Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

Nachman was silent for several blocks. He was upset and confused, and the morning felt colder, though the sun was brighter and sharp, making the streets dazzle and every shadow black. The long walk hadn’t warmed his body. When they came to the ancient church, he followed Marie inside, as if without personal will. It was less cold than the street, but far from warm.

The church was small and unusually dark, despite the tall windows that glared with color. There was a great deal of elaborately wrought gold and brass. It seemed to writhe and it gave off a dull hard shine, which intensified rather than dispersed the darkness. Clots of shadow formed about small flames of candles along the walls and in niches. A priest was conducting a service, and a dozen or so elderly men and women were gathered in the pews before him, some on their knees, some standing.

Nachman wandered away from Marie, retreating into the general darkness, absorbing the sensation of deep shadows and scattered brilliance of flame and metal, all of it enclosed in cold, heavy stone. He felt his isolation, his separateness within the church. He settled into the feeling, as if into the obscurity of a densely woven cloak. Long minutes passed before he remembered Marie and looked about for her. She was standing near the door, leaning against a pillar, looking at the priest, apparently absorbed by the ritual. Nachman approached her slowly and stopped a few feet away, waiting for her attention. She looked at him finally, and then moved toward him. As they walked together toward the door, she said, “Maybe I’ll return. I don’t know.” Nachman understood that she meant return to the religion of her childhood.

Outside, Nachman lit a cigarette, his second of the day. He said, “Would you like to eat something? You must be hungry.”

“There are no luxurious restaurants.”

“Any place with heat will do. I’m cold.”

“It’s still early, but I know where we can have vodka. Eel, too, maybe. The owner is a distant relation. Would you like vodka? You can pay him in dollars.”

“Vodka would be a blessing. I never in my life felt so cold.”

The restaurant, a fair-sized, square room with pretty gold-hued wallpaper, was warmer than the church, but Nachman didn’t remove his coat. The two waiters wore dinner jackets and ties. But there were no customers aside from Nachman and Marie. One waiter approached their table and presented menus and left. The other then came to the table. Nachman realized that the waiters were sustaining a ritual of service, for lack of knowing what else to do.

The menu was printed on large sheets of good, thick paper, and it listed a considerable variety of dishes, but Marie told him not to bother ordering any of them. It would embarrass the waiter. She said, “The dishes don’t exist. If you like to feel nostalgic, you may enjoy reading the menu, but it will have no practical purpose. Vodka and eel. Would that be all right?”

“Yes, all right.”

Nachman cared less about eating than simply sitting inside a fairly warm room, at a table with a clean white cloth. Glasses of vodka were set before him and Marie. Nachman picked up his glass and drank it all at once. The vodka went down in a delicious searing flow. He wanted another glass immediately. Two plates of eel, chopped into small sections, were set before them. Nachman ate a section. It went well with vodka.

Marie finished eating before he did. She sipped her vodka slowly.

Nachman urged her to take what remained of his plate of eel. She accepted.

“And two more vodkas.”

With his third glass Nachman became high, and felt better, almost good. His vision seemed to improve, too. Marie’s plain face took on a glow and looked rather beautiful. What is plain, anyway? Nachman asked himself. Her features were nicely proportioned. Nothing was ill-shaped. Others wouldn’t call her beautiful, but it was a good face, beautiful enough for Nachman. Where you expected a nose, she had a nose, and a mouth, a mouth. Her face looked fine to him. A bit long, perhaps, and somewhat solemn, but normal and unobjectionable, however plain. Nachman was sure he would remember her face with pleasure. Her brown eyes were intelligent and kind. What more could a man want? A beautiful face, afflicting people with passionate love, must be a tragic burden. But why was he thinking this way? In a city where his grandparents had been murdered, and the history of his family lost. The irresponsibility of feelings was a serious problem. But Nachman felt no obligation to define the problem, let alone solve it. For an instant, Nachman wished that he could love Marie, feel what a man is supposed to feel for a woman, but not for the sake of ecstasy. He would have liked something real, true, consistent with his nature, like the vodka, maybe. Pain, but a good pain. After today he’d never see Marie again. He already felt the poignancy of her absence from his life. She’d been an excellent guide. He wanted to kiss her.

“Would you like another vodka?”

“No thank you,” her voice was soft and polite as usual.

He remembered how she said, “He’s not a Jew, Professor Nachman,” and how she’d raised her voice to him in the street walking away from the synagogue. She’d known what Nachman was feeling under the spell of the caretaker and had wanted to protect him. But from the way she looked at him now, he could tell that she had no idea what he was feeling. For her, ordinary life had resumed. She simply looked as if, even in her personal depths, she was polite. She accepted what was there, didn’t wonder. It wasn’t in her to be intrusive, to speculate about his soul, and yet when it mattered, she’d understood and been with him. Nachman knew he was being sentimental, indulging a feeling. It was partly due to the vodka, but Nachman was suddenly awed by this plain girl, and it didn’t seem unrealistic or foolish or morally dubious, and he knew the feeling would outlast this moment.

IF NACH MAN WAS GIVENfifteen cents too much in change, he’d walk half a mile back to the newsstand or grocery store to return the money. It was a compulsion — to make things right — that extended to his work in mathematics. He struggled with problems every day. When he solved them, he felt good and he also felt that he was basically a good man. It was a grandiose sensation, even a mild form of lunacy. But Nachman wasn’t smug. He had done something twenty years before, when he was a graduate student at U.C.L.A., that had never felt right and still haunted his conscience. The memory of it came to him, virtually moment by moment, when he went to the post office or when he passed a certain kind of dark face in the street. And then Nachman would brood on what had happened.

It had begun when Nachman saw two men standing in front of the library on the U.C.L.A. campus. One was his friend Norbert, who had phoned the night before to make a date for coffee. Norbert hadn’t mentioned that he was bringing someone, so Nachman was unprepared for the other man, a stranger. He had black hair and black eyes, a finely shaped nose, and a wide sensuous mouth. A Middle Eastern face, aristocratically handsome.

Better-looking than a movie star, Nachman thought, but he felt no desire to meet him, only annoyance with Norbert. He should have warned Nachman, given him the chance to say yes or no. Nachman would have said no. He felt the beginning of a cold sore in the middle of his upper lip. Nachman wasn’t vain, but the stranger was not merely handsome. He was perfect. Comparisons are invidious, thought Nachman, but that doesn’t make them wrong. Compared with the stranger, Nachman was a gargoyle.

“Nachman, this is Prince Ali Massid from Persia,” Norbert said, as if introducing the prince to a large audience and somehow congratulating himself at the same time. “The prince has a problem. I told him you could help and I mentioned your fee, which I said is in the neighborhood of a thousand bucks.”