The Origin of Species (26 page)

He had called in the first week of classes.

“Your summer all right?”

That he was making an effort at small talk had immediately put Alex on alert.

“A bit busy.” He didn’t ask about Jiri’s summer—he’d heard all the rumors by then, about the break up but also about some questions that had arisen regarding his relations with a certain female undergrad.

“Good, good,” Jiri said. “Of course.”

He’d gone on in a strained tone about a book Alex ought to look at, while Alex waited for the penny to drop.

“By the way, it wouldn’t be for long, but I need a place to leave my things for a couple of days till my sublet’s free. I’d go to the Y but the rooms are so awful there.”

Alex wasn’t sure from this whether he actually intended to stay with him until he showed up the next day with his bag. It was the worst possible time for Alex, with the problems in the building and his constant cramming for CanLit. To top it off, Liz had dumped Moses with him: they had run into each other over the summer, a bristly encounter on St. Lawrence when they’d exchanged all of half a dozen words, but then she’d called him out of the blue to take the cat while she went out of town. The request was so clearly an effort at détente he could hardly say no, even though pets, in his building, were strictly verboten.

“You’ll have to be careful about the cat,” he said when Jiri arrived, though without much hope that Jiri would be careful about the cat or about anything.

There was the question of where Jiri would sleep.

“There’s a sofa bed, but it’s a bit lumpy.” At the silence that followed, Alex added, “You can use my bedroom if you want.”

Jiri placed his bag on Alex’s bed.

“It’ll just be for a few days,” he said.

Jiri wasted no time in colonizing Alex’s bedroom, taking over his desk and making several trips to his office the next day to collect shopping bags full of books, which he set out on Alex’s desktop and in the empty slots on Alex’s shelves.

“You didn’t need this, did you?”

“It’s all right. I can work at the table.”

That was the beginning. Several of Jiri’s suits appeared over the next days, displacing Alex’s clothes in the bedroom closet, as did Jiri’s little manual typewriter and half a dozen boxes of files that he arranged at the foot of the bed. Through all of this Jiri came and went as if Alex were merely some stranger the Communist Housing Committee had forced him to live with. Most of their conversations were purely practical ones—where the salt was, where to find the nearest cleaners. Alex had never used a cleaners in his life except for his
Sunday suits, but Jiri took every scrap of his clothing to them, right down to his underwear and his socks, something Alex had not even known was possible.

Alex held out hope that the bedroom might at least serve as a sanctum for Jiri, keeping the rest of the apartment Jiri-free. But that hadn’t been the case. Rather, Jiri, by seeming to anticipate every possible need or action on Alex’s part—always up before him, always in the bathroom first, always claiming the best place at the dining table, the one that faced the windows—had somehow managed to change the apartment’s usual rules of being so that what mattered were no longer the actual physical walls, which turned out to be flimsy things, but rather the psychic ones that more and more boxed Alex into the little corner of floor space occupied by his now permanently made-up sofa bed.

Even when Jiri was out, he was not gone. His toiletries filled the bathroom, including a tar shampoo that left an odor of roofing work; his strange foodstuffs filled every corner of the fridge, greenish pastes and sock-smelling cheeses and meats, thick, non-standard juices like pear and apricot. It was as if the very culture of the apartment was under siege, as if the moment would come when Jiri’s had so completely taken over that Alex would be forced out like an alien. Even Moses, already out of sorts at being abandoned in this foreign place, seemed to sense that the apartment’s center of gravity had shifted, skulking around in a sort of counterpoint to Jiri. Jiri showed Moses about the same amount of attentiveness he showed Alex, so that Alex was constantly on edge that he’d drop Moses from the balcony or betray him to the super or let him escape one day down the elevator and into the anonymous world. Yet a relationship had developed between them, disconcerting and strange, Moses forever circling around Jiri like a petitioner, planning his approaches, stealing quick feels against his leg. He took to curling up at night at the foot of Jiri’s, formerly Alex’s, bed, something Jiri actually tolerated, so that Alex was left alone on his lumpy sofa bed like a jilted lover.

