TEN.
I was running across Lagos with my sister. We were doing a marathon, and having to push vagrants and street dogs out of our way. But I have no sister; I"m an only child. When I suddenly awoke, it was to total darkness. My eyes tried to adjust. From the warmth of the bed, the sound of traffic reached me. As always when one wakes up like this, it was impossible to tell the time. But a deeper terror immediately gripped me: I couldn"t remember where I was. A warm bed, darkness, the sound of traffic. What country is this? What is this house, and who am I with? I reached out a hand; there was no one else in the bed. Was I alone because I had no partner, or because my partner was far away? I floated in the dark, anonymous to myself, lost in the sensation that the world existed but I was no longer part of it. was running across Lagos with my sister. We were doing a marathon, and having to push vagrants and street dogs out of our way. But I have no sister; I"m an only child. When I suddenly awoke, it was to total darkness. My eyes tried to adjust. From the warmth of the bed, the sound of traffic reached me. As always when one wakes up like this, it was impossible to tell the time. But a deeper terror immediately gripped me: I couldn"t remember where I was. A warm bed, darkness, the sound of traffic. What country is this? What is this house, and who am I with? I reached out a hand; there was no one else in the bed. Was I alone because I had no partner, or because my partner was far away? I floated in the dark, anonymous to myself, lost in the sensation that the world existed but I was no longer part of it.
The first question that found its answer was about the partner: I had no partner, I was alone. The fact arrived, and it calmed me immediately. The distress had been in not knowing. Then other information came: I was in Brussels, Belgium, in a rented apartment, the apartment was on the ground floor of the building, and the rumble outside was from the garbage trucks. The trucks came on Fridays, before daybreak. I was someone, not a body without a being. I had slowly returned to myself from a distance. The effort of gathering this ballast for my ident.i.ty, trivial-seeming ballast without which my heart might have given out, was exhausting. I fell back to dreamless sleep, and the trucks continued to rumble outside. When I finally woke up again, it was almost noon. The natural light that filled the room was diluted by rain. It was the seventh day of the rain, which had been nagging, trickling, falling without biblical grandeur. But its longevity reminded me of the only other rain I could recall that had lasted for days. There must have been others, but only that solitary incident stood out now in memory. I was nine at the time, so it was the year before I was sent away to boarding school.
That day had started with clear weather, hot, like any in the endless blur of hot days normal to us in all months of the year. I had come home from school at two, had lunch, and taken a nap, which was unusual for me. When I woke up, my mother had gone out, to the market, or to the bank. My father would not return from work for a few hours yet, and only my mama, my father"s mother, was home. Her room was at the back of the ground floor of the house, in the section behind the kitchen, in the same part of the house where the study was. I went to see her, but she was still asleep. The electricity was out. If it hadn"t been, I might have watched some television. I wasn"t permitted to do so on school days, and the only things of interest on the weekends were the sports review shows: English soccer on Sat.u.r.day evenings and the Italian league on Sundays. So the television rule was one I broke casually when my mother happened to be out on a weekday afternoon. Mama was hard of hearing. If she was downstairs, I could tell her I was going up to do my homework and easily watch two hours of television until the horn of my mother"s car sounded at the gate. With the power cut, TV was out of the question and I was at a loss. I wandered back downstairs, to the kitchen, and opened the fridge. It didn"t hum and no light came on. The bottles inside were beginning to sweat: the boiled water we drank, the fermented ogi ogi for breakfast, the Coca-Cola and other minerals kept there in case we had guests. for breakfast, the Coca-Cola and other minerals kept there in case we had guests.
The minerals were for parties and special events. When other families with their children came to visit, we served them, and the children always tussled over who got to drink Fanta-the most desired-or 7-Up or, at the bottom of the hierarchy, Coca-Cola. It was an absurd ranking. Some children believed c.o.ke would make them darker, just as they believed that eating amala would make them darker. The younger ones would cry if the Fanta had all been taken and they were left with c.o.ke. As a "half-caste," I had no conception of what it would mean to be darker; it was the least of my worries. And as an only child, I had formed my tastes simply, on the basis of what appealed to me. I liked c.o.ke because nothing else tasted like it. The fizziness in the other drinks was never as convincing, and Fanta was too sickly sweet. But in our house, as with all good things in childhood, c.o.ke was a controlled substance. I could no sooner just take a bottle of c.o.ke out of the fridge than open up my father"s whiskey cabinet. And so the temptation came at me on that hot day: I wanted a c.o.ke. I didn"t stamp my feet, or clench my fists: no one was present to view a petulant display. Mama was asleep and, in any case, she didn"t have the say-so over the c.o.kes. I pushed the fridge door back and forth on its hinge.
Only my mother could give permission. I could wait for her return, but my desire was nothing rational; it would have been like asking her for permission to add my clothes to the washerman"s pile instead of washing them myself. She would have looked at me, puzzled, and told me that I was no longer a child, and that I should think about how fortunate I was compared to other children. By the time I asked, I would have become embarra.s.sed at the infantile nature of the request; her pretense at surprise would be unbearable for a proud boy like me. But these rules were all my father"s. He had clear ideas about how not to spoil a child. The enforcement, though, had fallen to my mother, and if I resented the rules-which I only rarely did, as they were the only conception I had of childhood-if on rare occasions I ever resented the rules, I did so on my mother"s account, and never took into consideration my father"s part in it. In this way, I created a kind of innocence for him in my mind. But gradually, the dream of escaping these parental rules crystallized in my mind as the ideal of adulthood. There was no starting point for the rebellion, but I could mark an arbitrary one: that a grown-up was someone who, first and foremost, could drink a c.o.ke at whim. And so, I shut the door of the fridge, and reopened it. I took out one of the clammy bottles and placed it in the sink with an unintentionally loud clink (Mama"s room was next door).
I put the c.o.ke back into the fridge and went outside. It was darker and cooler, and the clouds were starting to move. I swore that I would never forget the intensity of what I was feeling at that moment. I solemnly promised myself, electrified by the self-consciousness of oath taking, that, once I became an adult, I would drink c.o.ke with impunity. In my imagination, this drinking took place in our kitchen: I saw a bigger version of myself walking casually up to the fridge and opening it. This grown-up self of mine takes a cool moment to think about what he wants, and he wants a c.o.ke, always. He pulls it out, opens it with a bottle opener, and pours the hissing contents into a gla.s.s full of ice. This older me, this adult, does this once every day. Every blessed day: the thought of such frequency almost drove me mad with excitement. My heart raced at the thought of such a vengeance, and I longed to be done, there and then, with childhood. Still, I could not break the rule. I walked to the back of the house.
