The Seventh Candidate (17 page)

Visits? The decision unconsciously reached
the day before focused sharply in Lorz’s mind. He felt a kind of
liberation. She assumed he was concerned by the news from the
hospital. In fact, he wasn’t involved. He was determined never
again to see “his candidate” (why “his”? how was he “his”
candidate?), Number Nine, Teddy.

Whatever his name, he was inseparable from
disaster and obsession. He saw himself, that first time, walking
toward the boy and the wall with the bomb ticking away behind it.
He saw himself wandering in the subterranean maze of the place of
the insane, saw himself shrinking aside from the path into the
thorny barberries before the hurtling blind bulk of the other. He
remembered the climax of the last visit, the scuffle, the squat
power of the attendant, his grunts punctuating those other inhuman
sounds.

The director had already freed himself of
responsibility for that last incident. Of course the move to 6B had
nothing to do with what had followed. He’d read mad things into the
sudden weakness of “his candidate’s” game. He’d read intimate
message, ironic intention into what was simply a symptom of the
crisis which was following its course, building up to frightening
outbreak, no connection at all with the checkmate and the
touch.

Lorz dismissed the matter from his mind. He
asked his assistant if she’d seen his watch in the office. When he
woke up that morning it was missing from his bruised left wrist.
He’d searched everywhere for the precious watch. It had belonged to
his father. She hadn’t seen it.

The void of the following two weeks
underscored the degree to which he’d allowed the short Sunday
visits to monopolize his life. They’d supplanted or contaminated
all his normal activities. He imagined the tombs of his parents,
neglected for two months now, plastered with wet dead leaves, his
last gift of potted flowers now black skeletons. Instead of
applying himself to intellectual improvement he’d spent his
Saturdays window shopping, searching for the impossible gift that
would finally be accepted. He’d spent the week-days preparing the
visit, thinking up impossible strategies of communication,
perfecting himself in the other man’s monstrous skills, first with
the interlinked metal puzzles then with the chess problems. In his
office he’d gone through the empty motions of his professional
activities, his mind occupied by the last visit and the visit to
come. His assistant had done the real work.

That Sunday he tried to return to the
pattern of his former weekends. Once a month, before the intrusion
of the weekly visits to Teddy, he would make sandwiches and drive
out to the cemetery. There he would sweep and flower his parents’
graves, a painstaking operation. For many years the custom had
been, afterwards, to drive out even further to semi-wooded country.
Once he had seen a deer. But that was long ago. The woods and
fields had been swallowed up by building lots, new motorways,
aerodromes. Day after day the city wrote indelible graffiti on the
countryside.

As soon as he passed through the gates Lorz
realized that the cemetery had been desecrated.

Why was he stunned? One read about it every
day in the newspapers. There were no more sanctuaries, not even
this one. It had happened the night before, a visitor to a
neighboring lot informed him. He was in his early fifties. Somehow
the set of his shoulders, the cut of his mustache, the quality of
his blue gaze indicated that they shared the same archaic
values.

Holding two of the smaller fragments of his
wife’s stone, unconsciously trying to fit them together, he said
that worse had happened to another grave, the coffin smashed, the
body … Lorz tried not to listen. Eyes brimming, the man said:
“Nobody is safe from them anywhere, not even the dead. They deserve
the death penalty, sir, and slow fire would be too kind.”

Glancing at the big fragment lying on the
gravel Lorz saw that the man’s wife had died three months before at
the age of thirty-nine. They must have used sledgehammers on the
man’s lot. Three of the other stones had been smashed and the
railing bashed in three spots.

Lorz was luckier.
The stones in his lot were unbroken but
desecrated with meaningless tarred graffiti. Even the
plastic-coated photographs fastened to the granite, the same as the
ones on his desk in the apartment, were covered with the insane
graffiti. Or maybe not graffiti, maybe just tar splashes. It
reminded the director of the inkblot tests Silberman had
administered to him, full of objects one couldn’t confess to
seeing. He scratched at the tar over his mother’s face till his
fingertips were sore and bleeding. He should have come with his
professional equipment on his back to pay his respects to his
mother and father.

