The Seventh Candidate (5 page)

Finally she climbed down the ladder and told
them that they had half an hour to apply their newly acquired
skills to the poster on their table. She approached the director,
knelt and picked up the brush. With a discreet cough she replaced
it in the glass. She made sure it tinkled. Motionless, eyes shut,
he paid no attention to her. “Sir,” she finally ventured, “if you
need me, I’ll be here, of course, monitoring them.”

He heard her murmur from far off. He’d given
up trying to localize the burning: duodenum, ascending colon,
jejunum, sigmoid flexure, transverse colon, ileum (he knew the
convolutions of the human intestine as well as he did those of the
capital’s underground lines to which it bore a remarkable
resemblance). The fire was everywhere.

The burning spells had started four years
before and had steadily worsened. Painful and humiliating
examinations revealed no intestinal lesions. Drugs provided no
relief. The prescription of his first doctor was purely verbal.
“You overreact. You must learn to relax, to untense,” he was fond
of saying as he pocketed his fee.

There was no question of letting a
mind-charlatan pry into his brain but he did follow his first
doctor’s advice more or less. At the slightest sign of negative
thoughts he would censor himself. When he felt like bellowing he
would smile. One of his later doctors had commented on the smile
maintained while Lorz was clutching his abdomen. “Let it out! Don’t
keep it bottled up. When you’re alone try kicking things, try
yelling.” Lorz’s smile unconsciously broadened with anger at
hearing, once again, the implicit localization of the trouble not
in his intestines but in his brain and at the dangerous stupidity
of the advice. If you let all the accumulated rage out wouldn’t you
run amok?

If this attack didn’t prove fatal he’d
return home and spend the next two days in bed, biting his arm to
blood during the worst times. It had all happened before. His
assistant saw things through. When he returned to the subterranean
office, pale and weak, there was always a bouquet of flowers on his
desk, for which he thanked her. For months the posters would remain
mere advertising devices and the graffiti represent no more than
technical problems. He would find himself again in precarious
possession of a less driven, less inward-focused self. The world
was still oppressive in its ugliness, but he’d got out from under
it a little. Occasionally in his striving for outwardness and
contact he’d pet the least mangy of the cats on the stairs leading
down to the sardines or ask his assistant about childhood on a
mountain farm. Then things would gradually build up again: the
Cycle.

There was a crash to the left of the
director, a vulgar curse, laughter. He opened his eyes. Maybe it
was a little better? He saw that a candidate a few feet away had
upset a jar of red paint on the floor. Amid the fragments a sticky
pool was widening. A very little bit better. But dizziness now.

His assistant swiftly opened a locker and
took out a scoop, a sweep, a quantity of rags, old newspapers, a
tin of turpentine and a new bottle of paint. She slipped on loose
rubber gloves. With the same virtuosity she’d displayed on the
ladder she removed the fragments, mopped up the paint and scrubbed
the spot with turpentine.

She looked at her employer and mimed
exasperation. Actually, she was glad the accident had happened. It
had allowed her to establish contact of sorts with the director.
His weeping gaze now shifted away. Why wasn’t he wearing his
glasses today? She spread four thicknesses of newspaper on the
moist floor, placed the fresh bottle on the candidate’s table,
dumped the rags and fragments into a metal oil-drum, stripped off
the rubber gloves and resumed her normal duties.

For the third time she passed behind the
struggling candidates, whispering words of encouragement. Their
efforts were hopeless. It had to be admitted, though, that the
lesson hadn’t been perfect. Every few seconds she glanced at her
employer, fearfully. Something like this had happened last year.
But not as bad, not nearly.

In her concern, she almost forgot the
seventh – originally the thirteenth – candidate seated in the rear.
Careful not to disturb him, she made a wide circuit and came up to
him from behind, her back practically against the wall. The toilet
behind it erupted again.

She opened her mouth to offer encouragement
even before she saw his poster.

Seeing it, she closed her mouth, bent closer
and stared and went on staring.

