Slow Man Read online

  ‘Those were the days before the French romance with the automobile had taken off properly. The roads were emptier; roaming the countryside on a bicycle was not such an odd thing to be doing.

  ‘Then I got involved with a girl, and suddenly I had other uses for my weekends. She was from Morocco: that really set me apart. The first of my unsuitable passions. She and I might have married if her family had not made it impossible.’

  ‘Struck by the lightning bolt of passion! And for an exotic maiden too! Material for a book in itself! How magnificent! How extravagant! You astonish me, Paul.’

  ‘Don’t mock. It was all very decorous, very respectable. She was studying to be a librarian, until she was summoned home.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That is all. Her father summoned her, she obeyed, that was the end of the affair. I stayed on in Toulouse for another six months, then I gave up.’

  ‘You came home.’

  ‘Home . . . What does that mean? I told you what I think about home. A pigeon has a home, a bee has a home. An Englishman has a home, perhaps. I have a domicile, a residence. This is my residence. This flat. This city. This country. Home is too mystical for me.’

  ‘But you are Australian. You are not French. Even I can seethat.’

  ‘I can pass among Australians. I cannot pass among the French. That, as far as I am concerned, is all there is to it, to the national-identity business: where one passes and where one does not, where on the contrary one stands out. Like a sore thumb, as the English say; or like a stain, as the French say, a stain on the spotless domestic linen. As for language, English has never been mine in the way it is yours. Nothing to do with fluency. I am perfectly fluent, as you can hear. But English came to me too late. It did not come with my mother’s milk. In fact it did not come at all. Privately I have always felt myself to be a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy. It is not I who speak the language, it is the language that is spoken through me. It does not come from my core, mon coeur.’ He hesitates, checks himself. I am hollow at the core, he was about to say – as I am sure you can hear. ‘Don’t try to load more onto this conversation than it will bear, Elizabeth,’ he says instead. ‘It is not significant, it is just biography of a rambling kind.’

  ‘But it is significant, Paul, truly it is! You know, there are those whom I call the chthonic, the ones who stand with their feet planted in their native earth; and then there are the butterflies, creatures of light and air, temporary residents, alighting here, alighting there. You claim to be a butterfly, you want to be a butterfly; but then one day you have a fall, a calamitous fall, you come crashing down to earth; and when you pick yourself up you find you can no longer fly like an ethereal being, you cannot even walk, you are nothing but a lump of all too solid flesh. Surely a lesson presents itself, one to which you cannot be blind and deaf.’

  ‘Really. A lesson. With a little ingenuity, it seems to me, Mrs Costello, one can torture a lesson out of the most haphazard sequence of events. Are you trying to tell me that God had some plan in mind when he struck me down on Magill Road and turned me into a hobbler? What about yourself? You told me you have a heart condition. Interpret your heart condition to me. What lesson did God have in mind when he struck you in the heart?’

  ‘It is true, Paul, I do indeed have a heart condition, I was not telling a fib. But I am not the only one so afflicted. You have a heart condition of your own – do you really not know that? When I came knocking at your door, it was not to find out how a man rides a bicycle with one leg. I came to find out what happens when a man of sixty engages his heart unsuitably. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, you have been a sorry let-down thus far.’

  He shrugs. ‘I was not put on this earth to entertain you. If you want entertainment’ – he waves a hand at the runners, the cyclists, the good folk taking their dogs for a walk – ‘you have a wide range to explore. Why waste your time on someone who exasperates you with his obtuseness and keeps letting you down? Give me up as a bad job. Visit yourself on some other candidate.’

  She turns and bestows on him a smile that lacks, as far as he can see, any malice. ‘I may be capricious, Paul,’ she says, ‘but not as capricious as that. Capricious: goat-like, leaping from one rock to another. I am too old for leaping. You are my rock. I will stay with you, for the time being. As I told you – remember? – love is a fixation.’

