The Seventh Candidate (9 page)

The last visit had been a week before. When
she left he’d gone over to the window and a few minutes later saw
her emerging from the entrance. She walked briskly toward a black
car, its battered obsolescence dissenting among the other shiny
cars. The front passenger-door opened like a trap. A thin bare arm
covered with barbaric bracelets like hers reached out and his
assistant was snatched within. The door had slammed shut and the
car jerked off.

As the elevator sank toward the ground floor
the director toyed with the idea of inviting her to an inexpensive
restaurant that very evening to celebrate his survival. After all,
she’d been with the concern for – how long? – four years, it must
be.

She wasn’t in the lobby. He sat down and
rested for a quarter of an hour. Finally he decided that she must
be with a client. He got up and walked out of the hospital.

In the sudden mid-May sunshine and
ether-free air he felt a well-being he hadn’t experienced for
months, years perhaps. It was good to be free of walls for a few
minutes. His new glasses firmly straddled his nose and he saw the
world clearly, the sane reality of green trees and yellow
butterflies flitting over the hospital flower beds, and in the blue
sky a pinkish piled-up cumulous cloud. His brain was purged
completely of the nonsense with Number Nine. His bowels were at
peace. The young visitors going up and down the steps aroused no
hostile feelings in him.

As for the business, there might be a few
problems in the immediate, but the newspapers said that
compensation for the blast-victims was impending. Finally, he would
make a peace-gesture toward his assistant, a good restaurant that
very evening.

Physically there was little change as far as
Lorz could make out through the taxi window. In certain stark
avenues, once leafy, he saw the stumps of chestnut trees cut down
to make symbolic barricades. In many streets the picturesque
cobblestones, often pried up for missiles against the riot-police,
had been covered over with asphalt. The smashed shop-windows had
long since been replaced. On certain walls tattered posters and
spray-canned slogans lingered with a defeated air, but nearly all
the graffiti had been steamed and sand-blasted off the main public
edifices. Only the facades of the high-rise university summoned
retroactively to long-dispersed demonstrations. Occasional dark
rectangles alongside the curbs commemorated the burning of cars.
New militant titles blared in the newspaper stands.

At a red light a young woman with long
blowing hair slapped the hood of the taxi, which encroached a few
centimeters on the zebra crossing. She had bare thighs and a yellow
blouse that seemed to have been sprayed on her naked torso. How
could styles have changed so completely in a matter of weeks?
Another woman with a minimal skirt and a radical neckline slapped
the hood.

“Bitches,” muttered the old driver. He
backed up.

When the director stepped inside his office
his assistant looked up from a file and spoke about difficulties
with an old client as though he’d been absent for no more than half
an hour instead of nearly two months. She called his attention to
the partially renovated office. She was partially renovated herself
with her hair chopped short and stark, pale lipstick, even more
jewelry, an acidulous green dress ending close to her knee-joints.
The newspaper lying on her desk was one of the new radical
titles.

Lorz didn’t dare offer her the tulips he’d
taken from the hospital room. They’d wilted badly. He placed them
on his desk, a present to himself, then. There were no other
flowers there for his return. How much did a bouquet cost?

But true to his resolution, he did invite
her to a restaurant, an expensive one (he named it), that very
evening. To celebrate survival, he said, fond of his formulation,
and to thank her for all she’d done.

She wasn’t free. She thanked him. She wasn’t
free the day after and thanked him. She didn’t know when she would
be free and thanked him again.

Conversation on her part was limited to
business now. Once, to break a long silence, he asked her about her
farm. She replied, “Oh the farm …” without looking up from what she
was doing.

Another time, he made a rare attempt at
confidence. “Sometimes I wish I lived on a farm myself. When I was
about fifteen I wanted to live in South America. Instead, here I am
down here.”

“South America,” she said. “That’s like the
farm. That’s escapism.” The word didn’t fit her, wasn’t hers. It
was like the jewelry and the hairdo.

