The Seventh Candidate (43 page)

She called him into the kitchen. He slowly
approached the formica table where the two dishes were steaming
next to the waxed package of pre-sliced bread. His face was alive
for the first time. He must be starving. He stood over the soup
without sitting down. “But this is bean soup,” he said in the same
bewildered tone he’d used asking about the key and the hole and the
year. “Tinned bean-soup.” She’d left the empty tin in the sink. She
went over and dropped it in the garbage-pail.

“If I’d known you didn’t like bean soup I’d
have asked you what kind, like in a restaurant.” She sat down and
started eating. He stood there. When she finished she said: “Do you
want the soup or don’t you?”

“Yes, but not that soup.”

“No problem,” she said and poured the second
plate of bean-soup into the sink. It was for the gesture since
she’d have to remove the beans one by one from the filter. “You can
sleep on the sofa. It’s because of the weather. Tomorrow morning
you leave. If you don’t have any money I’ll give you a little.”

In the night he came to her. She pushed him
away (and in the movement discovered that his forehead was burning)
but of course it wasn’t that. His lips were near her to talk. He
was kneeling alongside her bed. He whispered that he was a changed
man. He apologized “for everything.” For what? she challenged, to
see how much he remembered. He mentioned the things he apologized
for.

He hadn’t remembered a tenth of it. He
hadn’t read her three sheets after all. He did remember the last,
big, thing but couldn’t remember why he’d done that. He said that
probably it was because the harm had already been done on the
platform. Theo could have done it again on other platforms, in
other corridors. It was the pills. He had to be given the pills. He
had to be found. But he didn’t find him, not till last week. He
didn’t know where he disappeared to in the tunnel. So he went back
to the storeroom in the other station and waited. He never came. He
looked for him. He had the pills, still had them. He didn’t dare
take them for himself. He went on writing messages in all the
stations. That’s what he’d been doing all those weeks, months,
maybe.

She hadn’t understood a word. How could you
live in the underground that long? she asked, wondering whether if
pressed for impossible details he’d come out with the truth which
she thought she now knew but which he refused to know: where he’d
really been and had escaped from.

He said it wasn’t hard to stay there for a
month or so as he’d done (maybe a little longer because the
passengers changed from shirt-sleeves to scarves and after the
bathing suits on the posters there was Father Christmas in the
sleigh with a nude woman and ribboned bottles of whisky). There
were clothing shops and shoe polish and bookshops in
Central
Station
. He had his
credit card for the cash dispensers in the hub-stations until the
screen refused to honor the card. During the dead hours of closing
time there were the toilets with washbasins to keep clean and to
wash the clothing. Food was no problem: sandwiches from the vending
machines and food stands under the mercury tubes as long as the
money lasted. Then there was food thrown away, unimaginable
scandalous waste, and toward the end people had often been kind to
him and of course there’d been the hidden storerooms for sleeping.
You could spend weeks or months in the underground without once
coming up and out. You could spend a whole lifetime there, although
coming up and out was better if you were able to, if you knew where
to go as he did now.

Why didn’t you then? Why didn’t you leave
the underground since that’s where you say you were all this
time?

He’d tried to come up. He tried to tell it
to her, how time after time he’d tried. At the sight of the skies –
one blue, the other overcast, the third or fourth storm-rent – he’d
been paralyzed. Unable to breathe. Could breathe only when he went
back down the steps into the safety of the underground. So he
stayed underground and searched, wrote messages everywhere. When he
didn’t search he stayed in the room with the trains thundering
past. You never really got used to them because the rails were just
outside. When they became too bad there was the other gigantic
space. Because there was another iron door and a passageway with no
air, the flame was constantly going out. But once, he reached it
and threw himself against it all his might and lost consciousness
and logically should have died of suffocation. But when he awoke
there was a draft of damp air coming from the cleft. The rusty
padlock had burst and the iron door – the third iron door: was she
following? – was open on the cleft. And beyond the cleft there were
the passageways with the vaulted ceilings and the naked bulbs.
After, he often walked there. Sometimes he got lost in the maze of
passageways. It happened again last week. He had to sleep there and
thought he’d never get out. Finally he heard the sound of the
trains and he returned, closing the iron doors behind him. Waited
then till the trains stopped and the underground was empty. Then
went out on the ballast and the rails as he did every night. Walked
to the next station, put up the messages, then the tunnel beyond
again and a new station, as he’d done so many times for nothing.
But that night he found him. Didn’t find him. Was found by him.

