The Seventh Candidate (6 page)

There was no business for the time being,
she explained. Hadn’t been since the Events. The underground had
been shut down for two weeks. And even now he wouldn’t recognize
the stations. Rubbish knee-deep, the trains themselves covered with
giant graffiti, spray-canned. The original posters had vanished
completely beneath layer after layer of political posters, stickers
and inscriptions. The agencies had stopped producing posters. It
would take another week before the mess was cleaned up. Until then
there was no question of protecting posters. There was nothing left
to protect. It had been a crazy exciting month.

On the morning of March 7 (she could be
certain of
that
date, she
said) there occurred a number of explosions in public buildings and
ministries including the one next to
Ideal Poster
. Thirty or so innocent people had been killed or
at the very least injured. In any case it was certain there had
been deaths too. The government, which hadn’t resigned yet (that
was later), ordered the arrest of extremist leaders of the left. Or
of the right? Probably both, actually. Then there were strikes
everywhere. And demonstration after demonstration, the avenues
black with demonstrators, the weather glorious for that time of
year, tear-gas and arrests because of the smashed shop-windows and
the burning cars and more demonstrations to have them freed, the
arrested demonstrators, that was.

She herself got caught in one of them and
was saved from a clubbing (by a policeman! she!) by such a nice
girl who’d shoved her out of harm’s way into a doorway. She was
sometimes a little bit extremist, her new friend (it depended on
what you were talking about), but full of ideas, not that she
agreed with all of them, but some of them made you think. She wrote
poetry and made beautiful jewelry. Vera – that was her name –
thought she was dreadfully backward, a “noodle” she said, and maybe
she was. Anyhow the factories and the universities were occupied.
People started hoarding, there’d been a shortage of sugar,
cooking-oil and petrol (“and lemon-soap, too, for some strange
reason”). Black and red flags everywhere. “Total strangers would
speak to each other in the street,” she added, as though this was a
central point of those historic days along with the scarcity of
lemon-soap.

“So we are … now living under … a
collectivist … dictatorship. They shouldn’t … have troubled …
waking me up.” He said that, but he didn’t really care. Saying that
staved off the image of the nearing rear wall and the seated
figure. When he reached them the terrible thing would happen
again.

No, it was all over, she said. The provinces
hadn’t followed. There’d been too much looting by uncontrolled
elements, too many cars burned. They’d held legislative elections
last week and the government parties had won all the seats, or at
least most of them. A majority, for certain. So everything was the
same as before. There was cooking-oil and sugar in the shops,
petrol in the pumps, and strangers didn’t speak to each other in
the street anymore.

The nurse came in and said that it was time.
She could return tomorrow afternoon. His assistant put on her coat
and fussed with the flowers. She waved good-bye with timid
eagerness from the threshold. Her face was lit and her eyes wet
again.

The director asked the nurse to put the
flowers somewhere else, not so close to the bed. They gave off a
heavy sickening scent.

The night was very bad.

Early next morning he was disconnected from
his tubes. He was cranked up to a sitting position and his turban
of bandages was unwound. His skull, which felt cold and itchy,
elicited murmurs of satisfaction. They ignored his bandaged arm,
although he had trouble making a fist, also the painfully inflamed
right nostril where the tube had run. He was given a quantity of
differently colored pills, then cranked flat and underwent the
humiliation of a brief but intimate toilette, the last, the nurse
assured him. Then he was cranked up again and encouraged to eat
tasteless porridge accompanied by weak tea.

That afternoon he received the visit of a
portly man of about fifty, his upper half dressed elegantly in a
checkered jacket, a pinstriped shirt and a bow tie. On the lower
half he wore faded blue jeans and unlaced track-shoes. He had a fat
face, a balding skull, a triple chin and wore a pince-nez. From the
peculiarity of his dress the director guessed that he specialized
in mental health.

“Welcome back,” said his visitor cheerfully.
It seemed to be the formula in such cases. “My name is Doctor
Silberman. Yours should be Patient Lazarus.” He laughed at his own
joke. “I’ve come to bother you a little, if I may.”

