The Origin of Species Page 21

“What’s the problem?”

  “It’s not good. Some sort of a junction, I think.”

  The men hauled in matériel for their work, wrenches, crowbars, a jigsaw, and began carving channels in the bathroom walls. Much as Alex hated his mirror tiles he felt a wince each time another of them was prised away, usually in jagged bits. He could already envision the devastation these men would leave behind, the forms he would have to file at the Régie, the months or years he would have to wait before he got anything like satisfaction.

  He could barely think for the racket but didn’t dare go out, afraid each time one of the men came or went that Moses would make a run for the elevator.

  “Is cat,” one of them said, finally noticing him.

  “Yes.” Alex was sure the breach would get back to Tony now, and he’d be evicted.

  The workman squatted and gave Moses a little stroke on his muzzle.

  “Is good cat.”

  Jiri, through all of this, hadn’t left the apartment, though his work space was a shambles, Alex’s desk pushed aside and piled high with the shelving and books that had been removed from the wall so the men could smash it. He stood back watching the men’s work as if it were a quaint folk ritual he’d happened upon, putting questions to them now and then in his halting Russian.

  “Alex, maybe you should offer these gentlemen a cup of coffee.”

  It was evening before the workers had gone. The apartment looked like a construction site by then, crumbled drywall everywhere, abandoned tools, the bathtub full of broken pieces of tile.

  “That’s the funny thing about Russian Jews,” Jiri said. “Seventy years of brainwashing but they’ve never forgotten they’re Jews. It’s like a case study for the failure of the Soviet experiment.”

  The work went on for days. The men might come for an hour and be on their way; or they might be working full tilt in what seemed the middle of a marathon session, then break for coffee and never return. The whole time Alex was reduced to his bucket flushes and his bucket baths, always afraid he’d catch some splinter of tile up his backside. Meanwhile Jiri, perversely, embraced the disorder like someone rolling up his sleeves at a challenge. He had grown downright chummy with the workers, Boris and Mikhail from Gomel, not so far from Chernobyl.

  Back home, Boris and Mikhail had been engineers.

  “Chernobyl was a lucky break for them,” Jiri said. “Twenty years they’d been asking to get out, then Chernobyl happened and the approval came through in just a couple of weeks.”

  Even with Alex Jiri had taken on an in-the-trenches camaraderie. One evening he made supper for him, cucumber salad and schnitzel.

  “This was what I was eating when the Russians marched in,” he said. “At a Hungarian place in Soho, to be exact.”

  Alex was shocked to find out that Jiri hadn’t been in Czechoslovakia at all when the troops had come, but in London for a conference. He had watched the whole thing on TV like everyone else, for all his talk in class about not knowing what the revolution was when you were in the middle of it.

  “Just think of it as a teaching aid,” he said. “Anyway, the point’s still valid.”

  “So you didn’t go back?”

  “I thought about it. It wouldn’t have been so bad, maybe—I would just have ended up in a factory or whatever like the other intellectuals. But the truth was I didn’t want to have to start up the same old struggle again. Most people only have the one good fight in them. After that you start looking around for how to enjoy yourself a little.”

  This wasn’t the kind of thing you’d hear from Jiri in class. In class it was all about laying waste to every authority and every assumption. Then there was the matter of his wife and son: that was another of his touchstones, his seven-year separation from them, which in class always played out as a metaphor for the hole at the heart of totalitarianism. “That’s the nature of tyranny in a nutshell,” he’d say. “Always being defined by what’s absent.” But none of it looked so grand in the light of his schnitzel in Soho.

  Jiri had managed to root out the Scotch that Stephen had left behind back in the spring.

  “You know, I was taking a look at your new proposal,” he said.

  Alex wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

  “But I haven’t even handed it in to you.”

  “It saw it sitting on your desk. I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

  In fact it had been in his desk, down in one of the lower drawers, though Alex felt such a strange thrill at the thought that Jiri had actually taken the trouble to go through his things that he couldn’t muster any sense of outrage.