The old doctor phoned the director the
following Friday. He informed him that Teddy was better. The visits
could resume that coming weekend. The nagging foreign authoritarian
voice didn’t inquire whether he, the director, was coming, whether
he was able to, whether he wanted to. For some reason, Lorz didn’t
flatly announce his intention never again to see the doctor’s
patient. He gave an evasive answer in a distinctly unenthusiastic
voice. He assumed the doctor, a mind-man after all, had
decoded.

The following Sunday afternoon Lorz drove out
to the cemetery again with two large expensive potted briars for
them in the car-trunk along with the knapsack. Naturally there was
no need for the ladder at that height. But when he got there he saw
that the cemetery management had done the job, on the whole
satisfactorily. He felt deprived of the cleansing gestures,
penitential for his long neglect of his parents. He placed the
plants at the foot of the two tombs. He shifted them about for long
minutes to get the best effect. He nervously consulted his bare
left wrist and wondered what had happened to his watch.

The next day, the old doctor rang him up at
the office. He hadn’t decoded after all. He was furious. Why hadn’t
the director come? Teddy had been waiting for him, staring at the
door, waiting for it to open, said the doctor. He had left his room
with no resistance at all this time, with a chess set under his arm
and had positioned the pieces, white as well as black. He had
waited. And waited. It was the best of signs, the first time he had
shown interest in people instead of things. It had been a brief
window of opportunity, the first and perhaps the last one, quickly
shut. He, the director, had spoiled everything. Hadn’t come. Had
not come! Teddy had shown symptoms of upset.

At this information the director, vividly
remembering his candidate’s last, spectacular, symptom of upset,
told the doctor that he’d decided not to come anymore. Teddy was no
relative, he explained, no friend, not even an acquaintance. There
was too much mystery. Why was his presence indispensable? He didn’t
feel like risking his life again in the interest of science.

Risking his life? The old doctor barked,
perhaps a laugh. No, noo, nooo. His harsh voice tried to be
soothing as at a child’s boogieman terrors. There was no danger.
They were hiding nothing. Teddy needed human presence, people he
could accept. They, the director and Miss Ruda, were the last
people he had seen, a link to normality, so to speak. He tolerated
them. And who else wanted to visit him?

And so forth and so forth, said the old
doctor, in sudden irritation. He had things to do. So next Sunday,
without fail.

All week long Lorz felt like ringing the old
doctor back and informing him of his irrevocable decision. But the
following Sunday he stood on the other side of that closed door,
the gift clamped firmly beneath his right arm. He hesitated for
long seconds. Then he knocked and opened the door.

His candidate didn’t look up from what he
was doing. He hadn’t changed. The objects on the table had changed.
With a pair of tweezers he was systematically displacing the
contents of a disemboweled watch from one green velvet square to
another. There must have been a dozen other watches on the table,
in various stages of disembowelment. The tweezers deposited a
ratchet wheel alongside other wheels. There were pinions, the
setting-lever screw, dial-screws, return arms, barrel and barrel
arbor, etc. The director was surprised that he was able to
recognize and name so many of the parts.

He watched his absorbed candidate for a
minute and then said: “Theodore.” No reaction. He said it four or
five times, louder each time. After a while, he called him, six or
seven times, by his usual name: “Teddy.” He still got no
reaction.

Lorz undid the gift-wrapping with a flourish
that filled the silence with a joyous Christmas crackling, like a
log-fire, and placed the rosewood inlaid board on the table between
them. He caressed it with his fingertips. “Look, Teddy,” he said.
“It’s for you.” He began removing the ivory and ebony chessmen from
the box. “Theodore, look, it’s yours.”

“Too late,” said the old doctor behind him.
“Chess is over. It is something else again. Another phase. Watches,
as you can see.”

Lorz ignored the sarcastic foreign voice. He
went on positioning the white pieces, the exquisite fine-carved
ivory, on his side of the board. Then he looked up at his
candidate.

