Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

Piotr awoke fresh and rested, as though nothing had happened in the night. Nevertheless he let his hostess make an appointment at her clinic. “I still think it is bachelor’s ailment,” she grumbled, but she spoke with a false gruffness that meant she might be unsure.

“It is a chill in the throat,” he said. Oh, to be told there were only six weeks to live! To settle scores; leave nothing straggling; to go quietly. Everything had failed him: his work (because it inevitably fell short of his vision), his marriage, politics, and now, because of Laurie, he had learned something final about love. He had been to jail for nothing, a poet for nothing, in love for nothing. And yet, in the night, how desperately he had craved his life — his own life, not another’s. Also, how shamefully frightened he had felt. Laurie had told him once that he was a coward.

“All married men of your kind are scared,” she had said, calmly. This took place at the small table of one of the drugstores she favored. Piotr said he was not married, not really. “I’ll tell you if you’re married and scared,” she said. She looked at him over a steaming coffee cup. “Supposing I bought a Matisse and gave it to you.”

“How could you?”

“We’re imagining. Say I went without a winter coat to buy you a Matisse.”

“A Matisse what?”

“Anything. Signed.”

“For a winter coat?”

“Can’t you imagine anything, Potter? Your lovely Matisse arrives in Warsaw. You unwrap it. It is a present from me. You know that it comes with my love. It’s the sign of love and of going without.” The trouble was that he could see it. He could see himself unrolling the picture. It was the head of a woman. “Would you hang it up on the wall?”

“Of course.”

“And tell people where it came from?”

“What people?”

“If your wife came to see you, what would you say?”

“That it came from Paris.”

“From someone who loved you?”

“It isn’t her business,” said Piotr.

“You see?” said Laurie. “You’d never dare. You’re just a married man, and a frightened one. As frightened as any. You’re even scared of an ex-wife. The day you can tell her where your Matisse came from, the day you say, ‘I’m proud that any girl ever could have loved me that much,’ then you’ll know you’ve stopped being a scared little guy.”

The Matisse was as real to him now as the car in which she had rushed away from the airport. Laurie could never in a lifetime have bought a Matisse. “Matisse” was only a name, the symbol of something famous and costly. She could accuse Piotr of fear because she was not certain what fear was; at least, she had never been frightened. Piotr thought this over coolly. Her voice, which had sung in his mind since her departure, suddenly left him. It had died on the last words, “scared little guy.”

“How silent my life will be now,” Piotr said to himself. Yet it seemed to him that his anguish was diminishing, leaving behind it only the faint, daily anxiety any man can endure. A few days later he actually felt slow happiness, like water rising, like a tide edging in. He sat drinking black tea with Maria in her cramped little flat full of bric-a-brac and sagging divans. He saw sun on a window box and felt the slow tide. Maria was talking about men and women. She used books for her examples and the names of characters in novels as if they were friends: “Anna lived on such a level of idiocy, really.” “If Natasha had not had all those children …” “Lavretsky was too resigned.” Piotr decided this might be the soundest way of getting at the truth. Experience had never brought him near to the truth about anything. If he had fled Warsaw, forsaken his children, tried to live with Laurie, been abandoned by her, he would have been washed up in rooms like Maria’s. He would have remembered to put clean sheets on the bed when he had a new girl in the offing, given tea to visitors from the home country, quoted from authors, spoken comic-sounding French and increasingly old-fashioned Polish until everyone but a handful of other émigrés had left him behind.

At ten in the morning, by appointment, Piotr arrived at the clinic where his hostess had her office. She had drawn a map and had repeated her instructions in every form except Braille. The clinic was a nineteenth-century brick house, miles from a Métro stop and unknown to buses. He approached it through streets of condemned houses with empty windows. A nurse directed him out to a mossy yard that smelled of mushrooms, and across to a low, shabby building, where the dim light, the atmosphere of dread and of waiting, the smell of ether and of carbolic were like any prison infirmary on inspection day. He joined a dozen women and one other man sitting around the four sides of a room. A kitchen table, dead center, held last winter’s magazines. No one looked at these except Piotr, who tiptoed to the table and back. The room was so silent that he could hear one of the women swallowing saliva. Then from next door came the sound of thuds and iron locks. His prison memories, reviving easily, said, Someone is dying. They have gone out, all of them, and left a prisoner to die alone.

“My throat,” he rehearsed. “I have no fever, no other symptoms, nothing seriously the matter, nothing but an incurable cancer of the throat.”

A few mornings later his hostess knocked at the bedroom door and came in without waiting. His pajama jacket was undone. He groped for his glasses and put them on, as if they dressed him. The doctor placed a small glass tube filled with pink tablets on the night table.

“I still think it is bachelor’s ailment,” she said. “But if the pain should leave your throat, where you seem to want it to be, and you feel something here,” placing an impudent hand on his chest, “take two of these half an hour apart. As soon as you get back to Warsaw, go into hospital for serious tests. I’ll give you your dossier before you leave, with a letter for your doctor.”

“What is it?”

“Just do as I tell you. It isn’t serious.”

“I’ll imagine the worst,” said Piotr.

“Imagining the worst protects you from it.”

The worst was not a final illness; it was still a Venice built of white stone, with white bridges and statues. On a snowy street Laurie studied the menu outside a restaurant. Hand in hand with the Austrian, she said, “I’d rather go home and make love.” Piotr’s hand closed around the vial of pills. He guessed that the medicine was a placebo, but it could be a remedy for the worst. A placebo might accidentally attack the secret enemy that, unknown to the most alert and intelligent doctors in Paris, was slowly killing Piotr.

The worst, as always, turned out to be something simple. The French teacher sent to Poland in exchange for Piotr had wandered from her subject. Finding her students materialistic and coarsely bourgeois, she had tried to fire them with revolutionary ideals and had been expelled from the country. In retaliation, Piotr was banished from France. Marek accompanied his cousin to police headquarters. He seemed as helpless as Piotr and for once had no solutions. Piotr received a five-day reprieve to wind up his affairs. He would not give another lecture, and unless Laurie came back he would never see her again. Marek questioned him — grilled him, in fact: Who was the reporter he had talked to at the Balzar? Could Piotr describe him? Was he a Pole, an American? What about the pregnant girl — had Piotr offended her, had he made foolish and untranslatable jokes during that day’s lecture? Piotr answered patiently, but Marek was not satisfied. There must have been Someone, he said, meaning the shadowy Someone who dogged their lives, who fed émigré fears and fantasies. In Marek’s experience Someone always turned out to have a name, to be traceable. When, barely two days later, Someone informed Piotr that he had violated his agreement (that is, he was leaving) and therefore would not receive any money, he gazed at the unreadable signature and knew for certain that no human brain could be behind this; it was entirely the work of some bureaucratic machine performing on its own. Marek continued to grumble and to speculate about Someone, while Piotr settled for the machine. It was a restful solution and one he had learned to live with.