Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

He asked her about the young man who had been at dinner with her in the Russell. “Paul,” she said. “Paul Viertel. The son of my sister, the oldest one.”

“Was she—?”

“Yes, yes. Theresienstadt. Tuberculosis, and so one of the lucky ones, you could say.”

She made him close his eyes so she could kiss the lids. “Like kissing a moth,” she said.

They sat up, with the sheet over their knees, and shared a cigarette, passing it back and forth between them. “I can taste you on the paper,” she said. “My taste, too, from your lips. Both of us.” She laughed. “I had a boyfriend, when I was young, thirteen, fourteen. Very innocent. He had to go away, with his family. We wrote each other letters. I used to try to lift up the — what do you call it? the flap? — I used to try to lift it up and lick where he had licked.” She sighed, smiling. “He was such a nice boy. Not a Jew. He said it didn’t matter that I was, but it did, I think, in the end. Best, perhaps, that he went away.”

They got up, and put on some clothes, and sat at the kitchen table. The light in the sky was fading fast now. The gloaming, he told her, was another name for twilight. “Gloaming,” she said. “I will remember that.”

She was wearing his dressing gown. She hadn’t pulled it fully closed and he could see the slopes of her breasts; they gleamed, and in the cleft between them they were the color of a knife blade. When he was speaking, she had a way of lowering her head with her chin tucked in and gazing at him from under her gray-streaked fringe. Her plump upper lip was plumper still from his kisses.

He asked her what Paul did, Paul Viertel, her dead sister’s son. She told him he was studying to be a doctor. “A proper one,” she said, smiling, “not like you, not a body snatcher.”

He laughed. “Is that what I am?”

“Or do I mean a sawbones? I don’t know.”

They spoke of Phoebe. “Your daughter is unhappy,” she said.

“Is she? Are you sure? What is she unhappy about?”

“Many things. Herself. You.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. She loves you very much.”

“She does?”

“You don’t believe it because you can’t see it.”

He made a mock bow. “Jawohl, Herr Doktor,” he said.

“ Frau Doktor, please! Do I seem so mannish to you?”

Each time a car went past in the street, its headlights turned the dusk a little darker.

“Unhappiness is not so bad,” Evelyn said. “Once a woman came to Freud who was very sick, very sick in the head, you know, and asked him if he could cure her. ‘I cannot cure you,’ Freud said, ‘but I can perhaps make you be ordinarily unhappy.’ That was so wise, don’t you think? Ordinarily unhappy, like everyone else.”

He asked her about her husband. “Oh, Richard,” she said, “he was more than unhappy.”

“I didn’t really know him,” Quirke said. “What was his trouble?”

“Everything. Including me, I think. He had, one might say, a talent for unhappiness, poor man. And of course, he drank — you knew that?”

Quirke nodded. “Where did you meet?”

Smiling, she shook her head slowly. “You must understand,” she said, “there are things I will not speak of. Not because they are so terrible, like what happened to my family, or so private, like Robert’s uncurable sorrow, or our son who died.”

“Why, then?”

She looked up at the window and the darkening blue air outside.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that each one of us has a store of things that are — I don’t know what the word is. I am like a ship carrying a precious cargo through a great storm. All the sailors are telling the captain he must throw the cargo overboard or the ship will sink and all of them will be lost to the sea. But no, the captain tells them, no, if I do as you say, the loss will be greater than the risk of death — not the loss to the merchants who own the cargo, and who can always get more, but to ourselves. We shall arrive in harbor and be less than we were when we set out.” She laid a hand on his. “Do you see?”

He was frowning. “No,” he said, “I don’t understand. Isn’t that the point of what you do, isn’t it your job to get people to talk about things, especially things that are painful, or private?”

“Ah yes,” she said, “and that is why I am a doctor, and not a patient.”

They went into the bedroom to finish dressing. With their clothes on, they found they were suddenly shy of each other. He walked her down the stairs to the street. That single star, stiletto-shaped, glimmered low in the sky above the roofstops.

“Look at this,” Evelyn said, gesturing disgustedly at the Volkswagen. “My little Hitler car. I should be ashamed.”

She unlocked the car door. He felt a sudden rush of panic. “Will you see me again?” he said, touching her on the elbow.

She was getting into the car, and paused now and glanced back at him over her shoulder. “Why, of course,” she said. “Why would I not?”

“Yes, but—” He didn’t know what he wanted to say. “I mean — I mean like this. Will you see me again like this?”

She sat behind the wheel.

“I don’t know,” she said. She was facing the windscreen, frowning, and didn’t look up at him. “I think so. It was very nice, between us.”

He leaned down and put his head in through the low doorway and kissed her awkwardly. She caught him by his shirt collar and held him captive, crouching, half in and half out of the car, barely keeping his balance.

“My dear,” she said, “look at you, so silly. You think perhaps we can be unhappy together, ordinarily unhappy?”

“Like everyone else?”

“Yes. Like everyone else.”

She let go of him, and he stood back and swung the door shut. She didn’t roll down the window, but pressed the ignition, and switched on the headlights, and drove away.

* * *

Half an hour later, his telephone rang. It was Evelyn. He carried the phone to the window with the receiver to his ear and stood looking out at that star glistening tremulously above the roofs. He wondered what it was called. Sirius, was it, the Dog Star? Were these the dog days? He didn’t know.

“I just wanted to say good night,” Evelyn said.

“I’m glad you called.”

“Are you?”

All her questions, he noticed, no matter how inconsequential they might seem, were real questions, demanding real answers.

“Yes,” he said. “I am. I was thinking about you.”

“Good.” She was silent for a time. “It’s so strange,” she said, “I have something of you inside me still. Just now I put my finger there and tasted it.”

“Did you? What does it taste like?”

“Bread.”

“That’s good.”

“Bread and pearls.”

“Pearls don’t taste of anything.”

“How do you know? Anyway, it sounds nice, yes?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “Will you tell Phoebe about tonight, about us?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.”

“Then I shall.”

“You’ll tell her?”

“Yes. Why not? She’ll be glad, I think. She worries about you, that you are lonely.”

He felt a tiny stab of misgiving. Did she too think of him as lonely, was that why she had let him take her clothes off and make love to her?

“I can hear you thinking,” Evelyn said. “You mustn’t think sad thoughts. You are loved — this is true, what I’m telling you. Even if you and I were never to see each other again, you would have been loved, by me. And always you have your daughter.” She paused. “Be kind to yourself, my dear. Try to be.”

He was silent.

“Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here,” he said. “I don’t know what to say to you.”