Lydia Davis - Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

At last they reached Karsovy. As they drew up into a large clearing, Magin saw women in black crossing the drifts like shadows. Men crouched in front of their doorways.

Magin climbed down with his bag and rested against the car door. He looked up and saw that several people had gathered and were watching him. The women inched forward: their eyes flew from his face to his bag, but not a word passed their lips. Magin searched among the stony-faced men for the leader of the village, and the people became uneasy. They were puzzled by him.

“What?” said Magin to the driver, who had not moved from his seat. “What are they waiting for? Why are they staring at me? Why don’t they say anything?”

“Why should they say anything?” the driver said finally. “Anyway, you wouldn’t understand them. No one understands them. They don’t even know how to speak Trsk.” He smacked the wheel. “I brought another old man like you out this way. That was months ago and no one’s heard of him since.” He spat in the snow and glanced at the villagers with contempt. Before Magin could speak, he leaned on the horn, turned the car, and drove back into the woods.

Magin wondered what to do. One by one the villagers turned and went away, glancing back over their shoulders and stopping in mid-step to stare at him again. Two women stayed behind. One was old, thin, and shabbily dressed. The other was younger, and more muscular. The old one started forward, tightening her kerchief and opening her toothless mouth in a smile. The other one caught her by the sleeve.

“Ninininini,” the old one said, her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and her eyes glimmered from under the brow of her kerchief. She pulled away from the younger one and started forward again. The younger one cuffed her lightly on the shoulder and hissed at her. The old one turned and spat, and then walked away, her skirt trailing over the snow behind her.

The younger woman motioned to Magin to follow her. They turned up a small path, Magin favoring one leg. Under the trees he felt the cold close in on him like a vise. He coughed. His breath rattled in his throat.

The path wound among the stone huts. Heavily-furred dogs lay before many of the doors and growled as Magin and the woman went by. At the end of the path lay the woman’s hut. With one hand on the latch, she took a quick look back at Magin. Standing next to her, he caught a whiff of her fetid clothes. She opened the door and Magin followed her blindly. He was assaulted by the smell of unwashed linen. Slowly the air came in from the outside and he breathed more easily.

When his eyes grew accustomed to the pale light that fell over the back of the room from the small windows and the chinks in the stone, he saw that the hut was divided into two rooms by a thin wooden wall. To his left, in the larger room, he made out a table, a cupboard, some chairs, a bed, and on the far wall a framed photograph of the country’s leader in military dress. To his right was a small room, doorless. He could see the end of a narrow cot, and nothing else. The woman, standing close beside him, pushed on his shoulder.

“Ehh, ehh,” she said, and nodded. He went into the little room and dropped his bag by the bed. He was so tired that he could hardly bear the weight of his clothes. He wanted to lie down, but he was embarrassed by the woman behind him.

He looked out the window and then turned around. The woman had left. He lay down and closed his eyes tightly. He could not even remember why he was here. He began dreaming before he was fully asleep. He dreamt of the train ride through France, though that was already several days behind him. His wife, her hair slipping from its pins with the motion of the train, was reading aloud to him from a newspaper, like a child in her outmoded glasses and ill fitting dress. Yet in the dream he felt that he was the one in the wrong place.

Less than two hours later, waking from his sleep, he saw his brother’s tape recorder on a shelf in the corner of the room. He waited for this vision to fade.

It often happened, now, that his memory failed or that he recreated things he remembered and placed them where they did not actually exist.

The tape recorder remained, however, and beside it he now saw a neat pile of notebooks, some clothing, a sewing box, a pair of slippers, a pair of boots, and a knife. Was it possible that his brother had lived in this room? Magin did not move, for fear his brother’s possessions would vanish.

After fifteen minutes or so, Magin was fully awake. He got up and went over to the shelf. Touching his brother’s possessions, he felt reassured. This was his brother’s room: he had often been in his brother’s room when his brother was absent, though this was a different room from any of the others. Yet this was his brother’s room, and that meant that though his brother was now gone from the room, he would return to it.

And yet why, in that case, had the woman allowed him to lie down and go to sleep here? Perhaps she had merely been showing him the room, and did not intend him to sleep here. Or perhaps she thought he would wait for his brother here. And, after all, that was what he was actually doing, now.

But there was a musty, disused smell about the clothes. And the notebooks stuck together, so that when Magin touched one, they all moved in a block. Perhaps his brother had been gone for a long time. He could not be dead, because in that case the woman would have put his possessions away somewhere. Unless this was where she had put them.

When he went out of the room, the woman was setting a meal on the table. Magin took her arm and led her into the small room. He pointed to his brother’s possession and asked her, “Where is the man who owns these things?”

She answered him only by gesturing toward the objects on the shelf in a way which Magin could not understand. She said one or two words only, and these he could not identify in any way with Trsk. Though this disappointed him, it did not surprise him. His brother had come here in order to record the language, after all. He had said it was on the point of dying out.

Magin gave up, not knowing what move to make, and followed the woman back to the table. Out the window, there were long violet shadows under the trees. He sat down, very hungry. He looked at the food. A cube of dry meat stood next to a heel of bread. He could see that the meat was too tough for his old teeth. He picked up the bread and ate it little by little, letting it soften before he chewed it. His hunger faded.

As the woman cleared the table, Magin lit a thin, cheap cigar and immediately started to cough. He felt a certain satisfaction in having come this far. However, he did not see how he was going to find out where his brother was: he was rather helpless, it turned out, because of the language. He stubbed his cigar and slipped what remained of it back in its box.

The woman put on her overcoat and gestured toward the door. Magin thought, with sudden hope, that now she was going to show him how to find Michael. In his excitement, he forgot where his room was, and stood still until the woman pushed him in the right direction. He put on his coat and followed her.

Outside the hut, the birds were now quiet; there was almost no light left in the sky, and the air was sharp. Magin, hurrying, stumbled over hidden roots. The dogs were gone from the doorways of the huts, which he and the woman passed quickly. When Magin thought they were still far away from the clearing, the sky widened. The windows of the largest hut glowed with orange firelight. Magin’s mouth was dry. He swallowed and walked after the woman into the hut.

Before he could steady himself, the woman disappeared from his side. At first the firelight dazzled him. He looked down. A dog was snaking toward him with its belly to the ground. The room was dense with people. In perfect silence they watched him: near the fire, men squatted on low stools and benches digging rhythmically into the thick socks that covered their ankles and scratching their scalps and ears; farther away, in a disordered group, the women sat together hissing over their needlework, shrugging fitfully, and sucking their teeth.