The Seventh Candidate (42 page)

But usually she spent her weekends reading,
anything, all day in the public library on Saturdays. She spent
hours over the choice of the three books to take out, then at the
last moment, at closing time, grabbed anything. Once she took out a
textbook on organic chemistry and at home stared for hours at the
hydrocarbon linkages and the formulas. What she liked best of all
were travel books and exploration accounts. She asked the doctor if
that wasn’t escapism. She understood him to say that, like almost
everything else, it was acceptable in moderation.

She started going to church again but ended
by finding the young priest distant and stopped going after a
month. She avoided the underground even to go to her office
although there was a direct line. She went there by bus. It was a
roundabout route involving a transfer, the other kind. When her
fellow employees wondered at this she sometimes spoke of
claustrophobia. They spoke of the dangers of the underground. One
wasn’t safe anywhere.

One morning she saw the brief newspaper
article in the lap of a passenger next to her in the bus. She felt
nothing, neither pain nor satisfaction. Or maybe the two cancelled
each other out. She preferred to think that all that was something
that had happened a long time ago to somebody else.

The second week back home her phone started
ringing in the middle of the night and she could hear faint
breathing, but got no answer. This went on for a week. She took to
leaving it off the hook and then since this was about the only call
she got she had her phone rental cancelled for two months. It was a
saving.

One Friday afternoon in early January, a
holiday, she sat at her window and watched the season’s first
blizzard slowly effacing the bushes, the paths, the benches in the
small square opposite the council-house. By five o’clock the
whiteness had turned blue and then it was night with pallor
everywhere. The snow raged in the cones of light of the
street-lamps. She ate a sandwich, read a few pages of a detective
story, looked at cartoons on television.

At about eight there was a knock on her
door. As everybody did in that dangerous suburb she asked who it
was without opening the door. A man’s voice said something about
keys. She looked through the wide-angled spy hole that equipped all
the doors but couldn’t make out the figure in the gloom of the
corridor. Why hadn’t he turned on the landing-lights? She asked him
what he wanted and she heard the voice say that he wanted the keys.
She fastened the stout chain and opened the door a crack. She
looked and closed the door and bolted it. She left the chain
secured.

He went on talking on the other side of the
door. She told him to go away. He went on talking. When he got no
answer he started banging on the door. She threatened to call the
police if he didn’t go away. She took the phone as close to the
door as the wire allowed and dialed without removing the receiver.
She didn’t remember the number anyhow. The police would be there in
ten minutes, she said. Through the door she heard him say something
unintelligible about a case of self-defense. Then he returned to
the keys. He wanted them. Had to have them. Where could he go
without his keys?

“I have no keys,” she said to the locked
door. “No keys of yours. I thought you were dead. Everybody thinks
you’re dead. Aren’t you surprised I’m not dead?”

He said something about having almost died
and then he asked her to open the door. What for? The keys, he
repeated patiently. And also to see her. What keys? She had all the
keys, he said. The keys to the
Ideal
office, the key to his flat and the key to his car. But
there was a problem with
Ideal
.
His voice lost its assurance, sounded bewildered.

What happened to my business? Where
is
Ideal
? Where is
the building? There’s a big hole instead of the building. And my
car? It’s disappeared. Who stole my car? And you disappeared too.
And I can’t get into my flat, I haven’t got the right keys. You
must have them. So I came to get the keys. But of course not to the
hole, I don’t know what to do about that. At least the keys to the
flat, the ones you took when I was in the coma.

She said she’d given the flat keys back to
him a long time ago, years ago. She didn’t know where his car was.
She had spare keys to the office somewhere but since he said there
was no office anymore, just a hole, there was no point looking. She
hadn’t known about the building. She hadn’t been in that district
for a year. More than a year. He should go away, leave her
alone.

A year, he repeated in the bewildered voice.
He asked what the month was. She told him. When he asked what the
year was she put the phone down on the floor. She unfastened the
chain and shot back the bolts and opened the door.

Instead of entering he stood there in the
gloom of the landing and asked her, in a pedantic voice, to please
not look at him. For reasons he would explain he wasn’t
presentable. The gate had opened unexpectedly. He would explain
everything but first he would appreciate it if she would let him
use her bathroom. The shower, actually. She shouldn’t worry for her
washrag and towel. He had everything, even soap. It was possible to
buy almost anything down there. Once presentable he would explain
everything.

At this she felt like closing the door on
him but it was too late. He went past her, almost tripping on the
phone wire. She looked anyhow. His voice and his glasses were
almost all he’d held on to. The rest was like a scarecrow in
winter. He was carrying a bulging valise. He opened a few wrong
doors and then went into the bathroom with the valise.

She mopped up the puddle of water and
melting snow before the door where he’d been standing, also the wet
shoe-prints that led to the bathroom door and the wrong ones. She
heard the hiss of the shower. She shut the living room door and
returned to the television program. There was still the hiss of the
shower. She turned the sound up. It was a cartoon with loud music
and sound effects for the cat and the mouse ceaselessly overcoming
destruction: dynamite, bear-trap, sledge-hammer, steamroller.

Other cartoons followed. In one of the
pauses she listened. She couldn’t hear the hiss of the shower any
more. She went back to the detective novel. Occasionally she
glanced up at the screen when the sound announced
super-catastrophe.

At nine she switched off the TV. She went
into the kitchen and prepared another sandwich and a cup of coffee.
Finally she opened the living room door on the corridor. There was
no sound. She opened the bathroom door. The mirror was steamed up.
His dirty clothes lay in a neat heap in a corner. On the glass
shelf above the washbasin there was a safety razor, blades, shaving
cream, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste and a plastic cup. They
shared the shelf with her own things although a space separated
them.

