Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (10 page)

We know we are very special. Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?

The useful thing about being a selfish person is that when your children get hurt you don't mind so much because you yourself are all right. But it won't work if you are just a little selfish. You must be very selfish. This is the way it happens. If you are just a little selfish, you take some trouble over them, you pay some attention to them, they have clean clothes most of the time, a fresh haircut fairly often, though not all the supplies they need for school, or not when they need them; you enjoy them, you laugh at their jokes, though you have little patience when they are naughty, they annoy you when you have work to do, and when they are very naughty you become very angry; you understand some of what they should have, in their lives, you know some of what they are doing, with their friends, you ask questions, though not very many, and not beyond a certain point, because there is so little time; then the trouble begins and you don't notice signs of it because you are so busy: they steal, and you wonder how that thing came into the house; they show you what they have stolen, and when you ask questions, they lie; when they lie, you believe them, every time, because they seem so candid and it would take so long to find out the truth. Well, if you have been selfish, this is what sometimes happens, and if you have not been selfish enough, then later, when they are in serious trouble, you will suffer, though even as you suffer you will continue, from long habit, to be selfish, saying, I am so distraught, My life has ended, How can I go on? So if you are going to be selfish at all, you must be more selfish than that, so selfish that although you are sorry they're in trouble, sincerely and deeply sorry, as you will tell your friends and acquaintances and the rest of the family, you will be privately relieved, glad, even delighted, that it isn't happening to you.

My husband and I are Siamese twins. We are joined at the forehead. Our mother feeds us. When we are moved to copulate we join lower down as well forming a loop like a certain espaliered tree. Time passes. I separate from my husband below and give birth to twins who are not joined together as we are. They squirm on the ground. Our mother cares for them. They are most often asymmetrical with each other, even in sleep when they lie still. Awake, they stay near each other, as though elastic bands held them, and near us and near our mother. At night the bond is even stronger and we snap together and lie in a heap, my husband's hard muscles, against my soft muscles, against our mother's stringy old muscles, and our babies' feather muscles, our arms around one another like so many snakes, and distant thumping music in the fields behind us.

I am happy the leaves are growing large so quickly.

Soon they will hide the neighbor and her screaming child.

On the counter lay a pile of plastic packets of duck sauce, soy sauce, and mustard from their Chinese dinner. In her anger she was provoked by the smooth, slippery little bodies and slammed her fist down among them. Two or three exploded. She could not see through her tears. Her bathrobe cuff was drenched in mustard, and the next morning he discovered a spatter of soy sauce, or maybe duck sauce, over the ceiling, two windows, and one wall. She cleaned it off the windows, but it wouldn't come off the ceiling, where it had stained through the white paint, and then when she was done trying to get it off she saw that the drops of detergent and water falling on the wood floor had spotted the finish.

A few days later, carrying the baby, she stepped into a hole in the dining room floor in the old house where a plank had been removed because of termites. She bruised her arm badly, though the baby was not hurt. Then she stopped up the coffee maker with coffee grounds so that it overflowed onto the counter and floor when it went on in the morning. She sprayed the side of her face with the spray attachment at the sink. She burned her hand feeding the wood stove. The baby rolled off the side of their bed and fell onto the floor. She took the baby out for a walk late in the afternoon when the temperature was below freezing, its face turned red, and it started screaming with pain. This was the holiday season.

They sat talking peacefully before dinner. He said she probably needed to get more sleep. She was waiting for the oven to heat, but had forgotten to turn it on.

At dinner, he pointed out that the soy sauce had also spotted the apples in the fruit bowl and the lamp over the dining table. He went on to remind her of the toilet seat she had broken. It was an expensive red Swedish toilet seat. The lid had slipped out of her hand and dropped, cracking the seat. He had immediately taken the whole thing off and replaced it with a green one.

He had also replaced the plastic sheeting over the door to the deck because it had shattered when she left the door open in the cold. Then for the second time she disengaged the connection of a wire over the bedroom door. As he stood on a chair fixing it, she asked him if she could hold the light for him, but he said No, just don't slam the door anymore when you get mad.