  “It’s not bad,” Jiri said. “It’s not quite there yet, but it’s not bad. Your other draft, all the terminology was getting in the way. But this one seems more from the heart.”

  Alex took a gulp of his Scotch. This was when Jiri got most dangerous, when he approached anything like praise.

  “I guess I talked it out with someone who didn’t know all the language,” he said, realizing only as he spoke that he meant Esther.

  “That’s good, that’s good. Sometimes it’s important to remind yourself that all this stuff is actually supposed to mean something.”

  Jiri poured more Scotch.

  “When you think of someone like Derrida or Lacan, they’re not really doing anything different than you are. They’re just drawing a shape in the air, that’s all. But yours has an actual physical base—I don’t think anyone’s tried that before. There was Lévi-Strauss, of course, but most of that was just nonsense.”

  Alex’s head was swimming. In a moment, surely, Jiri would tell him he was pulling his leg.

  “Don’t get me wrong. It’s not going to be a breeze getting this past the committee. They’ll want to see the language. But I think there’s something there.”

  The rest of the evening was a haze. Alex had the feeling he used to get on acid, that he was on the brink of some tremendous revelation. Jiri was part of this feeling; Alex couldn’t imagine how he had ever felt any ill will toward him.

  They had drained every last drop of the Scotch.

  “I’m glad you’re finally buying the real stuff,” Jiri said.

  In the morning, Alex awoke so hungover that he wasn’t sure the evening had even happened.

  Jiri was already hurrying off to class.

  “Bring the proposal by my office and we’ll try to clean it up,” he said, as if they didn’t see each other every day of the week. “It’s not quite up to doctoral level yet.”

  The workmen finished a couple of days later. They left behind exactly the carnage Alex had feared, the plaster repairs in the bedroom looking like the scar tissue on a torture victim and the bathroom such a patchwork of tile and bald wall that Alex’s mind reeled every time he went in there, vainly searching for pattern amidst the ruins. In the meantime, Alex’s resentment toward Jiri had built back to full force, so that every smallest infraction, his crumbs on the cutting board, his abandoned coffee cups, the spots of Ultra Brite he left on the bathroom sink, seemed set to push it beyond endurance.

  Now I don’t suppose it occurred to you just to kick his butt out of there, pardon my French? I mean, talk about totalitarian!

  Well, Peter, the situation was a bit delicate. And then he’s a fascinating character, really. I learned a lot from him while he was there.

  Like how to take advantage of your graduate students, for instance.

  By the seventeenth floor Alex seemed to have come to a region of the stairwell that not even Guy had ever made it up to, half the lights burnt out and a fine dust powdering the stairs that looked like it hadn’t been stepped on in twenty years. He should lodge a complaint about the lights, he thought, and then he thought, Fuck it. Those days were done. It occurred to him that maybe his one good fight had come and gone.

  He wished he was more like Jiri. Here was a man whose job hung in the balance, whose wife had left him, who was homeless, who had a skinhead son, yet he managed to carry on as if none of it touch
ed him. The latest rumor was that his son had joined a bona fide neo-Nazi group.

  “The funny thing is he looks exactly like Jerry,” one of the faculty had told him. “A mirror image. Right down to his bald head.”

  Jerry. That was what the faculty called Jiri, the remnant, no doubt, of some pre-identity-politics self. Jiri would let the name float in the air without batting an eye, as if he was above it, as if it had been neutralized before it reached him.

  Alex had reached his apartment. Everything had become a synesthetic blur, the pounding in his head, his sweat, the stink of seafood. He was seeing colors: green for the stink, strobe-light purple for the pounding.

  He heard a sound on the other side of the door as he was turning his key and his first paranoid thought was that the landlords had broken in, that he was about to catch them red-handed, planting microphones or stealing his computer files or verifying some snitch’s report that he was harboring a pet. But then he swung the door open and saw what in his deepest heart of hearts he had been expecting all along, Jiri’s bag still planted by the entrance and Jiri himself sitting reading the paper on the sofa, which Alex, for the first time in many days, had pointedly restored to its proper use that very morning.

