The Seventh Candidate Read online

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  3

  White walls, a white ceiling, a white enamel bed, an arm swathed in white which he realized was his own (the meaningless term “Basic White” filled his mind for a second) and standing at the foot of the bed, contradicting all that whiteness, a woman he knew, the name didn’t matter, wearing a red dress. He didn’t know the name for the place but knew that the place was for distress. The woman’s eyes were wet. Her mouth made funny movements. The foot of the bed had bars. The whiteness hurt his eyes. He closed them and returned to darkness.

  He opened his eyes again. The woman (his employee, Dorothea Ruda) was still there but in a blue dress and next to her was a stout red-haired woman in a white dress, a uniform. She smiled down and said “Welcome back” and then the nurse did things to the bottle suspended above him with the tube that ran into the bruised crook of his unbandaged arm. She bent down and did things to other tubes that ran under the sheet. A young doctor came in. He had a sharp nose. He was cheerful like the nurse. He shined a light in his eyes. It hurt. He scratched the soles of his feet. That didn’t hurt. He asked him questions he should answer by yes or no if he could. If not, shake his head or nod. He answered and forgot the questions immediately. It didn’t matter. He closed his eyes and forgot the young sharp-nosed doctor and the two women and returned to the darkness.

  This time he woke up to the white room with a feeling of familiarity. There was the bandage on his left arm, white flowers on a Formica table, his assistant seated by the side of the bed. Her dress was gray now. He tried to anchor himself to these things by staring at them. Something terrible had happened to him but he feared return to the darkness if he thought about it. His mind leaped back before the darkness, giving it finitude in that direction too, turning it into a parenthesis. He saw the six applicants in the big windowless Ideal Poster office. He saw the rear of the office and seemed to be slowly walking towards a seated figure and the wall. His mind shied away in panic and concentrated on the thought: if she’s here then who’s taking care of the business?

  “So we can thank God it was a small bomb that exploded that morning,” she was saying, as though she’d been talking to him for a long time. Hadn’t she already said that? “A small home-made bomb, thank God. Otherwise we’d all be dead. It was in the ministry toilet.”

  Something in what she’d said vaguely disturbed him, he didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t the words “bomb” and “exploded.” He didn’t even think of the probable damage to the office. What was it? And what had happened to the sunshine? A minute or so ago it had been strong and glaring on the wall. Now it was huddled weakly red in a corner. Knowledge of time too was an anchorage against return to darkness. He heard a faint slow voice asking about it.

  “Five twenty-five,” she answered.

  His mind was clearer. The test, of course. It had started early that morning. Five twenty-five now. The whole day had gone by. And he was here and she too. What was she doing here? Why wasn’t she in the office? “I’ve been … unconscious …for … eight hours?” the slow faint voice, his own, asked. He was childishly proud of the accuracy of his calculation. She looked down, shrugged her shoulders slightly, made a helpless gesture.

  Slowly suspicious, he asked, “What day … is it?”

  “Monday,” she said promptly.

  He felt relief. The test had taken place, as usual, on Monday morning.

  He looked out of the window, squinting against his myopia. His glasses: the night of the rowdies. Those trees outside. Time was suddenly lost, calculations upset at the sight of those trees.

  That morning – which morning? – on the way from his flat to Ideal, the trees had been black and bare. Now they were covered with sinister young green leaves. Sometimes in late February there was a spell of warm weather. But it took a good week of such warmth to coax leaves out. A week.

  “How long … have I … been here? You said … today … was Monday.” His mind was alert. “It is Monday,” she replied, looking down at the floor again. Alert. What she’d said a minute ago was, “It was a bomb that morning.” ‘That’ was the potent word. “What Monday?” he demanded.

  She started crying. “I told you to go to the rear and look at his poster. I should have stayed there myself. It should have happened to me. But they say you’re all right now, practically.”

  “What Monday?”

  “It’s April 13 today,” she said, looking down at the floor. “I prayed for both of you all the time. You’re practically all right now they say. I keep on praying for him.”

  He closed his eyes. Had someone else been injured in the explosion?

  She stared at his white frozen profile beneath the bandaged head. His eyes remained shut. Alarmed, she prepared to call the nurse. Then his lips moved. Faintly, slowly, he said: “And the … business? I’m in a coma … for five weeks … and you … spend all your time here … changing dresses … and crying. Who’s taking care … of the business?”