The most recent thing was that she took a roll of photographs with no film in the camera, though this did not cost them any money or cause any damage, except for the baby's weariness in its many poses and her regret for the lost pictures, so many of which she remembered clearly, the last being a shot of an oil barge with a tugboat coming up the creek through the first winter ice toward her where she stood at the window, beginning to realize there was no film in the camera.

Now that we are living out here in the country the only people we see are working men who come to do jobs for us. They are independent and self-reliant, and they start work early in the day and they work hard without stopping. Last week it was Bill Bray, to install the washing machine. Next week it will be Jay Knickerbocker, to tear off the front of the porch. Today it is Tom Tatt. Tom Tatt is supposed to come disconnect some wires for us. Where is he? Early in the morning we stand in the kitchen together. Where is Tom Tatt? We walk outdoors. Here in the early sunshine is Tom Tatt. He has already finished the job, and is snubbing the cut ends of wire with little black snubs.

Magin was over seventy and not well. His right leg was lame and his lungs were weak. If his wife had been alive, she would not have let him go. As it was, his friends had told him to stay at home and wait for his brother Michael to come back. Yet he had never listened to anyone but his wife, and now he did not listen to anyone.

He was close to Silit, if the maps of the Trsk Land Office were correct. He had walked since early morning, very slowly, and his feet were sore. Just at noon, he came within sight of the town. His brother's postcard had been sent from here. Karsovy, therefore, should be only a few miles to the north.

He set down his bag on the snow and rubbed his cramped fingers. He looked up at Silit: the street was lined by narrow houses with shuttered windows. Many of the roofs had fallen in and tumbled over the doorsills. Down by the well at the end of the street, under a couple of pine trees, he saw two old women knitting on a bench. He picked up his bag and walked to them and they stopped knitting to stare at him.

Until he shouted his question, they did not understand him. Then one of them opened her mouth and pointed wordlessly across the street.

In the shadow of the eaves, a man sat combing his brown beard with a broken comb. His eyes were on Magin. A roofless car was parked in the lane beside him.

Magin crossed the street. “Can you take me to Karsovy?” he asked in Trsk. The man stopped moving.

“There's no such place,” he said.

“There must be,” said Magin. He pulled out the creased postcard from his brother and started to thrust it at the man.

“There is not. You are mistaken.”

Magin dropped his bag and shook his fist in the man's face, crumpling the postcard. He would not argue. “I am not mistaken,” he shouted. His voice broke.

The man was startled. “Well,” he said, spitting on his palm and rubbing his boot with it, “I don't often go there.”

Magin was trembling with anger and the blood at his temples throbbed. “How much?” he asked.

“I'll take fifty,” the man said. Magin drew a purse from his back pocket and laid two coins on the man's palm.

Magin picked up his bag and followed the man to the car. The man pulled himself up into the driver's seat, looking straight ahead. Magin hoisted his bag onto the back seat and climbed in beside it. When he sat down, the springs gave way so far that he came to rest on something that felt like an iron rod. He did not move.

The engine turned over and the car jerked forward and threw Magin against the back of the seat. The car skidded into the snowy ruts of the road. Magin lurched from side to side as the trees veered at him around the bends of the road. Two doves flapped away as the car passed them

The driver's hostility bewildered Magin. As an hour passed in the monotonous woods, he grew more and more uneasy. His search might be hopeless. There had been no word from his brother for weeks. And there was the question of how long he himself would last. “This is crazy,” he said to himself suddenly. “Here I am with one foot in the grave, in a north country winter, and I expect something to come of it. Mary would have laughed.” He pulled the collar of his overcoat up around his chin.

At last they reached Karsovy. As they drew up into a large clearing, Magin saw women in black crossing the drifts like shadows. Men crouched in front of their doorways.

Magin climbed down with his bag and rested against the car door. He looked up and saw that several people had gathered and were watching him. The women inched forward: their eyes flew from his face to his bag, but not a word passed their lips. Magin searched among the stony-faced men for the leader of the village, and the people became uneasy. They were puzzled by him.

“What?” said Magin to the driver, who had not moved from his seat. “What are they waiting for? Why are they staring at me? Why don't they say anything?”

