The Seventh Candidate (20 page)

“Like that,” he said. “Now you do it. Give
me another puzzle.”

This time there was no processing. The boy
instantly took the topmost puzzle on the pile, a cathedral, and
offered it to the director who stiffened his face against tears.
Perhaps this gave his features a stern or even a ferocious
expression. But if he tried to smile it would all burst out.

The boy kept gazing at him. Wasn’t Theodore
expecting something in return? Lorz calculated. He had two puzzles,
the boy one box of meat, now empty. The count was unequal. He felt
the contact loosening, perhaps because his hand was no longer
gripping his candidate’s arm. He had to act quickly.

He fumbled at the strap of the watch,
removed it and ordered the boy to take it. The boy took it. “It’s
yours, Theodore, we’re even now. I shouldn’t have taken it back.
Don’t take it apart this time,” he added apprehensively, seeing the
boy examining the dial closely. “Wear it.” His candidate continued
studying the dial.

The director took the watch back with one
hand, as gently as he could, and with the other seized his
candidate’s muscular forearm. He strapped the watch on the boy’s
wrist, inserting the buckle-prong in the first of the strap-holes,
careful not to catch the golden hairs.

“It’s yours now,” he said, trying to keep
the jubilation out of his voice. “I gave it to you. Give me
something in return. Give me another puzzle,” he ordered.

Instantly the powerful hands offered him
another puzzle-box. The director took it and placed it on top of
the cathedral puzzle on the table before him.

“Give me another,” he ordered.

Theodore did. And then, no need for command,
another and another. And still more. Now the last of the puzzles
crowned the swaying pile in front of the director. His candidate
continued with the watches, the works and cases, the green felt
rectangles, the miniature tools.

“Take them!” the hateful foreign voice
commanded behind him. “In your hands, in your arms!
Everything!”

The director obeyed as best he could. But
the trouble was, his candidate didn’t stop. Now he gave Lorz the
tiny-headed hammer, joining tools, the prancing horse. It seemed to
be a new obsession: giving.

The boy gave. He gave and gave. Didn’t stop
giving. Now got up and went over, with perfect coordination, to the
wall. Craning his neck and peering over the top boxed puzzle which
reached his nostrils, the director saw his candidate stripping the
wall bare of the framed puzzles. He gathered them in with the same
incredible rapidity with which he’d assembled the pieces of the
golden landscape.

He came over and placed the framed puzzles
on top of the boxed puzzles and watches, progressively immuring the
director whose arms trembled beneath the weight.

In a few seconds he heard the boy
approaching again. “Oh, that’s nice, but don’t you want to keep
some of them, Theodore?” he murmured fearfully, wondering if the
old doctor had overheard him. Now a great handful of the pieces of
the Chinese puzzles (he guessed by the sound, unable to see) joined
the rest with a merry Christmas jingle. Would his candidate stop
with his own things? Suppose the idea occurred to him to add the
chairs or – he had the strength for it – the gigantic table?

He saw himself crushed by his own success.
His arms trembled. The gifts started spilling over on to the floor.
He squatted rigidly to gather them up and lost more.

Could that be laughter he heard from behind
him? Surely not laughter, not at this moment.

His assistant hurried over. She picked the
things up and relieved him of some of the framed puzzles. She kept
it all in her arms. She thanked Teddy as though she’d been the
recipient of the gifts. The old doctor whispered something to the
squat attendant who left the room and seconds later returned
pushing a wheeled stretcher. With the help of the attendant Lorz
transferred the remaining armful of gifts onto it. His assistant
kept hers.

The boy ignored the stretcher. He continued
bringing the things to the director, much lighter things now, the
nails, the pot of glue, more joining tools, the cryptic geometric
drawings. The director placed them on the stretcher alongside the
great jumble.

He tried to combat a stupidly trivial worry.
How would he carry it away? What would he do with it all? The old
doctor was sure to make him keep these new things as he’d made him
keep the eleven watches. He couldn’t help thinking of the taxi, the
fare, the killing trips up and down the five flights carting the
stuff into his flat.