  She was still crying a little but laughing now too. He was himself again, hopelessly, the same as before, but thank God for that. She stopped laughing and then stopped crying. She blew her nose.

  There was no business for the time being, she explained. Hadn’t been since the Events. The underground had been shut down for two weeks. And even now he wouldn’t recognize the stations. Rubbish knee-deep, the trains themselves covered with giant graffiti, spray-canned. The original posters had vanished completely beneath layer after layer of political posters, stickers and inscriptions. The agencies had stopped producing posters. It would take another week before the mess was cleaned up. Until then there was no question of protecting posters. There was nothing left to protect. It had been a crazy exciting month.

  On the morning of March 7 (she could be certain of that date, she said) there occurred a number of explosions in public buildings and ministries including the one next to Ideal Poster. Thirty or so innocent people had been killed or at the very least injured. In any case it was certain there had been deaths too. The government, which hadn’t resigned yet (that was later), ordered the arrest of extremist leaders of the left. Or of the right? Probably both, actually. Then there were strikes everywhere. And demonstration after demonstration, the avenues black with demonstrators, the weather glorious for that time of year, tear-gas and arrests because of the smashed shop-windows and the burning cars and more demonstrations to have them freed, the arrested demonstrators, that was.

  She herself got caught in one of them and was saved from a clubbing (by a policeman! she!) by such a nice girl who’d shoved her out of harm’s way into a doorway. She was sometimes a little bit extremist, her new friend (it depended on what you were talking about), but full of ideas, not that she agreed with all of them, but some of them made you think. She wrote poetry and made beautiful jewelry. Vera – that was her name – thought she was dreadfully backward, a “noodle” she said, and maybe she was. Anyhow the factories and the universities were occupied. People started hoarding, there’d been a shortage of sugar, cooking-oil and petrol (“and lemon-soap, too, for some strange reason”). Black and red flags everywhere. “Total strangers would speak to each other in the street,” she added, as though this was a central point of those historic days along with the scarcity of lemon-soap.

  “So we are … now living under … a collectivist … dictatorship. They shouldn’t … have troubled … waking me up.” He said that, but he didn’t really care. Saying that staved off the image of the nearing rear wall and the seated figure. When he reached them the terrible thing would happen again.

  No, it was all over, she said. The provinces hadn’t followed. There’d been too much looting by uncontrolled elements, too many cars burned. They’d held legislative elections last week and the government parties had won all the seats, or at least most of them. A majority, for certain. So everything was the same as before. There was cooking-oil and sugar in the shops, petrol in the pumps, and strangers didn’t speak to each other in the street anymo
re.

  The nurse came in and said that it was time. She could return tomorrow afternoon. His assistant put on her coat and fussed with the flowers. She waved good-bye with timid eagerness from the threshold. Her face was lit and her eyes wet again.

  The director asked the nurse to put the flowers somewhere else, not so close to the bed. They gave off a heavy sickening scent.

  The night was very bad.

  Early next morning he was disconnected from his tubes. He was cranked up to a sitting position and his turban of bandages was unwound. His skull, which felt cold and itchy, elicited murmurs of satisfaction. They ignored his bandaged arm, although he had trouble making a fist, also the painfully inflamed right nostril where the tube had run. He was given a quantity of differently colored pills, then cranked flat and underwent the humiliation of a brief but intimate toilette, the last, the nurse assured him. Then he was cranked up again and encouraged to eat tasteless porridge accompanied by weak tea.

  That afternoon he received the visit of a portly man of about fifty, his upper half dressed elegantly in a checkered jacket, a pinstriped shirt and a bow tie. On the lower half he wore faded blue jeans and unlaced track-shoes. He had a fat face, a balding skull, a triple chin and wore a pince-nez. From the peculiarity of his dress the director guessed that he specialized in mental health.

  “Welcome back,” said his visitor cheerfully. It seemed to be the formula in such cases. “My name is Doctor Silberman. Yours should be Patient Lazarus.” He laughed at his own joke. “I’ve come to bother you a little, if I may.”