“Why should they say anything?” the driver said finally. “Anyway, you wouldn't understand them. No one understands them. They don't even know how to speak Trsk.” He smacked the wheel. “I brought another old man like you out this way. That was months ago and no one's heard of him since.” He spat in the snow and glanced at the villagers with contempt. Before Magin could speak, he leaned on the horn, turned the car, and drove back into the woods.

Magin wondered what to do. One by one the villagers turned and went away, glancing back over their shoulders and stopping in mid-step to stare at him again. Two women stayed behind. One was old, thin, and shabbily dressed. The other was younger, and more muscular. The old one started forward, tightening her kerchief and opening her toothless mouth in a smile. The other one caught her by the sleeve.

“Ninininini,” the old one said, her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and her eyes glimmered from under the brow of her kerchief. She pulled away from the younger one and started forward again. The younger one cuffed her lightly on the shoulder and hissed at her. The old one turned and spat, and then walked away, her skirt trailing over the snow behind her.

The younger woman motioned to Magin to follow her. They turned up a small path, Magin favoring one leg. Under the trees he felt the cold close in on him like a vise. He coughed. His breath rattled in his throat.

The path wound among the stone huts. Heavily-furred dogs lay before many of the doors and growled as Magin and the woman went by. At the end of the path lay the woman's hut. With one hand on the latch, she took a quick look back at Magin. Standing next to her, he caught a whiff of her fetid clothes. She opened the door and Magin followed her blindly. He was assaulted by the smell of unwashed linen. Slowly the air came in from the outside and he breathed more easily.

When his eyes grew accustomed to the pale light that fell over the back of the room from the small windows and the chinks in the stone, he saw that the hut was divided into two rooms by a thin wooden wall. To his left, in the larger room, he made out a table, a cupboard, some chairs, a bed, and on the far wall a framed photograph of the country's leader in military dress. To his right was a small room, doorless. He could see the end of a narrow cot, and nothing else. The woman, standing close beside him, pushed on his shoulder.

“Ehh, ehh,” she said, and nodded. He went into the little room and dropped his bag by the bed. He was so tired that he could hardly bear the weight of his clothes. He wanted to lie down, but he was embarrassed by the woman behind him.

He looked out the window and then turned around. The woman had left. He lay down and closed his eyes tightly. He could not even remember why he was here. He began dreaming before he was fully asleep. He dreamt of the train ride through France, though that was already several days behind him. His wife, her hair slipping from its pins with the motion of the train, was reading aloud to him from a newspaper, like a child in her outmoded glasses and ill fitting dress. Yet in the dream he felt that he was the one in the wrong place.

Less than two hours later, waking from his sleep, he saw his brother's tape recorder on a shelf in the corner of the room. He waited for this vision to fade.

It often happened, now, that his memory failed or that he recreated things he remembered and placed them where they did not actually exist.

The tape recorder remained, however, and beside it he now saw a neat pile of notebooks, some clothing, a sewing box, a pair of slippers, a pair of boots, and a knife. Was it possible that his brother had lived in this room? Magin did not move, for fear his brother's possessions would vanish.

After fifteen minutes or so, Magin was fully awake. He got up and went over to the shelf. Touching his brother's possessions, he felt reassured. This was his brother's room: he had often been in his brother's room when his brother was absent, though this was a different room from any of the others. Yet this was his brother's room, and that meant that though his brother was now gone from the room, he would return to it.

And yet why, in that case, had the woman allowed him to lie down and go to sleep here? Perhaps she had merely been showing him the room, and did not intend him to sleep here. Or perhaps she thought he would wait for his brother here. And, after all, that was what he was actually doing, now.

But there was a musty, disused smell about the clothes. And the notebooks stuck together, so that when Magin touched one, they all moved in a block. Perhaps his brother had been gone for a long time. He could not be dead, because in that case the woman would have put his possessions away somewhere. Unless this was where she had put them.

When he went out of the room, the woman was setting a meal on the table. Magin took her arm and led her into the small room. He pointed to his brother's possession and asked her, “Where is the man who owns these things?”

She answered him only by gesturing toward the objects on the shelf in a way which Magin could not understand. She said one or two words only, and these he could not identify in any way with Trsk. Though this disappointed him, it did not surprise him. His brother had come here in order to record the language, after all. He had said it was on the point of dying out.

