility.

  Something about the city attracted the failed poets of the world. Like the excavation of Troy, which discovered layer upon layer, settlement built upon settlement, the recent history of the civilized world might be read in the eyes of the lonely men waiting in the city’s countless cafés. Only rarely could Ernst spare the time to visit with his fellows, and then the men just stared silently past each other. They all understood; it was a horrible thing for Ernst to realize that they all knew everything about him. So he sat in the Fée Blanche, hiding from them, hoping for luck.

  Ernst’s city sat like a blister on the fringe of a great equatorial desert. The metropolitan centers of the more sophisticated nations were much too far away to allow Ernst to feel proud of his cultivated tastes. He built for himself a life in exile, pretending that it made no difference. But the provinciality of these people! The mountains and the narrow, fertile plain that separated the city from the northern sea effectively divided him from every familiar landmark of his past. He could only think and remember. And who was there to decide if his recollections might have blurred and altered with repetition?

  “Now, Eugenie. You had red hair. You had hair like the embers of a dying fire. How easy it was to kindle the blaze afresh. In the morning, how easy. The fuel was there, the embers burned hotly within; all that was needed was a little wind, a little stirring. Eugenie, you had red hair. I’ve always been weakened by red hair.

  “Marie, poor Marie, your hair was black, and I loved it, too, for a time. And I’ll never know what deftnesses and craft were necessary to fire your blood. Eugenie, the creature of flame, and Marie, the gem of ice. I confuse your faces. I can’t recall your voices. Good luck to you, my lost loves, and may God bless.”

  The city was an oven, a prison, an asylum, a dismal zoo of human aberration. Perhaps this worked in Ernst’s favor; those people who did not have to hire themselves and their children for food spent their empty hours searching for diversion. The laws of probability suggested that it was likely that someday one of the patricians would offer a word to Ernst. That was all that he would need. He had the scene carefully rehearsed; Ernst, too, had nothing else to do.

  The rain was falling harder. Through the drops, which made a dense curtain that obscured the buildings across the square, Ernst saw outlines of people hurrying. Sometimes he pretended that the men and, especially, the women were familiar, remnants of his abandoned life come coincidentally to call on him in his banishment. Today, though, his head hurt and he had no patience with the game, particularly the disappointment at its inevitable conclusion.

  He finished the last of the anisette. Ernst rapped on the table and held the tumbler above his head. He did not look around; he supported his aching head with his other hand and waited. M. Gargotier came and took the tumbler from him. The rain fell harder. Ernst’s hair was soaked and tiny rivulets ran down his forehead and into his eyes. The proprietor returned with the tumbler filled. Ernst wanted to think seriously, but his head hurt too much. The day before, he had devised a neat argument against the traditional contrast of city and arcadian life in literature. Shakespeare had used that antithesis to great effect: the regulated behavior of characters in town opposed to their irrational, comedic entanglements in the forest world beyond the city’s gates. Somehow, the present circumstances destroyed those myths; somehow, Ernst knew that he didn’t want them destroyed, and he had his headache and the everlasting morning rain to preserve them another day.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was a quarter past three. Ignoring Gretchen’s objections, Ernest had brought out the portable flat set and put it on the floor, plugging it into a socket in the kitchen area. He had watched a progression of three fifteen-minute programs; between them had come commercials and the special news bulletin. He had learned little more. It was now evident that the news media had been given no more details than Jennings had revealed at the factory. The formal announcement had been scheduled for eight o’clock that evening. Beyond that, Ernest was as uninformed and as annoyed as ever.

  “Why don’t they tell us anything?” asked Gretchen.

  “They’re building suspense,” said Ernest sourly. “Save the best for last. Always leave ‘em laughing. It’s good theater.”

  “But don’t we have a right to know?”

  Ernest couldn’t stand another minute, either of the television’s daytime programming or his wife’s nerves. “I’m going to go out for a while,” he said.

  “Go where?”

  “I might learn something,” he said, smiling at his own ingenuity. Gretchen nodded, staring at the flat set. It didn’t seem to be giving her a headache.

  Ernest took his jacket from the hook on the wall and left. He walked quickly down the narrow, foul-smelling hall. He punched the button for the elevator; a naked white bulb lit where the plastic “Down” arrow had been. Sounds from the other modapts startled him. He waited for the elevator; he put on his jacket and searched his pockets for money.

