Tightrope Walker (2 page)

I sat, astonished. Of course I understood him at once. What he said was true, of course it was true: I wanted above all else to be—well, normal, homogenized, pretty, popular, not lonely. I had accepted my longing as logical and sane, it was what Dr. Merivale wanted for me and it was what I wanted for myself. Now, suddenly, all my exercises and calisthenics and galvanizing mottoes looked like little straitjackets I’d cut out and made for myself. I couldn’t decide whether this funny little man was hypnotizing me or waking me up from a long sleep, and it was terribly important to know: I sat staring at him, and then I stood up and walked out. I left without a word to either Calley or to Amman Singh, and I walked alone back to the boardinghouse, went into my room, closed the door and stayed there for two days. On the evening of the second day I suddenly burst out laughing.

The next morning I telephoned Dr. Merivale and told him that I wouldn’t be coming in to see him for a while, and then I tore down all the mottoes from my wall and packed away all but a few of my books. I began to walk around town just looking at people and flowers and things. Sometimes I would stop in to see Amman Singh and he would make herb tea and we would sit very quietly and drink it. Once in a while, but rarely, he would tell me a story, but not often, because there
didn’t seem any need for words between us. When he asked me what I was doing I said I was waiting, and he nodded.

And then one day, two blocks from Amman Singh’s room, on the street that bisected it, I saw this merry-go-round horse in the window of a shop and I stopped, transfixed. I stared at its lines, at the rakish tilt of its bridled head, and a deep sense of pleasure lifted my heart and made it light and full of music. It was the first time in my life I’d felt an emotion that was all mine, and the first time I’d admired something not influenced or colored by someone else’s words and tastes and thoughts.

I went into the shop, which was called the Ebbtide Shop, and I bought the merry-go-round horse from the gnarled little man inside. It was delivered to my room and I spent the loveliest week of my life regilding and painting the horse which I named—of course—Pegasus.

And incredibly, for that entire week I slept without a nightmare.

Unfortunately the next week there was a second merry-go-round horse in the window of the Ebbtide Shop—coal black this time, with a scarlet saddle—and since my room measured only 15 by 15 it was obvious that I couldn’t buy this one, too. I went inside to admire it, though, and to explain to Mr. Georgerakis why I’d have to pass this one up. He said it didn’t matter to him because his business was for sale, and a merry-go-round horse in the window was a good advertisement, and four in the basement was even better.

For the first time I became aware that I had turned twenty-one and had money. I asked him how much he was asking for his shop. He said he had a long-term lease on the building, which was high and narrow, with a two-room apartment upstairs, and in the basement
a storeroom and delivery platform. For the business itself he was asking twelve thousand dollars.

I bought the shop that same day: bought it lock, stock and barrel and without haggling. Its more valuable stock consisted of five merry-go-round horses, two player pianos, three antique dolls, a jukebox, piles of old clothes, and a hurdy-gurdy. I scrubbed and swept and painted, had a new sign made for outside, and hung blue-and-white-striped curtains on gold rings at the back of the window. What I could not do was discipline the overwhelming amount of junk that Mr. Georgerakis had bought in cases and cartons, and by the dozen; if I threw it out there’d be almost nothing left in the shop and so I cut prices and hoped it would move slowly and steadily out of the door in the hands of customers.

The hurdy-gurdy I didn’t find until later, after I’d moved in upstairs, because it was covered with burlap and stood in a dark corner of the shop. It was a beautiful hurdy-gurdy, in mint condition for its age. It stood on a sturdy maple stick, and the strap for carrying it was only a little frayed. The box itself was glorious: a faded Chinese red with gold edging, and in the center was this bright, rather corny painting of towering blue alps, a river gorge and a cream-colored sky. Very Rousseau. When I turned the crank there was a creak, and then a twang, and the instrument actually began to play “Tales from the Vienna Woods.” After that came a second tune: a faded slip of paper glued to the side told me that it was Sonata No. 1 from Vivaldi’s “Il Pastor Fido,” and this was followed by the “Blue Danube Waltz.” I knew I couldn’t part with this; I carried it upstairs to the apartment and began playing it evenings when I wasn’t teaching myself how to play the banjo, or doing accounts.

