Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Paul placed his credit card on the bill, and went to the toilets. Tooly waited and waited, then wandered toward the front door, which a waitress opened for her. Outside, the air was hair-dryer hot and smelled of exhaust. Pedestrians gushed down the sidewalk, a human river coursing past the Chinese-Thai shopfronts displaying vases, gongs, ceramic lions, meat grinders. She found herself swept away, bundled along among strangers until the end of the block. On her return to the restaurant, Paul had still not come back from the bathroom. She approached it, heard his inhaler hissing in there, and she whispered his name.

Sheepishly, he edged out, a water stain down his trousers. “The sink area was all flooded but I didn’t see,” he said. “I leaned against the counter and got soaked. It looks …” As if he’d urinated down his khakis.

“I’ll ask for a napkin,” she suggested.

“Don’t say anything, Tooly!”

“Can we just run out?”

“I haven’t got my credit card back.”

“I could knock over the water. Then everything will be wet and they won’t see the difference.”

“That’s a terrible idea.”

“I can run through the restaurant and you chase after me, shouting that I poured water on you.”

“We can’t do that.”

But they did, to the bewilderment of the waiters and diners. Paul hunched forward in humiliation, mumbling his lines. “Why did you do that?” he said, rushing after her.

“I poured water all over you!”

“You’re a bad person! Where’s my credit card? Look what you did!”

“I threw water all over!”

Outside, he crossed his hands over his crotch as she searched for taxis, waving wildly at the passing traffic. “Don’t make a scene,” he pleaded.

In the cab, Paul said, “I wasn’t really angry in there.”

“I know you weren’t.”

They arrived back at Gupta Mansions, took the elevator up, unlocked the front door. “Good to be home,” he said.

As they looked at this latest apartment, it felt like home to neither of them.

BLINKING TO WAKEFULNESS, she glanced at her few possessions with estrangement: corduroys splayed across the floor, sweater and coat heaped on sneakers, bra twisted over a low-rise of books. She pushed open her bedroom door and clomped across the main room toward the toilet.

“Good mornink,” Humphrey said in his thick Russian accent. Seated on the couch holding a book, the old man nearly said more, but thought better of it, knowing Tooly to be grumpy at this hour, barely 11:30 A.M.

She lapped water from the bathroom faucet, then returned to her bedroom, pulled on her oatmeal cable knit and a dressing gown, its belt dragging along the cold concrete floor. At her window, she raised the blinds, contemplating their little-trafficked street under the shadow of the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn. The sidewalks were icy that November day. Shoes hung from the power lines, tossed up there years earlier by kids who’d long since grown into adults.

Much as Tooly wanted to impose her mood on the morning, she couldn’t resist Humphrey in the other room. He’d probably been waiting hours for her company. When she joined him, he had a steaming cup of coffee for her on the Ping-Pong table. She collected it, sat at the other end of the couch, and frowned in order to win a few minutes’ silence. He turned a page, pretending to read, though he peeked at her from under his overflowing eyebrows, raccoon shadows below his eyes, creases around his mouth, which kept tightening, ready to pounce on a conversation, then relenting. Humphrey, who was seventy-two, wore baby-blue slacks high around his gut, a polyester dress shirt of the small size he’d once been, and a loosened paisley tie, all from the thrift shop. Bits of stubble, like toast crumbs, adhered around his thin lips and prickled the cords of his throat; one ashen sideburn was longer than the other, giving the impression that he might tip over. “I’m so tired,” he sighed, “of being loved for my beautiful body.”

She smiled, took a sip of coffee, and plucked the book from his hands: The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld .

“I also have maxim in life,” Humphrey informed her. “My maxim is never let Tooly Zylberberg take book, because it goes and never comes back.”

“If I borrow a book and like it,” she contended, “it becomes mine by law.”

“I overrule this law.”

“I appeal to a higher court where I’m the judge, and I uphold the law.”

“System is flawed,” he observed.

“I have my own maxim in life: Why is it so freezing here?” She reached behind the couch frame to where he dumped his bedcovers each morning and dragged up his comforter, wrapping herself in it. (He slept on the couch and made efforts to move from it minimally. His seat was at the far end, amid a swamp of newspaper pages that he’d flung into the air in contempt. Under the cushion, he stuffed clippings and crosswords that over time had elevated him; each time he sat, newsprint crunched.)

Considering her swaddled in his bedcovers, Humphrey remarked, “You look like bear hyperbating for winter.”

“A bear doing what?”

“Hyperbating.”

“What is ‘hyperbating’? Sounds like a bear that can’t stop masturbating.”

“Don’t be disgusting pervert!”

“It’s a reasonable conclusion, Humph. There aren’t that many other words that end in ‘-bating.’ ”

“Plenty words end in ‘-bating.’ ”

“Like what?”

“Like … Like ‘riverbating.’ ”

“What is ‘riverbating’?”

“ ‘Riverbating’: when there is echo, you say it is riverbating.”

“ ‘Reverberating,’ ” she corrected him, “isn’t a word that ends in ‘-bating.’ ”

“Okay, I give you other.” He paused. “Here, I have it: ‘verbating.’ ”

“ ‘Verbating’?”

“When you speak something and I repeat it back same, then I am saying it verbating.”

“ ‘Verbatim.’ ”

“Yes, sure.”

Their current home was on the upper floor of a two-story storage space, with lightbulbs hanging from bare wires, the furniture damp. This main room served as kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and his sleeping quarters. She worried that he did this as gallantry, to ensure that she had the lone bedroom. Anyway, he was unmovable. Intermittently, she made efforts to clean the apartment. As for Humphrey, he was never renowned for tidiness. “My nature abhors the vacuum,” he said. In explaining his inertia, he cited a principle of physics that had yet to appear among the standard Newtonian laws: Slob Gravity. A slob such as himself, he claimed, struggles under a greater burden than others, being subject to a higher force of gravity. “More you are slob, more heavy gravity is.”

Over the years, he had amassed a huge library that was notable chiefly for its wretched condition. These were great works but pitiful volumes: disintegrating paperbacks of Kafka, Yeats, Goethe, Cicero, Rousseau. There were oddities, too, such as the user’s guide to Betamax, travel memoirs about countries that no longer existed, histories with half the pages and half the centuries missing, causing the Ming Dynasty to contest the Wars of German Unification with one swish of the page. Many volumes had come from garbage cans or boxes left on the sidewalk. This was less a library than an orphanage. His stated plan was to read everything ever printed. He claimed to be nearly there. Were it possible, he’d have read in the shower. But Humphrey’s books had little to fear from onrushing water, he and soap being on terms of only passing familiarity.

When they moved to this city several weeks earlier, Humphrey had gone immediately to explore the New York Public Library, awed by the ceiling fresco of heaven in the Rose Reading Room, at whose front bench he sat, watching readers submit chits for books. As in previous cities (their most recent being Barcelona), Humphrey’s next priority after books was finding the chess. This he located in Washington Square Park, where he watched ex-con hustlers facing off against nerdy grandmasters. He’d also discovered a Carmine Street store, Un-oppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books, where he could indulge another hobby, debating politics. He was still unconvinced about the Cold War. According to the world, capitalism had won that contest, but Humphrey called it a tie at best. He couldn’t see capitalism lasting. What was the point of any system, he asked, if it only encouraged the worst in humanity, elevating self-interest to a virtue? He described himself as a “Marxist, non-practicing,” and certainly seemed a Marxist in the sense of being broke.