The Gordian Knot (12 page)

Late in the afternoon of the following day Georg saw the young
man again. He had been looking through old telephone directories for a bona fide Kramsky, perhaps a friend, a relative, or even a former coworker whose name Françoise might have borrowed. He hadn’t found anything. At five o’clock he had left the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street and walked uptown. Where should he look next? The theater workshops at the cathedral changed every year, but perhaps some of the participants signed up several years in a row. He could ask the members of the current workshop if anyone had been a member of a previous one and might know someone who had been a member of an even earlier one, who, in turn, might know someone who had … On Madison Avenue Georg eyed the expensive trifles that filled the display windows of the boutiques: flowers, paintings, jewelry, toys, antiques, expensive carpets. The women with their elegant clothes and comportment looked at him coldly, as if they were gingerly picking up some bauble, glancing at it, and casting it aside.

A bus stop sign listed a bus that went past Georg’s place. He turned to look if he could see a bus coming, and saw the redhead again. He was on the other side of the street, and turned to look at a store window. The bus arrived, but the redhead made no sign of getting on too. For as long as Georg could see him from the bus, the man was still looking into the shop windows.

People were getting on and off, people were shopping, a fire hydrant was being given a fresh coat of paint, store shutters were being repaired, a car was being unloaded, two people were embracing next to a waiting cab. Georg saw all this but didn’t take it in. It was all about winners and losers. He and those like him stood on one side: amateurs, fools, and losers; on the other side were the professionals who were part of the world of big business, international politics, organized crime, and the secret service: the world of success. Still, like anyone who reads the newspapers, he had seen enough politicians and businessmen trip and fall over their lies and
blunders. But what intimidated him about the redhead’s shadowing him was how amateurishly he seemed to go about it.

The bus went up Madison Avenue and turned left. He had a hard time finding his bearings. At the next bus stop he saw on his left the bleak northern end of Central Park, and on his right a row of bricked-up, dilapidated mansions that had once been beautiful. Black children were playing in the rays of an early streetlight. A girl of about ten seemed to be putting on some kind of show: she struck poses like a star, limped like an old woman, scolded a little boy as if she were his mother, and strutted about like a macho guy putting the moves on a beautiful woman. She dropped the act, but the bus moved on and Georg couldn’t see what she did next.

WHEN GEORG OPENED THE DOOR
to his apartment, he heard music, voices, and laughter. Two children were playing in the hall, and there were some people sitting in the living room, though most of the guests had crowded into the kitchen. Larry had given a lecture on Kafka in America that had been very well received, and was now throwing a party for his friends and his colleagues from the German Department.

Georg poured himself a drink and mingled with the guests. In the kitchen he heard scraps of English and German conversations, academic chitchat. A beautiful, vain woman with black hair and green stockings was leaning against the door. “How are you?” Georg asked, but she turned away and began talking to a young man in a turquoise shirt.

An amicable elderly gentleman in a purple jacket and a violet scarf asked Georg whether they had met before. They hadn’t.

A black man in a white suit asked Georg what he was doing in New York, and Georg told him he was working on a book. The black man introduced himself as a reporter for the
New York Times
, and said he was still waiting for his big break. One day he’d make a real splash with a big feature.

In the living room a man was telling a story to a captive audience. “Finally our lawyers came to an agreement,” he was saying. “She gets custody, and I get visiting rights every Sunday.” Everyone laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Georg whispered to a woman next to him.

“Every time I come back,” the man continued, “I’m a shadow of my former self.” Again everyone laughed, except for the man telling the story; he was spindly and of an uncertain age, with sparse curls and nervous fingers.

“That’s Max,” the woman next to Georg whispered, as if in answer to his previous question.

“And?”

She took Georg aside. “The dog … Max and his girlfriend broke up and have been fighting over who gets to keep the dog. By the way, my name is Helen. Who are you?” She looked up at him expectantly. She was short and wearing a tight skirt and a thick woolen pullover out of which peeked the collar of her blouse. She struck him as having wary eyes. He wasn’t certain whether they were defensive or unsure. She had longish, dark blond hair, and one eyebrow arched slightly higher than the other. Her mouth was set and her chin energetic.