  He shrugs again. Love is a fixation. One might equally well call love a bolt of lightning that strikes where it wills. If he is an ignorant baby when it comes to the maladies of love, he does not see that the Costello woman is any better. But he is not going to argue with her. He is tired of arguing.

  He is also thirsty. A cup of tea would go down very well. They could cross the bridge to the tea-room on the other bank. They could go back to the flat with its noise and disorder. Or they could forget about tea and go on dawdling here by the riverside, letting the afternoon pass, watching the waterfowl disport themselves. Which?

  ‘Tell me about your marriage,’ says Elizabeth Costello. ‘You hardly ever mention your wife.’

  ‘I think not,’ he says. ‘It would not be proper. My wife would not thank me for offering her up as a minor character in one of your literary efforts. But if it is stories you want, I will tell you a story from the period of my marriage that does not involve my wife. You can use it to illustrate my character, or not, as you wish.’

  ‘All right. Shoot.’

  ‘It comes from the time I was still running the studio in Unley. I had two assistants, and one of them happened to fall in love with me. To be accurate, it was not love but adoration. She had no designs on me. That was why she could be so open about it. A perfectly intelligent girl. Pretty too. A fresh-faced, pretty, twenty-year-old girl in a solid, sturdy body, the body of a rugby player. Nothing she could do about it. No diet was going to save her, transfigure her into a sylph.

  ‘I was teaching an evening course at the time, at what used to be the polytechnic. Principles of photography. Three evenings a week this girl came to my class. Sat in the back row and gazed at me. Took no notes.

  ‘“Don’t you think this is becoming excessive, Ellen?” I said to her. “It’s my only chance,” she replied. No blushes. She never blushed. “Your only chance for what?” “To be alone with you.” That was how she defined being alone with me: being free to sit in class and watch and listen.

  ‘I had a rule: never get involved with employees. But in this one case I had a lapse. I broke the rule. I left a note for her: a time, a place, nothing else. She came, and I took her to bed.

  ‘You probably expect me to say it was a humiliating experience, for her and therefore for me. But it wasn’t humiliating at all. I would go so far as to call it joyous. And I learned a lesson from it: that love need not be reciprocated as long as there is enough of it in the room. This girl had enough love for two. You are the writer, the heart expert, but did you know that? If you love deeply enough, it is not necessary to be loved back.’

  The Costello woman is silent.

  ‘She thanked me. She lay in my arms crying and gasping “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” “It’s all right,” I said. “No need for anyone to thank anyone.”

  ‘The next day there was a note on my desk: “Whenever you have need of me . . .” But I did not call on her again, did not try to repeat the experience. Once was enough, to absorb that lesson.

  ‘She worked for me for another two years, keeping a correct distance because that was what I seemed to want. No tears, no reproaches. Then she disappeared. Not a word, just stopped coming to work. I spoke to her colleague, my other assistant, but she was in the dark. I telephoned her mother. Didn’t I know, the mother said? Ellen had taken a new job and moved to Brisbane as a rep for a pharmaceuticals company. Hadn’t she given notice? No, I said, this was the first I heard of it. Oh, said the mother, she told us she had spoken to you and you were quite cut up.’

&
nbsp; ‘And?’

  ‘That’s all. End of story. I was quite cut up: aside from the lesson in love, that was the part that interested me most. Because I wasn’t cut up, not at all. Did the girl really think I would be cut up because she had left my employ? Or was the story about her boss being cut up just something she told her mother so that she would not seem too abject?’

  ‘Are you asking my opinion? I don’t know the answer, Paul. The claim that you, her boss, were cut up may be the part of the story that you find interesting, but it is not what interests me. What interests me is the Thank you, thank you! Is Thank you, thank you! what you plan to say to Marijana if and when she yields herself to you? Why didn’t you say Thank you, thank you! to the girl I procured for you, the one you singled out for your attentions because she would not be able to witness you in your sadly reduced state?’

  ‘I did not single her out. You were the one who brought her up.’