The work on the water lines began, and Jiri had yet to move out. Notices had gone around about potential outages suggesting that the work would be handled with a degree of civility this time, but it quickly turned into a free-for-all, elevators commandeered, mangled pipes left in the halls, and the water going off at all hours. Jiri took to doing his toilette at the Y, where he had a membership, so that none of these disruptions
seemed to leave the least blemish on him. But Alex grew more bedraggled with each day. He went to the Y as well, for Esther’s swimming, but could hardly park her somewhere while he sneaked off to take a shower. Short, then, of forking out the ten dollars for a day pass to go on his own, he was stuck taking tepid bucket baths in his tub with water from the kitchen.

As the repairs inched upward Alex could hear the loudening din of plumbing work in his walls like a coming infestation. Then one morning, well before anything like a decent hour, two pasty-skinned workmen who looked as if they’d been holed up in a cellar for months avoiding capture showed up at his door.

“No one said you were coming.”

“Is okay,” one of the men said, “we start.”

So they did. There was a lot of smashing with a ball-peen hammer to get at the pipes through the bedroom wall, then a lot of grimacing while they stared at the mess of corroded couplings and joints they’d revealed, pipes branching off in every direction. Jiri, who had already been up at work when they arrived, stood by watching all this with an intent, curious air.

“Is bad,” one of the men said to Alex, clearly blaming him. An exchange ensued between the two workers full of grunts and heavy monosyllables, Jiri following it like a tennis match.

“
Prablyema?
” he interjected.

“
Da
,” one of the men said warily. “
Da
.”

It wasn’t long before the three of them were down on their knees poking and prodding at the mess of pipes, to more grunts and grim pronouncements. One of the workers stepped into the bathroom and traced an ominous line across the mirror tiles above the tub.

Jiri looked charmed.

“Russian Jews,” he said. “My Russian’s a bit rusty, but it’s better than my Yiddish.”

“What’s the problem?”

“It’s not good. Some sort of a junction, I think.”

The men hauled in matériel for their work, wrenches, crowbars, a jigsaw, and began carving channels in the bathroom walls. Much as Alex hated his mirror tiles he felt a wince each time another of them was prised away, usually in jagged bits. He could already envision the devastation these men would leave behind, the forms he would have to file at the
Régie, the months or years he would have to wait before he got anything like satisfaction.

He could barely think for the racket but didn’t dare go out, afraid each time one of the men came or went that Moses would make a run for the elevator.

“Is cat,” one of them said, finally noticing him.

“Yes.” Alex was sure the breach would get back to Tony now, and he’d be evicted.

The workman squatted and gave Moses a little stroke on his muzzle.

“Is good cat.”

Jiri, through all of this, hadn’t left the apartment, though his work space was a shambles, Alex’s desk pushed aside and piled high with the shelving and books that had been removed from the wall so the men could smash it. He stood back watching the men’s work as if it were a quaint folk ritual he’d happened upon, putting questions to them now and then in his halting Russian.

“Alex, maybe you should offer these gentlemen a cup of coffee.”

It was evening before the workers had gone. The apartment looked like a construction site by then, crumbled drywall everywhere, abandoned tools, the bathtub full of broken pieces of tile.

“That’s the funny thing about Russian Jews,” Jiri said. “Seventy years of brainwashing but they’ve never forgotten they’re Jews. It’s like a case study for the failure of the Soviet experiment.”

The work went on for days. The men might come for an hour and be on their way; or they might be working full tilt in what seemed the middle of a marathon session, then break for coffee and never return. The whole time Alex was reduced to his bucket flushes and his bucket baths, always afraid he’d catch some splinter of tile up his backside. Meanwhile Jiri, perversely, embraced the disorder like someone rolling up his sleeves at a challenge. He had grown downright chummy with the workers, Boris and Mikhail from Gomel, not so far from Chernobyl.

Back home, Boris and Mikhail had been engineers.

“Chernobyl was a lucky break for them,” Jiri said. “Twenty years they’d been asking to get out, then Chernobyl happened and the approval came through in just a couple of weeks.”