One evening about three weeks later the hurdy-gurdy crank got stuck and refused to budge, silencing
the “Blue Danube Waltz” on its second note. I found a screwdriver and pried open the back panel, which fitted loosely anyway, and that’s when I discovered that a folded slip of paper had slowly worked its way down toward the working mechanism. It was this that had brought it to a halt. I carefully lifted out the wad of paper with a pair of eyebrow tweezers and tried the crank again. It moved smoothly, and the “Blue Danube Waltz” resumed playing at once. I screwed the panel back into place and only then noticed the slip of paper I’d tossed on the floor. I picked it up, smoothed it out to see what it might be, and met with a terror far worse than my own.

I read:
They’re going to kill me soon—in a few hours I think—and somehow they’ll arrange it so no one will ever guess I was murdered. Why did I sign that paper last night? I was so hungry and tired but this morning I knew I should never have signed it. Whatever it was it was my death warrant.

But to die so strangely, a prisoner in my own house! WHY HASN’T SOMEONE COME? What have these two clever faceless ones told Nora, or even Robin, to explain my silence? Never mind, what has to be faced now is Death. Perhaps I could hide these words somewhere in a different place in the hope that one day someone will find them—that would make Death less lonely. And so—should anyone ever find this—my name is Hannah.…

The last letter collapsed under my eyes, the
h
ending in a long shaken stroke that dropped several inches below the line, as if the pen had slipped, as if a voice had been heard, or a step approaching.… I pictured this unknown Hannah trembling—as I was trembling now—folding up this paper, holding it a moment, wide-eyed as she looked around a room for a hiding-place, and then the quick move to the hurdy-gurdy with its
loose back panel, and the slipping of it through the crack.

What kind of person would own a hurdy-gurdy? The paper on which the words were written was faded but it was the kind of cheap yellow paper you can buy in any stationery store, a ream of it for two or three dollars, called “seconds.” Cheap yellow fades fast, so that didn’t mean a great deal. The handwriting looked sensible, and it was certainly legible, even if the words ran together a little toward the end. There was that paragraph, too; I didn’t think I would have bothered with a paragraph if I knew I was going to be murdered any minute. The handwriting was a little small but not cramped. What kind of person was this? I wanted to know. My wanting was so strong it astonished me.

Sometimes when I’m in a certain mood I’ve looked at life from a great distance, like peering at it through the small end of a pair of binoculars, and I wonder about it. The whole business seems very strange to me, just one shot at threescore years and ten, and for what? I mean, there has to be a reason for being here; even no reason is a reason. One of Amman Singh’s stories is that we’re on this planet because there are gods and demons in the universe who are numb to feeling, and so they send us here to watch our antics and feel violence through us, vicariously, because it’s violence that feeds them and keeps them alive. And the only way to escape being “eaten,” as he calls it, is to study violent emotions, detach oneself from them, and so cheat the gods and demons. Well, why not? People do seem to make such a botch of living: killing and squabbling and rejecting and hating, as if life’s some kind of toy to play with or destroy. Somehow we all end up victims, and the horror of it is that we’re victims of each other.

And now I was meeting another victim.

What kind of paper had they wanted her to sign?

She couldn’t still be alive. The hurdy-gurdy had been mine for several weeks and before that it had belonged to Mr. Georgerakis.

This woman didn’t know me, and I didn’t know her, but she must have gone to her death thinking about me, taking comfort from the thought that she had left these words behind her and that someone would find them. It said so right here: “that would make Death less lonely.” She wouldn’t mean death itself, she would mean those frightening moments just before it happens, when a person feels nakedly alone and unknowing. She must have clung to the thought of me then as one last final hope, a small candle flame in her midnight.

How had they kidded her, these people she called the clever faceless ones? Had they really managed her death so that no one knew she’d been murdered?

Would that be possible?