I removed the steel plate covering the well, and peered inside. It was more than ninety feet to the waterline. Were the spirits still there? The well diggers had given them alcoholic drinks, which my father had paid for. Had the spirits been merely placated, or had they been banished? It was too far a drop for the surface of the water to be visible. I looked hard and saw nothing, so I took a stone, holding it over the center, and I let it fall. It hit the side of the well with a flat sound, and then retorted with a splash. I thought perhaps I should go upstairs and do my long division. I took a larger stone and threw it, hard. It ricocheted several times until the invisible water gulped it loudly. I took off my rubber slippers and sat on the edge of the well, at first with my feet on the outside, then, one at a time, on the inside, so that both legs dangled into the darkness. I felt cool and dangerous; but what if a spirit from the outside pushed me? The well was close to the perimeter fence. Something I had seen on television recently had convinced me that the spirits congregated in the corners of the perimeter fence, and so those four points were the only part of the compound I feared. I carefully brought both legs back to safety, replaced the plate, and went inside.
Upstairs, long division seemed out of the question. I put a searching hand into my shorts. I took off my shorts and briefs, and removed my T-shirt as well. I lay on my back, and fondled myself, but had no imagination, had no idea of what to do. My genitals lay squished in my palm. I suddenly remembered that I had seen a magazine once, years before, maybe when I was six or seven. The terrible excitement of it choked me, as did the notion that the magazine might still be somewhere in the house. I hastily pulled my clothes back on, and went downstairs to the study, and started searching, frantically but quietly, in the stacks of old magazines. It must have been something a wayward uncle of mine had left around, a glossy magazine (my memory could not have invented such details), and what it depicted was what I now desperately had to see again. I methodically went through the papers in the study, the old file folders with printed sheets and engineering graphs from my father"s years in graduate school, the annual reports of the Nigerian companies in which my parents held stock. I was at it for the better part of an hour. I flipped through a dusty paperback t.i.tled Body Language Body Language, a book of popular psychology from the seventies, but there was nothing of that kind of interest in it. I combed through all the binders in the bottom shelves, then gave up and went back upstairs. Then I took up the idea again, pushed by a longing that felt almost external to me, and looked under all the mattresses, mine, my father"s, my mother"s. I found nothing; I remade the beds. The exertion had left me winded and seething.
I went downstairs to the kitchen, and took out a bottle of c.o.ke and went outside, again to the back of the house. The sky seemed to have cleared again. I sat on the steel plate, opened the bottle with my teeth, and sucked down the contents so fast that my throat hurt. I wiped my mouth, took the bottle to the storeroom, and took a warm bottle of c.o.ke to put back in the fridge. It was a weeknight and my homework had not yet been done, and so I turned to that and, as I worked on it upstairs, I could hear Mama moving about downstairs. That was when it started raining, and not long afterward, I heard the car horn. I ran downstairs to open the gate. It was a torrential rainfall, and I was already soaked by the time I unlatched the padlock and swung the large metal doors open. The car came in, carrying my mother, the enforcer toward whom I wordlessly directed all the afternoon"s anger. I wasted time closing the gate. I tilted my head back, and the rain diluted the sticky sweetness still in my mouth. Then I ran to my mother to bring in the bags of food she had bought. I would have preferred to stay in the rain and drink it and whip around in it. But I went inside and changed out of my wet clothes. The power supply hadn"t returned, but it did so eventually, sometime before my father and his driver came back home at eight.
From that sudden beginning, the rain continued through the night, and through the next day, and the one after that. It was confusing, alarming in its relentlessness and intensity. We had known rain, but nothing like this. Even the concrete driveway of our house looked as if it was softening. Our wide gutters drained the water away, but out on the streets, life was a muddy mess. Many cars broke down in the inundated roads, and the commute to school took twice as long. I was morose. I didn"t tell anyone what was wrong, and n.o.body asked. The well, which I didn"t revisit, must have risen dramatically, and reflections might have become visible in its black water. It would have been strange to think-I didn"t think so then, but it occurs to me now-that this flood wasn"t worldwide. It seemed to have no boundaries, and was destined to last three solid days before it finally petered out.
The rain in Brussels was nothing so heavy, although the forecast said it would turn into a major storm by the weekend. It had become, in my thoughts, like a distant, drawn-out echo of that earlier childhood rain. But the story attached to that childhood rain was finished with, and of no import for the present. Part of it-the overheated desire, the oath-was good for a private joke, a thought that, when it flitted through my mind, amused me. I could no longer stand c.o.ke, not its taste, not the rapacious company that produced it, or the ubiquitous screech of its advertising. For many years, I had been tempted to overinterpret the other events of that day, but what happened afterward, between my mother and myself, was due as much to any other day in my boyhood as to the day the rain began.
Looking out from my apartment and across the street, I saw a broken lightbulb and a newspaper lying in a puddle. The sidewalk pulsed with falling drops and, on the wall, someone had spray-painted the word ZOFIA ZOFIA and, in smaller letters, and, in smaller letters, JE T"AIME JE T"AIME.
ELEVEN.
I arrived too early at Aux Quatre Vents, where I was to have dinner with Dr. Maillotte. The sky, after seven days, was worsening, and I stood under the restaurant"s awning, attempting to repair the damaged top spring of my umbrella. Across the street was the soaring west facade of Notre Dame de la Chapelle. The wind tortured everything in its path, knocking down garbage bins, shaking leafless trees, blowing walkers off course, but it got no quarter from the cathedral itself. The stone hulk was lashed by rain, that was all. As Dr. Maillotte would not be arriving for another half hour, I headed across the street, toward the church. arrived too early at Aux Quatre Vents, where I was to have dinner with Dr. Maillotte. The sky, after seven days, was worsening, and I stood under the restaurant"s awning, attempting to repair the damaged top spring of my umbrella. Across the street was the soaring west facade of Notre Dame de la Chapelle. The wind tortured everything in its path, knocking down garbage bins, shaking leafless trees, blowing walkers off course, but it got no quarter from the cathedral itself. The stone hulk was lashed by rain, that was all. As Dr. Maillotte would not be arriving for another half hour, I headed across the street, toward the church.
