From the Fifteenth District (29 page)

H
e gave his first lecture and poetry reading in an amphitheatre that was usually used by an institute of Polish civilization for showing films and for talks by visiting art historians. Most of the audience was made up of the Polish colony. A few had come to hear him read, but most of them were there to see what he looked like. The colony was divided that night not into its usual social or political splinters but over the issue of how Piotr was supposed to have treated his wife. All were agreed on the first paragraphs of Piotr’s story: there were clues and traces in his early poems concerning the girl who saved his life. He and the girl had married, had lived for years on his earnings as an anonymous translator. Here came the first split in public opinion, for some said that it was really his wife who had done all the work, while Piotr, idle, served a joyous apprenticeship for his later career of pursuing girl students. Others maintained that his wife was ignorant of foreign languages; also, only Piotr could have made something readable out of the translated works.

Next came the matter of his wife’s lovers: no one denied them, but what about Piotr’s affairs? Also, what about his impotence? For he was held to be satyr and eunuch and in some ineffable way to be both at once. Perhaps he was merely impotent. Who, then, had fathered his wife’s two – or four, or six – children? Names were offered, of men powerful in political and cultural circles.

Piotr had tried to kill his wife – some said by flinging her down a flight of stone steps, others said by defenestration. He had rushed at her with a knife, and to save herself she had jumped through a window, landing easily, but scarring her face on the broken panes. A pro-Piotr faction had the wife a heavy drinker who had stumbled while carrying a bottle and glass.
The symmetry of the rumors had all factions agreed on the beginning (the couple meeting in prison) and on the end – Piotr collecting his wife’s clothes in a bundle and leaving them on the doorstep of her latest lover.

Before starting his lecture Piotr looked at the expectant faces and wondered which story was current now. After the lecture, strangers crowded up to congratulate him. He was pleased to see one of them, an old sculptress his parents had known before the war. When she smiled her face became as flat and Oriental and as wrinkled as tissue paper. Maria, as virginal as her name, had once been a militant; quite often such women automatically became civil servants, referred to by a younger generation as “the aunts of the Revolution.” Her reward had been of a different order: Summoned to Moscow by someone she trusted, arrested casually, released at random, she had lived in Paris for years. She never mentioned her past, and yet she was in it still, for her knowledge of Paris was only knowledge about bus stops. Her mind, ardent and young, moved in the direction of dazzling changes, but these were old changes now – from 1934 to 1935, say. Piotr recalled her spinster’s flat, with the shaky, useless tables, the dull, green, beloved plants, the books in faded jackets, the lumpy chairs, the divans covered in odd lengths of homespun materials in orchard colors – greengage, grape, plum. Her references had been strict, dialectical, until they became soft and forgiving, with examples drawn from novels got by heart. He did not know of any experience of passion, other than politics, in Maria’s life. Her work as a sculptress had been faithful and scrupulous and sentimental; seeing it, years before, one should have been able to tell her future. She had never asked him questions. Few women had mattered; she was one: a discreet, mistaken old woman he had seen twice
since his childhood, with whom he talked of nothing but politics and art. These were subjects so important to him that their conversations seemed deeply personal. Maria did not praise Piotr’s lecture but said only, “I heard every word,” meaning, “I was listening.” There were too many people; they could not speak. They agreed to meet, and just at that moment another woman, with dry red hair and a wide, nervous grin, pushed her way past Maria and said to Piotr, “My husband and I would think it an honor if you came to stay with us. We have a large flat, we are both out all day, and you would be private. We admire your work.” She had something Piotr considered a handicap in a woman, which was that she showed her gums. “You are probably in a hotel,” she said, “but just come to us when your money runs out.”

Piotr kept the card she gave him, and later Marek examined it and said, “I know who they are. She is a doctor. No, no, they are not political, nothing like that. You would be all right there.”