  He too shined a light in his eyes, all the while humming tunelessly with his hand gently posed on his patient’s shoulder. Then he sat down and made notes on a clipboard with an optimistic air. He looked up and asked Lorz if he played cards. It was another joke. Without waiting for a reply he took a deck out of his jacket pocket and asked Lorz to describe card after card. There were bull’s-eyes, patterns of zigzags, whirls, dots and circles, a great number of multi­colored labyrinths. Dr Silberman put the cards back in his pocket, sat down and scribbled more notes.

  He looked up, beaming. “Well, you won the game. You beat me. It’s a game I like to lose. That’s good, that’s very good. You’re a lucky man. How do you feel?”

  Lorz minutely enumerated all of his symptoms except the major one. “Normal, perfectly normal,” said Dr Silberman at each of them. He stood up, prepared to go and leave him alone with that major symptom.

  Timidly, because he was afraid talking about it would bring it back, Lorz referred to the recurrent image of the wall that had exploded. He omitted the boy who was of no clinical interest. He didn’t want to use melodramatic words like “panic” in describing his reaction to the image so he simply said: “It’s a bit unpleasant.” Silberman nodded, unimpressed.

  He’d absurdly understated it. He amended: “Very unpleasant. And I dream about it too.”

  The doctor assured him that in such trauma this phenomenon was classic. With the medicine he was taking it would disappear in a few days. He went over to the door.

  “How is he?” asked Lorz.

  “Who?”

  “The other man.”

  “The other man?”

  “The other man who was injured in the explosion, I don’t know his name.”

  “Oh, of course. The boy. His name. No one seems to know the boy’s name, actually. A police-inspector should be coming to ask you a few questions about that. If you feel tired, send him away. You may find him tiring, particularly in your condition. I did, without being in your condition.” He laughed. It was another joke, apparently. “He was hoping you’d know the boy’s name, I gathered. But you say you don’t.”

  The director explained that he’d been one of over twenty applicants. How could he remember? The police would learn his name when he came out of it. He would come out of it, wouldn’t he? He, the director, had.

  “It’s by no means absolutely excluded,” said Dr Silberman. “He was even more severely injured than you, though. But you never can tell in such cases.”

  The next afternoon, the inspector bulled into his room without knocking. The director was resting on his bed, kneading a lump of clay the Physical Therapy Department had given him for his numb left hand. Several times he’d found himself fashioning a human head and had quickly squeezed it back to formlessness with the help of his good hand.

  The inspector, a squat red-faced man of about forty in an ill-fitting blue suit, introduced himself pugnaciously in a rasping voice. The director made no effort to remember his name. He couldn’t help comparing him with his father, impressive in his black uniform. The inspector remained standing, ignoring Lorz’s invitation to sit down. There were no time-wasting preliminaries, like asking about the state of his health.

  What the police wanted to know was the name of the other man who had been hurt in the explosion, the one still in coma. No identity papers had been found in what was left of his clothing. The inspector surmised that one of the other candidates had taken advantage of the confusion to steal the man’s wallet. Second nature for this generation. Example: the Events, the looting that went on in broad daylight. What had happened to values?

  The director was irritated at hearing his own ideas in the mouth of an ungrammatical vulgarian. He said that he didn’t know the man’s name. He went on kneading the clay.

  “You have to know his name. Your secretary says you got letters of application. She couldn’t find them in the office. What was left of it. And she couldn’t find them in your apartment either. They must be somewhere.”

  Lorz stopped kneading and stared. “You actually forced my assistant to search my apartment?”

  “Her idea. She had the keys. So where are those letters? There was a wooden filing cabinet in the office. It burned. Were they there? You don’t remember? What do you mean, you don’t remember? Don’t you remember anything about the man?”

  “He corrected a poster like a professional. That’s all I know about him.”

  He saw the wall again and felt the rise of panic.

  “Had you ever seen him before?”

  He should have been prepared for the question but it caught him off guard. For the first time on this side of the darkness, he saw the boy’s face. It was inseparable from imminent disaster. He tried concentrating on his assistant’s white flowers in the corner. Then on the image of her ferreting in his flat. The boy’s face persisted. It grew tremendous with peril.

  The inspector snapped him out of it by exclaiming: “You knew him!”