  Moses, though he wasn’t allowed there, sat purring on the sofa beside him.

  Alex had to struggle to keep the tremor from his voice.

  “I thought you were going.”

  “Hmm?” Jiri glanced up from his paper. “Back already?”

  “I thought you’d be gone.”

  “Oh. I missed my train.”

  Any minute, Alex thought, he was literally going to burst into flames with rage.

  “Why didn’t you wait for another one?”

  “The truth is I never really left the apartment. It was taking so long to get an elevator I just gave up. I thought I’d wait till tomorrow.”

  “There’s a train at three-forty. I’ve taken it. There’s another one at five.”

  “What’s the difference?” Jiri said. “I’d just as soon wait.”

  “The difference is”—Alex tried to restrain himself—“the difference is, I had plans.”

  Jiri looked at him over the rims of his glasses.

  “Alex, my boy, you’re not saying you had a romantic encounter planned, are you?”

  “What I had planned—” But there was no point being evasive. “Yes. Yes. As a matter of fact, I did.”

  “Good, good, I was beginning to worry about you! I can arrange to be out, of course, it’s not a problem.”

  “Yes,” Alex said, “yes, it’s a problem. I don’t want you to be here.”

  Jiri shrugged as if he did not follow.

  “As I say, I can go out. The whole night, if you think it’ll come to that. I’ll just take a room at the Y—”

  “No, you don’t understand.” This was the point at which he ought to have stopped himself, at which it was still possible for things to end civilly. “I don’t want you here at all. I want my apartment back, I want my desk back, I want my bed. I know you’re going through a rough time, I know your wife left you and your son hates you or something, but that doesn’t give you the right to take advantage of me. It doesn’t give you the right.”

  There, he had got it out. For a moment he felt a great lifting.

  “Ah,” Jiri said. “I see.”

  He looked truly crestfallen. Already Alex could feel his relief seeping away.

  “Look, I’m just saying, with all the work and everything—”

  “No, no, you’re absolutely right,” Jiri said, drawing his dignity around him. “I’ll take a room at the Y until I find a place.”

  He had started packing papers into his briefcase.

  “I didn’t mean you had to go this minute.”

  “That’s fine, it’s just as well. I’ll come for the rest of my things when I get back from Toronto.”

  He rounded up a few odds and ends in the bedroom. He’d left his paper on the dining table—not a Gazette, Alex saw, but a Toronto Star, folded to a headline that read “Man Attacked in City Park.”

  Jiri took up the newspaper and put it in his briefcase.

  “Maybe you could dig up a couple of boxes later and leave my books in them,” he said. “To speed things up a bit.”

  “Sure. Sure.”

  He added a few extra underwear to his bag, neatly folded and pressed from the cleaners, then donned his trench coat.

  “So. Thank you, then. I’m sorry if I overstayed my welcome.”

  Whatever goodwill Alex might have earned over the previous weeks seemed cast to the winds.

  “Call my office when you want to discuss the proposal,” Jiri said, all business now.

  After the weeks of lingering it took Jiri all of five minutes to clear out. Alex felt a chill at how abruptly the matter had ended. It seemed only now that he understood that something like a relationship had been forming between the two of them while Jiri had been there, a twisted, unbalanced one, maybe, but a relationship nonetheless. What he remembered, watching Jiri go, was the glow that had come off him the night of the Scotch, as if he were a shaman or wizard sent to guide him.

  The elevator, miraculously, arrived almost at once. Jiri stepped into it without looking back, straight-shouldered and undiminished.

  – 6 –

  It was well past his appointed time when Alex finally managed to make his way down to Esther’s to collect her for her swimming. Molly, Esther’s new helper, stood waiting for him at her open door.

  “Twenty minute I am waiting,” she said. “You say you will come at three.”

  Every time he saw Molly—Wamalie, her real name was, though Alex was the only one who ever called her that, a courtesy she showed no sign of appreciating—he felt his aversion toward her surge anew.

  “She would have been fine if you’d just left her on her own a few minutes.”

