The Seventh Candidate Read online

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  5

  The next day Dr Silberman asked him how he was feeling after yesterday’s little adventure. He replied that the unpleasantness with the wall didn’t bother him any more and how now (he leaned slightly forward toward Silberman with a smile he meant to be wry) he couldn’t even visualize the wall. It was almost frustrating, not to be able to visualize the wall when he wanted to.

  “I can’t seem to do without misery of some kind. Don’t you people have a word for that?”

  “Is it really bothering you?”

  “I wouldn’t call it anything … melodramatic.”

  “Melodramatic. Like …? What would be melodramatic?”

  “It’s not a feeling of, say, loss.”

  Silberman nodded and waited. He was a great listener.

  “Or, say, amputation.”

  “Amputation?”

  “No, certainly not. Or void.” The director smiled tightly again.

  “What would you call it, then?”

  He tried to find poetic similes. For some reason he was always anxious to impress the doctor. Like a fifth-magnitude star, he said, that you can make out in the peripheral zone of vision, but which vanishes if you try to look at it directly. Or music just beyond recall. He stopped and laughed again to minimize the importance of what he’d said.

  Anyhow it wasn’t actually like the star business or a frustrating memory-blank. It was more like loss, amputation, void.

  Dr Silberman changed the subject. He started sniffing about Lorz’s occupation. Lorz was on his guard. There was nothing to be ashamed of but when people asked him what he did he always spoke vaguely of being in advertising.

  The doctor confessed that before Lorz’s assistant had spoken to him about it he’d never suspected the existence of that occupation. He didn’t remember ever having seen Lorz’s employees on their peculiar ladders, but then he generally traveled by bus. He said that he was fascinated by that occupation of Lorz’s. A little jealous, even.

  The director blinked rapidly, wavering between gratification and suspicion.

  Dr Silberman went on. In the course of his work, he’d encountered representatives of a great variety of professions: bankers, bakers, bricklayers (his globular eyes behind the pince-nez searched the ceiling for another alliterative professional), burglars (“Yes, no joke, once, a charming old man.”) but never the inventor of banking, baking, bricklaying, burglary. How had he, Lorz, come to invent … What was the exact technical word for what Lorz did?

  “‘Poster cosmetics’,” said Lorz, flattered at the doctor’s interest. “Or ‘poster rectification’. There is no established term.”

  “But you can invent that too. So your employees are ‘cosmetizers’ or ‘rectifiers’.”

  “I prefer the term ‘eradicators’.”

  “‘Eradicators’. Ho. Splendidly sinister. Like professional killers.”

  “The idea had never occurred to me. They eradicate what deserves to be eradicated. In any case I usually refer to them simply as ‘operators’.”

  As to the circumstances that had led to the “invention” (Dr Silberman confessed to curiosity about it), the director guardedly recounted the thing in the barest of outlines. He was careful to omit anything that might be misconstrued as obsession. They obsessively read obsession into everything, supposedly. He also omitted any reference to his mother. The mind-men, he had heard, had a fixation on other people’s mothers.

  True enough, his mother, by dying, was very indirectly involved in his vocation. After the funeral, he hadn’t wanted to return to the flat where the two of them had lived together for twelve years – not counting her three institutional sojourns – following the murder of his father. Guiltily, he resumed job-hunting. He’d been discharged by the latest bookshop the week before for excessive interest in the contents of the books he was paid to shelve. It was the third such discharge for that reason.

  One afternoon in Central Station, returning from an unsuccessful interview and deeply depressed, he saw a giant poster of a little girl smiling radiantly. She was defaced with some of the same words that had been scrawled on the walls of the gutted flat twenty years before.

  He saw his mother, distraught and exquisite, seated in the middle of the room with the fragments of the vase, those words on the wall behind her. He started weeping, for the first time since she died.

  At that time such words were still limited to shameful confidential places. The two platforms were empty. He rummaged in the depths of his worn briefcase and came up with an eraser. He was vaguely aware that what he was doing was like his mother’s absurd attempts to piece together the shattered Chinese vase. The penciled obscenities yielded easily enough. But not the ball-pointed ones.

  When passengers appeared on the opposite platform he stopped.

  That night in the new solitude of the flat the triumphant obscenity troubled him, distracting him from the totality of his grief. The next morning he slipped white ink-effacer into the briefcase and the girl – at that time he hadn’t yet started calling her Helena – was restored to innocence. He experienced a sense of restoration himself, a cleansing almost.

  Effacement became a necessary habit. Other people collected stamps or coins or matchboxes or postcards, he eliminated graffiti. Which was the most futile occupation? But while those other hobbies were solitary, his was exercised in the most public of places. Some (the elderly, mainly) applauded his efforts, most (the young, mainly) quipped or jeered.

  He soon overcame his sense of shame. The graffiti had started up clandestinely in the last days of the monarchy, in the service of subversion that was more than political. He felt the connection between these new obscenities and those earlier diagonal triple arrows and clenched fists. His activity was less individual aberration, he felt, than moral protest. Paradoxically, his major fear was to be taken for one of the very vandals he was combating. His early technique of writing over the obscenity with the effacing brush gave him a troubling sense of duality, defacer and effacer at the same time.

  When he got another of his senseless jobs (stock-clerking, this time), what he regarded as his significant activity didn’t stop. He pursued it very early in the morning before work and late at night after work instead of returning home. He spent as little time as possible in the empty apartment.

  The turning point, the unsuspected social justification of the most intimate of pursuits, came one day in Crossroads when a well-dressed fat man with an expensive pig-skin briefcase congratulated him on his skill. That happened often enough. But this time it wasn’t for the usual moral or political reasons. The fat man had seen the capital to be derived from Lorz’s disinterested efforts. He was an executive in a concern that specialized in underground advertising posters. He offered him a job and initiated him to the economic potentialities of poster rectification.

  For a year Lorz was paid for doing what he liked best to do. Sometimes he felt a nagging sense of falling away from the ragged purity of his initial efforts, shame at this commercialization. His job was, by and large, what he now had his operators do. He himself invented the wheeled stepladder. He refined his techniques. In a year’s time he had established contact with other poster concerns and was in a position to resign and set up on his own.

  That was the story as it happened. In the modified version he recounted to Silberman he appeared as a keen-eyed levelheaded entrepreneur, alive to business opportunities in the most unlikely of places. He sidestepped certain of Silberman’s questions. The doctor seemed satisfied with Lorz’s version.

  “If I find myself out of a job one day,” he said, “would you consider hiring me as a – what is it again? – as an eradicator? Ho. The marvelous word.”