When Corde returned, Minna said, “Traian will drive us.”
“All three?”
“Yes.”
They sat down to a dinner of cold leftovers. Little was said at table. For a change, Tanti Gigi was silent. Tonight she was neither the kid sister nor the charming girl who had once lived in London, but a tense old woman, her strained neck with its bobbed hair bent over her plate.
Traian was punctual. He rapped at a pane of the curtained dining room door and asked permission to come in. Obese and Mexican-looking, he had long tufts of hair at the corners of his mouth. He wore his trousers close and tight, especially at the crotch. His many-zippered Hell’s Angels leather jacket was reddish, his boots were black and highly polished. He was particularly attentive to Tanti Gigi. Of course, he had known her for most of his life. Probably she had often fed him in the little kitchen, when he was a small boy. They rose from the table and went into the vestibule. Orlon-Dacron fur coats hung there, purplish brown, but even these synthetics were saturated with the fragrance of the ladies, even (so Corde felt) with their personalities. To the right was the primitive kitchen, to the left the old-fashioned water closet. Above were closed cupboards containing boxes of family relics, documents.
Traian handed Gigi into the china-closet elevator, aligned the swinging doors, pressed the button. Squeezed into a corner, Corde lifted up his coat collar, tied the muffler over it tightly, bracing himself for the street. Minna looked sternly absentminded; gracefully dissociated as well. By the small light, her white face was dark under the eyes. The outward curve of her upper lip, the pressure marks of her severe chin, almost made a stranger of her. Corde was carrying the plastic Christmas bag with the Kents in it. Minna got into the front seat of the Dacia while Traian was hooking up the windshield wipers—they would be stolen here if you didn’t lock them in the glove compartment. “Albert, give me the cigarettes,” she said. When Traian sat behind the wheel, Minna spoke to him, handed him one of the cartons. He opened it and filled the door pocket with Kents. No surprise, no problem; he was on. He drove to the hospital. Gigi, sitting beside Corde in the back seat, seemed incapable of speaking.
Snow might have helped that night, brightened the streets. It had begun to fall earlier but soon petered out. No one went strolling in this blackness. There was only an occasional car. Corde thought he had never seen such street lamps before—something like phosphorescent humus inside the globes.
But at the hospital the porter’s lodge was brightly lighted. There were women from the country waiting for passes, peasants in boots and kerchiefs. Then up came Tanti Gigi in the draggled Orion fur, her bent back and bobbed gray hair, a splash of terror on her face, her wide forehead pure white. She stood staring at the ground. The porter had Minna and Corde on his visitors list and handed them their passes. Traian got him to come outside. The man carried a clipboard; he was booted, a white smock came to his knees, he wore a woolen watch cap. His look was sulky. Primped to say no, thought Corde. Traian took the man by the arm and began to talk to him privately. Next to the porter’s lodge there was an outer waiting room, shaped like a trolley car and well lighted. Gigi entered it and sat down.
As they went up the driveway together, Corde said to Minna, “Poor Gigi is scared. Do you think he’ll get her in?”
“He seems to know his way around….”
They entered the main building. Just inside the doors was a wide hall, a clerk behind a wicket, another long queue. Then two more spacious dark rooms, and then a door with frosted glass: Intensive Care. Corde recognized the woman who answered their knock; it was Dr. Drur, on duty tonight. Round-faced, speaking softly, she shook Minna’s hand with particular warmth. That was significant, the sympathy. Again, Minna and Corde went through the robing routine—sterile gowns, caps, masks, the swelling white overshoes tied with tapes.
“Mammi!” said Minna. Corde followed slowly and stood in the door of the cubicle, but the doctor motioned him to come closer. Valeria’s right hand stirred, as much as she could manage. The movement was slight. She knew what was happening, you could see that in the blind face. Also, the monitoring devices speeded up, briefly. Standing by the bed, Corde was much moved, but unsure what to do beyond signifying somehow that he would keep Minna from harm. He bent near and rumbled, “It’s Albert, Valeria.” She nodded.
Minna drew down the gauze mask to kiss Valeria. Then the quick, plump doctor came up with a pad of paper. She helped Valeria to close her fingers on a ballpoint pen, and the old woman tried to write. No control, thought Corde. Can’t manage. She formed a few letters but ended in a big loose spiral that crossed the yellow page. Minna and the doctor tried to make out the word. Corde’s guess was that she was asking still to be taken home. But a woman like Valeria would have made alternative preparations—plan A, plan B. Fully aware, and good and ready—that would be characteristic of her. He thought there was no other way to interpret the expression of her face; he derived it even from the posture of her legs and from the old woman’s belly, which had risen higher than ever. On both sides of her face, the currents of hair were shining on the bed linen. Consciousness was as clear as it had ever been. No, more acute than ever, for when Minna signaled that he should take her hand (again he noted the blue splayed knuckle, and the blue kink of the vein there), she pressed his fingers promptly. He said, “We came as soon as possible.” Then, as if he should not delay the essential message, he said in his deep voice, “I also love you, Valeria.”
