Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

The doctor heard him out. “I think it is just something I call bachelor’s ailment,” she said. “You ought to have a mistress, if only to give you something real to worry about.” Perhaps she meant this kindly, but even a doctor can have curious motives, especially one who shows her gums when she laughs, and whose husband gets up early to avoid being alone with her. “Do you want to see someone at my clinic?”

“No. It will go away.”

“Suit yourself.”

He delivered his third lecture through a tight, cindery throat. The room was filled with students this time, smoking, fidgeting, reading, whispering. He wondered what they were doing indoors on a glowing day. They showed little interest and asked only a few of their puzzling questions. After the lecture a plump man who introduced himself as a journalist invited Piotr to the terrace of the Brasserie Balzar. He wore a nylon turtleneck pullover and blazer and a large chrome-plated watch. Piotr supposed that he must have been sent by Marek — one of his cousin’s significant connections. The reporter drank beer. Piotr, whose vitals rejected even its smell now, had weak tea, and even his tea seemed aggressive.

The reporter had a long gulp of his beer and said, “Are you one of those rebel poets?”

“Not for a second,” said Piotr fervently.

“What about the letter you sent to Pravda and that Pravda refused to print?”

“I have never written to Pravda,” said Piotr.

The reporter scribbled away, using many more words than Piotr had. Piotr remarked, “I am not a Soviet poet. I am a Polish lecturer, officially invited by a French university.”

At this the reporter wrote harder than ever, and then asked Piotr about the Warsaw Legia — which Piotr, after a moment of brick wall, was able to recognize as the name of a football team — and about its great star, Robert Gadocha, whom Piotr had never heard of at all: The reporter shook Piotr’s hand and departed. Piotr meant to make a note of the strange meeting and to ask Marek about the man, but as he opened his pocket diary he saw something of far greater importance — today was the sixteenth of October, the feast day of St. Jadwiga. His hostess, whose name this was, had particularly wanted him to be there for dinner. He went to a Swiss film about a girl in love with a married dentist, slept comfortably until the renunciation scene, and remembered when he came out that he would have to bring his hostess a present. Buying flowers, he glanced across the shop and saw the Austrian. He was with an old woman — his mother, perhaps. She moved back and forth, pointing and laughing in a way Piotr took to be senile. As she bent her topknot over calla lilies Piotr saw the Austrian clearly. Oh, it was the same man, with the wide forehead and slight smile. He gave the babbling old woman all his attention and charm. But when he and Piotr stood side by side, each of them paying — one for lilies, one for roses — Piotr saw that he was older than the Austrian in the picture, and that his arms and shoulders were stiff, slightly paralyzed. The senile old mother was efficient and brisk; it was she who carried the flowers. The Austrian was back in Venice, where he belonged. Is that where I want him, Piotr wondered.

The entire apartment, even Piotr’s part of it, smelled of food cooking. The doctor had waved and tinted her hair and darkened her lashes. Her husband was dressed in a dark suit and sombre tie. His gift to his wife, a pair of coral earrings, reposed on a velvet cushion on the dining-room table. The guests, remnants of the couple’s old, happy days in the Resistance, sat stiffly, drinking French apéritifs. They were “little” Poles; Marek would not have known their names, or wished to. Their wives were French, so that the conversation was in French and merely polite. No one came in unexpectedly, as friends usually did for a name day. St. Jadwiga, incarnated in Paris, seemed to Piotr prim and middle-class. From Heaven his mind moved naturally to Venice, where he saw a white table and white chairs on the edge of a blue square. But perhaps Venice was quite other — perhaps it was all dark stone.

He had trouble swallowing his drink. A demon holding a pitchfork sat in his throat. Sometimes the pitchfork grazed his ear. The three men and Jadwiga soon slipped into Polish and reminiscences of the war. The French wives chatted to each other, and then the doctor drew their chairs close to the television set. She had been one of a delegation of doctors who that day had called on the Minister of Health; if they looked hard they might see a glimpse of her. All seven stared silently at the clockface now occupying the screen. The seconds ticked over. As soon as the news began, the doctor’s husband began closing the shutters and drawing the curtains. It was a noisy performance, and Piotr saw that the doctor had tears in her eyes. Piotr thought of how this sniping went on night after night, with guests or without. He stared at lights reflected on the glassy screen, like fragments of a planet. A clock on the marble mantel had hands that never moved. The mirror behind the clock was tipped at an angle, so that Piotr could see himself. His hostess, following her most important guest’s gaze, cried that the clock worked perfectly; her husband kept forgetting to wind it! At this everyone smiled at Piotr, as if to say, “So that is what poets wonder about!”

Dinner was further delayed because of a television feuilleton everyone in the room except Piotr had been following for seventeen weeks. A girl named Vanessa had been accused of euthanasia on the person of her aunt, named Ingrid, who had left Vanessa a large fortune. Anthony, a police detective from the Sûreté whose role it was to bully Vanessa into a hysterical confession, was suspected by all in the room (save Piotr). Anthony was a widower. His young daughter, Samantha, had left home because she wanted to be a championship swimmer. Anthony was afraid Samantha would die of heart failure as her mother, Pamela, had. Samantha did not know that at the time of her mother’s death there had been whispers about euthanasia. The detective’s concern for Samantha’s inherited weakness was proof to everyone (except Piotr) that he had been innocent of Pamela’s death. The dead aunt’s adopted son, Flavien, who had been contesting the will, and who had been the cause of poor Vanessa’s incarceration in the Santé prison, now said he would not testify against her after all. Piotr’s France, almost entirely out of literature, had given him people sensibly called Albertine, Berthe, Marcel, and Colette. This flowering of exotic names bewildered him, but he did not think it worth mentioning. He had a more precise thought, which was that if his throat infection turned out to be cancer it would remove the need for wondering about anything. He invented advice he would leave his children: “Never try to make an unhappy person happy. It is a waste of life, and you will defeat your own natural goodness.” In the looking glass behind the stopped clock Piotr was ugly and old.

Before going to sleep that night he read the account he had written of his love for Laurie. It had turned into a long wail, something for the ear, a babbling complaint. Describing Laurie, he had inevitably made two persons of her. Behind one girl — unbreakably jaunty, lacking only in imagination — came a smaller young woman who was fragile and untruthful and who loved out of fear. He had never sensed any fear in Laurie. He decided he would never write in that way about his life again.

He was pulled out of a long dream about airports by his own choked coughing. His left lung was on fire and a new pain, like an electric wire, ran along his arm to the tip of his little finger. He tried to suppress the coughing because another burst would kill him, and as he held his breath he felt a chain being forged, link by link, around his chest. The last two links met; the chain began to tighten. Before he could suffocate, a cough broke from him and severed the chain. He was shaking, covered in icy sweat. Panting, unable to raise himself on an elbow because of the pain, he gasped, “Help me.” He may have fainted. The room was bright, the doctor bent over him. She swabbed his arm — he felt the cold liquid but not the injection. He wanted to stay alive. That overrode everything.