  Back in the white room, Lorz looked past the inspector’s triumphant red face at a hazy tree in leaf framed by the window like a captionless poster. He must remember to have new glasses made up.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Say it one way or the other. You knew him or you didn’t know him. It looked like you knew him.”

  “I don’t remember if I knew him.”

  The inspector stared down at him and asked what that meant: he didn’t remember if he knew him.

  Before he could try to explain what that meant, the door opened. The sharp-nosed young doctor who had tickled his soles greeted both of them. Excusing the interruption, he squatted and examined the chart at the foot of the bed. He started taking notes. The inspector ignored him and kept on staring at Lorz.

  What did that mean? Lorz reflected a second.

  “That means … that perhaps when I saw him I thought I knew him, but now … I can’t be sure if that’s what I thought.”

  The inspector stared down at him again in longer silence. Visibly he was turning Lorz’s phrase about, examining it from all possible angles. Finally he said that his statement didn’t make sense. But it didn’t matter. The man was here in the hospital in the Life Support Unit. Lorz could try to identify him.

  “Now?” the director asked, badly frightened.

  “They can push you there in a wheel-chair, can’t they?”

  Without looking away from the
chart, the young doctor vetoed the idea. Certainly not today. Perhaps in two or three days. In any case the medical staff, not the police, decided such matters. He went on with his notes.

  “I’ll contact you in two days, then,” said the inspector, impassive. He moved massively towards the door. “Or three days,” said the doctor to his back. “But it’s not sure,” he added. Without answering, the inspector left the room.

  The doctor left the room too and the image started up again for the hundredth time, the way it always did, without warning.

  Without warning the wall would loom. The boy would smile up at him, expecting recognition. There was no recognition. And the strange thing was, Lorz couldn’t picture his face abstracted from the encounter. At best he was able to snatch an isolated feature, like a piece of a jig-saw puzzle, and flee in dread that the wall would burst and release a flood of blackness from which, this time, he would never emerge, as the other hadn’t emerged.

  What he retrieved, then, wasn’t an image of the other’s face but curiously abstract and piece-meal knowledge of a generous mouth, wide-pitched dark blue eyes with black flecks in the irises, a faint constellation of freckles over the bridge of his nose, tousled dark gold hair. When Lorz allowed the features to coalesce into a face the wall came back and with it terror. The director would return or be returned to the scene again, endlessly.

  Sometimes he didn’t know whether the image of the boy was imposed on him or whether it was a temptation irresistibly yielded to.

  Some situations were safe. The image didn’t come during Dr Silberman’s daily visits with their therapeutic jokes. In the rehabilitation pool his mind was too busy coping with nearly nude amputees and paralytics. In the physical-therapy room there was the steady chatter of the buxom therapist while he monotonously overcame the springs of the hand-exerciser or statically pedaled. But other situations were predictably bad, sure to trigger the syndrome: bare white walls and any brutal extinguishing of light. Also clock-hands at 9:00, it didn’t matter whether a.m. or p.m., with the minute hand right-angled to the other like a wall.

  The worst moment came on the seventh day of his emergence, at the climax of a long tottering walk down the fourth-floor corridor. It was his own idea. He was still unsteady on his feet. Something would be proved, he felt, by reaching the end of the corridor where the staircase and the elevators were. But when he finally got there, gasping for breath, he saw on the wall arrows pointing up and down next to the names of the various units on the other floors. That’s how he learned that the Life Support Unit – where he’d been, where the other still lay – was located on the floor above.

  The image started up. To break free he turned to the other wall and began studying the ten maze-like floor plans. Superimposing in his mind the fifth-floor chart on the fourth-floor one, he saw that the Life Support Unit was situated above his room (412). It might be that at night he lay directly beneath the other, separated only by the thickness of the ceiling, a horizontal wall.

  Dizziness overcame him and he collapsed into a chair. A nurse had to help him back to his room. She scolded him like a child for overdoing things.

  That night he dreamed that he undertook the same long journey down the deserted corridor. He pulled himself up the staircase to the fifth floor. He passed through the leather-padded swinging-doors of the Life Support Unit into the empty visitors’ lounge. It was painted a restful green and had neutral paintings and big green plants. A second door opened on a corridor with a succession of big windows. Behind them, tributary to machines, patients were lying on wheeled stretchers. He was approaching the last window when the nurse came again and scolded him severely and then he opened his eyes on the ceiling in the pallid early morning light of his room.