The doors were open, and the first impression, on entering, was of total silence. But soon afterward, my ears adjusted to the quietness of the s.p.a.ce, and I could hear the organ being played softly. I looked down the nave, but no one was visible. I walked down the aisle on the south side of the cathedral, under cool and soaring bays. Nothing of the rain outside was audible and, as I moved closer to the front, the music became clearer. Usually in these churches, there were one or two staff members about, and occasionally a handful of tourists as well. So I was surprised to find myself completely alone, save for the unseen organist, in such a cavern; it was desolate even for a rainy Friday afternoon. I noticed, just then, a dissonance in the sound of the organ music. There were distinct fugitive notes that shot through the musical texture, like shafts of light refracted through stained gla.s.s. I was sure it was a Baroque piece, not one I had heard before, but with all the ornamentation typical of that period, yet it had taken on the spirit of something else-what came to mind was Peter Maxwell Davies"s "O G.o.d Abufe" "O G.o.d Abufe"-a fractured, scattered feeling. It was at such low volume that, even as I heard the distinctly unsettling half step of a tritone repeated in the music, the melody itself was difficult to catch hold of.
Then I saw that there was no organist playing at all. The music was recorded and piped in through tiny speakers attached to the ma.s.sive piers at the crossing. And I saw, also, the source of the fracture in the sound: a small yellow vacuum cleaner. The high-pitched hum from the machine had risen and mixed with the recorded organ music to create diabolus in musica diabolus in musica. The woman who was cleaning did not look up from her work. She wore a bright green scarf, and a coat that reached down to the floor. She moved between the little wooden chairs of the north aisle. Instead of going into the crossing, I walked up the south aisle, toward the altar. The woman continued her work, fully absorbed, and the organ piece wove around the single, wavering hum of the vacuum cleaner.
A few weeks before, I would have a.s.sumed that the woman was Congolese. I had arrived in Brussels with the idea that all the Africans in the city were from the Congo. I knew the colonial relationship, I had a basic understanding of the history of the slave state there, and that had dislodged any other idea from my head. But then I went out one night to a restaurant and club on rue du Trone, a place called Le Panais. I spent the evening alone at my table, drinking and watching the young Congolese, all dressed up, fashionable, flirting with each other. The women wore afros or hair weaves, and many men wore long-sleeved shirts tucked into their jeans and looked particularly African, like recent arrivals. The music was American hip-hop, and the average age was twenty-five or thirty. It was a scene such as one would see in any city in Africa, or in the West: a Friday night, young people, music, liquor. After almost three hours, I paid for my drinks and was about to leave, and that was when the bartender came to talk to me. He asked where I was from, and we had a brief conversation; he was himself half-Malian and half-Rwandan. But what about the crowd, I wanted to know, were they all Congolese? He shook his head. Everyone was Rwandan.
The realization that I had been with fifty or sixty Rwandans changed the tenor of the evening for me. It was as though the s.p.a.ce had suddenly become heavy with all the stories these people were carrying. What losses, I wondered, lay behind their laughter and flirting? Most of those there would have been teenagers during the genocide. Who, among those present, I asked myself, had killed, or witnessed killing? The quiet faces surely masked some pain I couldn"t see. Who among them had sought deliverance in religion? I changed my mind about leaving just then and instead ordered another drink. I watched the couples, watched the parties of four and five, watched the young men who stood in trios, who were obviously absorbed in the moving bodies of the beautiful young women. The innocence on view was inscrutable and unremarkable. They were exactly like young people everywhere. And I felt some of that mental constriction-imperceptible sometimes, but always there-that came whenever I was introduced to young men from Serbia or Croatia, from Sierra Leone or Liberia. That doubt that said, these, too, could have killed and killed and only later learned how to look innocent. When I finally left Le Panais, it was late and the streets were silent, and I walked the three and a half miles home.
Looking now at the woman in the church, as she slowly folded the telescoping tube of the vacuum cleaner, I thought that she, too, might be here in Belgium as an act of forgetting. Her presence in the church might doubly be a means of escape: a refuge from the demands of family life and a hiding place from what she might have seen in the Cameroons or in the Congo, or maybe even in Rwanda. And perhaps her escape was not from anything she had done, but from what she had seen. It was a speculation. I would never find out, for she possessed her secrets fully, as did those women that Vermeer painted in this same gray, lowland light; like theirs, her silence seemed absolute. I walked around the choir and, when I pa.s.sed her by in the north aisle, only nodded to her, before heading out again. But near the entrance, there was suddenly someone else. I started. I hadn"t seen him walk up behind me: a middle-aged white man with a full beard. A vicar or s.e.xton, I guessed. He ignored me, and went on his way across the south choir aisle with soundless footfall.
AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE RESTAURANT, TELEVISION NEWS WAS on, with the volume turned low. On the screen was an aerial shot of choppy waters, which captions identified as on, with the volume turned low. On the screen was an aerial shot of choppy waters, which captions identified as la Manche la Manche, the English Channel. I could just make out that a container vessel had run into trouble in the storm, and all twenty-six crew members had gone overboard on life rafts. The ship, rectangular and orange, looked like a toy, listing dangerously in the swelling sea, and, all around its inundated form, tiny orange life rafts bobbed. The camera cut to a weather report, which said that the storm was spreading across Europe and moving swiftly eastward. There was already serious damage in Germany: a collapsed bridge, swathes of snapped trees, and smashed cars. Then someone touched my arm. It was Dr. Maillotte. She kissed me on the cheek and said, It"s never this bad, this is the strangest winter we"ve had in years; come, let us eat. Then she added, Wait, I forgot, you prefer English, yes? Okay, I"ll remember, we"ll speak English.
We sat near a big window that came down to floor level, on the other side of which the rain descended like a sheet. She said she had just had a meeting about a foundation she was involved with. I hate meetings, she said, some things are much easier if one person decides. It was easy to imagine what her style was like in the operating room, or at an official meeting. She broke off a piece of a bread roll, chewing quickly as she studied the menu and said, almost randomly, Did we talk about jazz on the plane? I think we did, no? But if you like jazz, I"ll tell you about Cannonball Adderley. He was a patient of mine.
Her finely veined hands tore expertly into the bread. She looked much older, I thought, than when we had first met. Actually, she continued, it was his brother, Nat Adderley, who was my patient in Philadelphia. I had to take some gallstones out of him, and it was through Nat that I met Cannonball, and then Cannonball himself became my patient. He had high blood pressure, you see. Anyway, because of the Adderley brothers, we-my husband and I-met many of the notable jazzmen of the sixties. Chet Baker.