W
as it because of the lecture? Because of seeing Maria? Because he had been invited by the doctor? Piotr now considered Laurie’s absence with a sense of deliverance, as if a foreign object had been removed from his life. She had always lied. He recalled how she could tremble at will – how she had once spilled a cup of coffee, explaining later that she was attracted to him at that moment but felt too diffident to say so. She had let him think she was inexperienced in order to torture him, had kept him in her bed for hours of hesitation and monologue, insisting that she was afraid of a relationship that might be too binding, that she was afraid of falling in love
with him – this after the party where she had said, “You, Potter, you stay.” Afterward she told Piotr that she’d had her first lover at fifteen. Old family friend, she said, with children about her age. He used to take her home for holidays from Bishop Purse. She was his substitute for a forbidden daughter, said Laurie, calmly, drinking coffee without spilling it this time. Piotr should have smacked her, kicked her, cut up her clothes with scissors and hung the rags all over the lamps and furniture. He should have followed her around Paris, calling insults, making a fool of her in restaurants. As he was incapable of doing anything even remotely violent, it was just as well she had gone. Relief made him generous: he reminded himself that she had added to his life. She had given Piotr whatever love was left over from her love for herself. You could cut across any number of lies and reach the person you wanted, he decided, but no one could get past narcissism. It was like the crust of the earth.

He slept soundly that night and part of the next afternoon. Marek had left books at his hotel, the new novels of the autumn season. Nothing in them gave Piotr a clue to the people he saw in the streets, but the fresh appearance of the volumes, their clean covers, the smooth paper and fanciful titles put still more distance between himself and his foolish love affair. After dark his cousin arrived to take him to a French dinner party. Piotr had been accepted by a celebrated, beautiful hostess named Eliane, renowned for her wit, her lovers, and her dislike of foreigners. She had been to Piotr’s lecture. At the dinner party she planned to place Piotr on her right. Marek was afraid that Piotr did not take in what this signified in terms of glory. Any of the people at that lecture
would have given an arm and a leg if the sacrifice had meant getting past Eliane’s front door.

Piotr asked, “What does she do?”

They travelled across Paris by taxi. Marek continued his long instructions, telling Piotr what Eliane was likely to talk about and what she thought about poetry and Poland. Piotr was not to contradict anything, even if he knew it to be inaccurate; above all, he was not to imagine that anything said to him was ever meant to be funny. Marek and Piotr would be the only foreign guests. He begged Piotr not to address any remark to him in Polish in anyone’s hearing. Answering Piotr’s question finally, he said that Eliane did not “do” anything. “You must get over the habit of defining women in terms of employment,” he concluded.

During the preliminary drink – a thimble of sweet port – Marek did not leave his cousin’s side. The hostess was the smallest woman Piotr had ever seen, just over dwarf size. She wore a long pink dress and had rings on every finger. To Piotr’s right, at table, sat a pregnant girl with soft dark hair and a meek profile. He smiled at her. She stared at a point between his eyes. His smile had been like a sentence uttered too soon. Marek’s expression signalled that Piotr was to turn and look at his hostess. Eliane said to him gravely, “Have you ever eaten salmon before?” She next said, “I heard your lecture.” Piotr, still bemused by the salmon question, made no reply. She continued, “The poetry you recited was not in French, and I could not understand it.” She waited; he waited, too. “Were you
greatly
influenced by Paul Valéry?” Piotr considered this. His hostess turned smoothly to the man on her left, who wore a red ribbon and a rosette on his lapel.

“Cézanne was a Freemason,” Piotr heard him saying. “So was Braque. So was Juan Gris. So was Soutine. No one who was not a Freemason has ever had his work shown in a national museum.”

The pregnant girl’s social clockwork gave her Piotr along with the next course. “Is this your first visit to Paris?” she said. Her eyes danced, rolled almost. She tossed her head, as a nervous pony might. Where the rest of the table was concerned, she and Piotr were telling each other something deliciously amusing and private.

“It is my third trip as an adult. I came once with my parents when I was a child.” He wondered if his discovery of chestnut meringues at Rumpelmayer’s tearoom in 1938 was of the slightest interest.

“The rest of the time you were always in your pretty Poland?” The laugh that accompanied this was bewildering to him. “What could have been keeping you there all this time?” In another context, in a world more familiar, the look on the girl’s face would have been an invitation. But what Piotr could see, and the others could not, was that she was not really looking at him at all.