  ‘Nonsense. I merely took my cue from you. You singled her out in the hospital lift. You had dreams about her. Why did you not thank her, I repeat? Was it because you paid her, and if you pay you don’t need to say thank you? Your rugby player had enough love for two, you say. Do you really think love can be measured? Do you think love comes by volume, like beer? That as long as you bring a case of it, the other party is permitted to come empty-handed – empty-handed, empty-hearted? Thank you, Marijana (Marijana with the j this time), for letting me love you. Thank you for letting me love your children. Thank you for letting me give you my money. Are you really such a dummy?’

  He stiffens. ‘You asked me for a story, I gave you a story. I am sorry you don’t like it. You say you want to hear stories, I offer you stories, and I get back nothing except ridicule and scorn. What kind of exchange is that?’

  ‘What kind of love?, you might have added. I didn’t say I didn’t like your story. I found it interesting, and well told too, the story of you and your rugby player. Even the interpretation you give is interesting in its own right. But the question that nags me is: Why does he pick on this story to tell me, this above all others?’

  ‘Because it is true.’

  ‘Of course it is true. But what does it matter if it is true? Surely it is not up to me to play God, separating the sheep from the goats, dismissing the false stories, preserving the true. If I have a model, it is not God, it is the Abbé of Cîteaux, the notorious one, the Frenchman, the one who said to the soldiers in his pastoral care, Slay them all – God will know who are His.

  ‘No, Paul, I couldn’t care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.’

  She pauses, cocks an eyebrow at him. Is it his turn? He has nothing more to say. If truth and lies are the same, then speech and silence may as well be the same too.

  ‘Do you notice, Paul,’ she resumes, ‘how conversations between you and me keep falling into the same pattern? For a while all goes swimmingly. Then I say something you don’t want to hear, and at once you clam up or storm off or ask me to leave. Can’t we get beyond such histrionics? We don’t have much time left, either of us.’

  ‘Don’t we.’

  ‘No. Under the gaze of heaven, in the cold eye of God, we don’t.’

  ‘Is that the truth. Go on.’

  ‘Do you think I find this existence any less hard than you? Do you think I want to sleep outdoors, under a bush in the park, among the winos, and do my ablutions in the River Torrens? You are not blind. You can see how I am declining.’

  He gives her a hard stare. ‘You are making up stories. You are a prosperous professional woman, you are as comfortably off as I am, there is no need for you to sleep under bushes.’

  ‘That may be so, Paul. I may be exaggerating a little, but it is an apt story, apt to my condition. As I try to impress on you, our days are numbered, mine and yours, yet here I am, killing time, being killed by time, waiting – waiting for you.’

  He shakes his head helplessly. ‘I don’t know what you want,’ he says.

  ‘Push!’ she says.

  Twenty-six

  On the hall table, a scrawled note: ‘BYE MR RAYMENT. I’VE LEFT SOME STUFF, I’LL PICK IT UP TOMORROW. THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, DRAGO. PS PHOTOGRAPHS ALL IN ORDER.’

  The ‘stuff’ Drago refers to turns out to be a garbage bag full of clothing, to which he adds a pair of underpants he finds among the bedclothes. Otherwise no trace of the Jokićs, mother or son. They come, they go, they do not explain themselves: he had better get used to it.

  Yet what a relief to be by himself again! One thing to live with a woman; quite another to share one’s home with an untidy and imperfectly considerate young man. Always tension, always unease when two males occupy the same territory.

  He spends the afternoon tidying his study, putting things where they used to be; then he takes a shower. In the shower he by accident drops the flask of shampoo. As he bends to pick it up, the Zimmer frame, which he always brings into the cubicle with him, slips sideways. He loses his footing and falls, slamming his head against the wall.

  Let nothing be broken: that is his first prayer. Tangled in the frame, he tries to move his limbs. A flicker of exquisite pain runs from his back down his good leg. He takes a slow, deep breath. Be calm, he tells himself. A slip in the bathroom, nothing to be alarmed about, it happens to many people, all may yet be well. Plenty of time to think, plenty of time to set things right.

