Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

From impatience, she decided to travel ahead and, if all went well, they would join her. Humphrey’s father read her letters aloud. The boy shared his mother’s enthusiasm for the cause and viewed his father unforgivingly. They should have gone — his father spoke fluent Russian, and could have helped. The Communist bureaucrats disbelieved her story, and held her at the border. Finally, Humphrey’s father packed up their belongings. But the train took them in the wrong direction, north to Rotterdam. He informed Humphrey that his mother had died. They took a ship for South Africa, wearing black armbands on board, their grieving restricted to the time at sea.

His father polished diamonds in Johannesburg, and they lived in an adequate house in Orange Grove. Humphrey attended local schools, and was young enough to learn the language rapidly, his foreign accent gone by adolescence. Soon he and his father spoke only English together. At school, there was a map on which the history teacher stuck thumbtacks to mark the latest battles in the European war. South Africa was almost a straight line south from the fighting. It was up there in Europe that Humphrey ought to have been. He had — and not for the last time — the sense that his life unfolded in the wrong place.

The war ended, and he graduated from secondary school, after which he studied to become a pharmacist, a choice determined by early exposure to medicaments during his sister’s illness. Potions, when rightly dispensed, alleviated suffering. As for doctoring, he never considered that, retaining a distaste for his punitive maternal grandfather, who exercised that profession. Or had done so. Neither he nor any of her family had been in touch since Humphrey and his father arrived in Johannesburg.

Jewish agencies issued lists of those murdered in Europe, and Humphrey glanced down the rolls, looking for someone whose name was the same as his, as if a doppelgänger had conducted his proper life, and death, up there. Lists of survivors arrived, too. One woman shared his sister’s name; another shared his mother’s. He wrote to the authorities overseeing the displaced-persons camp, identifying himself, inquiring into the story of this woman with his mother’s name. Weeks later, he received an answer: she had survived three years in various Nazi camps but weeks after liberation had committed suicide with laudanum.

Humphrey and a fellow student opened a pharmacy. After a few years, they had three stores. Humphrey bought two apartments, both in the same building, one for himself and the other for his father, whom he lodged a floor above, meaning that he could attend to the man by listening to his footsteps. They spent lots of time together, since Humphrey had a limited social life. The rules of romance perplexed him: the more you liked someone, the less they liked you; the less you liked them, they more they liked you. How could it ever work? By his thirties, he pretended to be jaded, kibitzing with the pharmacy assistants and playing the curmudgeon, which endeared him to women in a thoroughly nonsexual way. It was preferable to being shunned.

He considered moving with his father to England, which for him represented the height of civilization. South Africa had never suited them: heat and exploitation and complacency. But his father resisted another move. Finally, the man in the apartment above was too frail, forgot names, locked himself out. Humphrey tended to his father as long as possible, then admitted him to the Jewish care home. To erase the present, Humphrey disappeared into books. He contemplated death, ran through the imagined stages of his own suicide, toying with laudanum in the pharmacy after hours.

When his father died, Humphrey was in his forties. Just as his mother had once done, he yearned for a world of bohemian intellectuals. He lingered at cafés in Hillbrow frequented by the university students. But he was two decades older than those kids. He studied chess as an excuse to interact with them, and treated them to coffee so they’d stay in his company. Embarrassed to be just a pharmacist, he said — and it wasn’t a lie — that he’d come from Europe. To exoticize himself further, he adopted an accent. Rumors circulated that he was from the Soviet Union, because the false accent was, unintentionally, that of his Russian-speaking father, who had never shed his Old World syntax, constantly bungling idioms: “I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t hear it with my own eyes!” and “Never count your eggs before they cooked!” However, someone recognized Humphrey from the pharmacy and, to humiliate him, turned up with a modern-languages student who addressed him in Russian. Humphrey sold both apartments, plus his share in the pharmacies, then figured out how to get his savings out of the country, and set out to find the intellectuals.

His first stop was London. He didn’t fit in, lacking the education and social sense. He experimented with playing the Soviet dissident again, but was caught out and moved countries, refining the impersonation over time. He had ample savings, and didn’t spend much anyway. By the 1980s, he was in Asia, passing through Thailand, where he rented a house — he often took overly large lodgings, in hopes of attracting company. He met a young Canadian, a charmer with a thick beard who welcomed a place to stay, then invited others to join him. Soon Venn was using the house as he pleased, while Humphrey was confined behind his chessboard, toilet-paper earplugs to block out the pounding music below.

“Which is when I met you,” she concluded.

Throughout much of this account, Humphrey had listened, his eyelids clenched shut, squeezing from his synapses the weak pulses of recall. But, by the end, he had faded.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she told him. “It’s you and me again. But I’m finding a place out here in Sheepshead now. Don’t have tons of money, so I’m hoping there’s something in this building. Wouldn’t it be nice if I was on the same floor? Or maybe I could get a room on the floor below you, so I can hear when you’re walking around!”

He mumbled a few words — the spasms of a spent brain. Without further warning, he was asleep, deeply so, forehead still furrowed from the preceding effort.

By nightfall, she helped him onto his mattress and cleared a patch of space for herself on the floor, lying parallel to his bed. She gazed up, able to make out his shape under the covers, hearing his slow breaths, and she reached her hand over his wrist, which quivered at each heartbeat. When people have children, she thought, they don’t think of them as adults, don’t think of them as old or lonely. They think of having a baby, not having an old man. Tooly was glad that Mac had met Humphrey. Maybe someday the boy would be the last person in the world to remember him.

After sixteen hours of impenetrable sleep, Humphrey was slow to wake the following morning. She smiled, informing him of the remarkable duration of his slumber. Tooly expected to encounter the man who had exerted himself the day before, but such a person had retracted. She sought to summon anew the details of his life, but he betrayed no interest.

Nevertheless, for the first time since her arrival Humphrey was peaceful. He could not see or hear properly, and remained doubtful about the time of day. But he knew who she was, and was uncommonly affectionate, holding her hand as she sat beside him. He kept saying this was the perfect life.

“What do you want to eat this weekend?” she asked. “I want us to have a blowout. Something we can’t afford. The shops will be shut when the storm arrives, so I have to pick up stuff beforehand.” She emptied out her wallet: less than forty dollars. “Champagne? Actually, probably can’t afford that. But a bottle of wine? Or vodka? You used to like vodka tonic. I can make you cocktails, Humph, and we can make toasts about things. What do you think?”