She received private phone calls now,
unthinkable before. Her voice was almost a whisper. Once, he
overheard: “I will, I will, I promise you I will.”

She no longer had lunch in the office. For
years the custom had been that each brought sandwiches and munched
away, often while working, at their respective desks. Now at
precisely one she left and returned at precisely two, like an
ordinary employee.

During one of those absences he picked up
the woman’s magazine she’d left on her desk. It was a post-event
title called
New Eve
. The
cover-photo was no longer the habitual wholesome smiling blonde but
a low-cut brunette with rebellious hair. Sullen-lipped, she
glowered at the viewer as though measuring his sexual capacity,
clearly judged deficient on sight alone. Lorz’s experience with
women’s magazines was limited to what he leafed through in doctors’
and dentists’ waiting rooms. He seemed to recall a cackle of diets,
knitting-codes, recipes, child-rearing techniques, dress-patterns,
occasional moralizing pieces on marital infidelity, supposedly
true-life dramas of intimate transgression.

Things had changed. On every other page in
this magazine he saw bare breasts, detailed maps of
“pleasure-zones,” seduction techniques, apologies for license, the
proclamation of the right to orgasm and abortion. Was this the sort
of thing his assistant read?

His attention was caught by a
self-evaluation test entitled, “Are You in a Rut?” because his
assistant had visibly evaluated herself (with a violet-inked No. 3
ballpoint pen). There were twenty questions with a choice of
answers. The reader was invited to identify herself spontaneously
with one of four animals. His assistant saw herself not as cat (a),
swan (c), tigress (d) but as mouse (b). She let herself be trampled
upon. She daydreamed not often but constantly. She cried “far too
often.” Etc. Etc. She’d totaled up her results, slightly better
than Lorz’s, and found herself objectively in the profoundest
depths of rut. The comment spoke of self-amendment through positive
thinking and urged reading the article on page 87. Lorz put the
magazine back on her desk in its original position.

Then he picked it up again and turned to
page 87. She had conscientiously checked the article paragraph by
paragraph. It was entitled: “Yes, You Too Can Change!” Lorz found
nothing helpful. It was easier for women what with their
fundamental exteriority. Diets, perfume, bolder hair-dos, brighter
and scantier clothing were enough to pull the trick for them,
apparently. There was a before-and-after photo. “Before” in dumpy
depressed black-and-white. “After” in color, the woman leaping
lithe with explosive breasts. But wasn’t it obvious that they were
two different models? It was gross cheating. Feeling contempt (but
also residual jealousy) for the gullible readers of such
periodicals, the director placed the magazine back on his
assistant’s desk.

Another day she came back from lunch twenty
minutes late. She’d never been as much as a minute late before. She
wasn’t flustered or even apologetic. She explained that she’d been
at the hospital.

“The hospital? I’m back.”

“I still go there once a week.”

“Oh yes, Number Nine.”

When she didn’t react, he amended:
“Teddy.”

She nodded, sat down at her desk and
examined the typewriter keys. She reached for the brush. He asked
her if she’d been praying again. It was just to break the silence
but after he said it he realized it could be interpreted as an
indiscreet question. Also, it sounded sarcastic as well as
ungrateful since he himself had been the subject of her prayers
according to what she’d once said. Naturally, he hadn’t meant it
that way. She nodded again and started cleaning the typewriter
keys.

Again to break the silence, he asked her if
she thought that it did “Teddy” any good.

Without looking up from the typewriter keys,
she said:

“It does me good, anyhow. When he sat down
in the back of the office that morning I wanted to tell him to join
the others up front and I didn’t.”

This gave the director the opportunity to
say something generous, to make up for his unfortunate remark about
her prayers.

“I wouldn’t blame myself for that any more
than for calling me to the back to look at his poster.”

She went on cleaning the keys in
silence.

Three weeks following his release from
hospital Lorz received a letter which she placed unopened on his
desk with the other, opened, mail. It announced her resignation,
effective in two weeks following receipt of the present.