  So day and night he was assailed by that image. Sometimes he surprised himself trying to wring humor out of his tribulations – a cosmopolite approach to suffering, he’d read – by toting up his incredible accumulation of woes over the past few weeks. There was his lacerated right sole (healed, true, during the coma) with the attendant loss of his glasses; the intestinal fire (for the moment back to latency); the wrecking of his office; possible bankruptcy; the blasting of his brain; his half-paralyzed left arm; and now hounded day and night by an image he couldn’t cosmetize.

  While waiting for Silberman’s pills to take effect, he tried to fight the syndrome on his own. The trick, he thought, was to concentrate on quantifiable worries. His assistant brought over plenty of these in the form of bills, dunning letters and balance sheets in growing unbalance. One day the radio announced the government’s decision to compensate uninsured victims of the bombing outrages. It had to come soon. But no date was mentioned.

  So the prospect of bankruptcy did afford a certain relief from the image. But concern about money matters couldn’t be indefinitely kept up. In the interstices of disastrous calculations, without warning, wall and face would loom. This even happened during one of his assistant’s visits.

  She came often and stayed long, even after business matters had been disposed of. On the fourth day of his return to the world, at what they called “dinner-time” (five o’clock) the new nurse, mistaking their relationship, had offered her a tray. She’d eagerly accepted it, a deadly precedent. When bed-ridden he’d had the space of the bed as a buffer. Now he had to sit at angles at the narrow wheeled formica table like a crazy modern painting, his legs jack-knifed out of harm’s way, his torso twisted to make room for their foreheads when they leaned forward for soup.

  For the first time he understood the expression tête-à-tête. Since the death of his mother, he’d lost the habit of being in a confined space with another person. In addition, she never failed to bring flowers and potted plants. He always thanked her. But didn’t they compete for oxygen or emit dangerous gas at night? He didn’t remember which. Perhaps both?

  He didn’t realize it but he had a reason for being thankful to her. She proved to be a counter-fire to the obsessive image, not just because of the alarming things she brought over to the hospital from the office but because his mind was kept busy combating the irritation her presence frequently caused.

  However, on the eighth day of his return, in the very middle of a dictated sentence, the boy and the wall came back with such force that he broke off helplessly. He tried the trick of staring at her latest flowers. When that didn’t work he again pictured her ferreting in his apartment. Since the death of his mother, nobody had entered his flat except, once, a plumber, strictly confined to the flooded bathroom, and, twice, a doctor, not the same one. He imagined her using his toilet. He banished the absurd, scandalous image. The wall and the boy returned. He blurted out: “You had no business in my apartment.”

  That worked. Now he was out of it but into the consequences of his words as he could see by her face. Ever since the inspector had told him about her intrusion, he’d been trying to find the right approach to the subject: something firm but certainly not brutal like that. She took things to heart as he could see.

  She flushed, sat up stiffly and began the justification for perhaps the twentieth time. But now it was no solitary rehearsal.

  She’d managed to salvage his overcoat, she explained. It had been in tatters. Naturally she’d emptied the pockets. There’d been a few coins (she named the exact sum) and three underground tickets and the keys. She immediately put them all in an envelope, which she sealed. But the inspector was very insistent about the missing letters of application. He wanted her to give him the keys. She thought it would be better if she looked herself. He might have broken things. The police hadn’t always behaved well during the Events.

  She’d spent no more than five minutes in his apartment. She’d have seen it right away: a purple folder. “It wasn’t there so I left. I was careful to lock up.”

  This was largely the truth. She’d felt sure the inspector would become nastily insistent if she didn’t volunteer to have a look. Besides, there were probable plants to water, a possible cat to
feed, although by the way he reacted to the cats in the building this was unlikely. She came with a tin of sardines anyway.

  She’d touched practically nothing there unless you counted the closed windows and metal shutters of the first room as part of the flat. In the musty darkness she hadn’t been able to find the light-switch. The shutters had resisted as though undisturbed for years. They cried painfully and let in only a diffused distant light absorbed by the somber carpet and wallpaper, the massive, badly marred mahogany furniture. The windows gave on an airshaft. You had to lean out and crane your neck, as she did, to see a fragment of blue sky. The living room had an unlived-in smell. The only sound in the room was the slow tocking of a grandfather clock in a corner and occasional wing-bursts of pigeons from the airshaft. The worn carpet muffled her footsteps.