Magin gave up, not knowing what move to make, and followed the woman back to the table. Out the window, there were long violet shadows under the trees. He sat down, very hungry. He looked at the food. A cube of dry meat stood next to a heel of bread. He could see that the meat was too tough for his old teeth. He picked up the bread and ate it little by little, letting it soften before he chewed it. His hunger faded.

As the woman cleared the table, Magin lit a thin, cheap cigar and immediately started to cough. He felt a certain satisfaction in having come this far. However, he did not see how he was going to find out where his brother was: he was rather helpless, it turned out, because of the language. He stubbed his cigar and slipped what remained of it back in its box.

The woman put on her overcoat and gestured toward the door. Magin thought, with sudden hope, that now she was going to show him how to find Michael. In his excitement, he forgot where his room was, and stood still until the woman pushed him in the right direction. He put on his coat and followed her.

Outside the hut, the birds were now quiet; there was almost no light left in the sky, and the air was sharp. Magin, hurrying, stumbled over hidden roots. The dogs were gone from the doorways of the huts, which he and the woman passed quickly. When Magin thought they were still far away from the clearing, the sky widened. The windows of the largest hut glowed with orange firelight. Magin's mouth was dry. He swallowed and walked after the woman into the hut.

Before he could steady himself, the woman disappeared from his side. At first the firelight dazzled him. He looked down. A dog was snaking toward him with its belly to the ground. The room was dense with people. In perfect silence they watched him: near the fire, men squatted on low stools and benches digging rhythmically into the thick socks that covered their ankles and scratching their scalps and ears; farther away, in a disordered group, the women sat together hissing over their needlework, shrugging fitfully, and sucking their teeth.

The dog began snarling, and the silence exploded: a tall man with a hooked nose rushed toward the dog, who was crouching at Magin's feet with its teeth bared. A bench tumbled to the floor. The man kicked the dog in the ribs. The dog yelped and slipped away through legs and under stools. The men by the fire roared, and the women cried out strangely, themselves like animals. The dog squirmed into a corner. The man looked at Magin.

In Trsk, Magin said, “I came up here to look for my brother Michael, a scholar. My brother Michael came here to study your language.” He stopped because the man obviously did not understand him and was turning away. The man looked among the women for the one who had brought Magin here, and pointed at her, pronouncing what to Magin was only a guttural noise. The woman rose and spoke long enough to explain everything she knew. The man took Magin by the sleeve and sat him down on a bench near the fire. He spoke to an old man who was bent over a checkerboard in one corner of the room, and then went away. The man had not responded.

Magin lit the butt of his cigar and sat still for some time, wondering what was going to happen. The women sewed placidly, murmuring to one another. The men passed a jug around. For Magin, they poured the liquor into an earthenware cup. They scratched and talked, smiling and nodding at Magin every so often. Occasionally a man would come to him and recite a few words in English, which startled Magin extremely. “No, no. Sky,” one would say. Or another would say, “No, yes, here. Tape two.”

Magin threw the end of his cigar into the fire and kept an eye on the old man in the corner. The game was nearing its end. The long white hair of the old man grazed the scabbed pate of his opponent whenever they leaned over the board. Every time the white-haired one moved a piece, the other screwed up his nut-like face in anger. Magin lit another cigar and coughed. He was so tired that he could hardly sit straight. Suddenly the bald old man was on his feet, his skull gleaming in the firelight.

“Ruckuck,” he cried and brought his fist down on the checkerboard. The pieces—red and black discs and a few fragments of stone and wood—flew through the air and fell on the floor like a shower of hail. The white-haired man smiled calmly, his nose nearly touching his chin.

Now at last he looked at Magin and reluctantly came and sat down beside him. Magin stubbed out his cigar and put the end back in the box.

“Seek old man?” asked the white-haired man in Trsk.

“I'm looking for my brother,” said Magin.

“Brother here,” said the man.

Magin became excited. “Here?” He pointed to the ground.

“No, no, no.” The man held up his hand impatiently. “Brother here. Then: brother gone. Brother gone with man—north. Lost. Gone, lost. Gone, dead. Maybe.” He sliced his throat with one finger.

“What man?” Magin asked.