Mavis Gallant - The Cost of Living - Early and Uncollected Stories

“That’s a good sign,” said the dark nurse. “Smiling is the best sign. We are bringing your telephone back today. We took it out so the ringing wouldn’t disturb you. And look!” She whipped out her hand and held an envelope to his face. The handwriting said something to him, but his feeling was of apprehension, as if the letter had come too soon, and made too great a claim. He lifted his hand and took the letter. He had a wired arm attached to a wired spine. He was unable to read his own name. “There’s too much light in this room,” he said.

“It’s the morphine,” said the nurse. She had a sugary voice. “You can’t focus. But you are getting smaller doses now.”

That was all. From this momentary puzzle he moved on to his new state of bliss. He knew there would be nothing but brief periods of doubt followed by intervals of blessedness. Uncaring, impartial, he remembered the name for his condition: la belle indifférence .

“We have used the expression too often and I for one am sick to death of it,” said the judge. Another voice remarked, “He is simulating indifference and knows very well what is in the balance.” “I used the term in an ironical sense,” said the consulting psychiatrist, rather crossly, “and did not intend the court to take it seriously.”

He saw the prisoner, the judge. The prisoner was smiling, dreamy, unaware; they could do as they liked. Had he really seen this? No, he had read about it. It was an account of a trial he had read that summer, sitting on a beach. He had the airmail edition of the Times . The Times gave a long, thorough, and sober account of the case. He read it on the beach, with his children and wife nearby, and he wondered about la belle indifférence , which seemed a state of privileged happiness reserved for criminals and the totally insane. His younger son crawled away with his sunglasses, his cigarettes. It was because of his children, both babies, that his wife could not be with him now.

“When can I smoke?” he said, carefully putting the letter down.

“That is a very good sign, wanting to smoke,” said the cooing nurse. “Your wife has called twice from Paris. We told her you were very quiet, no trouble at all. When you have the telephone you can talk to her. You must practice reaching, so that you can pick up the telephone. Pretend this is a telephone.” It was his toothbrush.

In Europe, the doctors save you but the nurses kill you; before the operation someone had told him that. But he had a job in Paris and it was too expensive, out of the question, to go home. He had been told that in this place he would have care as good as any. What a mistake! The nursing was slipshod, slack. The girls were callous and unconcerned. They came and went, doing nothing really useful. They chattered together, and took little notice of him. And the doctor; what of the doctor? “Why hasn’t the doctor been to see me?” he asked in a new, querulous voice — like an ailing countertenor’s.

“Aren’t three visits a day enough for you?” said the nurse, with all the honey gone from her voice. “You will be seeing less of him now. He has cases much more serious than yours. He is a celebrated surgeon, a busy man.”

The goddess was a plain girl of about twenty-three. She was rough and impatient about his bath, and when she pulled the sheet taut underneath him it was an earthquake.

“You have to do too much for patients in Switzerland,” she remarked. “I am French, and I am working here only to get an international certificate. All this washing and feeding…” She made a face and said, “In France, the patients look after themselves.”

“I know it,” he said. “That’s why I came to Lausanne. I work in France.” He had intended to tell her all about himself that morning — all about his children and wife. Now he would tell her nothing. In any case, he hardly needed her now. He could move his head when he wanted to, and reach for the telephone or his cigarettes. With only a little help he was able to turn on his side.

“You’re getting better,” the former goddess said placidly. “Bad temper is the best sign.”

“You mean I’m a bad patient?” He resolved he would give as little trouble as possible, even if it meant hardship, hopeless neglect. Just the same, he thought, I think the doctor might come around more often than he does.

Now he knew everything, of course. What lingered of his amnesia was the sweetness of la belle indifférence . Sometimes he regretted it, and wished he had been in a state to observe it and put it away in his mind, but the return of memory, and reason, brought all the reasonable problems of the future as well — sensible problems of convalescence, work, money, home. Very soon he recalled everything he needed for everyday life, although there were crevices now and again: he forgot the names of close friends, and once the number of his own telephone. In conversation with the doctor, an amateur botanist, he forgot “trillium.” And even much later, when nearly all of the first days had gone from his consciousness, he still could not believe he had ever come to this place voluntarily but secretly was certain he had somehow been tormented and then brought against his will.

1962

HE HAD SEEN his older brother, Günther, swear personal allegiance to Hitler when Günther was fifteen and he, Stefan, only six. Actually Günther promised nothing aloud, but stood with his lips tight. Later on, the boys’ father said to Günther, “You haven’t proven anything. No one knows what you were thinking. It was too late to drop out at the last minute. You have promised what the others promised, whether you wanted to or not.”

What Stefan had never known and wondered now — it came back to him eighteen years later on a winter morning in France — was whether Günther was against the words because they were binding or against the idea they expressed. The formula of fidelity had been changed since the war (from 1939 until the capitulation, one swore to the person of Hitler instead of to the State), and perhaps Günther positively did not wish to make a gift of his life. Whatever his silence concealed, it stood for extreme feeling. Günther, now dead, had nothing more to say or conceal. And Stefan, walking among the French on a rainy morning, was wordless, as his brother had been eighteen years before.

In the laboratory outside Paris where Stefan’s scholarship had taken him, the professors, the technicians, his friends and comrades, had put on their coats. Someone said, “Is Germany with us?” “Germany” meant Stefan. The rooms were dark and the heat in the building turned off; there was a general strike from eight until noon. Stefan went with the rest. It was too dark to work and he couldn’t very well stay there alone.

There were nearly eighty of them straggling along the pavement. They walked slowly, as if it were a mild spring day instead of a winter morning of rain. They walked by the stone walls, the brick houses, the drenched winter gardens of this town that had been a quiet suburb and was now ringed with factories and fragile-looking blocks of flats. Rain darkened Stefan’s fair hair. If the police came now and asked them what they were doing, he intended to excuse himself. “Forgive me,” he would say, “but it was impossible to stay behind. I am in France with a scholarship. I am a guest of the country. I regret any worry I might be causing you by walking to the center of town instead of remaining at my work.”

He was more than a guest; they had sent for him. What is a foreign scholarship if not a sort of bribe? Faint conceit made him glance at a girl walking beside him — a girl who had flirted with him in the halls. Now she walked with her hands in the pockets of her raincoat. Her head, in a cotton scarf, was bent slightly forward. She was silent and thinking hard; he could see that because of the way a tooth held her lower lip. It would have seemed to him attractive, rather sensual, if she had not been so removed. Stefan hoped for her sake that she was wearing a sweater under her thin raincoat. Now and again she shivered. When they got back to the laboratory, he would advise her to take aspirin, he thought.