The valise was on one side of her bedroom
door. She pushed the door open. The ceiling light was on. He was
lying on her bed snoring slightly. He was wearing a wrinkled
blue-striped shirt with a dark tie, a dark jacket and trousers,
both badly creased. His newly shined black shoes were carefully
aligned on the carpet next to the bed. Even asleep he wore his
glasses. One of the lenses had been broken and was mended with
scotch-tape. The dirt was gone from his face. It looked worse that
way. His neck bore a purple-green bruise.

She shook him. “Get off my bed.” His lips
moved. He settled back into sleep. She shook him much harder. He
cried out, propped himself up on his elbows, still crying out. The
dark lenses faced the ceiling. He stopped the noise and collapsed
into his original position. She couldn’t tell if his eyes were
open. “Get out of my flat,” she said in a loud voice. He snored
slightly. She left the bedroom.

She put on her coat, scarf and boots. She
opened the door on the landing and then closed it and went back.
She took her alarm clock and set the alarm for eleven. She found a
sheet of paper and a pen. Still in her coat and boots she sat down
at the kitchen table and printed in big characters: “Leave my flat.
When I come back in an hour if you are still here I will phone the
police. This is a solemn promise.”

She should have stopped there but with her
face screwed up ferociously against any possible surprise attack of
tears she went on and on, listing the unforgivable things of those
six years. It was all there in her memory. She’d forgotten nothing,
needed a second sheet then a third.

The alarm clock rang. She stopped it, reset
it for midnight, and returned to the sheet. Not really finished,
she stopped anyhow. She went into her bedroom, placed the alarm
clock like a bomb centimeters from his ear and the sheets of paper
alongside it.

Opening the door on the landing again, she
remembered she hadn’t numbered the sheets and almost went back. But
then she thought that he could begin anywhere, it didn’t matter,
there was no beginning and no end to what he had done and hadn’t
done.

Normally at that hour nobody dared venture
out. But with the blizzard even the thugs and rapists would be
indoors behind bolted doors. The floors rose without halt in the
elevator-window. The elevator jolted still and opened on the empty
lobby.

She had to push the plate-glass main door
with all her might against the wind, which blasted into the lobby
with swirls of snow. She pulled the hood over her head and fought
her way down the cement lane that ran before Buildings C and D,
past ash cans and prone Christmas trees with shreds of tinsel still
in the yellowing branches. She crossed the street and went into the
square. She had to guess at the path. The wind dashed snow into her
face. Underfoot ankle-deep it crunched. She decided to walk around
the square fifteen times. The fifth time around in the midst of her
own previous footsteps her teeth started chattering. She shuddered
violently and couldn’t stop. What was she doing here, evicted and
shuddering in the cold?

She followed her earlier footprints back to
the lobby and sat down on the bench near the radiator. It was ten
to midnight. In ten minutes it would go off in his ear. She saw him
propped up on his elbows, crying out. Wasn’t it sometimes dangerous
to be awakened like that? She leaned against the radiator and dozed
off. She woke up violently at exactly midnight as though the alarm
had gone off in her own ear. Then she fell asleep again.

She was awakened by the elevator jolting to a
halt and the doors sliding apart. He stepped out with his
blind-man’s glasses and the bulging valise and the shiny black
shoes. The shelf above the washbasin had been cleared too, she
imagined. Didn’t he see her sitting there on the bench? He’d said
he’d explain. He went over to the plate-glass door and opened it.
She felt the icy draft where she was seated. Where was he going?
The lobby was more or less heated. Why didn’t he sit on the bench
till tomorrow morning? Why was he going out into the blizzard like
in a melodrama? She hadn’t said that. What he was doing now was
something new to add to the third sheet next to the alarm clock.
Had he read them?

He had reached the end of the cement lane.
Now he was in the street. She caught up with him and pulled his
sleeve. She asked him where he was going.

To the underground.

To go where?

To the underground.

The nearest underground station was two
kilometers away, she said. The busses weren’t running at that hour.
By the time he got there on foot the underground would be closed,
she said, trying to steer him back to Building C. He should return
to the lobby and tell her about it.

There wasn’t time, he said. Walking fast he
could make it to the station. You could stay inside at closing time
(if you knew the trick) but you couldn’t get in once it was
closed.

At least sit in the lobby till the blizzard
let up, she said. It was better than sleeping on an underground
bench.

She heard the old superiority in his voice
as he said that he’d never slept on the benches with the beggars.
Never once. He had his storeroom, cleaned and furnished. No more
spiders. Just crickets. They were almost company. It sounded like
the countryside.

Crickets in the underground? Tell me about
it in the lobby. Have you eaten? Plenty of food in the storeroom,
he said with the old superiority.

She sneezed violently three times. We’ll
both catch pneumonia, she said. Walk me back to the lobby at least.
I’m scared to by myself. It’s dangerous here. I know you wouldn’t
want anything to happen to me.

When they reached the lobby she steered him
toward the elevator. She pushed the elevator button and started
sneezing again. She said she was going to have a plate of hot soup
to head off the cold. He could have some too if he wanted. “Yes, of
course, that’s why I came,” he said.

In the slowly rising elevator the dark disks
of his glasses were aligned with her eyes. If he was really looking
at her it must have been the first time since he came. She felt
like pulling the hood down further to conceal her face. Her hair
was already concealed.

She’d changed back to the old days, he said.
The same as on the photo. He’d often looked at her where he had
been. It had been a great help at certain moments. It was like
having company when the crickets stopped. He dug out a creased
photograph from his wallet and showed it to her. She looked at the
black-and-white identity-photo for a second and then handed it back
to him.

The elevator jolted to a halt. She opened
the door and told him to sit down for a few minutes in the living
room.