Suddenly he was crying, like harsh hiccups.
You make me nervous whispering in my ear like that, she said as a
diversion, pulling her head away. She was horrified. She couldn’t
associate those sounds with her ex-employer. It was as though a
total stranger were in the dark next to her. To make amends for the
cruelty of this thought she told him to lie down on the bed, not
under the sheet, under the blanket. He should take his shoes off.
He obeyed.

She got up and went into the bathroom. She
came back with four aspirins and two glasses of water. He was still
talking, hadn’t realized she’d been gone for a minute. She’d missed
the beginning, just got the fragment: so another message on a
poster with the distant meeting-place proposed in red paint before
some panel or other but suddenly the meeting-place was there, the
powerful arm, his neck in the crook of it, he clutching for the
dagger at his belt (he’d learned how to carry it there) and
stabbing wildly, some stabs in his own body but others deeper still
in the body of the other and then he lost consciousness. When he
awoke, bleeding badly, he saw other gouts of blood leading to the
stairs and before he could follow them, it was opening-time, the
blue-uniformed underground employees were coming and he got down on
the ballast and hid in the tunnel all day long and part of the
night in a niche till the trains stopped.

He broke off. After a while his breathing
became regular in the dark next to her ear. Didn’t he ever read the
papers down there? she asked. (She thought: maybe they don’t let
them read papers there and then thought of the ugly bruise on his
neck and finally didn’t know what to think). It was true, she said,
that it was tucked away in an inside page. If she hadn’t seen it,
accidentally, in the bus she wouldn’t have known herself. She
reached over and grasped his arm, shook him a little to make sure
he heard what she was saying. Whoever had attacked him and he had
stabbed in perfectly legitimate self-defense (she would have done
the same) it wasn’t him, couldn’t be: not stabbed but electrocuted
by the third-rail in a tunnel, not yesterday like he said but
months and months ago. It had been in the papers.

He was snoring slightly. She dozed off and
when she woke a little he was saying something about woods, a
kitchen garden, an orchard, three peaks. It sounded vaguely
familiar. She tried to remember if it wasn’t one of the thousands
of posters they’d corrected in the old days. She dozed off and
awoke half-a-dozen times to his monotonous voice. Once she heard
him say it was what saved him. From the start down there he’d seen
it when he couldn’t sleep in the storeroom because of the trains.
She’d been in it. At first a small figure in the orchard with the
three mountains behind her. Then she stood behind the closed gate.
He was on the other side. Sometimes it rained. More often there was
sunshine. The gate was always closed. But that night, the bleeding
finally stopped and she’d opened the gate. He saw everything there.
In the darkness of her room he tried to tell about it. He went on.
She fell asleep again.

She returned to hear his monotonous voice
saying that he’d known that this time he could so he packed his
things in the valise. He got up and walked the rails and when the
station opened got up on the platform and took the escalator up to
the stairs leading out. And sure enough he could. It was starting
to snow. He climbed up and out. He’d gone to the building that
wasn’t there, a hole, and to his flat with the wrong keys – or had
someone changed the lock? – so that didn’t work, but as soon as she
gave him the keys to the car they could go.

“Go where?”

“To the farm.”

“What farm?”

“Your farm of course. I don’t know any
other.”

“Go there in winter? Now?”

“Winter or summer. Spring or autumn. What
does that matter?”

“We’d never get there, for one thing. The
roads are icy.”

“I’m a careful driver.”

“Who says I’d let you drive my car?”

“You have no car.”

