Robert Silverberg - In Another Country

“You liked that, didn’t you?” she said.

“Carpaccio has always been one of my favorites,” he told her shamelessly.

Vichyssoise turned out to be a cold dish too, a thick white soup, presumably made from some vegetable. It seemed harmless and proved to be quite tasty. Christine had ordered the salmon, and he tried not to peer at her plate, or to imagine what it must be like to put chunks of sea-creatures in one’s mouth, while she ate.

“You promised to tell me something about yourself,” he reminded her.

She looked uneasy. “It’s not a very interesting story, I’m afraid.”

“But you must tell me a little of it. Are you a musician by profession? Surely you are. Do you perform in the concert hall?”

Her look of discomfort deepened. “I know you don’t mean to be cruel, but—”

“Cruel? Of course not. But when I was listening there outside the window I could feel the great gift that you have.”

“Please.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t, do you?” she said gently. “You weren’t trying to be funny, or to hurt me. But I’m not any sort of gifted pianist, Thimiroi. Believe me. I’m just a reasonably good amateur. Maybe when I was ten years old I dreamed of having a concert career some day, but I came to my senses a long time ago.”

“You are too modest.”

“No. No. I know what I am. And what the real thing is like. Even they don’t have an easy time of it. You can’t believe how many concert-quality pianists my age there are in this country. With so many genuine geniuses out there, there’s no hope at all for a decent third-rater like me.”

He shook his head in amazement, remembering the magical sounds that had come from her window. “Third-rater!”

“I don’t have any illusions about that,” she said. “I’m the sort of pianist who winds up giving piano lessons, not playing in Carnegie Hall. I have a couple of pupils. They come and go. It’s not possible to earn a living that way. And the job that I did have, with an export-import firm—well, they say that this is the most prosperous time this country has seen in the past forty years, but somehow I managed to get laid off last week anyway. That’s why I’m downtown today—another job interview. You see? Just an ordinary woman, an ordinary life, ordinary problems—”

“There is nothing ordinary about you,” said Thimiroi fervently. “Not to me! To me you are altogether extraordinary, Christine!” She seemed almost about to weep as he said that. Compassion and tenderness overwhelmed him, and he reached out to take her hand in his, to comfort her, to reassure her. Her eyes widened and she pulled back instantly, catching her breath sharply, as though he had tried to stab her with his fork.

Thimiroi looked at her sadly. The quickness and vehemence of her reaction mystified him.

“That was wrong?” he said. “To want to touch your hand?”

Awkwardly Christine said, “You surprised me, that’s all. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—it was rude of me, actually—oh, Thimiroi, I can’t explain—it was just automatic, a kind of dumb reflex—”

Puzzled, he turned his hand over several times, examining it, searching for something about it that might have frightened or repelled her. He saw nothing. It was simply a hand. After a moment she took it lightly with her own, and held it.

He said, “You have a husband? Is that why I should not have done that?”

“I’m not married, no.” She glanced away from him, but did not release his hand. “I’m not even—involved. Not currently.” Her fingers were lightly stroking his wrist. “I have to confess something,” she said, after a moment. “I saw you at Symphony Hall last week. The De Santis concert.”

“You did?”

“In the lobby. With your—friends. I watched you all, wondering who you were. There was a kind of glow about the whole group of you. The women were all so beautiful, every one of them. Immaculate. Perfect. Like movie stars, they were.”

“They are nothing compared with you.”

“Please. Don’t say any more things like that. I don’t like to be flattered, Thimiroi. Not only does it make me uncomfortable but it simply isn’t effective with me. Whatever else I am, I’m a realistic woman. Especially about myself.”

“And I am a truthful man. What I tell you is what I feel, Christine.” Her hand tightened on his wrist at that. He said, “So you knew who I was, when I approached you in the plaza up above just now.”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“But pretended you did not.”

“I was frightened.”

“I am not frightening, Christine.”

“Not frightened of you. Of me. When I saw you that first day, standing outside my house—I felt—I don’t know, I felt something strange, just looking at you. Felt that I had seen you before somewhere, that I had known you very well in some other life, perhaps, that—oh, Thimiroi, I’m not making any sense, am I? But I knew you had been important to me at some other time. Or would be important. It’s crazy, isn’t it? And I don’t have any room in my life for craziness. I’m just trying to hold my own, don’t you see? Trying to maintain, trying to hang on and not get swept under. In these wonderful prosperous times, I’m all alone, Thimiroi, I’m not sure where I’m heading, what’s going to come next for me. Everything seems so uncertain. And so I don’t want any extra uncertainties in my life.”

“I will not bring you uncertainty,” he said.

She stared and said nothing. Her hand still touched his.

“If you are finished with your food,” he said, “perhaps you would like to come back to the hotel with me.”

There was a long tense silence. After a time she drew her hand away from him and knotted her fingers together, and sat very still, her expression indecipherable.

“You think it was inappropriate of me to have extended such an invitation,” he said finally.

“No. Not really.”

“I want only to be your friend.”

“Yes. I know that.”

“And I thought, since you live so close to the hotel, I could offer you some refreshment, and show you some treasures of my own country that I have brought with me. I meant nothing more than that, Christine. Please. Believe me.”

She seemed to shed some of her tension. “I’d love to stop off at your hotel with you for a little while,” she said.

He had no doubt at all that it was much too soon for them to become lovers. Not only was he completely unskilled in this era’s sociosexual rituals and procedures, so that it was probably almost impossible for him to avoid offending or displeasing her by this or that unintentional violation of the accepted courtship customs of her society, but also at this point he was still much too uncertain of the accuracy of his insight into her own nature. Once he knew her better, perhaps he would be less likely to go about things incorrectly, particularly since she already gave him the benefit of many doubts because she knew he came from some distant land.

There was also the not inconsiderable point to consider that it was a profound violation of the rules of The Travel to enter into any kind of emotional or physical involvement with a native of a past era.

That, somehow, seemed secondary to Thimiroi just now. He knew all about the importance of avoiding distortion or contamination of the time-line; they drilled it into you endlessly before you ever started to Travel. But suddenly such issues seemed unreal and abstract to him. What mattered was what he felt: the surge of delight, eagerness, passion, that ran through him when he turned to look at this woman of a far-off time. All his life he had been a stranger among his own people, a prisoner within his own skin; now, here, at last, it seemed to him that he had a chance of breaking through the net of brittle conventions that for so long had bound his spirit, and touching, at last, the soul of another human being. He had read about love, of course—who had not?—but here, he thought, he might actually experience it. Was that a reckless ambition? Well, then, he would be reckless. The alternative was to condemn himself to a lifetime of bitter regret.