He received the news with the echo of the
last hammer-strokes of the workmen on the chipboard partition which
replaced the demolished plaster wall. The damage to the ceiling and
the floor had already been repaired. She’d also seen the old
clients and persuaded most of them to continue with
Ideal.
She’d even picked up a new one.
The ship was still off-keel and leaking badly but the pumps were
operating at top speed. It was as though she were determined to
efface all of the sequels of the explosion before
leaving.

He stared down at her letter. It was as if
the walls of his office had announced their resignation. He got up,
took his chair, placed it alongside hers and sat down.

“What’s this, Dorothea?” he asked gently,
calling an almost compassionate smile to his lips, as though
dealing with somebody who had just announced her intention to leave
for a distant galaxy. It was the first time he’d ever called her by
her first name.

“My resignation, sir. I’m getting married.
Probably.”

Married, Miss Ruda? Why “probably”? One did
or one didn’t. Why did she always call him “sir”? He had a
name.

“Why is it ‘sir’ all the time, Dorothea?
That’s all I’ve ever heard from you for four years.”

“Five, sir,” she corrected.

Suppressing anger, Lorz pointed out that
they’d been collaborators for five years, more than a third of
their lives together during that time, and it was still “sir”. He
was beginning to realize the enormity of the impending loss: the
bookkeeping, the telephone, the correspondence, the lessons for the
applicants, the surveillance of the operators, the canvassing which
she did so well. But beyond this, how could she, Dorothea Ruda, do
this to him, Edmond Lorz? There was the human dimension. And at
such a moment, with debts piling up and clients dwindling. It was
the coup de grace as much by what it betokened as by its
predictably disastrous consequences.

The ship was sinking.

“I know you must think the ship is sinking,”
he said.

“I’m not a rat,” she retorted.

It was the first time she’d ever retorted,
not counting what happened, briefly, three times a year. Lorz felt
great relief at the thought that, of course, this was another of
her episodic disguises, only much longer than the others. Tomorrow
or the day after, she’d be back without jangling costume jewelry
and in loose attire, contrite, her true self again.

“I intended quitting for a long time,” she
added.

He cast about for arguments.

“Married women work too, don’t they, in this
century? A married woman has the right to choose.”

It sounded, he knew, like the rhetoric of
old-style waiting-room women’s magazines, but he couldn’t come up
with anything better.

“We’ll be leaving the city. I’m sick of the
city.”

He stared at her mournfully. “If it’s a
raise you want, Dorothea, it’s granted. On the spot.”

“It’s true my salary wasn’t very generous
for all the work I did,” she replied, offensively, he thought. The
use of the preterit wasn’t a good sign either. “But it’s not money.
It’s what I said. I need a change. I’m tired.”

“A twenty percent increase. As of today.
Long overdue, I’ll admit.”

He waited for a reply. What did her silence
signify? Was it a bargaining tactic?

“I might see my way to twenty-five percent,”
he proposed after a while. God alone knew where the money was going
to come from. “Retroactive to January,” he added.

She’d returned to the customer-file. Now she
reached over for a marker. In the process she swiveled her chair in
that direction. She maintained the chair in its new position, her
back to her employer, presenting him with her hair hacked short
over her neck vertebras, an unknown part of her.

After a minute’s silence he offered her
double her present salary, also retroactive to January.

She went on with the marker.

Two weeks later Dorothea Ruda was gone. On
leaving she placed the slipcover, like a gray shroud, over her
typewriter. She went over to his desk and gave him back the keys.
She shook hands with him like a man and wished him continued good
health and good luck. She renewed the proposal she’d already made
in her letter of resignation to introduce an acquaintance of hers,
a very competent lady, to replace her.

Her extremist girl friend, the one with the
battered car and the barbaric bracelets? Lorz thanked her coldly
but did accompany her to the door. He stood there watching her
climbing up the gloomy staircase past mewing cats towards the
daylight beyond the door. At that moment he recalled the question
he’d wanted to ask her about the injured candidate: what he had
looked like to her.