“Don’t I? Oh don’t I? Anyhow the last time I
saw it, most of the windowpanes were broken. The house, I mean. The
house was practically falling to pieces. And that was a long time
ago.”

“We’ll put new panes in. We’ll repair
everything that needs repair.”

“Anyhow I work on Monday. It’d take two days
to get there and back.”

“We won’t be coming back.”

“We won’t be going, you mean. I won’t,
anyhow. Not in a blizzard. Let me sleep.”

The sounds from the living room awakened her.
The bed was empty. He was puttering about in the living room. She
went in, squinting against the light. He had his shoes on again,
also his jacket. He was squatting in front of the valise, neatly
placing his razor and toothbrush in it.

He stood up. “I knew you had the keys,” he
said triumphantly, holding her car keys high by the metal tag. Then
he made a fist about them.

“
They’re
my
keys,” she said indignantly. He wasn’t going to begin with
the keys again at past 3:00am. She shouldn’t have left them on the
table.

“You don’t drive,” he said with what she
took to be contempt. At that she felt rage rising, part of it at
her stupid weakness for having invited him back in the flat, most
of it aimed at him. It was as though by taking her car keys, doubly
stealing them by denying they could possibly be hers, he was
depriving her of something precious, her space of independence, her
almost secret dissipation (only the doctor knew about it), the
semi-monthly drive down the motorway to the rest-area and back. She
tried to keep the anger down and reason with him.

“But if you can’t find your car for God’s
sake what good are the keys even if they were yours which they
aren’t, they’re mine? What good are the keys?”

He stared at her, still making a fist about
her keys. Finally it got through.

“Yes … Yes, that’s true. I have the keys to
my car. You’re right. It’s the car itself I haven’t got. I’m very
tired. I can’t think.” He stared at the keys and the name of the
make on the metal tag. “These aren’t my keys,” he said indignantly.
She could imagine that behind the lenses his eyes were glaring at
her. “I’ve never owned an Italian car. Wouldn’t dream of an Italian
car. They must be your keys,” he tried to convince her. He handed
them back. He looked at her with grave satisfaction.

“You have a car. And apparently you know how
to drive. Everything’s all right, then. I wanted to drive you there
in my car. Now you’ll drive us there in yours. It’s the same thing.
We’ll leave tomorrow.”

“Drive you where?” she asked in a small
voice, very tired. After the keys the other thing would start
up.

“To the farm, Dorothea, your farm.” He said
it patiently as though making allowances for her slow
comprehension.

“When spring comes round, maybe.”

“I can’t wait that long. It’s the same above
as below, everything colored dots, except you and the farm. I’ll
find my car. I didn’t look in the right spot.”

He picked up the valise. The door shut
behind him. She moved forward and tripped over the wire of the
phone she’d placed on the floor to open up to him hours ago. By the
time she picked herself up and opened the door the landing was
empty and the elevator-motor whining.

She ran into her bedroom and struggled into
her coat and boots. She ran back and saw that the elevator had
stopped at the ground floor. By the time she called it back and got
down he’d be gone. She ran back into her bedroom, wrenched aside
the curtain and opened the window.

Snow blew in. She saw him coming out of the
building. He was tiny below.

She yelled his name. The wind whipped the
words away. He didn’t hear. She yelled till her lungs ached. He was
going. She seized the table-lamp, yanked the plug free and with
both hands heaved it out into the night. My God, not there. It
would hit him, kill him. It smashed on the snow-covered pavement
centimeters from his left foot.

He started, stopped, turned round, looked
up, saw her. Windows were lighting up left and right. Yellow
squares were punctuating the dark mass of Building G. She waved.
“Come back!” she cried. Did he understand it had been to attract
his attention, not meant to kill him as she almost had? Had almost
killed him.

She smiled till it hurt with her arms
outstretched, her hands making quick beckoning movements toward the
room behind her. With her arms and hands like that she had the
impression of being a bird ready to fly up and out leaving the
sullen suburb behind. The snow blew in on her harder. They started
shouting at her from the other windows and balconies.