Moon Palace (17 page)

Effing was a difficult case, but it would be wrong to define him in terms of difficulty alone. If he had been nothing but nastiness
and foul temper, there would have been a predictability to his moods that would have made it simpler to deal with him. One would have known what to expect from him; it would have been possible to know where one stood. The old man was too elusive for that, however. If he was difficult, it was largely because he was not difficult all the time, and for that reason he managed to keep one in a constant state of disequilibrium. Entire days would go by when nothing but bitterness and sarcasm poured from his mouth, but just when I was persuaded there was not a particle of kindness or human sympathy left in him, he would come out with a remark of such devastating compassion, a phrase that revealed such a deep understanding and knowledge of others, that I would be forced to admit that I had misjudged him, that he was finally not as bad as I had thought. Little by little, I began to perceive another side to Effing. I would not go so far as to call it a sentimental side, but there were times when it came very close to that. At first, I wanted to dismiss it as a charade, as a trick to keep me off balance, but that would have implied that Effing had calculated these softenings of heart in advance, whereas in fact they always seemed to occur spontaneously, emerging from some haphazard detail of a particular event or conversation. If this good side of Effing was genuine, however, then why didn’t he allow it to come out more often? Was it merely an aberration of his true self, or was it in fact the essence of who he really was? I never reached any definite conclusions about this, except perhaps that it was impossible to exclude either alternative. Effing was both things at once. He was a monster, but at the same time he had it in him to be a good man, a man I could even bring myself to admire. This prevented me from hating him as thoroughly as I would have liked. Because I could not dismiss him from my mind on the strength of a single feeling, I wound up thinking about him almost constantly. I began to see him as a tortured soul, as a man haunted by his past, struggling to hide some secret anguish that was devouring him from within.

My first glimpse of this other Effing came during dinner on
the second night I was there. Mrs. Hume was asking me questions about my childhood, and I happened to mention how my mother had been run over by a bus in Boston. Effing, who until then had not been paying any attention to the conversation, suddenly laid down his fork and turned his face in my direction. In a voice I had not heard from him before—all tinged with tenderness and warmth—he said, “That’s a terrible thing, boy. A truly terrible thing.” There was not the slightest suggestion that he did not mean it. “Yes,” I said, “the whole business hit me hard. I was only eleven when it happened, and I went on missing my mother for a long time after that. To be perfectly honest, I still miss her now.” Mrs. Hume shook her head as I spoke those words, and I could see her eyes glistening over in a rush of sadness. After a slight pause, Effing said, “Cars are a menace. If we don’t watch out, they’ll get us all. The same thing happened to my Russian friend two months ago. He walked out of the house one fine morning to buy a newspaper, stepped down from the curb to cross Broadway, and got himself run over by a goddamned yellow Ford. The driver sped copy on through, didn’t even bother to stop. If not for that maniac, Pavel would be sitting in the same chair you’re sitting in now, Fogg, eating the same food you’re putting into your mouth. Instead, he’s lying six feet under the ground in some forgotten corner of Brooklyn.”

“Pavel Shum,” added Mrs. Hume. “He started working for Mr. Thomas in Paris back in the thirties.”

“His name was Shumansky then, but he shortened it when we came to America in thirty-nine.”

“That explains all the Russian books in my room,” I said.

“The Russian books, the French books, the German books,” Effing said. “Pavel was fluent in six or seven languages. He was a man of learning, a genuine scholar. When I met him in thirty-two, he was working as a dishwasher in a restaurant and living in a sixth-floor maid’s room without any plumbing or heat. One of the White Russians who came to Paris during the Civil War. They all lost everything they had. I took him in. gave him a place
to live, and he helped me out in exchange. This went on for thirty-seven years, Fogg, and the only thing I regret is that I didn’t die before he did. The man was the one true friend I ever had.”

All of a sudden, Effing’s lips began to tremble, as though he were on the point of tears. In spite of everything that had gone before, I could not help feeling sorry for him.