The waiter, a dead ringer for Obelix, arrived to take our orders: waterzooi waterzooi for her, veal for me. She asked if I liked wine, I said yes, and she ordered a carafe of Beaujolais. Philly Joe Jones, the drummer, and Bill Evans, too. You know Art Blakey? Cannonball liked to introduce people to each other, so we met all kinds of characters through him. We went to too many concerts to count. Not as many after Cannonball died, in the mid-seventies. He had a stroke and, like all these other men, he was terribly young. Forty-two or forty-six, something like that. for her, veal for me. She asked if I liked wine, I said yes, and she ordered a carafe of Beaujolais. Philly Joe Jones, the drummer, and Bill Evans, too. You know Art Blakey? Cannonball liked to introduce people to each other, so we met all kinds of characters through him. We went to too many concerts to count. Not as many after Cannonball died, in the mid-seventies. He had a stroke and, like all these other men, he was terribly young. Forty-two or forty-six, something like that.
I was happy to be there, and enjoyed the way she pulled each vignette like a rabbit out of a hat. The names of the jazz artists Dr. Maillotte was now listing meant nothing to me, but I could tell that she had gotten something extraordinarily meaningful out of having been part of, or rather having fallen into, that milieu.
I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy. And your husband, I said, does he not come to Brussels as often as you? No, she said, he"s much happier in the States. I think he slowly lost his connection to Belgium. For me, it"s my friends that keep me coming back. And also the fact that I just can"t stand American public morals. And you, do you go to Nigeria a lot? I don"t, I said. My last visit happened two years ago, and that was after a gap of fifteen years; and it was a brief visit. Being busy all these years was part of it, and losing some of the connection, as you said, also plays a role. Also, my father died not long before I left, and I have no siblings.
Our food arrived. So, I guess English is only your second language, she said. What"s the first? For a second, I thought I might tell her that German, not English, was my second language, the private language between my mother and myself until I was five, the language I later totally forgot. Though, even now, to hear a child call out in a department store Mutter, wo bist du? Mutter, wo bist du? still cut me to the quick; it must have been the kind of thing I said myself, once upon a time. English only came later, at school. But I didn"t want to get into the intricacies of the story, so I told her that Yoruba was my first language. It"s the second biggest of Nigeria"s native languages, I said. I spoke only Yoruba until I began primary school. still cut me to the quick; it must have been the kind of thing I said myself, once upon a time. English only came later, at school. But I didn"t want to get into the intricacies of the story, so I told her that Yoruba was my first language. It"s the second biggest of Nigeria"s native languages, I said. I spoke only Yoruba until I began primary school.
Are you still fluent in it? Yes, I said, I can get by, though by now my English is much stronger. But I want to ask you something, I said. You"ve been away for a long time, so you"re not a typical Belgian in any sense, but I wonder what you make of something a friend of mine said recently. He described Belgium as a difficult place for an Arab to be. My friend"s specific trouble is about being here and maintaining his uniqueness, his difference. Do you think that"s true? I don"t know if you remember, but on the plane you described Belgium as color-blind. But that doesn"t seem to have been the experience of Farouq-that"s my friend"s name-in the seven years that he has been living here. I think he even had his thesis rejected at the university, presumably because he wrote on a subject that the committee was uncomfortable with.
She had not touched her waterzooi waterzooi. She continued chewing bread and spoke, in response to my question, dispa.s.sionately. Look, I know this type, she said, these young men who go around as if the world is an offense to them. It is dangerous. For people to feel that they alone have suffered, it is very dangerous. Having such a degree of resentment is a recipe for trouble. Our society has made itself open for such people, but when they come in, all you hear is complaints. Why would you want to move somewhere only to prove how different you are? And why would a society like that want to welcome you? But if you live as long as I do, you will see that there is an endless variety of difficulties in the world. It"s difficult for everybody. I nodded. But it would have been different, I said, if only you"d heard him tell it. He"s not a complainer, and I don"t think he"s full of resentment, not really. I think the hurt is genuine. Well, I"m sure it is, she said, but if you"re too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too. There"s a reason, she said, I had to leave Belgium and try to make my life in another country. I don"t complain and, to be honest, I really have little patience for people who do. You"re not a complainer, are you?
I ate, and my thoughts wandered over to her son, the one who had died. I wanted to hear her talk about him, and about the foundation that had been set up in his name, but I didn"t dare ask. She finally put a spoon into the creamy dish in front of her. The restaurant was almost empty; it was an unusual time of day to be eating, late for lunch, and a few hours before dinner. So, she said, how long will you remain here? I leave tomorrow morning, I said. She said she would stay a few weeks yet, that she was planning to buy a little sports car, an antique. Something for her use as she spent more and more time in Belgium; and then she spoke about jazz again. Our afternoon pa.s.sed easily. I hoped she wouldn"t attempt to pay for the meal, and she didn"t. She said, You must call me if you ever come to Philadelphia. We have a house near the woods, in the suburbs, which is wonderful in the summer, and even better in the fall. Again, as she spoke, I felt the sense of well-being surge through me, a feeling that, even then, I couldn"t quite match up with her dismissal of Farouq"s story. And be sure to get Cannonball"s Somethin" Else Somethin" Else, she said. That"s the great one of all his alb.u.ms, a true cla.s.sic. I promised I would.
Walking from Place de la Chapelle, up through Sablon toward the museums, I wondered if I would run into the Czech, though I knew it was unlikely she was still in the city. The rain had subsided a little, but the wind picked up suddenly, turning my umbrella inside out. One of the ribs snapped, dislodging the top spring I"d been trying to repair earlier and leaving only half the umbrella functional. And though I was intent on getting out of the rain and getting home, I was arrested by a small monument set in a garden at the side of rue de la Regence, where that road met rue Bodenbroek. I had seen it before, in better weather, but had never stopped to look at it properly. It was a bronze bust of the poet Paul Claudel, set on a plinth on the side of the road like a shrine to Hermes.
Claudel had served as French amba.s.sador to Belgium in the 1930s, and later went on to fame as a writer of Catholic plays, and as a right-winger. His support for the collaborators and Marshal Petain during the war earned him much scorn, but W. H. Auden, himself a leftist agnostic, spoke kindly of him. Auden had written: "Time will pardon Paul Claudel, pardons him for writing well." And as I stood there in the whipping wind and rain, I wondered if indeed it was that simple, if time was so free with memory, so generous with pardons, that writing well could come to stand in the place of an ethical life. But Claudel, I had to remind myself, was far from being the only problematic figure among the hundreds of statues and monuments around the city. It was a city of monuments, and greatness was set in stone and metal all over Brussels, obdurate replies to uncomfortable questions. It was time, in any case, to go home, to leave Claudel with his wet bronze head, to leave, in the museum next door, Auden"s Bruegel with its falling Icarus, and the unforgettable painting by an anonymous painter of a young girl with a dead sparrow.
