Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

The old man could not hear any of this. His shaking freckled hands had been assembling the hearing aid. He adjusted it in time to hear Ilona say, “It is hard to be given lessons in correct speech by someone who eats like a pig.”

He sighed and said only, “Children,” as one might sound resigned to any natural enemy.

The émigré’s mother, their landlady, had stopped writing. She looked up, not at them, but of course they believed they could be seen. They began to talk about their past family history, as they did when they became tense and excited, and it all went into the letter. Ilona had lost her father, her mother, and her little sister in a road accident when, with Grandfather, they had been on their way to a funeral in the suburbs in a bus.

Funerals seemed to be the only outing they ever enjoyed. The old man listened to Ilona telling it again, but presently he got up and left them, as if the death of his son allowed him no relief even so many years later. When he came back he had his hat and coat on. For some reason, he had misunderstood and thought they had to leave at once for the new excursion. He took his landlady’s hand and pumped it up and down, saying, “From the bottom of my heart…,” though all he was leading up to was “Goodbye.” He did not let her hand go until he inadvertently brought it down hard on a thick cup.

“He has always embarrassed us in public,” said Ilona, clearing away. “What could we do? He was my father’s father.”

That other time, said the old man — calmed now, sitting down in his overcoat — the day of the fatal funeral, there had been time to spare, out in a suburb, where they had to change from one bus to another. They had walked once around a frozen duckpond. He had been amazed, the old man remembered, at how many people were free on a working weekday. His son carried one of the children; little Ilona walked.

“Of course I walked! I was twelve!” she screamed from the sink.

He had been afraid that Ilona would never learn to speak, because her mother said everything for her. When Ilona pointed with her woolly fist, her mother crooned, “Skaters.” Or else she announced, “You are cold,” and pulled a scarf up over Ilona’s apple cheeks.

“That was my sister,” Ilona said. “I was twelve.”

“Now, a governess might have made the child speak, say words correctly,” said the old man. “Mothers are helpless. They can only say yes, yes, and try to repeat what the child seems to be thinking.”

“He has always embarrassed us,” Ilona said. “My mother hated going anywhere in his company.”

Once around the duckpond, and then an old bus rattled up and they got in. The driver was late, and to make up for time he drove fast. At the bottom of a hill, on a wide sheet of black ice, the bus turned like a balky horse, rocked, steadied, and, the driver threw himself over the wheel as if to protect it. An army lorry came down the hill, the first of two. Ilona’s mother pulled the baby against her and pulled Ilona’s head on her lap.

“Eight killed, including the two drivers,” Ilona said.

Here was their folklore, their richness; how many persons have lost their families on a bus and survived to describe the holocaust? No wonder she and Grandfather were still together. If she had not married her child’s father, it was because he had not wanted Grandfather to live with them. “You, yes,” he had said to Ilona. “Relatives, no.” Grandfather nodded, for he was used to hearing this. Her cold sacrifice always came on top of his disapproval.

Well, that was not quite the truth of it, the émigré’s mother went on writing. The man who had interceded for them, whom she had felt it was wiser not to refuse, who might be the child’s father, had been married for quite a long time.

The old man looked blank and strained. His eyes had become small. He looked Chinese. “Where we lived then was a good place to live with children,” he said, perhaps speaking of a quarter fading like the edge of a watercolor into gray apartment blocks. Something had frightened him. He took out a clean pocket handkerchief and held it to his lips.

“Another army lorry took us to the hospital,” said Ilona. “Do you know what you were saying?”

He remembered an ambulance. He and his grandchild had been wrapped in blankets, had lain on two stretchers, side by side, fingers locked together. That was what he remembered.

“You said, ‘ My mother, my mother ,’ ” she told him.

“I don’t think I said that.”

Now they are having their usual disagreement, she wrote her son. Lorry or ambulance?

“I heard,” said Ilona. “I was conscious.”

“I had no reason. If I said, ‘My mother,’ I was thinking, ‘My children.’ ”

The rainstorm would cover pages more. Her letter had veered off and resembled her thoughts at night. She began to tell him she had trouble sleeping. She had been given a wonderful new drug, but unfortunately it was habit-forming and the doctor would not renew it. The drug gave her a deep sleep, from which she emerged fresh and enlivened, as if she had been swimming. During the sleep she was allowed exact and colored dreams in which she was a young girl again and men long dead came to visit. They sat amiably discussing their deaths. Her first fiancé, killed in 1943, opened his shirt to show the chest wound. He apologized for having died without warning. He did not know that less than a year later she had married another man. The dead had no knowledge of love beyond the span of their own lives. The next night, she found herself with her son’s father. They were standing together buying tickets for a play when she realized he was dead. He stood in his postwar shabbiness, discreet, hidden mind, camouflaged face, and he had ceased to be with the living. Her grief was so cruel that, lest she perish in sleep from the shock of it, someone unseen but conciliating suggested that she trade any person she knew in order to keep him with her. He would never have the misery of knowing that he was dead.

What would her son say to all this? My mother is now at an age when women dream of dead men, he might tell himself; when they begin to choose quite carelessly between the dead and the living. Women are crafty even in their sleep. They know they will survive. Why weep? Why discuss? Why let things annoy you? For a long time she believed he had left because he could not look at her life. Perhaps his going had been as artless, as simple, as he still insisted: he had got his first passport, flown out with a football team, never come back. He was between the dead and the living, a voice on the telephone, an affectionate letter full of English words, a coin rolled and lying somewhere in secret. And she, she was the revered and respected mother of a generous, an attentive, a camouflaged stranger.

Tell me the weather, he still wrote. Tell me the names of streets. She began a new page: Vörösmarty Place, if you remember, is at the beginning of Vásci Street, the oldest street in the Old City. In the middle of the Place stands a little park. Our great poet, for whom the Place is named, sits carved in marble. Sculptured figures look gratefully up to him. They are grateful because he is the author of the national anthem. There are plane trees full of sparrows, and there are bus stops, and even a little Métro, the oldest in Europe, perhaps old-fashioned, but practical — it goes to the Zoo, the Fine Arts Museum, the Museum of Decorative Art, the Academy of Music, and the Opera. The old redoubt is there, too, at least one wall of it, backed up to a new building where you go to book seats for concerts. The real face of the redoubt has been in ruins since the end of the war. It used to be Moorish-romantic. The old part, which gave on the Danube, had in her day — no, in her mother’s day — been a large concert hall, the reconstruction of which created grave problems because of modern acoustics. At Gerbeaud’s the pastries are still the best in Europe, she wrote, and so are the prices. There are five or six little rooms, little marble tables, comfortable chairs. Between the stiff lace curtains and the windowpanes are quite valuable pieces of china. In summer one can sit on the pavement. There is enough space between the plane trees, and the ladies with their elegant hats are not in too much danger from the sparrows. If you come there, you will see younger people, too, and foreigners, and women who wait for foreigners, but most of the customers, yes, most, belong to the magic circle of mothers whose children have gone away. The café opens at ten and closes at nine. It is always crowded. “You can often find me there,” she went on, “and without fail every Saturday,” as if she might look up and see him draw near, transformed, amnesiac, not knowing her. I hope that I am not in your dreams, she said, because dreams are populated by the silent and the dead, and I still speak, I am alive. I wear a hat with a brim and soft gray gloves. I read their letters in three foreign languages. Thanks to you, I can order an endless succession of little cakes, I can even sip cognac. Will you still know me? I was your mother.