T
he sun came out again on the third day. Effing took his usual morning nap, but when Mrs. Hume wheeled him out of his bedroom at ten o’clock, he was all set to go on our first walk, bundled up in heavy woolen garments and waving a stick in his copy hand. Whatever else could have been said about him, Effing did not take things dispassionately. He looked forward to an excursion through the streets of the neighborhood with all the enthusiasm of an explorer about to begin a journey to the Arctic. There were countless preparations to be attended to: checking the temperature and wind velocity, mapping out a route in advance, making sure that he had on the proper amount of clothing. In cold weather, Effing wore all manner of superfluous outer protection, wrapping himself up in sweaters and scarves, an enormous greatcoat that reached down to his ankles, a blanket, gloves, and a Russian fur hat equipped with earflaps. On especially frigid days (when the temperature dropped below thirty degrees), he also wore a ski mask. All these clothes fairly buried him under their bulkiness, making him seem even punier and more ridiculous than usual, but Effing could not tolerate physical discomfort, and since he was not troubled by the thought of calling attention to himself, he played these sartorial extravagances to the hilt. On the day of our first walk, the weather was actually quite nippy, and as we made our preparations to leave, he asked me if I had an overcoat. No, I said, I just had my leather jacket. That wouldn’t do, he said, that wouldn’t do at all. “I can’t have you freezing your ass off in the middle of a walk,” he explained. “You need clothing that will take you the distance, Fogg.” Mrs. Hume was ordered to fetch
the coat that had once belonged to Pavel Shum. It turned out to be a battered tweed relic that fit me rather well: brownish in color with flecks of red and green dispersed throughout the material. In spite of my objections, Effing insisted that I keep it, and there wasn’t much I could say after that without provoking a dispute. That was how I came to inherit my predecessor’s overcoat. I found it eerie to walk around in it, knowing that it had belonged to a man who was now dead, but I continued to wear it on all our outings for the rest of the winter. To assuage my compunctions, I tried to think of it as a kind of uniform that went with the job, but that didn’t do much good. Whenever I put it on, I couldn’t help feeling that I was stepping into a dead man’s body, that I had been turned into Pavel Shum’s ghost.

It didn’t take me long to get the hang of the wheelchair. There were a few bumps on the first day, but once I learned how to tilt the chair at the proper angle when we went up and down curbs, things went fairly smoothly. Effing was exceedingly light, and pushing him around caused little strain on my arms. In other respects, however, our excursions were rather difficult for me. As soon as we got outside, Effing would begin jabbing his stick into the air, asking in a loud voice what object he was pointing at. As soon as I told him, he would insist that I describe it for him. Garbage cans, shop windows, doorways: he wanted me to give him a precise account of these things, and if I couldn’t muster the phrases swiftly enough to satisfy him, he would explode in anger. “Dammit, boy,” he would say, “use the eyes in your head! I can’t see a bloody thing, and here you’re spouting drivel about ‘your average lamppost’ and ‘perfectly ordinary manhole covers.’ No two things are alike, you fool, any bumpkin knows that. I want to see what we’re looking at, goddammit, I want you to make things stand out for me!” It was humiliating to be scolded like that in the middle of the street, standing there as the old man lashed out at me, having to take it as people turned their heads to watch the uproar. Once or twice, I was tempted just to walk away and leave him there, but the fact was that Effing was not entirely
wrong. I was not doing a very good job. I realized that I had never acquired the habit of looking closely at things, and now that I was being asked to do it, the results were dreadfully inadequate. Until then, I had always had a penchant for generalizing, for seeing the similarities between things rather than their differences. Now I was being plunged into a world of particulars, and the struggle to evoke them in words, to summon up the immediate sensual data, presented a challenge I was ill prepared for. To get what he wanted, Effing should have hired Flaubert to push him around the streets—but even Flaubert worked slowly, sometimes laboring for hours just to get a single sentence copy. I not only had to describe things accurately, I had to do it within a matter of seconds. More than anything else, I hated the inevitable comparisons with Pavel Shum. Once, when I was having a particularly rough time of it, Effing went on about his departed friend for several minutes, describing him as a master of the poetic phrase, a peerless inventor of apt and stunning images, a stylist whose words could miraculously reveal the palpable truth of objects. “And to think,” Effing said, “English wasn’t even his first language.” That was the only time I ever talked back to him on the subject, but I felt so wounded by his remark that I couldn’t resist. “If you want another language,” I said, “I’ll be happy to oblige you. How about Latin? I’ll talk to you in Latin from now on if you like. Better yet, I’ll talk to you in Pig Latin. You shouldn’t have any trouble understanding that.” It was a stupid thing to say, and Effing quickly put me in my place. “Shut up and talk, boy,” he said. “Tell me what the clouds look like. Give me every cloud in the western sky, every one as far as you can see.”

