Lydia Davis - Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

When he opened his eyes, the room was again black. He heard the sound of the woman snoring. He was thirsty. “Wake up,” he said. His voice was too feeble. He drew a shallow breath and as the pain increased, spoke again. He coughed and choked on his mucus. The woman only shifted in her bed. He lay back to wait for dawn to draw her from her sleep. Slowly he worked the blankets off his burning legs. A cool breeze blew over his skin.

In the morning, the pain had climbed into his throat, so that he could not swallow without tears coming to his eyes. As though mocking his own darkness, the sun shone over the bed where his limbs gleamed through the rents in this clothes. He looked at his body and saw that it was wasted: the veins stood out over his arms where the flesh had shrunk, and his skin was like parchment. His lungs drew little air into his body; his chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly.

He listened to the early air, searching for some sound to root him in the world. Bird songs circled away through the woods and back again. A dog barked once. A man called out and another, nearby, answered. A footstep brushed the dirt close to Magin, and looking up he saw the woman’s face in the doorway.

“Ning,” she said, smiling.

Magin tried to raise himself from the bed, but had no strength in his arms.

“Oh no. No, no, no,” the woman cried in English with a look of horror on her face, throwing back her head.

“Listen to me,” said Magin.

The woman took a breath and rushed on.

“No: tk. Uurk, uursh.”

Magin turned away from her. His pain deafened him.

The woman hobbled quickly to the door and called out: “Ruckuck. Tk! No, no!” Magin heard the sound of people coming: a soft rustling and then the ground shaking outside his door.

The people crowded into the hut, filling it with the smell of burning wood and tobacco.

“Tk. Pshsht uuril,” said one man, softly.

Magin shrank from the crowd above him.

“Ning,” said the woman.

“No, tk, no pshtu tori,” said another man, bending over Magin and breathing on his face.

As each minute passed, Magin felt the need for silence more desperately, and his fear grew. He wanted to be alone, to think of Mary, to breathe, and to sleep.

There was almost no air left in the room. Magin’s eyesight grew dim. With difficulty, he searched the faces above him for the white-haired old man and did not find him. The woman was smiling in a friendly way. He tried to lift his arm. It was too heavy. Fixing her with his eyes, he said in Trsk, “Bring me water.”

She did not understand, and stopped smiling.

A black-bearded man, standing near the bed, puffed on his pipe in quiet contemplation of Magin. Magin hardly breathed. His throat was dry and he could not swallow.

“Water,” he said again, hoarsely.

“Water,” answered several voices.

Then the black-bearded man said a few guttural words and the people began talking vigorously. “Uurk,” said a small man. “No, tsatet ruck!” shouted another. The dogs, who had come to the hut at the heels of the men, became excited and barked sharply, one after another, outside the door. Magin fainted.

When he regained consciousness the room was empty. He tried to think clearly, but his thoughts faded and slipped from his grasp. The pain had wrapped around him tightly. His throat burned. He looked across at the inner wall and followed the grain of the wood. It was dark and water-stained. He looked at the floor. Clumps of snow lay over the pocked dirt. His eyes turned up toward the ceiling, and found only deepening darkness over the beam. His eyes moved down over the outer wall, from stone to stone, until they fixed on the window. There, beyond the pane, was a crowd of faces, staring intently at him.

Startled, he turned away. He heard fingers moving over the sill. Snow rustled below the window. He tried to close his hands around the mattress, testing his strength, and waited for the voices to rise again.

It has been so long since she used a metaphor!

I like the students. I like their company. I like them here — if only they would remain in the indefinite future. They must be somewhere in my future or they will not be here for me, for company, where I can talk to them sometimes all day long. But that future must never come. Because it is so hard to meet them in the class itself. The problem is that in order to have the company of them here, in my imagination, I must pay the price of that future arriving, as it does, with all the difficulty of that encounter.

Then there is another sort of company in the letters I have not answered. If I answer the letters, those patient or impatient people waiting for answers are no longer present to me. If I answer the letters, I suppose I may be in some cases present to them, then. But, though not telling myself this is the reason, I don’t answer these letters. And yet this is selfish, and of course impolite. I answer some, in fact. But most go unanswered for weeks, months, more than a year, several years, or forever. Several times, I have waited so long to answer a letter that the person has moved away. Once, I waited so long to answer a postcard that my friend died.

But maybe these people are no longer waiting for answers by now anyway; maybe their attention is no longer on me, and this company is only an illusion: the friendly or neutral words are still there on various sheets of paper in different envelopes, but in the minds of these people who wrote the unanswered letters the words for what they are thinking about me, if they think of me at all, are no longer friendly or neutral but unfriendly, dismissive, even disgusted. I believe I have this company, but I do not have it, unless believing this is enough, and I do in some form have this company, whatever they may be thinking.

When I answer one of these letters, true, sometimes all I receive in return, weeks later, is a brief, tired reply. But more often the reply comes quickly and is full, warm, even delighted; and then, just because it is so generous and such wonderful company, it may sit again on my bedside, or on my desk, or on my pile of correspondence, for weeks or months or longer before I answer it.

If they try to add and subtract to see whether the relationship is equal, it won’t work. On his side, he is giving $50,000, she says. No, $70,000, he says. It doesn’t matter, she says. It matters to me, he says. What she is giving is a half-grown child. Is that an asset or a liability? Now, is she supposed to feel grateful to him? She can feel grateful, but not indebted, not that she owes him something. There has to be a sense of equality. I just love to be with you, she says, and you love to be with me. I’m grateful to you for providing for us, and I know my child is sometimes a trouble to you, though you say he is a good child. But I don’t know how to figure it. If I give all I have and you give all you have, isn’t that a kind of equality? No, he says.

It was not possible, and yet it happened; and not suddenly, but very slowly, not a miracle, but a very natural thing, though it was impossible. A girl in our town turned into a stone. But it is true that she had not been the usual sort of girl even before that: she had been a tree. Now a tree moves in the wind. But sometime near the end of September she began not to move in the wind anymore. For weeks she moved less and less. Then she never moved. When her leaves fell they fell suddenly and with a terrible noise. They crashed onto the cobblestones and sometimes broke into fragments and sometimes remained whole. There would be a spark where they fell and a little white powder lying beside them. People, though I did not, collected her leaves and put them on the mantlepiece. There never was such a town, with stone leaves on every mantlepiece. Then she began to turn gray: at first we thought it was the light. With wrinkled foreheads, twenty of us at a time would stand in a circle around her shading our eyes, dropping our jaws — and so few teeth we had among us it was something to see — and say it was the time of day or the changing season that made her look gray. But soon it was clear that she was simply gray now, just that, the way years ago we had to admit that she was simply a tree now, and no longer a girl. But a tree is one thing and a stone is another. There are limits to what you can accept, even of impossible things.