  In the corridor she opened a door on blackness and groped for the switch. A multitude of bulbs burst forth. They illuminated a repetitious chaotic space: hundreds of beds with frilly yellowed covers, a forest of crucifixes, endless heads of Jesus, framed bleeding hearts, mottoes in reversed lettering, “Jesus is Love!” and fragments of a vase.

  After a second she understood that it was a room with a single overhead bulb but enlarged and repeated by the mirrors lying on the bed, the floor, propped against the furniture, hanging from the walls, countless mirrors of all sizes and shapes. The mustiness was unbreathable.

  Coughing, she’d closed the door and continued her exploration. Two other doors in the corridor were locked. She was proud not to have opened them with the other keys. She passed into a small bedroom, a kitchen and a study. She found no cat and no vulnerable plants in the flat. Not counting the bouquet that almost fooled her, there was only, in his study, a green enameled dish full of pebbles and sandy soil and thumb-high cacti. The dish stood on an old desk beneath a swivel-lamp, in the exact center of a cone of light. The cacti, which had barbed needles, were of the same mineral hue as the pebbles. They needed no watering.

  Also on the desk were two leather-framed black-and-white photos. One was a bust portrait of a strong-chinned man in a black uniform with old fashioned royal insignia on the collar. The other was of a very pretty woman in artistic soft-focus with short fluffy blonde hair back lighted to incandescence. She wore a big crucifix around her slender neck. Her eyes were strange; great and transparent as water.

  In a blue vase in front of her photograph was a bunch of perfect flowers. She was ready to water them when she realized they were plastic.

  She opened the desk drawers but didn’t find the letters of application. So with the exception of the doorknobs and the drawers she hadn’t touched anything. She’d been prepared to tidy up but there was nothing to tidy up. There was rigorous order everywhere, even in the kitchen, the focal point of masculine disorder, she’d read. She had no personal experience. It was true that she couldn’t withstand a sudden urge to urinate. But, technically, could this be considered “touching”?

  She returned to his study and sat there until the grandfather clock in the living room boomed tremulously once.

  She showed up breathless at the restaurant, half an hour late as usual, foolishly holding the tin of sardines. Vera’s thin face was discontented. She’d spoiled her appetite with salted almonds and mineral water. She asked where she’d been – not at the hospital again? Vera found that it was a waste of time to visit somebody who was unconscious and who scandalously underpaid and exploited her.

  As usual, Vera had a gift for her. She had to close her eyes and hold out her arm. She felt something cold on her wrist that clicked: a modernistic silver chain-bracelet Vera had made for her.

  In the middle of the night she remembered that she’d switched off the swivel lamp on his desk. The cactus plants were sure to die. The next day she returned to his apartment and switched the lamp back on. She opened the windows and shutters in all the rooms except the two locked ones and the one filled with dusty mirrors. She gave the cacti a few drops, most of which rolled off the refractory soil. Then she sat in his study perfectly still for a half-hour before leaving.

  She ended by visiting the flat nearly every day during his coma.

  She burrowed in her bag, came up with his keys and placed them on the table. There was a long silence. He fingered his book, never far from his reach during her visits, but not insistently this time. He still felt faintly guilty at his outburst. Instead of leaving, she sat there with an air of triumphant mystery.

  Finally she came out with her big news. Her brother had just decided to give up the farm but of course couldn’t sell it. Still fingering the book, he heard her out. Who wanted to buy a tiny run-down farm in the rocky middle of nowhere? she said. So it was practically hers now. One day she’d say goodbye to the city, goodbye, goodbye, retire there and live on practically nothing. There was wood for the fireplace in the woods behind the house, and water from a well. No food problem either: a kitchen garden, a chicken or two, snared rabbits, nettles for soup, dandelion salad, wild asparagus and mushrooms and chestnuts in season, you could make wine from blackberries. Maybe she’d live there with a friend. And if people she didn’t care to see came to see her she’d wait in those woods till they were gone.

  Finally she left and Lorz was able to return to his book.