He too shined a light in his eyes, all the
while humming tunelessly with his hand gently posed on his
patient’s shoulder. Then he sat down and made notes on a clipboard
with an optimistic air. He looked up and asked Lorz if he played
cards. It was another joke. Without waiting for a reply he took a
deck out of his jacket pocket and asked Lorz to describe card after
card. There were bull’s-eyes, patterns of zigzags, whirls, dots and
circles, a great number of multicolored labyrinths. Dr Silberman
put the cards back in his pocket, sat down and scribbled more
notes.

He looked up, beaming. “Well, you won the
game. You beat me. It’s a game I like to lose. That’s good, that’s
very good. You’re a lucky man. How do you feel?”

Lorz minutely enumerated all of his symptoms
except the major one. “Normal, perfectly normal,” said Dr Silberman
at each of them. He stood up, prepared to go and leave him alone
with that major symptom.

Timidly, because he was afraid talking about
it would bring it back, Lorz referred to the recurrent image of the
wall that had exploded. He omitted the boy who was of no clinical
interest. He didn’t want to use melodramatic words like “panic” in
describing his reaction to the image so he simply said: “It’s a bit
unpleasant.” Silberman nodded, unimpressed.

He’d absurdly understated it. He amended:
“Very unpleasant. And I dream about it too.”

The doctor assured him that in such trauma
this phenomenon was classic. With the medicine he was taking it
would disappear in a few days. He went over to the door.

“How is he?” asked Lorz.

“Who?”

“The other man.”

“The other man?”

“The other man who was injured in the
explosion, I don’t know his name.”

“Oh, of course. The boy. His name. No one
seems to know the boy’s name, actually. A police-inspector should
be coming to ask you a few questions about that. If you feel tired,
send him away. You may find him tiring, particularly in your
condition. I did, without being in your condition.” He laughed. It
was another joke, apparently. “He was hoping you’d know the boy’s
name, I gathered. But you say you don’t.”

The director explained that he’d been one of
over twenty applicants. How could he remember? The police would
learn his name when he came out of it. He would come out of it,
wouldn’t he? He, the director, had.

“It’s by no means absolutely excluded,” said
Dr Silberman. “He was even more severely injured than you, though.
But you never can tell in such cases.”

The next afternoon, the inspector bulled
into his room without knocking. The director was resting on his
bed, kneading a lump of clay the Physical Therapy Department had
given him for his numb left hand. Several times he’d found himself
fashioning a human head and had quickly squeezed it back to
formlessness with the help of his good hand.

The inspector, a squat red-faced man of
about forty in an ill-fitting blue suit, introduced himself
pugnaciously in a rasping voice. The director made no effort to
remember his name. He couldn’t help comparing him with his father,
impressive in his black uniform. The inspector remained standing,
ignoring Lorz’s invitation to sit down. There were no time-wasting
preliminaries, like asking about the state of his health.

What the police wanted to know was the name
of the other man who had been hurt in the explosion, the one still
in coma. No identity papers had been found in what was left of his
clothing. The inspector surmised that one of the other candidates
had taken advantage of the confusion to steal the man’s wallet.
Second nature for this generation. Example: the Events, the looting
that went on in broad daylight. What had happened to values?

The director was irritated at hearing his
own ideas in the mouth of an ungrammatical vulgarian. He said that
he didn’t know the man’s name. He went on kneading the clay.

“You have to know his name. Your secretary
says you got letters of application. She couldn’t find them in the
office. What was left of it. And she couldn’t find them in your
apartment either. They must be somewhere.”

Lorz stopped kneading and stared. “You
actually forced my assistant to search my apartment?”

“Her idea. She had the keys. So where are
those letters? There was a wooden filing cabinet in the office. It
burned. Were they there? You don’t remember? What do you mean, you
don’t remember? Don’t you remember anything about the man?”

“He corrected a poster like a professional.
That’s all I know about him.”

He saw the wall again and felt the rise of
panic.