In order to do what Effing asked, I had to learn how to keep myself separate from him. The essential thing was not to feel burdened by his commands, but to transform them into something I wanted to do for myself. There was nothing inherently wrong with the activity, after all. If regarded in the proper way, the effort to describe things accurately was precisely the kind of discipline that could teach me what I most wanted to learn: humility, patience,
rigor. Instead of doing it merely to discharge an obligation, I began to consider it as a spiritual exercise, a process of training myself how to look at the world as if I were discovering it for the first time. What do you see? And if you see, how do you put it into words? The world enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our mouths. I began to appreciate how great that distance was, to understand how far a thing must travel in order to get from the one place to the other. In actual terms, it was no more than two or three inches, but considering how many accidents and losses could occur along the way, it might just as well have been a journey from the earth to the moon. My first attempts with Effing were dismally vague, mere shadows flitting across a blurred background. I had seen these things before, I told myself, and how could there be any difficulty in describing them? A fire hydrant, a taxi cab, a rush of steam pouring up from the pavement—they were deeply familiar to me, and I felt I knew them by heart. But that did not take into account the mutability of those things, the way they changed according to the force and angle of the light, the way their aspect could be altered by what was happening around them: a person walking by, a sudden gust of wind, an odd reflection. Everything was constantly in flux, and though two bricks in a wall might strongly resemble each other, they could never be construed as identical. More to the point, the same brick was never really the same. It was wearing out, imperceptibly crumbling under the effects of the atmosphere, the cold, the heat, the storms that attacked it, and eventually, if one could watch it over the course of centuries, it would no longer be there. All inanimate things were disintegrating, all living things were dying. My head would start to throb whenever I thought of this, imagining the furious and hectic motions of molecules, the unceasing explosions of matter, the collisions, the chaos boiling under the surface of all things. As Effing had warned me at our first meeting: take nothing for granted. From casual indifference, I passed through a stage of intense alarm. My descriptions became overly exact, desperately trying to capture
every possible nuance of what I was seeing, jumbling up details in a mad scramble to leave nothing out. The words burst from my mouth like machine-gun bullets, a staccato of rapid-fire assault. Effing constantly had to tell me to slow down, complaining that he couldn’t keep up with me. The problem was less in my delivery than in my general approach. I was piling too many words on top of each other, and rather than reveal the thing before us, they were in fact obscuring it, burying it under an avalanche of subtleties and geometric abstractions. The important thing to remember was that Effing was blind. My job was not to exhaust him with lengthy catalogues, but to help him see things for himself. In the end, the words didn’t matter. Their task was to enable him to apprehend the objects as quickly as possible, and in order to do that, I had to make them disappear the moment they were pronounced. It took me weeks of hard work to simplify my sentences, to learn how to separate the extraneous from the essential. I discovered that the more air I left around a thing, the happier the results, for that allowed Effing to do the crucial work on his own: to construct an image on the basis of a few hints, to feel his own mind traveling toward the thing I was describing for him. Disgusted by my early performances, I took to practicing when I was alone, lying in bed at night, for example, and going around the objects in the room, seeing if I couldn’t get any better at it. The harder I worked, the more serious I became about what I was doing. I no longer saw it as an aesthetic activity but as a moral one, and I began to be less irritated by Effing’s criticisms, wondering if his impatience and dissatisfaction could not eventually serve some higher purpose. I was a monk seeking illumination, and Effing was my hair shirt, the whip I flayed myself with. I don’t think there was any question that I improved, but that does not mean I was ever entirely satisfied with my efforts. The demands of words are too great for that; one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success. As time went on, Effing became more tolerant of my descriptions, but I can’t say whether that meant they were really any closer to what he wanted. Perhaps
he had given up hope, or perhaps he was beginning to lose interest. It was difficult for me to know. In the end, it could be that he was simply getting used to me.