Then he was angry with himself for dwelling
on the secondary negative aspects of his immense victory, just as
he’d stupidly done with the watches. What did it matter anyhow if
they were all piled up in his study? It wouldn’t be a radical
change. On entering Room 307 he’d been struck by the way it
resembled his own study, chaotic with objects that had corresponded
to his candidate’s passing crazes, necessarily his own too: the
three chess-sets, his old one, the pocket-set, the expensive
rose-wood inlayed refused set; the two volumes of Schlechter and
Moch and the other books on the game he’d bought; the scores of
Chinese puzzles; the spurned boxes of chocolates, pralines, nuts,
etc.

But would there be room for the new lot?
Wouldn’t it block the doorway? Unless he could persuade his
assistant to take it all. He’d tell her that they were almost as
much for her as for him he thought, with a rare touch of pity for
her. He’d just seen her placing “her” gifts on the table and,
believing herself unobserved, picking up three of the geometric
drawings and secreting them into her bag.

He heard them talking behind him.

They’d at last emerged from their stupor. He
caught only one word, totally unfamiliar, in the babble.
“Dexitrine,” he thought. It sounded like the name of a female dog.
Or a drug? Surely a drug. Why were they talking of such things at
such a moment?

He turned toward the two administrators, the
three doctors, the audience of his afternoon performance. He
disciplined his face into an expression of moderate but ironic
triumph.

Excellent, said the old silver-haired doctor
with an expression of grudging satisfaction to Silberman, ignoring
Lorz altogether. He said, in a low voice, things about dosage. He
looked at Lorz.

“You get on quite well with him,” his old
thin lips conceded. “Both of you,” he added, looking past Lorz. The
others were looking in the same direction.

Lorz turned about. His assistant was guiding
his candidate, like a blind man, toward the door. Absurdly small
alongside his muscular bulk, she had her hand on his shoulder, her
arm uplifted in a gesture that for some reason reminded Lorz of the
female physiotherapist’s gesture in the pool that other day,
guiding him out of artificial buoyancy into the reality of gravity.
Her face was uplifted toward his and she was whispering
unintelligible things.

They disappeared into the corridor. Lorz
wanted to follow.

The old doctor sharply whispered: “No.”

There was no disobeying that voice. Lorz
stood confused amid the plethora of presents, empty shells of
overcome obsessions, his possessions, all his now. There was
silence in the room for a while. His fingers felt sticky from his
candidate’s glue-pot. No one was looking at him and his possessions
piled up on the wheeled stretcher.

The young doctor whispered something. The
spectators got up with a scrape of chair legs. They went over to
the window. Lorz followed them. Their backs blocked his vision.
They were perfectly immobile and silent, waiting.

The director stood still a moment and then
went out of the room into the corridor. He stopped before a small
window. He pressed his forehead against the cold pane to gain a
maximum view. Down below to the left was the main entrance, the
winding graveled drive, skirted by flowerbeds, now muted
chrysanthemums. It seemed like yesterday, the primroses and
daisies, when he himself had been a hospital inmate. Time was going
by very fast.

They came out together, her face uplifted
toward his and talking. He could see her lips moving but couldn’t
guess at the words. They advanced out of the shade of the building
into the sunshine. The boy flung up his arm and covered his eyes
against so much sky. The late October day was already declining. It
was the softest of reddish sunshine, but after those months of
darkness and artificial light it must have been a dazzle to his
eyes. He, Edmond Lorz, remembered how it had been. She was holding
his arm, guiding him with great care, concentrating on their steps
now, her lips parted, frowning with the immensity of her
responsibility. It was somehow familiar. Before they reached the
bench the boy removed his arm from his eyes. She kept her hand on
his shoulder and went on talking to him. He looked down at her,
unblinking, attentive. Already his eyes must have become accustomed
to the light of the sky.

***

Part Three

1

Edmond Lorz edged with difficulty into his
study. His overcoat was powdered with the first heavy snow of the
new year. It was January 29, a Sunday evening, fourteen hours and
eleven minutes removed from tomorrow’s decisive meeting with Dr
Silberman.