“Had you ever seen him before?”

He should have been prepared for the
question but it caught him off guard. For the first time on this
side of the darkness, he saw the boy’s face. It was inseparable
from imminent disaster. He tried concentrating on his assistant’s
white flowers in the corner. Then on the image of her ferreting in
his flat. The boy’s face persisted. It grew tremendous with
peril.

The inspector snapped him out of it by
exclaiming: “You knew him!”

Back in the white room, Lorz looked past the
inspector’s triumphant red face at a hazy tree in leaf framed by
the window like a captionless poster. He must remember to have new
glasses made up.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Say it one way or the other. You knew him
or you didn’t know him. It looked like you knew him.”

“I don’t remember if I knew him.”

The inspector stared down at him and asked
what that meant: he didn’t remember if he knew him.

Before he could try to explain what that
meant, the door opened. The sharp-nosed young doctor who had
tickled his soles greeted both of them. Excusing the interruption,
he squatted and examined the chart at the foot of the bed. He
started taking notes. The inspector ignored him and kept on staring
at Lorz.

What did that mean? Lorz reflected a
second.

“That means … that perhaps when I saw him I
thought I knew him, but now … I can’t be sure if that’s what I
thought.”

The inspector stared down at him again in
longer silence. Visibly he was turning Lorz’s phrase about,
examining it from all possible angles. Finally he said that his
statement didn’t make sense. But it didn’t matter. The man was here
in the hospital in the Life Support Unit. Lorz could try to
identify him.

“Now?” the director asked, badly
frightened.

“They can push you there in a wheel-chair,
can’t they?”

Without looking away from the chart, the
young doctor vetoed the idea. Certainly not today. Perhaps in two
or three days. In any case the medical staff, not the police,
decided such matters. He went on with his notes.

“I’ll contact you in two days, then,” said
the inspector, impassive. He moved massively towards the door. “Or
three days,” said the doctor to his back. “But it’s not sure,” he
added. Without answering, the inspector left the room.

The doctor left the room too and the image
started up again for the hundredth time, the way it always did,
without warning.

Without warning the wall would loom. The boy
would smile up at him, expecting recognition. There was no
recognition. And the strange thing was, Lorz couldn’t picture his
face abstracted from the encounter. At best he was able to snatch
an isolated feature, like a piece of a jig-saw puzzle, and flee in
dread that the wall would burst and release a flood of blackness
from which, this time, he would never emerge, as the other hadn’t
emerged.

What he retrieved, then, wasn’t an image of
the other’s face but curiously abstract and piece-meal knowledge of
a generous mouth, wide-pitched dark blue eyes with black flecks in
the irises, a faint constellation of freckles over the bridge of
his nose, tousled dark gold hair. When Lorz allowed the features to
coalesce into a face the wall came back and with it terror. The
director would return or be returned to the scene again,
endlessly.

Sometimes he didn’t know whether the image
of the boy was imposed on him or whether it was a temptation
irresistibly yielded to.

Some situations were safe. The image didn’t
come during Dr Silberman’s daily visits with their therapeutic
jokes. In the rehabilitation pool his mind was too busy coping with
nearly nude amputees and paralytics. In the physical-therapy room
there was the steady chatter of the buxom therapist while he
monotonously overcame the springs of the hand-exerciser or
statically pedaled. But other situations were predictably bad, sure
to trigger the syndrome: bare white walls and any brutal
extinguishing of light. Also clock-hands at 9:00, it didn’t matter
whether a.m. or p.m., with the minute hand right-angled to the
other like a wall.

The worst moment came on the seventh day of
his emergence, at the climax of a long tottering walk down the
fourth-floor corridor. It was his own idea. He was still unsteady
on his feet. Something would be proved, he felt, by reaching the
end of the corridor where the staircase and the elevators were. But
when he finally got there, gasping for breath, he saw on the wall
arrows pointing up and down next to the names of the various units
on the other floors. That’s how he learned that the Life Support
Unit – where he’d been, where the other still lay – was located on
the floor above.