I placed the piece of yellow paper on the table and walked into the kitchen and poured water into a pan and measured instant coffee into a mug. I felt really shaken, finding a thing like that in the hurdy-gurdy. The old clock on the shelf told me that it was half-past ten. It was so quiet in these two rooms over the shop that I could hear each tick, like a heart beating, and then a truck passed on the street outside and blurred the silence. The kitchen was very plain: oilcloth tacked to the wall behind the sink, and scruffy linoleum on the floor. No counter top but a long old wooden table with knife cuts on it, scrubbed clean; an ancient gas stove, two sets of homemade wooden shelves for groceries and dishes, and a really decadent refrigerator that snored peacefully for days and then suddenly vibrated wildly until I gave it a kick and put it to sleep again. The bath was off the short passage to the living room, and very much the same.

Coffee in hand I returned to the living room, carefully avoiding the slip of yellow paper that I could see waiting for me out of the corner of my eye. The coffee grounded me, it returned me to the present: so did Pegasus, standing guard next to my couch-bed, his head high and mane flying. I went to one of the two windows and opened it and looked out. The street was silent and empty but not dark; this was a street where other people lived over shops, too, the family across the street who ran the secondhand book store, the dressmaker next to them, the Nearly New Clothes Shop beyond, and the palmist, Madame Helen, above that. The lights were bright squares: one by one I watched them extinguished.

I thought, “There must be some way to find out who wrote that note.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” scoffed the contrary half of me, “it could have been written years ago. And she didn’t even give her name.”

“She gave half of it.”

“You
think
she gave half of it. It could just as easily have been written by a man named Hannahsburg or some such.”

“But the note was written, it doesn’t matter by whom.”

“Yes, and the person who wrote it is probably walking around alive and sound at this very minute. Don’t be a fool.”

“If she’s alive, then why didn’t she recover the note and tear it up?”

“Too much trouble, of course. The nightmare was over.”

“I’m familiar with nightmares,” I pointed out dryly, “and they are not ended so easily. She wouldn’t have forgotten that note.”

“Then if you believe she’s dead, what’s the point of trying to find out anything about her?”

“It’s a responsibility.”

“Don’t be a fool. Dr. Merivale said you’re much too imaginative, and don’t forget that streak of the morbid in you. Next you’ll be saying it’s a hand reaching out to you from the grave.”

“There’s nothing gravelike about that letter,” I argued. “I think she valued life, and I admire that. And she addressed the note to me. She wrote it to whoever found it and I found it, didn’t I? And there’s
no one else to care
.”

“Then you just might tell me what you think you can do.”

And of course I hadn’t the slightest idea.

I turned from the window and looked at the room behind me. In this room I’d affected my environment, as Dr. Merivale would phrase it; he was always urging me to affect my environment. I’d sanded the bumpy old plaster walls and painted them off-white, and a man had come in with a machine to refinish the hardwood floor. It was a room that pleased me very much: there was Pegasus rearing up beside the couch, a Buffet print on the wall, a yellow beanbag chair, a thick rug in primary colors, a number of plants hanging from the ceiling in rope bags—and of course the hurdy-gurdy against the wall beside my banjo. This room was my cocoon now, its shining white walls and bright colors were what gave my downstairs life in the shop a lovely dimension. I didn’t want to lose the sensuous delight of creating more of this—I hadn’t even begun on the kitchen. I didn’t want to turn my attention elsewhere, which I would have to do if I went plunging out into the world to look for a woman who had written that she was going to be murdered, and who was probably
dead now, anyway. Where would a person begin if they decided to look?

I filled my garden sprayer with water and walked around absent-mindedly spraying my plants for the second time that day. After that I placed Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto on the phonograph and lay on the floor and listened to it, and when that ended it was midnight and I fooled around a little with the banjo, plunking out “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” and “Little Maggie.” Attention is a funny thing: when I meditate I can concentrate on an imaginary candle flame and reach a point where I see all kinds of lovely flashing lights on the periphery. That’s what I was doing now, concentrating on the banjo and hoping I’d find something off on the side.

But already in the pit of my stomach I knew that I was going to do
something.
I had to, don’t ask me why.

At two o’clock I turned off the light and climbed into bed and lay down, and then I got up and turned on the light again, and looked up two addresses in the phone book, one of them in the yellow pages. Feeling better, I set the alarm clock and returned to bed. I had expected to toss and turn, and frankly I’d expected a nightmare or two—at the very least that hand reaching up to me from the grave—but I slept soundly and serenely until the alarm woke me at seven.