I waited at the bus stop in front of the elaborate ironwork facade of the Musee des Instruments de Musique, and the bus, when it arrived, was nearly full. It was warm and damp inside, and everyone found it hard to breathe. We went through the city in that fogged-up interior, looking out with difficulty at the windy streets. I disembarked at Flagey. My umbrella was useless by then, and I threw it away. As I came onto rue Philippe, I found myself walking behind a woman pushing a pram. We were walking in single file between the buildings and some temporary barriers, flat panels of st.u.r.dy plastic anch.o.r.ed in concrete blocks that had been set up for a construction project. A sudden gust of wind lifted the panels, which were all tied to each other, and tipped them over, toward us. Immediately I sprang forward and broke their fall with my hands and my body. I staggered, but did not lose my balance. The woman, who was young and Mediterranean-looking, in too-tight jeans, was able to swerve her pram out of harm"s way. I caught no sight of the child, who was swaddled and shielded from the rain with a translucent plastic sheet. The young mother thanked me, again and again, gasping. She seemed stunned at how quickly it had all happened. I waved it off, proud.
The wind persisted in its howling fury. The little street we were walking on had, a hundred years ago, been a stream, not a street. It had been covered over by city planners, and waterside houses suddenly found themselves looking out on traffic. But the water still coursed underground, along the entire length of the street, and that water was returning now, in the form of rain, heavy waters above and flowing waters below.
Instinctively saving a baby, a little happiness; spending time with Rwandans, the ones who survived, a little sadness; the idea of our final anonymity, a little more sadness; s.e.xual desire fulfilled without complication, a little more happiness: and it went on like that, as thought succeeded thought. How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed about like a cloud. Predictably, the mind noted that judgment, too, and a.s.signed it its place: a little sadness. The water that had once flowed along the street we were walking on had run into an artificial pond in the middle of Flagey, a pond that had then been obliterated to create a traffic island, echoing the creation of land in the oldest myths, as a division between the waters.
Night had fallen. I entered the apartment and threw off my clothes and lay in bed in the darkened room, naked. Heavy drops tapped on the window. The weather report was right: in ever widening circles from where I stood, rain was lashing the land. It fell heavily all over the Portuguese district, on the shrine to Pessoa and on Casa Botelho. It fell on Khalil"s phone shop, where Farouq had perhaps just begun his shift. It fell on the bronze head of Leopold II at his monument, on Claudel at his, on the flagstones of the Palais Royal. The rain kept coming down, on the battlefield of Waterloo at the outskirts of the city, the Lion"s Mound, the Ardennes, the implacable valleys full of young men"s bones grown old, on the preserved cities farther out west, on Ypres and the huddled white crosses dotting Flanders fields, the turbulent channel, the impossibly cold sea to the north, on Denmark, France, and Germany.
PART 2.
I have searched myself
TWELVE.
I made an effort to develop a mind of winter. Late last year, I actually said to myself audibly, as I do when I swear these oaths, that I would have to embrace winter as part of the natural cycle of seasons. Ever since I left Nigeria, I"d had a bad att.i.tude about cold weather, and I wanted to put an end to that. The effort was surprisingly successful, and through October, November, and December, I was properly braced for winds and snow. One thing that helped was that I made a habit of overdressing. Without checking the daily weather, I would wear long johns, doubled socks, a scarf, woolen gloves, a long, thick, dark blue coat, and heavy shoes. But it was to be a year without a real winter. The blizzards for which I braced never came. There were a few days of cold rain, and one or two cold snaps, but heavy snow stayed away. We had a series of sunny days in the middle of December, and I was unnerved by that mildness, and when the season"s first snow did eventually fall, it was while I was in Brussels, getting drenched by the rain there. The snow was in any case short-lived, melted away by the time I returned to New York in mid-January, and thus did the impression of unseasonal, somewhat uncanny, warmth persist in my mind, keeping the world, as I experienced it, on edge. made an effort to develop a mind of winter. Late last year, I actually said to myself audibly, as I do when I swear these oaths, that I would have to embrace winter as part of the natural cycle of seasons. Ever since I left Nigeria, I"d had a bad att.i.tude about cold weather, and I wanted to put an end to that. The effort was surprisingly successful, and through October, November, and December, I was properly braced for winds and snow. One thing that helped was that I made a habit of overdressing. Without checking the daily weather, I would wear long johns, doubled socks, a scarf, woolen gloves, a long, thick, dark blue coat, and heavy shoes. But it was to be a year without a real winter. The blizzards for which I braced never came. There were a few days of cold rain, and one or two cold snaps, but heavy snow stayed away. We had a series of sunny days in the middle of December, and I was unnerved by that mildness, and when the season"s first snow did eventually fall, it was while I was in Brussels, getting drenched by the rain there. The snow was in any case short-lived, melted away by the time I returned to New York in mid-January, and thus did the impression of unseasonal, somewhat uncanny, warmth persist in my mind, keeping the world, as I experienced it, on edge.
Those thoughts had returned even before I was properly back in the city. The pilot"s voice crackling through the system-We are now making our final approach for landing-added to the anxiety of return because those ordinary and, by now, ba.n.a.l words seemed to carry some ghostly portent. My thoughts quickly became entangled with one another, so that, in addition to the usual morbid thoughts one normally has on a plane, I was saddled with strange mental transpositions: that the plane was a coffin, that the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes. But as we broke through the last layer of clouds and the city in its true form suddenly appeared a thousand feet below us, the impression I had was not at all morbid. What I experienced was the unsettling feeling that I had had precisely this view of the city before, accompanied by the equally strong feeling that it had not been from the point of view of a plane.
Then it came to me: I was remembering something I had seen about a year earlier: the sprawling scale model of the city that was kept at the Queens Museum of Art. The model had been built for the World"s Fair in 1964, at great cost, and afterward had been periodically updated to keep up with the changing topography and built environment of the city. It showed, in impressive detail, with almost a million tiny buildings, and with bridges, parks, rivers, and architectural landmarks, the true form of the city. The attention to detail was so meticulous that one could not help but think of Borges"s cartographers, who, obsessed with accuracy, had made a map so large and so finely detailed that it matched the empire"s scale on a ratio of one to one, a map in which each thing coincided with its spot on the map. The map proved so unwieldy that it was eventually folded up and left to rot in the desert. Our view from the plane, as we banked over Queens itself, brought all of that back to mind, and in this case it was the real city that seemed to be matching, point for point, my memory of the model, which I had stared at for a long time from a ramp in the museum. Even the raking evening light falling across the city evoked the spotlighting used at the museum.
