From the Fifteenth District (26 page)

After her death, Mrs. Essling remained in the Fifteenth District. She says she can go nowhere without being accosted by the Professor, who, having completed the last phase of his work
Malebranche and Mysticism
, roams the streets, looking in shopwindows, eating lunch twice, in two different restaurants, telling his life story to waiters and bus drivers. When he sees Mrs. Essling, he calls out, “There you are!” and “What have you been sent to tell me?” and “Is there a message?” In July, catching sight of her at the open-air fruit market on Dulac Street, the Professor jumped off a bus, upsetting barrows of plums and apricots, waving an umbrella as he ran. Mrs. Essling had to take refuge in the cold-storage room of the central market, where, years ago, after she had ordered twenty pounds of raspberries and currants for making jelly, she was invited by the wholesale fruit dealer, Mr. Lobrano, aged twenty-nine, to spend a holiday with him in a charming southern city whose Mediterranean Baroque churches he described with much delicacy of feeling. Mrs. Essling was too startled to reply. Mistaking her silence, Mr. Lobrano then mentioned, a northern city containing a Gothic cathedral. Mrs. Essling said that such a holiday was impossible. Mr. Lobrano asked for one good reason. Mrs. Essling was at that moment four months pregnant with her second child. Three stepchildren waited for her out in the street. A fourth stepchild was at home looking after the baby. Professor Essling, working on his
Malebranche and Money
, was at home, too, expecting his lunch. Mrs. Essling realized she could not give Mr. Lobrano one good reason. She
left the cold-storage room without another word and did not return to it in her lifetime.

Mrs. Essling would like to be relieved of the Professor’s gratitude. Having lived an exemplary life is one thing; to have it thrown up at one is another. She would like the police to send for Professor Essling and tell him so. She suggests that the police find some method of keeping him off the streets. The police ought to threaten him; frighten him; put the fear of the Devil into him. Philosophy has made him afraid of dying. Remind him about how he avoided writing his
Malebranche and Mortality
. He is an old man. It should be easy.

P
otter was almost forty-one when he fell in love with Laurie Bennett. She lived in Paris, for no particular reason he knew; that is, she had not been drawn by work or by any one person. She seemed young to him, about half his age. Her idea of history began with the Vietnam war; Genesis was her own Canadian childhood. She was spending a legacy of careless freedom with an abandon Piotr found thrilling to watch, for he had long considered himself to be bankrupt – of belief, of love, of license to choose. Here in Paris he was shackled, held, tied to a visa, then to the system of mysterious favors on which his Polish passport depended. His hands were attached with a slack rope and a slipknot. If he moved abruptly, the
knot tightened. He had a narrow span of gestures, a prudent range. His new world of love seemed too wide for comfort sometimes, though Laurie occupied it easily.

He called his beloved “Lah-ow-rie,” which made her laugh. She could not pronounce “Piotr” and never tried; she said Peter, Prater, Potter, and Otter, and he answered to all. Why not? He loved her. If she took some forms of injustice for granted, it was because she did not know they were unjust. Piotr was supposed to know
by instinct
every shade of difference between Victoria, British Columbia, and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, whereas he, poor Potter, came out of a cloudy Eastern plain bereft of roads, schools, buses, elevators, perhaps even frontiers – this because she could not have found Warsaw on a map. She knew he was a poet and a teacher, but must have considered him a radical exception. She had been touchingly pleased when he showed her poems of his in an American university quarterly. Three pages of English were all he had needed to get past her cultural customs barrier. She kept a copy of the review in a plastic bag, and so far as he knew had never read more than his name on the cover. None of this disturbed him. It was not as a poet that Laurie had wanted Piotr but as a lover – thank God. The surprise to him after their first conversations was that there were any roads, schools, etc., in Canada, though she talked often of an Anglican boarding school where she had been “left” and “abandoned” and which she likened to a concentration camp. “You’ve really never heard of it, Potter?” It seemed incredible that a man of his education knew nothing about Bishop Purse School or its famous headmistress, Miss Ellen Jones. Bishop Purse, whatever its advantages, had not darkened Laurie’s sunny intelligence with anything like geography, history, or simple arithmetic.
She had the handwriting of a small boy and could not spell even in her own language. For a long time Piotr treasured a letter in which he was described as “a really sensative person,” and Laurie herself as “mixed-up in some ways but on the whole pretty chearfull.”