The boy was totally absorbed in his task.
The tweezers set down the mainspring. It looked like a spiral
galaxy. He could have been light-years distant.

Lorz started positioning his candidate’s
ebony pieces. He set them down vigorously, for the sound they made.
He wondered now for the first time why his candidate had always
played black. The tweezers worked on. All of the pieces were
positioned. The director waited.

He waited. He saw the price-label still on
the box and displaced his anger onto the old doctor.

“Why did you tell me he was waiting for me
with a chess set last Sunday?”

“That is the way it was last Sunday. It is
not that way this Sunday. It may be yet another way next Sunday.
Perhaps something easier in which to participate than watch
repairing. We can hope, yes?”

“I doubt very much that you’ll see me here
again next Sunday. Or any other Sunday, for that matter. Why do you
insist on my presence?”

“Why do you ask the same question always? He
accepts you. When he notices you. Don’t sulk. Perhaps next Sunday
he will notice you.”

Lorz flushed and was on the point of asking
the foreign doctor if he fully appreciated the meaning and
implications of the verb “sulk” when suddenly he saw it among the
other watches, the empty gold shell at least, with the old leather
strap, burst, and the dial with the old fashioned
roman-numerals.

He’d lost it at that moment of flight from
this same room two weeks before, he understood. It could only be
that, the strap caught by the corner of the table, it must have
been, which explained the bruise on his wrist. But how had it come
into the possession of the other? There was something monstrously
insulting about it: all those costly spurned gifts and then this
virtual theft.

Why had he taken it apart? The works with
the boasted 18 jewels were heaped on another green velvet
rectangle. The image of the probing tweezers in the opened
watchcase reminded him, first, of a brain operation. Then of his
assistant prying in his flat. Then of his mother’s desecrated
tombstone.

He turned to the old doctor and stammered:
“That’s my watch! He’s ruined my watch! He’s taken it apart!”

Beneath the sense of outrage, he felt faint
shame: a schoolboy denouncing a classmate to the teacher. It
aggravated his angry reaction. So did the doctor’s alien pedantic
sound of denial, tongue clacking three times quick against the roof
of his mouth and his reply: “All of the watches are loans from the
Vocational Rehabilitation Unit. Somewhat involuntary loans, this is
true.” He smiled thinly.

Lorz ignored the old doctor now, turned his
back to him. He leaned forward toward the other, pointing toward
the hollow shell, the heap of parts, and pronounced the words
loudly and brutally as so often happened when he felt
frustrated.

“That’s my watch you’ve taken apart. I want
it back.” He broke off in confusion. “No I don’t, not in a hundred
pieces like that I don’t.”

The other didn’t notice the contradictory
commands. He didn’t notice anything except the cogs and wheels.

Lorz turned to the old doctor, stammering
again out of frustration:

“It’s your responsibility. Take it away from
him and give it to the Vocational Rehabilitation people and tell
them to repair it. I want it back as it was, put together and
keeping correct time. Tell them to phone me when it’s ready.
Wednesday at the latest.”

He marched out of the office without looking
back at either of them.

The following Wednesday his assistant told
him that the old doctor had rung up. Something of the greatest
importance had happened. They would be expecting him next Sunday.
His presence was indispensable.

Lorz entered the office and immediately saw
on the table before his waiting chair twelve tiny packages,
obviously watches, all gift-wrapped meticulously. They lay three
abreast in four rows, distanced identically to the millimeter. They
looked like miniature flag-wrapped coffins after a massacre. “This
is important,” breathed the old doctor.

“Which one is mine?” Lorz asked, not
realizing the greatness of the thing, unable to check the momentum
of his latest preoccupation. “I just want mine.”

Lorz started opening one of the packages. It
wasn’t his watch. He was about to put it in the center of the table
when the old doctor snapped: “Take them all. He means them for you,
gifts. You must reject nothing. You are spoiling things. And you
haven’t thanked him. Thank him profusely.”