On the day I had seen the Panorama, I had been impressed by the many fine details it presented: the rivulets of roads snaking across a velvety Central Park, the boomerang of the Bronx curving up to the north, the elegant beige spire of the Empire State Building, the white tablets of the Brooklyn piers, and the pair of gray blocks on the southern tip of Manhattan, each about a foot high, representing the persistence, in the model, of the World Trade Center towers, which, in reality, had already been destroyed.
THE DAY AFTER I I RETURNED, STILL IN THE MENTAL FOG OF JET RETURNED, STILL IN THE MENTAL FOG OF JET lag, and knowing that by seven in the evening I would start to get sleepy, I tried to keep thoughts of Monday from my mind. That my colleagues would be hostile toward me was an inevitability because I had taken all four of my vacation weeks at once. Using up vacation time like this was permitted, under the regulations of the program, but it was unusual, and considered bad form because it put the other residents under additional pressure. It was the kind of thing that would probably show up in a future letter of recommendation, disguised in the language of faint praise. In the course of the four weeks of my absence, many of the cases would have turned over, with the exception of the most serious admissions. There were bound to be several new patients. lag, and knowing that by seven in the evening I would start to get sleepy, I tried to keep thoughts of Monday from my mind. That my colleagues would be hostile toward me was an inevitability because I had taken all four of my vacation weeks at once. Using up vacation time like this was permitted, under the regulations of the program, but it was unusual, and considered bad form because it put the other residents under additional pressure. It was the kind of thing that would probably show up in a future letter of recommendation, disguised in the language of faint praise. In the course of the four weeks of my absence, many of the cases would have turned over, with the exception of the most serious admissions. There were bound to be several new patients.
The weeks to come were going to be difficult.
That was still a day away. On Sunday, I went down to the International Center of Photography in midtown. The main attraction there was a show on Martin Munkacsi. Admission was reduced for students, so I lied, flashing my expired medical school ID, and as I did so remembered how seriously Nadege had taken this practice. I had always countered her by saying that I was hardly earning more than a student, even if I was technically out of school. I had begun to use the expired ID more often, at first as a way to annoy her, and then, afterward, out of habit. Nadege came to mind because she had written to me while I was away. In the pile of printed mail waiting for me at the apartment when I arrived, there was the lime green envelope, addressed in her hand. The card was a sickly-sweet Nativity scene, and on the inside she had written a plain Christmas greeting.
The show was crowded and the prints unexpectedly lively. Munkacsi"s journalism was dynamic; he liked sports poses, youth, people in motion. In these snaps-which were so carefully composed but always seemed to have been taken on the go-I could see the alertness that he brought to his other masterful work, such as the photograph of three African boys running into the surf in Liberia. It was from him, and from this picture in particular, that Henri Cartier-Bresson had developed the ideal of the decisive moment. Photography seemed to me, as I stood there in the white gallery with its rows of pictures and its press of murmuring spectators, an uncanny art like no other. One moment, in all of history, was captured, but the moments before and after it disappeared into the onrush of time; only that selected moment itself was privileged, saved, for no other reason than its having been picked out by the camera"s eye.
Munkacsi moved from Hungary to Germany, where he would remain until 1934. He worked for the Berliner Ill.u.s.trirte Zeitung Berliner Ill.u.s.trirte Zeitung, a weekly paper of photographs and advertising; it was for this paper that he had made his picture of the Liberian boys in 1930. The Ill.u.s.trirte Zeitung Ill.u.s.trirte Zeitung had covered the First World War, and would, after Munkacsi"s departure, cover the Second as well. In the ICP show, copies of the magazine, showing Munkacsi"s work, had been placed in Plexiglas cases at waist height. A man in his sixties was studying the same case as I was, and we stood side by side, leaning over the clear case. His face was relaxed, and he wore a yellow windbreaker. Seeing how intently I was studying the magazine, he said, without turning to look at me, that the spelling was a mistake-what was printed on the newspaper was had covered the First World War, and would, after Munkacsi"s departure, cover the Second as well. In the ICP show, copies of the magazine, showing Munkacsi"s work, had been placed in Plexiglas cases at waist height. A man in his sixties was studying the same case as I was, and we stood side by side, leaning over the clear case. His face was relaxed, and he wore a yellow windbreaker. Seeing how intently I was studying the magazine, he said, without turning to look at me, that the spelling was a mistake-what was printed on the newspaper was ill.u.s.trirte ill.u.s.trirte instead of instead of ill.u.s.trierte ill.u.s.trierte, he said-and that had been the case since the first issue. In that first issue, the gentleman said, it had been an error, but later, it became a kind of trademark for the magazine and was left unchanged. This was familiar to him, he said, because he remembered the magazine from his childhood. It had come to their house weekly when he was a little boy in Berlin.
Sensing my interest, the man spoke on, and our eyes moved over the surfaces of Munkacsi"s photographs as he talked. There was one that showed a field of young Germans lying in the sun, which must have been taken from a zeppelin. The bodies, filling every available s.p.a.ce, made a flat, abstract pattern against the field. The man spoke with the slowness of someone who was entering a memory, but it was not a foggy memory, and he spoke about it clearly, as though it had only just happened. I was thirteen when we left Berlin in 1937, he said, and New York has been my home ever since.
My guess of his age had been far off, and yet he looked nothing like an eighty-four-year-old. He was fit, and the way he moved his body was unimpeded by age. There was a lightness, too, in the way he spoke about his boyhood, almost as if he were talking about something else, something less frightening, something less littered with disaster. It wasn"t until much later, he said, that they finally adopted ill.u.s.trierte ill.u.s.trierte with the extra with the extra e e. But this spelling, this is the one I knew in those days. Have you been to Berlin? I told him I had, and that I had enjoyed the city very much. I"ve never been back, he said, but I liked it a lot when I was there. It must have been an unimaginably different place back then, I said. I did not tell him that my mother and my oma had been there, too, as refugees near the end of the war and afterward, and that I was myself, in this distant sense, also a Berliner. If we had talked more, I would have told him only that I was from Nigeria, from Lagos. As it turned out, just then, his wife, or an old lady whom I presumed was his wife, came to join him. She looked much older than he did, and used a walker. With a smile and nod to me, he moved on with her to another part of the exhibition.