He squeezed past the low tables cluttered
with the jigsaw puzzles and other trophies of his victory almost
three months before, struggled out of his overcoat and sat down at
the desk. He opened the top drawer and removed the two notebooks
and a bottle shaped like a peasant-lass. Unscrewing her vapid head,
he granted himself, exceptionally, a small glass of
plum-alcohol.

Sipping, he gazed at the pastoral jigsaw
puzzle hanging on the wall. The golden landscape deserved more
expert framing. But his candidate had given up that activity. Lorz
himself had glued the puzzle to a rectangle of cardboard and
mounted it under glass with clips. The job had taken him the better
part of a day.

He set the alarm clock to ring at nine for
dinner. It had already happened that he’d gone past midnight
without eating, his mind totally monopolized by the two notebooks
devoted to the astonishing progress of his candidate. For the next
two hours he’d pore over the pages, intervening with black, blue or
red ink. Then, after the brief concession to dinner, he’d return to
them till bedtime.

The notebooks had replaced the encyclopedia.
Each reading revealed subtle connections between apparently
unrelated incidents and yielded new hypotheses. It was exciting,
almost creative, fitting things together, shaping order and meaning
out of the welter of chronologically noted happenings.

The first of those notebooks had soon
proved insufficient for all the things he’d had to record since the
cascade of gifts on October 25. Before that date, as he could see,
his impoverished notes huddled in the center of the pages,
surrounded by white void like the arctic
terra incognita
of old globes. What had there been to
record outside of the chess moves, the terse indication of new
obsession, refused gifts or, for want of anything more significant,
the boy’s clothing?

Then with the memorable breakthrough – what
Lorz thought of as the Day of Giving – the white wastes ended. The
pages were now crowded with notes and illustrations of his
candidate’s progress.

If giving was the start of it all, logically
he should have devoted pages of analysis to the twelve gift-wrapped
packages weeks before instead of the pitiful complaint about the
watches he would supposedly have to pay for. The true significance
of the boy’s gesture had been obscured by his stupid reaction of
outrage and apprehension. He recalled his initial perception of the
twelve boxes as aftermath to massacre. That day was like a fine
poster hopelessly overridden with indelible graffiti, beyond
repair.

The director flipped forward to November
11.

Those eleven pages, which he started
rereading for maybe the hundredth time, recounted total triumph.
He’d omitted certain inappropriate reactions like imagining
laughter behind his back as the ceaseless gifts spilled over his
arms to the floor, his absurd concern with the technicalities of
disposing of the gifts, the even more absurd fear that his
candidate might have added the great table to the pile of gifts in
his embrace, crushing every bone in his body.

Also unrecorded were the rival claims. He
couldn’t even recall the name of their drug, could only come up
with an association with a female dog and so referred to it in his
mind as “Bitchine.” He had no more than a faint memory of the
feeling of exclusion he’d briefly experienced in the corridor,
looking down behind glass at his assistant and his candidate on the
bench below. What he felt now was a certain pity for her.
Charitably, he’d refrained from recording her guilty look as she
spirited his candidate’s drawings into her bag. A few days later,
she’d transformed them into gifts to her from Teddy.

The last paragraph of Lorz’s comments for
that day began with the cautious remark that his candidate’s face
seemed to be losing its habitual expression of brutality. Three
question marks followed the observation. He was suspicious of
subjectivity in the matter. But it was pointless to ask his
assistant. She’d never recognized that expression of brutality in
the first place. As for the doctors, they’d surely credit the
change to the switchover to Bitchine. An obvious solution had came
to him. His notes for that day ended with the underlined word,
“camera.”

The director was about to reach for the
second log and the photographs when the phone rang. It was his
assistant. She came up with more suggestions about what he should
say to Dr Silberman tomorrow morning. He assented mechanically at
regular intervals. When she finally rang off he sat motionless for
an instant and then remembered what her call had interrupted: the
photographs.