Her good nature made her entirely exotic. Piotr was accustomed to people who could not look at a letter without saying eagerly, “Bad news?” He had known women who set aside a little bit of each day for spells of soft, muted weeping. The problem with Polish women, as Piotr saw it, was that they had always just been or were just about to be deserted by their men. At the first rumor of rejection (a fragment of gossip over-heard, some offhand evidence of a lover’s neglect) they gave way at once, stopped combing their hair, stopped making their beds. They lay like starfish, smoking in the strewn, scattered way of the downhearted. He saw them, collectively, wet-cheeked and feverish, heard a chorus of broken voices gasping-out the dreadful story of male treachery. Out of the fear of losing the man at hand would grow a moist determination to find another to take his place. Piotr was separated from his wife, he was irresolute, and he never had quite what he wanted. What he did not want was a feather bed of sadness. He knew that unhappiness is catching and wondered if happiness might not be infectious, too. All that he needed was to love a happy person and get her to love him.

“Am I too cheerful?” Laurie asked. “They say I am sometimes. I’ve been told. It puts people off. You know, like ‘It’s nothing to laugh about.’ ”
I’ve been told
. There, at the beginning, she had given him the raw material of future anguish, if only he had been alert. But it had come linked with another statement, which was that if Potter was not exactly her first
lover he was certainly among the first, and the first ever to please her – a preposterous declaration he accepted on the spot.

Piotr met Laurie through a cousin he had in Paris, an émigré bachelor who worked at a travel agency. Piotr had never seen Marek’s office. Meeting Piotr for lunch in one of the smoky café-bars around the Place de l’Opéra, Marek would look at his watch and whisper, “I have to meet someone very high up in Swiss television,” or “the editor of the most important newspaper, the most politically powerful man south of the Loire,” or “a countess who controls absolutely everything at the Quai d’Orsay.” Although he did not say so, it sounded to Piotr very much like social survival in Warsaw. By means of his affability, his ease with languages, and a certain amount of cultural soft-soaping, Marek had acquired a French circle of acquaintance, of which he was extremely proud. But it was a fragile affair, like a child with a constant chest cold. He lavished great amounts of time, care, and worry on keeping it alive, which did not prevent him from knowing every name, event, scandal, and political maneuver in the local Polish colony. He knew so much, in fact, that he was widely believed to be working for the French police. Like most informers – should that have been his story – he was often hard up and often had unexpected money to spend. He lived in the rundown area east of the Hôtel de Ville. The street seemed drab and gritty to Piotr, but his cousin assured him that it was thought fashionable in the highest reaches of bohemia. His rooms were next door to a synagogue and one flight up from an undertaker’s. When, as it sometimes happened, nighttime outbursts of anti-Semitism caused swastikas to be chalked on the synagogue, a few usually spilled along to the undertaker’s sombre window and over the door and staircase leading to
Marek’s. The swastikas gave rise to another legend: Marek had been a double agent in the French Resistance. Actually, he had been nowhere near France, and had been barely thirteen by the end of the war. Rumor also had him working for Israel (possibly because of the proximity of the synagogue) and for the C.I.A. His quarters contained large soft lumps of furniture, gray in color, considered “modern,” and “American,” which had undoubtedly been shipped by airfreight from Washington in exchange for information about Mr. X, who had bought a controlling interest in a toy shop, or little Miss Y, who had triumphantly terminated another school year. The chairs and sofas had in fact been the gift of a Swiss decorator from Bern, who owed Marek money or favors or help of some kind – the explanation always faded out. Although he was far more interested in men than in girls, there were usually more girls than men at his parties. The most beautiful young women Piotr had ever seen climbed the unlighted staircase, undaunted by the matter-of-fact trappings of death on the ground floor or the occasional swastika. Piotr marvelled at his cousin’s ease with women, at the casual embracing and hand-holding. It was as though the girls, having nothing to fear, or much to hope for, enjoyed trying out the lesser ornaments of seduction. The girls were Danish, German, French, and American. They were students, models, hostesses at trade fairs, hesitant fiancées, restless daughters. Their uniform the year Piotr met Laurie was bluejeans and velvet blazers. They were nothing like the scuffed, frayed girls he saw in the Latin Quarter, so downcast of face, so dejected of hair and hem that he had to be convinced by Marek they were well-fed children of the middle classes and not the rejects of a failing economy. Marek’s girls kept their hair long and glossy, their figures trim. They discussed their
thoughts, but not their feelings, with a solemn hauteur Piotr found endlessly touching. But he did not find them light-hearted. They were simply less natively given to despair than Polish women. He was looking for someone, though no one could have told. Perhaps his cousin knew. Why else did he keep on inviting Piotr with all those pretty women? One scowling French girl almost won Piotr when he noticed that the freckles across her nose were spots of russet paint. She was severe, and held her cigarette like a ruler, but she must have been very humble alone with her mirror. “Help me,” she must have implored the glass. “Help me to be suitable, wanted.” She remarked to Piotr, “How can anyone write poetry today? Personally, I reject the absolute.” Piotr had no idea what she meant. He had never asked her, or any woman, to accept the absolute. He had been toying with the hope that she might accept him. Before he could even conceive of an answer, Laurie Bennett intervened. She simply came up to Piotr and told him her name. She had blue eyes, fair hair down to her shoulders, and a gap between her upper front teeth.