The mood of Munkacsi"s photographs darkened as the 1920s became the 1930s, and the soccer players and fashion models gave way to the cool tensions of a military state. This story, told countless times, retains its power to quicken the heart; always, one holds out the secret hope that things will turn out differently, and that the record of those years will show wrongs on a scale closer to the rest of human history. The enormity of what actually happened, no matter how familiar it is, no matter how often it is reiterated, always comes as a shock. And that was what happened when, among the photographs of troops and parades at the opening of the Reichstag in 1933, there was the image, at once expected and unexpected, in the middle ground of a row of soldiers, of the new German chancellor. Walking close behind him, with his contorted nightmare of a face, was Goebbels. I happened to be looking at this picture at the same time a young couple was. I stood to the left of it, and they to the right. They were Hasidic Jews. I had no reasonable access to what being there, in that gallery, might mean for them; the undiluted hatred I felt for the subjects of the photo was, in the couple, trans.m.u.ted into what? What was stronger than hate? I did not know, and could not ask. I needed to move away, immediately, needed to rest my eye elsewhere and be absent from this silent encounter into which I had inadvertently barged. The young couple stood close to each other, not speaking. I couldn"t bear to look at them, or at what they were looking at, any longer.
The show turned on that axis. It became about something else, and couldn"t be saved. There were other photographs, images from Munkacsi"s successful career in the 1940s in Hollywood, stylish pictures of socialites and actors: Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire. But the afternoon was poisoned, and I wanted only to get home and sleep, and begin my year of work. I moved through the crowd toward the exit, and caught a last glimpse, as I pa.s.sed the museum shop, of the old Berliner and his wife. His long-saved story of ill.u.s.trirte ill.u.s.trirte had found the time and place for its airing; unimaginable how many small stories people all over this city carried around with them. It was only then that I noted that Munkacsi, the photographer of the so-called had found the time and place for its airing; unimaginable how many small stories people all over this city carried around with them. It was only then that I noted that Munkacsi, the photographer of the so-called Day of Potsdam Day of Potsdam, into whose camera one seemingly ordinary moment in Berlin in 1933 was secreted away for future viewers, was himself Jewish.
I walked north on Sixth Avenue as far as Fifty-ninth Street. Then I took a turn, and walked on Broadway in the direction of Times Square, and pa.s.sed the Iridium Jazz Club. No longer wanting to go to bed, trying to fend off jet lag, I called my friend to ask if he would come see the guitarist playing there that night. He expressed sarcastic shock that I would willingly pay for jazz but said he was already booked for the evening. And so I headed home, with the thought I would call Nadege: it would be around four in the afternoon in California, and she would be back from ma.s.s. But it wasn"t time yet to open up the lines of communication. Months had pa.s.sed, but it wasn"t yet time. How strange the effect of those few months with her had been on me. Her card meant, perhaps, that things were thawing from her point of view, but I, for my part, remained unready. Nor was I prepared, now that I think of it, to admit to myself that I had made too much of our brief relationship. When I got home, I took a shower, drowsing under the warm water, and I got into bed; but right away got out again and called her, after all.
WE EXPERIENCE LIFE AS A CONTINUITY, AND ONLY AFTER IT FALLS away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty s.p.a.ce, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity. These were the things that had been solidified in my mind by reiteration, that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts: certain faces, certain conversations, which, taken as a group, represented a secure version of the past that I had been constructing since 1992. But there was another, irruptive, sense of things past. The sudden reencounter, in the present, of something or someone long forgotten, some part of myself I had relegated to childhood and to Africa. An old friend came to me out of this latter past, a friend, or rather an acquaintance whom memory now made convenient to think of as a friend, so that what seemed to have vanished entirely existed once again. She appeared (apparition was precisely what came to mind) to me in a grocery store in Union Square late in January. I didn"t recognize her, and she followed me for a while, tracing my steps around the aisles, to give me an opportunity to make the first move. It was only when I noticed that I was being shadowed, and was beginning to adjust my body into that skeptical awareness, that she came right up to where I was standing, in front of a display of carrots and radishes. She said a bright h.e.l.lo, waved, and addressed me by my full name, smiling. It was clear she expected me to remember her. I didn"t. away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty s.p.a.ce, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity. These were the things that had been solidified in my mind by reiteration, that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts: certain faces, certain conversations, which, taken as a group, represented a secure version of the past that I had been constructing since 1992. But there was another, irruptive, sense of things past. The sudden reencounter, in the present, of something or someone long forgotten, some part of myself I had relegated to childhood and to Africa. An old friend came to me out of this latter past, a friend, or rather an acquaintance whom memory now made convenient to think of as a friend, so that what seemed to have vanished entirely existed once again. She appeared (apparition was precisely what came to mind) to me in a grocery store in Union Square late in January. I didn"t recognize her, and she followed me for a while, tracing my steps around the aisles, to give me an opportunity to make the first move. It was only when I noticed that I was being shadowed, and was beginning to adjust my body into that skeptical awareness, that she came right up to where I was standing, in front of a display of carrots and radishes. She said a bright h.e.l.lo, waved, and addressed me by my full name, smiling. It was clear she expected me to remember her. I didn"t.
She looked Yoruba, with a slight slant to her eyes and an elegant swoop to the jaw, and it was clear from the accent that that was where I should look for the connection between us. But I failed to find it. At the same moment that I confessed to having blanked out on who she was, she accused me of just that, a serious accusation, but jocularly expressed. She couldn"t believe I had forgotten her, and she said my name several times in quick succession, as if to chide me. My lighthearted apology masked the irritation I suddenly felt. I feared for a moment that she would overextend the charade, and make me cajole her into saying who she was, but she introduced herself, and the memory was restored: Moji Kasali. She was the older sister (by one year) of a school friend, Dayo. I had met her two or three times in Lagos, when on school breaks I would visit Dayo at home. Dayo and I were rather close friends during the junior secondary years, but he hadn"t stayed at NMS long, leaving at the beginning of the first senior secondary year, and transferring to a private school in Lagos. We made an effort to communicate with each other the following Christmas break, but when I visited him at home, the gateman turned me away, and when he returned my visit a week later, I wasn"t home. We no longer had the NMS connection, and I was sure he"d made new friends. Our friendship faded. About a year later, I"d met him at some tennis courts in Apapa. He was with a girl, playing the man-about-town, and our conversation was stilted.