She hurried back to her employer where he
sat motionless in his chair, staring at the blank wall. She
hesitated and then whispered urgently: “Sir, the candidate in the
back, you should see what he’s done. It’s miraculous. Don’t you
want to look?”

He accepted diversion this time and even let
her help him to his feet. Frowning with concentration, flushed and
lips slightly parted, she guided him towards the rear. In half a
decade of association it was the first physical contact between
them exceeding a fraction of a second. She wouldn’t easily be able
to forget it.

He freed his arm from her supporting grasp.
There was another crash from up front, even louder laughter.

“What a lot. I’ll be right back,” she
whispered, her exasperation genuine now. She returned to the front
of the room, abandoning him. She wouldn’t easily be able to forget
that either.

He continued alone toward the wall and the
seventh candidate. The burning seemed to be letting up a bit. Not
the dizziness though. It was another lull. How would he be able to
withstand the next onslaught?

The overhead mercury-tubes stuttered and
went out, leaving him in premonitory darkness. The power-workers
again. He groped forward.

When the lights stuttered back on he found
himself alongside the seventh candidate. The director looked down
at the poster. His assistant had made a bad mistake in setting up
the tables for the test. This was unlike her. She’d placed a
perfect ungraffitied poster on this table.

Aware of his slight myopic focus, he bent
down closer. Despite the aggravation of his dizziness, his
practiced eye could now see the rectifications the seventh
candidate had made on the girl.

The lacerations had been seamlessly mended.
His brush had banished the appeals to disorder and all the other
disfigurements. Helena lay there in unmarred loveliness. It was a
masterpiece of restorative art that he thought only he himself was
capable of creating. A miracle, as she’d said.

Now at twenty-three seconds to 9:00 in the
morning of March 7, he peered into the face of the seventh
candidate smiling up at him.

He might have been the brother of the girl
on the poster. His features possessed the same archaic virtues of
gentleness, candor and affection. His smile was one of complicity,
an invitation to counter-recognition.

“He knows me,” was perhaps the director’s
first thought and the second, “I know him.”

Much later, on the other side of disaster,
he remembered (when he dared to) their meeting this way. But
sometimes he had doubts. There’d been the distortion of myopia and
how sure could he be of his memory after what happened?

Groping for his identity, the director
looked into those fine wide-pitched eyes. It was as if everything
else were being effaced: the pain, the dizziness, the windowless
office and beneath it the tangle of underground corridors with
their marred posters and marred passengers. For a second he had a
passing impulse to hold on to all that. As early as that brief
meeting he experienced a fear which, though, like so much else, may
have been a later contamination of the original scene.

Then he let go and there was just the two of
them. Welling up from obscure regions of authenticity – what, in
defiance of his time, he wasn’t ashamed to call his soul – was
music, near-tears, exaltation.

That’s how he was to remember it, fearfully,
when memory returned.

He reached out for the contact that was sure
to unlock memory. Did he actually touch the boy’s shoulder? Even if
he did there was no recognition, for it was exactly 9:00am and
giant hands brutally clapped his ears, the boy vanished in a roar,
and on the rectified poster red drops and streaks vandalized the
girl once more.

The lights went out again, for much
longer.

This time it wasn’t the power-workers.

***

3

White walls, a white ceiling, a white enamel
bed, an arm swathed in white which he realized was his own (the
meaningless term “Basic White” filled his mind for a second) and
standing at the foot of the bed, contradicting all that whiteness,
a woman he knew, the name didn’t matter, wearing a red dress. He
didn’t know the name for the place but knew that the place was for
distress. The woman’s eyes were wet. Her mouth made funny
movements. The foot of the bed had bars. The whiteness hurt his
eyes. He closed them and returned to darkness.