“I’m Georg, Larry’s new roommate. Are you in the German Department too?”

She was teaching German and was working on a dissertation about German fairy tales, and had lived in Germany for quite a while as a student. She spoke fluent German, and only hesitated sometimes searching for a word, because it had to be just right.

“So you’re interested in the cathedral?” she asked. “Larry calls you the …” She tried to find the right expression, “the cathedral researcher.”

“Cathedral researcher? Not much of a topic. No, I’m here to … 
Where’s your glass? I’m going to get myself some more wine—would you like some too?”

She was waiting for him when he got back with the bottle and the glasses. She talked about her work on her thesis, and about her cat, Effi. She asked him if the German word
Alraune
had the same mysterious connotation as
mandrake
had in English. She told him the tale of a man who pulls a mandrake root from the soil, hears a plaintive, earthshaking cry, and suddenly finds a magician standing in front of him. Georg conjectured about the connection between the words
Alraunen, runes
, and the German word
raunen
, “to whisper.” He told her about France and his take on the French, what he liked about New York, and what he found intimidating about it. He could share with Helen his fairy-tale fears. Her conversation was clever and witty, and she listened to him attentively.

Georg was touched. He hadn’t had a normal conversation in ages, especially not with a woman. He had enjoyed talking with Françoise, though they had never talked extensively. But after he had caught her with a camera in his study that night, he had mistrusted her words and had calculated his, and their communication had become artificial. Slowly his trust in the normality of communication with others had been frayed, first with Bulnakov and Françoise, and then with his translators in Marseille and his friends in Cucuron. He remembered the evening he had dropped by Les Vieux Temps to have some salmon fettuccine. Gérard had greeted him warmly—too warmly. Had Gérard been lying in wait for him? Georg had abruptly turned back at the door and left, after which he had avoided Gérard.

Georg longed to have faith—not in some higher power, but in day-to-day things one could rely on. But could he trust Helen? Had he drawn her into a conversation or had she drawn him? He had met her at Larry’s and he had met Larry at the Hungarian
Pastry Shop. Were these coincidences, or some strategy? Was Bulnakov behind Larry and Helen, behind the red-haired man? Georg was no longer listening to what Helen was saying, and had a hard time coming across as if he were listening at all. What could he tell her about himself without actually saying anything? He made small talk, nodded as she spoke, laughed, shook his head, asked her this and that, and was happy when he had the opportunity to look down at the floor for a few moments to gather his thoughts. All this took a lot out of him.

He excused himself and went to the toilet. When he got back, she was no longer there. In his room he went and stood by the window. He felt a lump rising from his chest to his throat. How will I ever be able to love anyone again? How can I learn once more to interact normally with people? I’m going insane, really insane. He began to cry and felt better, though the lump in his throat didn’t dissolve.

One of the guests came bursting into the room. Larry had put all the coats on Georg’s bed. Georg blew his nose. Other guests came and collected their things. The party was over. Before she left, Helen asked him if he wanted to meet Effi. She sounded natural and friendly. His suspicion was once more aroused. Effi? Who was this Effi? Oh, of course! Effi was her cat. He laughed and they set a date.

GEORG LAY ON HIS BED
and looked out the window. It was dawn, the sky was still dark, but the upper windows of the tall buildings across the Hudson were already reflecting the red morning sun. Glowing windows—he had seen the burning light of the setting sun in the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers. This city isn’t just a forest, he thought, it is also mountains, alps.

He had dreamed of Cucuron, of the cats, and of Françoise. In the dream they had packed their suitcases and put them in the car, but he couldn’t recall where they were thinking of going. Or were they running away? Something in the dream frightened him. He still felt the fear.

Is that what my life has become? Things happen that I don’t understand and I only react to with fear and awkwardness? I have to act, not react. He had often brooded about this over the past few weeks, though he wasn’t quite sure what the difference was.

But maybe what truly matters is not acting and changing the world but
interpreting
differently. Georg laughed and put his arms behind his head. That he was being shadowed was the way
they
interpreted it. Why not interpret the whole thing differently, and
see the shadowing as a trail that
he
could follow, an opportunity that
he
could use?