I was by then much taller than he was, but he was stout and had the stubbly beginnings of a beard. We promised once again to stay in touch with each other, and I remember telling him I was thinking of going to America, if I could find a way out, though, as it turned out, I didn"t leave until a few years afterward. He was wearing dark gla.s.ses that day, which he didn"t take off, though the sky was overcast; his girlfriend had on a white polo shirt and tight shorts, and looked bored, and was, as such, the instant object of my envy. That I had my own girlfriend didn"t matter. Dayo"s girl struck me as impossibly cool.
I took his address and phone number-he wrote them down, I recall, on the back of a religious tract someone had pinned to the fence-and not long afterward, I called him. Then there had been a party at his house, a wild one, with lots of drinking. The girl wasn"t there by that point-they"d split up-and I had split up with my girl, too. Afterward, I lost Dayo"s address and, in any case, by the time I came to the United States, three years later, I had no serious intention of writing to him, or anyone else. The promise to write had simply been a gesture of respect, an acknowledgment of the fact that once, when we were in our early teens, we"d been close, and even for a brief moment best friends.
I doubt I would have recognized him thirteen years later, in a grocery store, much less his sister. But now, the certainty with which she pinned me to my name, the ease with which she repeated it, made me think she"d thought of me but never expected to see me again. And perhaps I had been the unwitting target of a schoolgirl crush: the brother"s friend, the sophisticated aje-b.u.t.ter aje-b.u.t.ter, a self-confident older teen. On the earlier occasions that I had gone to Dayo"s house, there had been one or two other school friends there as well, and she had ignored us, of course. Perhaps she was more interested in us than she"d let on. Maybe that memory remained now, as she stood with a box of muesli under her arm, and the embers of that memory were what made her catch my eyes, and hold them, as she asked me the expected questions: marriage, children, career. When I had answered, plain answers that I was careful not to deliver too brusquely, I felt it polite to ask her the same.
She was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers, she said. I acted suitably impressed, and made vague noises about how busy she must be. But I did not want the small talk to go on, so I looked every now and again at the basket in my hand, and nodded as she talked. Her brother was in Nigeria at the moment, she said. He"d gone to the U.K. for graduate school, at Imperial College, but had returned home and gotten married. Moji said she"d been in closer contact with him during the six years he"d been in London. We don"t talk very often now, she said, he"s got a kid, he runs his own civil engineering firm. But he"s had some strange times. He had an accident in 1995, just before going for his master"s. I suppose that"s the biggest thing, really, that"s happened to him since you left Nigeria. He was studying in the east at the time, in Nsukka, and he was in a bus crash, out on the highway at night. The bus ran into a motorcyclist who was riding without lights, and it careened off the road. Ten of the fourteen people onboard died instantly; another three were badly injured, and one of them died later. Dayo alone had walked away without injury. I think maybe he dislocated a shoulder or something, but nothing major at all. When you have such an experience as that, she said, everyone immediately thinks it would make you more religious. That wasn"t the effect it had on him. He became more thoughtful, I guess. He went through life, for the next couple of years, in a kind of distracted daze. He spoke about the accident just once, after he came back to Lagos-that"s when we found out it had happened. Maybe it was a news item buried inside the papers-ten killed in Nsukka crash, or something like that-so we might have heard of it, but we could never have imagined he would be involved. He simply kept it to himself until he came home on semester break; he"s funny like that. My parents, of course, made him come to church for a special thanksgiving service. He went along with it. Then he put it out of his mind, filed it away like it had just been a bad dream and, if he revisited it, it wasn"t in any public way. Me, of course, I was curious, and I used to badger him about it initially, but he just clammed up, and that was that. I"ve seen dead people at the scene of an accident-I guess everyone who lives in Nigeria has-but I"m sure it"s different if you were in the accident yourself, or if that body lying by the side of the road could easily have been yours. So for a long time, everyone treated Dayo as if he was the luckiest person in the world, but I think his att.i.tude was that it would have been luckier to be nowhere near the crash at all. Anyway, he"s mostly past it now, and it was all so long ago. I"m sure that"s more detail than you wanted.
We"d used up our common ground, and there seemed nothing left to chat about. She a.s.sured me that I would hear from her again, and marveled once more, in what had become a quite irritating way, that we had run into each other. I don"t really believe in coincidences, she said. Something either happens or it doesn"t, coincidence has nothing to do with it.
THIRTEEN.
At the beginning of February, I went down to Wall Street to meet Parrish, the accountant who was doing my taxes, but I forgot to bring my checkbook. Speaking with him just before I left home, I had asked if I should bring anything, and he"d said I should bring a check, so I could pay him. I had taken the checkbook out of its drawer and placed it on the table with my gloves and keys. But I then left it behind, and didn"t realize I had done so until the 2 train came to the station. I was embarra.s.sed at having to meet him empty-handed. But I was supposed to give him only two hundred dollars, and I had my bank card with me. I could get cash. It seemed vaguely illicit, putting cash in an envelope and sliding it across a table, but it was better than not paying him right away.
When I came out of the Wall Street station, I looked around for a cash machine. I hadn"t been to that part of town since I had gone on my night walk there in November. Now, in daylight, with the sun pouring into the deep clefts formed by the sides of skysc.r.a.pers, the street"s ominous character was tamed. It had become an ordinary street, a place of work, marred in the normal way by construction cordons and divots where the road was undergoing repair, and nothing at all like the Dante-esque vision of huddled and faceless bodies I had experienced a few months earlier. After a short walk, I found a cash machine inside a pharmacy, but was unable to take money out of it because I typed in the wrong four-digit code for my card. So I tried again, and failed again. I tried five times, with different numbers, all of them wrong. I wasn"t alarmed-which I would have been if I had thought the card was compromised-but rather, sad: I had simply forgotten the number. A thought flitted through my mind: how terrible it would be to blank out like this while seeing a patient. This was the ATM card I had used for more than six years, and it had always had the same code. I had used the card on my recent trip to Brussels and, indeed, I had been entirely dependent on it for that journey.
Now, as I stood in a little pharmacy on the corner of Water Street and Wall Street, my mind was empty, subject to a nervous condition; this was the expression that came to me as I stood there, as though I had become a minor character in a Jane Austen novel. Such sudden mental weakness, I thought (as the machine asked if I would like to try again, and I did, and failed again), was from a simplified version of the self, an area of simplicity where things had once been more robust. This was true o