  Setting things right (he tries to be calm and clear) will mean, one, disengaging himself from the frame; two, manoeuvring himself out of the cubicle; then, three, assessing what he has done to his back; and, four, proceeding to whatever comes next.

  The problem lies between one and two. He cannot disengage himself from the Zimmer frame without sitting up; and he cannot sit up without a gasp of pain.

  No one bothered to inform him, and he did not think to ask, who the Zimmer is or was who has come to play such a role in his life. For his own convenience he has imagined Zimmer as a thin-faced, tight-lipped figure of a man, dressed in the high collar and stock of the 1830s. Johann August Zimmer, son of Austrian peasants, determined to escape the drudgery of the family farm, toils by candlelight over his anatomy books while in the byre behind the house the milch-cow moans in her sleep. After scraping through his examinations (he is not a gifted student), he finds a posting as an army surgeon. The next twenty years he spends dressing wounds and cutting off limbs in the name of His Serene Imperial Majesty Carl Joseph August, nicknamed The Good. Then he retires from the service and after several wrong turns lands up at Bad Schwanensee, one of the lesser spas in Bohemia, prescribing for gentlewomen with arthritis. There he has the brainwave of adapting for the more frail among his patients the apparatus that back in Carinthia has for centuries been used to teach children to walk, thereby earning for himself a modest immortality.

  Now here he is on the tiled floor, naked, immobile, with Zimmer’s invention on top of him blocking the cubicle door, while water continues to pour down and leaking shampoo rises in a froth all around and the stump, which has taken a knock on its tender end, begins to throb with its own, unique variety of pain. What a mess! he thinks. Thank God Drago does not have to witness it! And thank God the Costello woman is not here to make jokes!

  There are drawbacks, however, to having neither Drago nor the Costello woman nor anyone else within calling distance. One is that, as the supply of warm water runs out, he finds himself being douched with cold. The controls are beyond his reach. He is certainly free to lie here all night without risk of being laughed at; but by dawn he will have frozen to death.

  It takes him a full thirty minutes to escape the prison he has made for himself. Unable to lift himself, unable to push Zimmer’s frame out of the way, he finally grits his teeth and forces the door of the cubicle back until the hinges snap.

  All shame is gone by now. He crawls across the floor to the telephone, calls Marijana’s numbe
r, gets a child’s voice. ‘Mrs Jokić, please,’ he says through chattering teeth; and then, ‘Marijana, I have had an accident. I am OK but can you come at once?’

  ‘What is accident?’

  ‘I had a fall. I have done something to my back. I can’t move.’

  ‘I come.’

  He drags the bedclothes down and huddles under them, but he cannot get warm. Not only his hands and foot, not only his scalp and his nose, but his very belly and heart are gripped with cold; spasms overtake him during which he grows too rigid even to shiver. He yawns until he is light-headed with yawning. Old blood, cold blood: the words drum in his brain. Not enough heat in the veins.

  He has a vision of himself hung by the ankles in a cold chamber amid a forest of frozen carcases. Not by fire but by ice.

  He falls into some kind of slumber. Then suddenly Marijana is bending over him. He tries to form his frozen lips into a smile, into words. ‘My back,’ he croaks. ‘Careful.’ No need, thank God, to explain how it happened. How it happened must be all too clear from the chaos in the bathroom, the hiss of the cold shower.

  There is no tea left, but Marijana makes coffee, puts a pill between his lips, helps him to drink, then with surprising strength raises him bodily from the floor onto the bed. ‘You get scare, eh?’ she says. ‘Now maybe you stop this shower business all alone.’

  He nods obediently, closes his eyes. Under the ministrations of this excellent woman and superlative nurse, he can feel the ice within him begin to thaw. No bones broken, no being reprimanded by Mrs Putts, no being laughed at by Mrs Costello. Instead, the soothing presence of an angel who has put aside all else to come to his aid.