He opened his eyes again. The woman (his
employee, Dorothea Ruda) was still there but in a blue dress and
next to her was a stout red-haired woman in a white dress, a
uniform. She smiled down and said “Welcome back” and then the nurse
did things to the bottle suspended above him with the tube that ran
into the bruised crook of his unbandaged arm. She bent down and did
things to other tubes that ran under the sheet. A young doctor came
in. He had a sharp nose. He was cheerful like the nurse. He shined
a light in his eyes. It hurt. He scratched the soles of his feet.
That didn’t hurt. He asked him questions he should answer by yes or
no if he could. If not, shake his head or nod. He answered and
forgot the questions immediately. It didn’t matter. He closed his
eyes and forgot the young sharp-nosed doctor and the two women and
returned to the darkness.

This time he woke up to the white room
with a feeling of familiarity. There was the bandage on his left
arm, white flowers on a Formica table, his assistant seated by the
side of the bed. Her dress was gray now. He tried to anchor himself
to these things by staring at them. Something terrible had happened
to him but he feared return to the darkness if he thought about it.
His mind leaped back before the darkness, giving it finitude in
that direction too, turning it into a parenthesis. He saw the six
applicants in the big windowless
Ideal Poster
office. He saw the rear of the office and seemed
to be slowly walking towards a seated figure and the wall. His mind
shied away in panic and concentrated on the thought: if she’s here
then who’s taking care of the business?

“So we can thank God it was a small bomb
that exploded that morning,” she was saying, as though she’d been
talking to him for a long time. Hadn’t she already said that? “A
small home-made bomb, thank God. Otherwise we’d all be dead. It was
in the ministry toilet.”

Something in what she’d said vaguely
disturbed him, he didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t the words
“bomb” and “exploded.” He didn’t even think of the probable damage
to the office. What was it? And what had happened to the sunshine?
A minute or so ago it had been strong and glaring on the wall. Now
it was huddled weakly red in a corner. Knowledge of time too was an
anchorage against return to darkness. He heard a faint slow voice
asking about it.

“Five twenty-five,” she answered.

His mind was clearer. The test, of course.
It had started early that morning. Five twenty-five now. The whole
day had gone by. And he was here and she too. What was she doing
here? Why wasn’t she in the office? “I’ve been … unconscious …for …
eight hours?” the slow faint voice, his own, asked. He was
childishly proud of the accuracy of his calculation. She looked
down, shrugged her shoulders slightly, made a helpless gesture.

Slowly suspicious, he asked, “What day … is
it?”

“Monday,” she said promptly.

He felt relief. The test had taken place, as
usual, on Monday morning.

He looked out of the window, squinting
against his myopia. His glasses: the night of the rowdies. Those
trees outside. Time was suddenly lost, calculations upset at the
sight of those trees.

That morning – which morning? – on the way
from his flat to
Ideal
, the trees
had been black and bare. Now they were covered with sinister young
green leaves. Sometimes in late February there was a spell of warm
weather. But it took a good week of such warmth to coax leaves out.
A week.

“
How long … have I … been here? You said …
today … was Monday.” His mind was alert. “It
is
Monday,” she replied, looking down at the floor
again. Alert. What she’d said a minute ago was, “It was a bomb that
morning.” ‘That’ was the potent word. “What Monday?” he
demanded.

She started crying. “I told you to go to the
rear and look at his poster. I should have stayed there myself. It
should have happened to me. But they say you’re all right now,
practically.”

“What Monday?”

“It’s April 13 today,” she said, looking
down at the floor. “I prayed for both of you all the time. You’re
practically all right now they say. I keep on praying for him.”

He closed his eyes. Had someone else been
injured in the explosion?

She stared at his white frozen profile
beneath the bandaged head. His eyes remained shut. Alarmed, she
prepared to call the nurse. Then his lips moved. Faintly, slowly,
he said: “And the … business? I’m in a coma … for five weeks … and
you … spend all your time here … changing dresses … and crying.
Who’s taking care … of the business?”

She was still crying a little but laughing
now too. He was himself again, hopelessly, the same as before, but
thank God for that. She stopped laughing and then stopped crying.
She blew her nose.