  “And what her father will say, if she tell him?”

  In the three months now that Molly had been looking after Esther, Alex had yet to get a proper bead on her. He disliked her, yes, but hadn’t been able to determine whether this had some basis in reality or was just him sulking over territory or being racist. He quizzed Esther on her constantly, as innocently as he could manage, since Esther worshipped her, but so far nothing he’d gleaned had established definitively whether she was an abusive power-tripper holding Esther in a kind of Stockholm-syndrome thrall or a godsend who’d brought Esther back from the brink of despair. This much he knew, that she showed up five mornings a week precisely at seven, and from then on took over Esther’s life with all the force of an invading army, bathing her and dressing her and feeding her, escorting her to her doctors’ appointments and to her physio sessions at the Royal Vic, attending classes with her at the university, where she worked her tape recorder for her and held open her books and for all Alex knew browbeat her professors into giving her passing grades, all of this before she left again at three with the same promptness with which she’d arrived.

  She seemed to loom there in Esther’s doorway, though she didn’t stand more than five feet. Molly Svengali.

  “I hope I didn’t keep you from an appointment,” he said coolly.

  “No appointment. Only my cousin’s daughter, she is coming home from school, no key.”

  All Alex’s sanctimoniousness drained away. Somewhere in the city, probably in a gang-infested tenement in the squalid lower reaches of Point St. Charles, some innocent little Filipina was cowering alone now in a darkened hallway because Alex had been late.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Is okay, she wait.”

  Esther was parked in the living room in her wheelchair trussed and prepped, her hair tied back in a ponytail, her cheeks done up with a bit of rouge to hide her pallor, a gym bag draped over the arm of her chair holding, Alex knew, a towel, goggles, a bathing cap, an extra pair of underwear, and a child’s sippy cup filled with orange juice.

  Her visio
n had grown erratic since her last exacerbation and it took her an instant sometimes to make out when someone had entered her field of vision.

  “Sorry I’m late, Es,” Alex said.

  “Oh, Alex! Are you late?”

  The wheelchair had been a shock. One week Esther had been getting around fine on her cane, her usual social-butterfly self, the next she was flat on her back in a hospital bed hardly able to move.

  “I can’t believe it, I just blacked out,” she said when Alex went in to see her. “Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever blacked out like that?”

  Alex could hear the fear in her voice. When by the third day she still wasn’t able to get out of bed she began to panic.

  “I can’t do it, Alex,” she said. “I can’t stop walking. I just can’t. I might as well be dead.”

  By then the slow procession of reality mongers had started coming through, her doctor, the hospital staff, her mother. Her mother was the one who had found her, collapsed on the floor of her apartment unable to get to the phone.

  “It’s still early,” Alex said. He didn’t want to seem on the side of the naysayers, even if in his heart he was. “In a week we’ll be going out for cappuccinos again.”

  But a week later she was still in hospital. By then a chair had arrived, and a physio had started working on getting her used to it. Esther acted as if all of it was merely temporary, as if she was just humoring everyone. By the time she came home, wheeled up the steps at the front of the building by her brother Lenny—there was nothing like a ramp there—she was treating the chair as a lark.

  “Look at my new chair,” she said to people. “La-di-da.”

  But alone with her, Alex would see how the life drained out of her sometimes. He’d always thought of her stubbornness as an intrinsic part of her, but now he saw it was something she actually had to make an effort for. It was scary to think what her life might be like without it: there’d be only the pit then, only one bad thing to look forward to after another.

  There had seemed no question of her going back to her swimming. Before the exacerbation, this had been an article of almost religious faith, her daily hour in the building’s pool. In the water, Esther was transformed—it was something about the weightlessness, the way the water held her. She was strangely in control; you had to look, and look again, to see the bit of unsureness in her. The first time Alex had seen her, he’d felt as if he were looking at a stranger: this was Esther, whole. She’d done a lap, had turned smoothly, done another, just a woman in the water. It had been hard to bear the intimacy of it, as if he’d stolen a look at her naked, or as if he was the one who was standing naked.