“I’ve never wanted to have it fixed,” she told Piotr. “It’s supposed to be lucky.”

“Are you lucky?” said Piotr.

“Naturally. Who isn’t? Aren’t you?”

They sat down, Piotr in a Swiss armchair, the girl on the floor. Remarks in a foreign language often left him facing an imaginary brick wall. Lucky? Before he could answer she said, “You’re the famous cousin? From there?” – with a wave that indicated a world of bad train connections and terrible food. “Do you know Solzhenitsyn? if Solzhenitsyn were to walk in here, I’d get right down on my knees and thank him.”

“What for?” said Piotr.

“
I
don’t know. I thought you might.”

“He isn’t likely to come in,” said Piotr. “So you won’t have to make a fool of yourself.”

She was already kneeling, as it happened, sitting on her heels at Piotr’s feet. She slid nearer, placed her glass of rosy wine on the arm of his chair, her elbow on his knee: “I was just trying to show you I sympathized.” He wanted to touch her hair but clasped his hands instead. His cousin had told him he looked like a failed priest sometimes. He did, in fact, inspire confessions rather than passion from women.

In his later memories he thought it must have been then that Laurie began to tell about her neglected childhood and her school. She did not sound in the least mournful, though the story was as dismaying as the smiling girl could make it. After Bishop Purse, what she had hated most was someone called “my brother Ken.” “My brother Ken” was so neurotically snobbish that he’d had a breakdown trying to decide between a golden and a Labrador. His wife, whose name sounded like “Bobber Ann,” took the case to a psychotherapist, who advised buying one of each. Piotr did not know Laurie was talking about dogs, and after she explained he found the incident even more mystifying. What he loved at once was her built-up excitement. She was ignited by her own stories and at the end could scarcely finish for laughing. Yes, her brother’s wife was Bobber Ann. Barbara, that is – she had been imitating Bobber Ann’s Toronto accent. “Actually, my brother Ken’s a mean sort of bugger,” said Laurie, happily. “And she, Bobber Ann, she wears white gloves all the time, cleans’em with bread crumbs – it’s true. How long are you in Paris for, Otter, Potter, I can’t pronounce it. Would you come to a party, if I gave one?”