He let his thoughts roam. He imagined himself walking through a dark Riverside Park, the redheaded man some fifty yards behind him: Georg comes to a large tree and reacts, no, acts, with lightning speed. He glances back and sees his shadower sauntering along casually. Georg slips behind the thick tree trunk, hears his heart pounding, and then the steps of his shadower coming closer. Suddenly there is silence. Keep on walking! Georg thinks. Keep going! On the street above, a bus rumbles by. He hears the steps again, hears them hesitate, become decisive, then run. It’s all a child’s game. He trips the redhead, and even as he falls Georg kicks him in the stomach. He kicks him as he lies there: that’s for the cats, that’s for the attack, that’s for all the pain he has endured for Françoise. His first punch breaks the man’s nose. The bleeding face utters words in faulty English:
They had heard he was coming to New York and were worried he would
 …

Would what? Georg didn’t know what his imagination should make the redhead say. That was why he wanted to beat it out of him. But if it wasn’t a child’s game? Georg trips up the running man, the redhead leaps forward, rolls, and jumps back up before Georg can even steady himself. A knife flashes in the man’s hand.

Georg tried another scenario. Where could he get a false beard and color for his face and hair? Where could he get a hat and dark glasses? And what could he wear and take with him so that after a few minutes in a men’s room he could turn into someone else? There had to be costume rentals and theatrical wardrobes in the Yellow Pages. But what would his shadower think if he saw him go there? Georg imagined putting black shoe polish in his hair, brown color on his face, and a beard he would make from his pubic and chest hair. He peered under the covers—there wasn’t a lot there.

He heard Larry leaving the apartment. He got up, looked
through the closets, and found a black hat and a light-colored nylon coat that was rolled up. If he buttoned it up all the way, nothing but the knot of his tie would show. There were a dozen ties hanging on the inside of the closet door. He put everything back in place.

All morning he strolled down Broadway, keeping an eye out for the shadower. The weather had changed. The sky hung low and gray, and the air was warm and humid. The people hurrying by had left their coats and jackets at home, and only the panhandlers were wrapped in layers of clothing, some holding out paper cups in gloved hands begging for money. The storm broke, and Georg took shelter beneath the awning of a fruit stand. Beside him were heaps of melons, pineapples, apples, and peaches. There was a pleasant aroma. He watched the flow of buses, trucks, bright-colored cars, and yellow cabs.

The rain stopped, and he walked on. He went into several drugstores. He found some tan coloring that was good enough in the first one. However, the drugstores didn’t sell false beards or the kind of hair dye that could be quickly applied or sprayed on. He looked for his shadower in vain. Between Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth streets he almost walked past the Paper House store with its greeting cards for every occasion and masks of Mickey Mouse, King Kong, Dracula, and Frankenstein’s monster. Shrink-wrapped beards, side-burns, and mustaches of shiny, black synthetic fiber hung by the entrance. He wanted to get to the greeting-card section in case the shadower peered through the store window. He quickly grabbed one of the beards and found a selection of hairspray in all colors, took a can with a black cap, picked three greeting cards at random, and paid the cashier before anyone stopped outside the store window. He put the beard and the hairspray in his coat pocket and stood by the door, looking at the cards he had bought: “Be My Valentine.” Three times.

At the optician’s, he quickly hid the sunglasses he had bought in his bag, and stood outside again polishing his own glasses before anyone had a chance to walk by.

He no longer left his apartment without a plastic bag. In it were the hat, the coat, a tie, the brown tanning color, the black hairspray, the beard, and a small mirror. But either no one was shadowing him, or he didn’t see anyone. He took the subway to Brooklyn to meet the head of the kindergarten, who, it turned out, couldn’t tell him any more about Françoise than the former head of the Ladies Guild in Queens had. Again he stood outside the Polish and Soviet consulates, but every time he walked away he didn’t notice anyone shadowing him. Mostly he wandered the streets aimlessly, only occasionally glancing back sheepishly to see if he was being followed. Sometimes he got lost. That didn’t worry him—sooner or later he always found a subway station. The weather remained stormy and humid. He now saw the city as a living organism, a hissing dragon, or the kind of gigantic whale that castaways in old adventure books mistook for islands. The whale spouted fountains of water from time to time, and its sweat evaporated in a haze.