Even with Alex Jiri had taken on an in-the-trenches camaraderie. One evening he made supper for him, cucumber salad and schnitzel.

“This was what I was eating when the Russians marched in,” he said. “At a Hungarian place in Soho, to be exact.”

Alex was shocked to find out that Jiri hadn’t been in Czechoslovakia at all when the troops had come, but in London for a conference. He had watched the whole thing on TV like everyone else, for all his talk in class about not knowing what the revolution was when you were in the middle of it.

“Just think of it as a teaching aid,” he said. “Anyway, the point’s still valid.”

“So you didn’t go back?”

“I thought about it. It wouldn’t have been so bad, maybe—I would just have ended up in a factory or whatever like the other intellectuals. But the truth was I didn’t want to have to start up the same old struggle again. Most people only have the one good fight in them. After that you start looking around for how to enjoy yourself a little.”

This wasn’t the kind of thing you’d hear from Jiri in class. In class it was all about laying waste to every authority and every assumption. Then there was the matter of his wife and son: that was another of his touchstones, his seven-year separation from them, which in class always played out as a metaphor for the hole at the heart of totalitarianism. “That’s the nature of tyranny in a nutshell,” he’d say. “Always being defined by what’s absent.” But none of it looked so grand in the light of his schnitzel in Soho.

Jiri had managed to root out the Scotch that Stephen had left behind back in the spring.

“You know, I was taking a look at your new proposal,” he said.

Alex wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

“But I haven’t even handed it in to you.”

“It saw it sitting on your desk. I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

In fact it had been
in
his desk, down in one of the lower drawers, though Alex felt such a strange thrill at the thought that Jiri had actually taken the trouble to go through his things that he couldn’t muster any sense of outrage.

“It’s not bad,” Jiri said. “It’s not quite there yet, but it’s not bad. Your other draft, all the terminology was getting in the way. But this one seems more from the heart.”

Alex took a gulp of his Scotch. This was when Jiri got most dangerous, when he approached anything like praise.

“I guess I talked it out with someone who didn’t know all the language,” he said, realizing only as he spoke that he meant Esther.

“That’s good, that’s good. Sometimes it’s important to remind yourself that all this stuff is actually supposed to mean something.”

Jiri poured more Scotch.

“When you think of someone like Derrida or Lacan, they’re not really doing anything different than you are. They’re just drawing a shape in the air, that’s all. But yours has an actual physical base—I don’t think anyone’s tried that before. There was Lévi-Strauss, of course, but most of that was just nonsense.”

Alex’s head was swimming. In a moment, surely, Jiri would tell him he was pulling his leg.

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s not going to be a breeze getting this past the committee. They’ll want to see the language. But I think there’s something there.”

The rest of the evening was a haze. Alex had the feeling he used to get on acid, that he was on the brink of some tremendous revelation. Jiri was part of this feeling; Alex couldn’t imagine how he had ever felt any ill will toward him.

They had drained every last drop of the Scotch.

“I’m glad you’re finally buying the real stuff,” Jiri said.

In the morning, Alex awoke so hungover that he wasn’t sure the evening had even happened.

Jiri was already hurrying off to class.

“Bring the proposal by my office and we’ll try to clean it up,” he said, as if they didn’t see each other every day of the week. “It’s not quite up to doctoral level yet.”

The workmen finished a couple of days later. They left behind exactly the carnage Alex had feared, the plaster repairs in the bedroom looking like the scar tissue on a torture victim and the bathroom such a patchwork of tile and bald wall that Alex’s mind reeled every time he went in there, vainly searching for pattern amidst the ruins. In the meantime, Alex’s resentment toward Jiri had built back to full force, so that every smallest infraction, his crumbs on the cutting board, his abandoned coffee cups, the spots of Ultra Brite he left on the bathroom sink, seemed set to push it beyond endurance.

Now I don’t suppose it occurred to you just to kick his butt out of there, pardon my French? I mean, talk about totalitarian!

Well, Peter, the situation was a bit delicate. And then he’s a fascinating character, really. I learned a lot from him while he was there
.

Like how to take advantage of your graduate students, for instance
.