Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Her thesis was called “The Occurrence of Alkaloids in the”—in the something. In a word beginning with A. I could look it up — there must be twelve copies or even more down in the wine cellar. “The Occurrence” was nearly a book — eighty-two pages long, not counting the pages of thanks and the dedications. Julius has a whole page to himself: “To Doctor Engineer Julius Lauer, of the firm of Possner (Cologne), my Heartfelt Gratitude.” The copies are well bound in that brown paper that imitates bark. Possner must have paid.

Bibi was something of a friend, finally. My daughter called her Aunt and was taught to respect her. She even lived with us for a time — for ten years in our old house, and for several months in the house we have now. She emigrated to an American branch of Possner and she died over there.

I don’t think she ever wanted to marry. She never mentioned it. She had peculiar opinions and was no good at hiding what she thought. After the age of thirty she became insistent. She would insist on the same thing over and over — usually something to do with the harsh side of life. She felt shy about some ugly scars she had on her legs, and wore thick stockings even in summer, and would never go on a beach.

Even if I had ever considered Bibi less than myself, how could I have shown it? By having her eat in the kitchen alone? In the days when we met Bibi the kitchen was a privileged place, the only warm room anyone had. Julius worked nearly every evening then and I was glad to have Bibi’s company. As she sewed and ironed I sat nearby, reading, sometimes talking to her, wishing she would stop whistling and singing but not liking to say so. She had several odious habits. For instance, she owned only one pair of stockings and was afraid of wearing them out. As soon as she arrived she would take them off and drape them over the back of a chair. Once, Heidi, the old brown poodle we had, licked Bibi’s bare legs under the table.

“Heidi, you swine!” Bibi wailed. I have forgotten to say how funny she looked and sounded when she was young. She had short blond hair that stuck out like stiff flower petals, and she spoke with a coarse, droll, regional accent that turned her simplest remarks into comedy. “Heidi, you swine” became a joke between Julius and me until the day he was informed she was brilliant. After that, I lost my bearings where Bibi was concerned, for now she was part of Possner, and Possner was also Julius, and neither Julius nor Possner were to be laughed at. Possner was a small industrial complex then — nothing compared with a great house such as Bayer; but to Julius it was a new force in the nation, an elite army for which he enlisted the best of recruits. Julius was, I suppose, a lieutenant in the industry-army. He knew he would go up and up as this new army grew. I knew it too, and that was why I had asked for help — why I had Bibi. I was afraid that if I became a housewife Julius would find me dull and would leave me behind. Every morning, instead of scrubbing and dusting, I read a newspaper. The papers were thin; the news was boring and censored, or, rather, “approved.” I would begin at the back, with the deaths and the cinema advertisements, and work forward to the political news. In the afternoon I walked Heidi and tried to read books belonging to Julius. Of that period of my “education” I remember long, sleepy winter afternoons, and I see myself trying to keep awake. I also spent hours in queues, because meat, clothing, and even matches were hard to find.

Like Bibi, I had no friends; I had no family, except Julius. I was not from Cologne but from Dortmund. Anyone who had ever known me or loved me had been killed in one period of seven weeks. I was a year or two older than Bibi — about twenty-four. I was not as pretty as my daughter is now, though my wedding picture shows me with soft chestnut hair. In the picture I look as though someone had just scolded me. I was nervous in those days and easily startled. I worried about gas escaping, burglars at the windows, and bicycles ridden by drunken criminals; I was also afraid of being thought too stupid for Julius and unworthy of being his wife.

I can still see us in our kitchen, under the faintest of lightbulbs, with three plates of soup on the table and a plate for Heidi, the poodle, on the floor. Heidi had belonged to Julius’s parents. “Four old survivors,” said Julius, though Heidi was old and we three were young.

Julius was made a captain and we took our first holiday. We went to Rome. I remember a long train journey during which we ate hard-boiled-egg sandwiches and slept in our clothes. The shops dazzled me; I wanted to buy presents for dozens of people, but I had only Bibi. I chose a marble darning egg and a pair of sandals that were the wrong size. I had thought of her feet as enormous, but to my surprise they were narrow and fine. She could not take two steps in the new sandals without sliding. She kept the shoes as a souvenir. Julius found them in her trunk, wrapped in white tissue paper, after she died.

A change in Bibi’s status came at about that time. Julius had wangled an excellent scholarship for her. With that, and the money she earned at Possner, Bibi could afford an apartment. She said she was happy as she was, but Julius wanted Possner employees to live decently. Also, she roomed with a family of refugees, and Julius did not want her to waste her mental energies talking about the tides of history. I can truthfully say that Julius has never discussed historical change. Do leaves speak? Are mountains asked to have an opinion? Bibi still resisted, saying there was no such thing as a flat in Cologne; but Julius found one. He personally moved her to her new quarters — one room, gas ring, and sink. Just about what she was leaving, except that now she lived alone. I don’t know how the room was furnished — Bibi never invited me to see it. She still came to us for three weekly evenings of housework, still ate her bread and soup and put the money we paid her aside. We were astonished at the size of her savings account when we saw her bankbook years later.

Julius was not so much concerned with Bibi as with Possner. When he helped other people it was because he was helping the firm. His life was his work; his faith was in Possner’s future. I believed in Julius. In one of the books belonging to him — the books that gave me so much trouble on winter afternoons — I read that belief, like love, could not be taken by storm. I knew that Julius lied sometimes, but so do all divinities. Divinities invented convenient fables and they appeared in strange disguises, but they were never mistaken. I believed, because he said it, that we would not live among ashes forever, and that he would give me a new, beautiful house. Because he vouched for Bibi’s genius I had to believe in it too. It was my duty to imagine Bibi ten years from now with a Nobel Prize for chemistry. This was another Bibi, tall and gracious and speaking pure German. She had stopped singing tunes from The Merry Wives of Windsor in such an annoying way, she no longer sat like an elephant or laughed with her mouth wide open or held bread on the palm of her hand to spread it with margarine.

If, in this refined and comfortable future, I corrected Bibi’s manners it was a sign that the postwar social amnesty could not go on. In fact, the rules of difference were restored long before the symphony orchestras were full strength, the prisoners were home, the schools were rebuilt. Seeing where Bibi was going, I began wondering where she had started out. Her name, Beate Brüning, was honest and plain. She hinted that once she had not lived like other people and had missed some of her schooling on that account. Why? Had she been ill, or delinquent? Was she, as well as Silesian, slightly foreign? Sometimes male ancestors had been careless about the women they married. Perhaps Bibi had been unable to give a good account of herself. My textbook of elementary biology in high school explained about the pure and the impure, beginning with plant life. Here was the picture of an upright, splendid, native plant, and next to it the photograph of a spindly thing that never bloomed and that was in some way an alien flower. Bibi’s round face, her calm eyes, her expression of sweetness and anxiety to please spoke of nothing but peasant sanity; still, she was different; she was “other.” She never mentioned her family or said how they had died. I could only guess that they must have vanished in the normal way of a recent period — killed at the front, or lost without trace in the east, or burned alive in air raids. Who were the Brünings? Was she ashamed of them? Were they Socialists, radicals, troublemakers, black marketeers, prostitutes, wife-beaters, informers, Witnesses of Jehovah? After she died no one came forward to claim her bank account, though Julius was scrupulous about advertising. Whoever the Brünings were, Bibi was their survivor, and she was as pure as the rest of us in the sense that she was alone, swept clean of friends and childhood myths and of childhood itself. But someone, at some time, must have existed and must have called her Bibi. A diminutive is not a thing you invent for yourself.