Don DeLillo - Underworld

"Til just go ten, twenty yards," he told her. "Just to see what's causing this, some ruptured pipe probably, out of curiosity."

He had to conceal the memory from her just as he'd once concealed the smell. And the strain of evacuation grew worse, they had their passports, they had their visas, they went to Pinsk, they went to Minsk, he grunted on the seat until all the elements issued-earth, air, fire and water.

The deeper into communist country, the more foul his BMs.

They were accompanied everywhere they went by an Intourist guide. A guide dropped them off, another guide met them, someone sneaked a look in their luggage, a guide made sure they did not cast a passing glance at certain sensitive buildings, at rivers with dams a hundred miles upstream, at roads that led to military sites a thousand miles away. It was like sharing every breath with your personal policeman. Even the weather was a secret, unpublished in newspapers and never mentioned in tones above a whisper.

He had names and addresses and talked to a dozen people and followed a trail that led to Gorki, where a cousin many times removed told him to go to a street of unfinished buildings and that's where they found Avram, the first time he and Marvin had ever set eyes on each other, he's living in a tiny flat with his second wife and his second, third and fourth children. They embraced and wept, maybe it was real, maybe partly for effect, speaking smidgens of Russian, English and Yiddish, and soon they were arguing strenuously. Avram was a dedicated communist with a beetled brow and he spat little word-flecks of contempt at the U.S., the system is corrupt, we will eat you for lunch, you are a what-do-you-call-it kind of culture, a mickey mouse culture, and that night Marvin had to make an emergency visit to the hotel toilet, where he unleashed a

Marvin thought of his bowel movements as BMs, a phrase he'd heard an army doctor mutter once. His BMs were turning against him, turning violent in a way. He and Eleanor went through the Dolomites and across Austria and nipped into the northwest corner of Hungary and the stuff came crashing out of him, noisy and remarkably dark. But mainly it was the smell that disturbed him. He was afraid Eleanor would notice. He realized this was probably a normal part of every early marriage, smelling the other's smell, getting it over and done with so you can move ahead with your lives, have children, buy a little house, remember everybody's birthday, take a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway, get sick and die. But in this case the husband had to take extreme precautions because the odor was shameful, it was intense and deeply personal and seemed to say something awful about the bearer.

His smell was a secret he had to keep from his wife.

They entered Czechoslovakia, where the toilets flushed so weakly that he had to flush and wait and then flush some more and he opened windows and waved towels, feeling guilty and trapped. There was something cold and hard in the streets, a breathable tension, many arrests, people on trial. The newlyweds argued with an ironworker in a cafe, he was proud of the smoke and filth that hung over the landscape, this was progress, this was industrial might and drive- the darker the skies and the more property owners in prison, the greater the future of the socialist state.

Who are they, Marvin thought, that it drives me crazy not to convince them that they're wrong?

His BMs grew steamier as they traveled up through eastern Poland. They argued with workers in a stand-up bar, men drinking morning mugs of beer. They argued with a woman who did ticket prices on an abacus. Marvin returned to a toilet for a newspaper he'd left behind, he was looking vainly for baseball scores in a Warsaw daily, and he was surprised by the heat in the little room, the steamy aura he'd established there, it was heavy and humid, an air mass of sweltry stench- all that radiant energy from a single BM.

Lucky for him that Eleanor went first every day. Because she Shouldn't have to confront this, an English girl with hair that's nearly blond. He made sure she never passed a toilet he'd just used.

He said to Marvin, We're making bigger bombs than the West can even dream. That's why the windows break so easy.

Yes, it galled Marvin to think of a man living under these circumstances, carrying a kitchen tap back and forth, the spout and two valves but only the cold gives water, the family crowded up the walls and he's so cocky and flushed, this was the thing that drove Marvin nuts, how the guy gets along without the basic whatevers, Eleanor knows the word, the things that contribute to material comfort-she says it so refined.

She called out to him now, "Come away."

And on the way back to Western Europe his system slowly returned to normal, branny BMs, healthful and mild.

And they were on a train in Switzerland, a normal neutral place, going through tunnels and past moonlit lakes, and Marvin heard a familiar voice up ahead, a radio crackle and yak, and he followed the sound to the front of the car, where two GIs were huddled over a little portable radio with a stunted antenna, listening to Russ Hodges on the Armed Forces Network, his account of the game interrupted whenever the train entered a tunnel, and that's where Marvin was when Thomson hit the homer, racing through a mountain in the Alps.

Eleanor was just out of the shower when Marvin walked in, collapsing the room with his mood. She stood in a towel, pink-toed, and looked at him.

"The ship came in. Lucky Argus. Pier seven. Exactly when they said to the minute."

"But Wainwright," she said.

"Not onboard."

"Stand up straight."

"Jumped ship in Vancouver."

"Do they know where he went?"

"Signed on some other ship. Going north somewhere. He's a cold-weather person, this Chuckie."

"You'll find him."

"It doesn't matter."

firewall of chemical waste. The smell that surrounded him was infused with what, with geopolitics, and he waved a towel for five minutes and propped open the window, it kept closing, with a rolled-up copy of Pravda, he was still looking for baseball scores, and then he went and stood in their room and watched Eleanor sleep-she came from a gentle rural place and could easily perish from his reek.

He walked to the edge of the construction debris and realized this was not the source of the smell. The smell was still distinct, completely reminiscent of his Soviet experience, only less farshtinkener than his personal output, a bit toned down, and it was not coming from a sewer main break or a communal toilet of the homeless.

Then he saw the ship. It was docked at a remote pier up ahead, between a number of empty slips and a wide basin, and it appeared to be abandoned, with bridge and deck deserted and rust stains running down the sides and graffiti spray-painted on the smokestacks in languages he did not recognize and in alphabets unknown.

He turned and looked at Eleanor. She had a thing she did to show impatience, where she dipped her body and tilted her head and went half limp, her mouth showing a yawny oh.

The name of the ship was unreadable, covered with rust and graffiti. Such a woebegone thing, an oceangoing vessel that carries a public funk of portable toilets in a field.

Marvin and Avram argued for three days. They ate meals in the little unheated flat where you had to unscrew the tap from the kitchen sink and take it down the hall to the bathroom when you wanted to take a bath because construction of this block of flats ended on a certain date, finished or not. The two men traded many family stories but always with an undercurrent of contention and with intervals of open insult, Us and Them, and it grated on Marvin to hear these things from a man so self-assured who's a total nobody, a little guy who pushed upward when he talked, with two false teeth made of stainless steel, he's the shiniest appliance in sight. The flat came without windows. Avram had to install the windows himself, they came from the plate-glass factory where he worked, glass so thin you had to come away from the window to talk, A word with too many consonants might shatter the glass.