“Well, at one time I was in prison,” he said, “and sometimes translating books, and sometimes teaching at a university. Sometimes the progression goes in reverse, and your poet begins at the university and ends in jail.”

“Have you ever had veal cooked this way before?” she said, after a quick glance to see if their hostess was ready to take on Piotr again. “It is typically French. But not typically Parisian. No, it is typically provincial. Eliane likes doing these funny provincial things.” She paused again. Piotr was still hers. “And
where did you learn your good French and your charming manners?” she said. “In Poland?”

“The hardest thing to learn was not to spit on the table,” said Piotr.

After that both women left him in peace. But of course he was not in peace, for Marek was watching. He did not reproach Piotr, but Piotr knew he would not be invited to a French evening again.

P
erhaps because he had slept too much in the afternoon, he found that night long and full of dark misery. He awoke at the worst possible hour, at four, when it was too late to read – his eyes watered and would not focus – and too early to get up. He heard the chimes of the hotel clock downstairs striking five, then six. He slept lightly and woke on the stroke of seven. His body had taken over and was trying to show him that the nonchalance about Laurie had been a false truce. Feeling dull and sick, he shaved at the basin in his room, and asked the maid to unlock the door down the hall so that he could have a bath. He entered the steamy room, with its cold walls and opaque windows, reminding himself that Laurie was a foreign object, that he had a life of his own, that he had a center of gravity. His body reacted to this show of independence with stomach cramps and violent nausea. His mouth went dry when he returned to his room to find a breakfast tray waiting. The skin around his mouth felt attacked by small stinging insects. A headache along his hairline prevented him from unfolding the morning paper or reading a letter from home. The day was sunny, and he saw now that the commonplace sayings about
crossed love were all true: the weather mocked him; he craved darkness and rain. His unhappiness was a disease. Strangers would see signs of it, and would despise him.

He loved her. For more than two years now his waking thought had been Is there a letter? He wanted to reach across to her, straight to Venice, but she had to want him – otherwise he was a demand, a claim, a dead weight on her life; he was like the soft, curled-up, dejected women who seemed to make an equal mess of love and cigarette ash. Laurie was in Venice, on a snowy beach. (The Venice of his imagining was all blue and white.) She lay immodestly close to a cloudy man. Piotr could not really see him. Perhaps he was placid, like the Austrian, or thin and worried, like Piotr. Perhaps he was a disgusting boulevardier with cheeks like boiled shrimp. “He speaks three languages … enjoys running his own business.” Oh, inferior, callous, stupid!

Piotr told his diminished self, My poems are translated into … I have corresponded with … been invited by … I can lecture in Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, German, English, French, and I can also …

Laurie had assured Piotr that no one, ever, had been like him. She had said, “To think that until now I thought I was just one more frigid North American!” Piotr had believed. He wanted to compose a scream of a letter: Where are you? Why don’t you send me a telegram, give me a sign? I haunt the hotel office where mail is kept. I mistake the hotel bill for a message saying you have come back. They say that mail from Italy is slow, but I see other people receiving letters with Italian stamps. I wake at dawn wondering if today will be the day of the letter.

His torment was intensified by the number of mail deliveries; there were three a day, with a fourth for parcels (should she
show she remembered him by sending a book). The porter, sorting letters, would see Piotr hovering and call, “Nothing!” and Piotr would scurry away as if he had been caught in some shameful voyeur posture. He now heard and saw “Venice” everywhere: When he bought fruit he found it stamped on an orange. He even said, “God,” though until now he had thought there was no God to hear him.

P
iotr had still not received any money from the university. He was used to administrative languor, but the francs his cousin had advanced him were melting fast and Piotr did not want to ask Marek for more. The day came when he decided to leave his hotel and move in with the doctor and her husband. Marek approved of the address, which was close to the école Militaire; he had unearthed what he thought of as useful information: the doctor and her husband had emigrated to France, separately, before the war. They had met in a Polish Resistance network operating out of Grenoble. The marriage was not a happy one. The husband had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter, with whom he spent every Sunday. The doctor was certain to fall in love with Piotr, Marek said.