  The faint green light of the elevator car slid up behind the round porthole of the door. Ernest opened the door. Inside, in a far corner, he saw a puddle of urine, now running toward him, two long muddy arms reaching for him. “Goddamn it,” he muttered. He let the elevator door go. Before it wheezed shut he had started down the stairway.

  Out on the sidewalk once more, Ernest paused to consider. It was now about half past four. The Representatives’ announcement was due at eight. That gave him a good amount of time to kill, with a very limited amount of money to spend. He sat for a few moments on the modapt building’s stoop, watching the few pedestrians. They all seemed so ugly. Those few people who still forlornly claimed the brotherhood of men had never visited New York. Or Cleveland. Or Washington. Or Los Angeles. A romantic notion had died, it was true, but it was unmourned. No one had the energy to climb up out of the immense crowd and throw flowers. Or love his neighbor, thought Ernest, as he watched an incredibly obese man make his slow progress down the block.

  Ernest put his hand in his pocket and jingled the loose change. He had enough to get himself mildly drunk. It was Gretchen’s fault; if it hadn’t been for her, he would have taken his time and found more money. Ah, well, it was good enough to make a start. He could finish the job with a few cans of beer while he watched his government on television.

  He encountered few people between the modapt building and the bar. Almost everyone had been sent home from work, and were now waiting anxiously for the news. The streets were deserted, giving the usually choked neighborhood of Brooklyn a hot, grimy, ghost-town atmosphere. It was frightening. Ernest tried to turn his thoughts away, but he kept returning to the same notion: like it or not, he was involved in a peculiarly unpleasant situation, one that he was entirely helpless to solve.

  “I wish Sokol were here,” thought Ernest, trying again to ignore the empty streets, the solitary stragglers. “Sokol. The Man Who Knows What’s Going On. The Man Who Knows What To Do. Somewhere in that blue plastic notebook he must have the rules written down. Sokol, or somebody, has been briefed. There is a right thing to do, a proper response, that will protect me and my family. All that I have to do is learn what it is. That is the fallacy of education. ‘There are things to be done, and ways to do them, and books to teach you how. All you have to do is choose wisely.’ No, it just doesn’t work in real life.”

  From a distance of half a block, Ernest could see that the bar, like a
ll the other businesses, had been closed for the day. He didn’t want to accept that disturbing fact. He continued walking. “Sokol could be in there now,” he thought. “The lights are turned off, so most of the common people will think the bar’s closed. They’ll just walk on by. But the genuine thinkers will investigate. They’ll try the door. Sokol will let them in; after a while, he’ll have collected a small gang of sharp people, men and women who passed the simple test. We’ll all sit around on the bar stools. Sokol will look around, nod at us all, take out his notebook, and begin reading. Then we’ll find out what all this nonsense is about. And we’ll know how to cope with it. Let all the other idiots worry themselves to death.” The bar’s door was locked. Ernest rattled it angrily. It was too dark inside to see anything. Mike, the owner, was gone. Suzy, the “waitress,” was gone. Sokol had never set foot inside the place. Ernest kicked a bent beer can, bouncing it off the door. He turned around, his hand jingling the coins in his pocket again. The bar was closed, the lunch counters would be closed, the bowling alleys would be closed, the magazine stands would be closed. Ernest muttered and walked slowly home.

  “You’re back,” said Gretchen when Ernest opened the door to the modapt.

  “I’m back,” he said wearily.

  “Did you learn anything?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We wait for the announcement, like everybody else. But I figure, how bad could it be, if they didn’t tell us right off?”

  Gretchen thought about that for a moment. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “I hope so.”

  “Get me a beer. And turn off that set.”

  The time passed slowly. Gretchen chattered, talking about the things she had seen on the television, the even more boring things her mother had told her, and all the unimaginative things she expected the Representatives to say. There was no way for Ernest to escape. He felt sorry for himself, and the beer was a poor consolation. Soon, though, it was seven forty-five: one more tedious program until the big news. Ernest sat with bleary eyes, staring at the strange flat figures on the television screen. They were engaged in some moronic activity, which he had little desire to understand. Ernest was pleased with himself; he was fairly drunk, nearly isolated from the irritating influences around him. He had accomplished that on his own, too. The bar had been closed. He was resourceful. Sokol would be proud.