The Seventh Candidate Read online

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  4

  Three days later it was suddenly three o’clock, an hour before the scheduled identification of the boy. His heart alarmed him. He went into the library. Another patient tried to strike up a conversation. He fled. He couldn’t go to the encounter with his mind confused by futile conversations with strangers. He needed these last minutes to prepare his mind in solitude, to win back calm.

  Lorz returned to his room, lay down on the hard bed and closed his eyes. For the first time he tried to let the dangerous image come instead of resisting it. He had the confused idea that if he couldn’t recall the boy’s face now he’d never be able to identify him twenty minutes from now. All he had otherwise was that abstract knowledge of piece-meal features that refused to coalesce into a face apart from the moment of the explosion. One part of his mind wanted to go back to that moment. It strained against the leash of the fearful part of his mind.

  Lorz called up the wall again and again without fear but with growing despair because he couldn’t call up the face. The leash was too tight. He relaxed it. Relaxed it more and more. Now the leash was gone and all of his mind strained forward. It was like pushing against a flimsy barrier guarding a chasm and which could yield any second. He felt dizzy and could taste his sweat.

  It was coming, he was coming, he could hear his breathing, feel his breath on his face, how was that possible?

  He opened his eyes on a totally wrong face that filled his entire field of vision. The wrong face asked anxiously if something was wrong.

  He said that nothing was wrong. But the wall-clock gave him only ten minutes to find the right face.

  “I was going to call the nurse,” she said. “I thought something had happened, you were so pale and sweating. You still are. Shall I call the nurse?”

  “Nothing is wrong. I have an appointment in ten minutes. You can leave the correspondence on the table.” She was holding the plastic shopping-bag she brought the correspondence over in.

  “It’s not correspondence,” she said. He closed his eyes and tried again. Nothing came.

  He heard the rustling of paper. He opened his eyes. She was still there, standing in the middle of the room, burrowing in the plastic bag. He closed his eyes again. The rustling of paper went on. “Look!” she said as to a child and exhibited the cake. It was crowned with candied cherries and dripped with honey.

  “The desserts are so awful here.”

  “I’m not hungry. I’m very tired. I have an appointment in a minute. Isn’t there a lot to do in the office?”

  “Business hasn’t picked up yet. I just get in the way of the workmen.”

  “Why don’t you take the day off and go somewhere?”

  “That’s what I do. I come here.”

  “Go somewhere less depressing, the cinema, the zoo.”

  “I don’t mind keeping you company. You don’t seem to have many visits.”

  “I’m used to that. It doesn’t bother me. I prefer it that way.”

  He closed his eyes.

  The boy’s face didn’t come.

  A knock on the door. Silberman came in. To relieve the pressure on him, Lorz understood, the doctor looked with a comically hungry expression at the elaborate cake his assistant had left on the formica wheeled table.

  The three of them passed through the leather-padded swinging-doors of the Life Support Unit into the empty visitors’ lounge where the inspector was waiting for them. It was painted a restful green and had neutral paintings and big green plants. Lorz had to sit down in one of the chrome and leather armchairs. He bent over to get the blood back in his head. Dr Silberman placed his hand on his shoulder.

  “I’ve been here before,” he whispered. “Yes, for five weeks,” said the doctor.

  “I recognize it,” he whispered.

  “No. You were here but you never saw it.”

  “I recognize it.”

  “It must have been in some other hospital. From one hospital to another these units look pretty much the same. If you don’t feel up to it we can call it off.” Lorz shook his head and got up.

  “It shouldn’t take more than a minute,” said Dr Silberman as they walked over the fitted carpet toward the other door. “You look at Teddy and say yes or no, that’s all he wants.”

  Teddy?

  Silberman explained that the nurses had first called him “Number Nine,” the number of his cubicle, but then they saw that the tag of his sweatshirt bore the brand name “Teddy” and they called him that. It was less anonymous than a number.

  They passed through the second door. They were in a corridor with a succession of big windows behind which patients, tributary to machines, were lying on wheeled stretchers.

  Lorz halted. “I recognize this place,” he said again.

  Dr Silberman didn’t answer. The inspector in the fore, they started going past the display-windows with their prone dummies.

  “Where was I?” he asked for the sake of a pretext to stop. Silberman pointed to the next-to-the-last cubicle. “Teddy” was in the last one, he said. The inspector was already waiting for them there.

  Lorz stopped before the ninth cubicle. He felt the inspector staring into his face as he himself stared down in confusion into the other face behind the glass.

  Now the right face came back in his mind: the tousled dark gold hair, freckles, dark blue eyes with black flecks in the irises coalesced into a smiling face.

  But the face on the other side of the glass was all wrong. The chin was too massive. Or was this an illusion created by the angle of the head, tilted back to leave free passage for the tube in the right nostril? The closed waxy lids hid the color of the eyes. And in that situation there was no question of a smile. The hair, of whatever color, had been shaved off. The bare skull, criss-crossed with stitches and shadowed by indeterminate stubble, made the face ageless.

  Lorz turned away abruptly even as he heard the inspector’s blaring question.

  He was already seated in the lounge in his former position, bent forward, when Silberman and the inspector joined him. Without looking up he told the inspector that he’d never seen the man before. He tried to call up the right face but it didn’t come. Not even the wall came.