This had a violent effect. One of her knees came up, her eyes, very full under the skin of the lids, moved back and forth. She made an effort to force them to open. Her face was taken by a spasm. The monitors jumped simultaneously. All the numbers began to tumble and whirl. He might have killed her by saying that. Either because she believed him or because she did not. But she ought to have believed him. So far as he painfully knew, it was the truth. The doctor was startled by the speed of the flashing digits. She motioned to Corde and Minna to step back. No, to go.
They returned to the staff room. He took off his gown. He could hardly bear this. The light was very sharp in this doctors’ room.
Minna said, “That was right, what you told her.”
Corde was less sure of that.
Then Minna said, “Albert, what kind of state do you think she’s in?”
He thought the soul was loosened in Valeria, ready to pull out, and that she could therefore know you for what you were. He answered nothing.
The doctor came in and the women spoke. Minna said, “It’s all right on the monitor again.” She said she would go out now and fetch her aunt. She was determined to get her in. She said, “Valeria was the big sister; she always took care of her. Tonight I have to do it.” Gigi hadn’t even asked to be brought. Corde figured that here in the Soviet bloc you learned to refrain from asking. And then, too, Gigi depended on Minna as she had done on Valeria. But it turned out that Minna had promised her aunt—she would have told her with severity: “I’m taking you. You’ll see her!”
Minna folded and laid down the sterile gown and the boots—she was even now thorough in her orderliness, absentmindedly ritualistic. She told the doctor that she was going out for a few minutes. She’d be right back. The apprehensive doctor did not question her but shook her head. This was wrong. The rules were being broken. What if the Colonel should burst in?
As Corde helped Minna over the ice of the sloping driveway, the evergreens made a chill sound above them, as if things could simmer also below freezing. Passive, stooped and silent, Gigi sat waiting to see whether Minna would keep her promise. She would. Traian’s signal was that the cigarettes had worked, the fix was in. So the two women now went up the slope to the main building, while Corde took Gigi’s place beside Traian on the bench. Then the waiting room lights were switched off. The porter, taking no chances, hid them in darkness. As if the Colonel would care much. Now that he had had his way, the matter was closed. The doctors had probably told him that it was all over with Valeria, and the deal with the Minister of Health was, “Let them come.”
Meanwhile, Valeria’s mind was clear. This was what impressed Corde most deeply. She could still hear and understand everything, and respond. Probably Dr. Drur with the soft face, and the intensive care staff, talked with her, kept her informed. A physician herself (the founder of this hospital), Valeria had seen plenty of people go. The woman doctor seemed particularly close to her. To have a woman in attendance was a good thing. She had probably said, “Your daughter has permission tonight.” Valeria would understand what this signified. There again you saw the extent of the woman connection, its great importance.
Dr. Drur hadn’t doped Valeria (professional courtesy) and she was dying in clear consciousness. And Corde contrasted this with the consciousness of that boy Rick Lester, when he realized that he had gone through the window and was falling. The young man had played a kind of game that night, assuming the usual safe conditions, but the conditions were missing—he had a gag in his throat and two or three seconds to recognize that he was finished. He, Corde, had more in common with that boy than with the old woman. She didn’t have their sort of mind, the modern consciousness, that equivocal queer condition, working with a net of foolish assumptions, and so much absurd unwanted stuff lying on your heart. He was impressed with Valeria. (Couldn’t he attribute it to his equivocal consciousness that he was so much impressed?) She and Dr. Raresh, Marxists, had gone into the streets with roses to greet the Russians, lived to see the prison state, repented. She went back to the old discipline, believed in the good, probably took it all seriously about the pure in heart seeing God, and the other beatitudes. (Nothing too rum?) Her ashes would be placed beside those of her husband.
Though it went against the grain, he suspected that his nephew may have been right, that on the night he was killed Rick Lester had been out for dirty sex, and it was this dirty sex momentum that had carried him through the window. Corde understood this far better than he understood the old woman’s beliefs. So what was the pure-in-spirit bit? For an American who had been around, a man in his mid-fifties, this beatitude language was unreal. To use it betrayed him as a man wildly disturbed, a somehow crazy man. It was foreign, bookish—it was Dostoevsky stuff, that the vices of Sodom coexisted with the adoration of the Holy Sophia, cynicism joined with purity in the heart of the paradoxical Russian. He was no Russian but Huguenot and Irish by descent, a Midwesterner flattened out by the prairies, a journalist and a lousy college dean. He suspected that the academic connection had been getting to him. He could feel, with Dr. Faustus, “O would that I had never seen Wittenberg, never read a book”; and it was no wonder that the classroom, the library environment, had driven him finally into the streets of Chicago, or that he had written—well, written that at the Cabrini Green black housing project, some man had butchered a hog in his apartment and had thrown the guts on the staircase, where a woman, slipping on them, had broken her arm, and screamed curses in the ambulance. She was smeared with pig’s blood and shriller than the siren. It was illumination from a different side, Chicago light and color, not the Sermon on the Mount.
He was strongly agitated. He thought, Hadn’t it been too easy, bribing the porter? Had he let Minna and Gigi walk into a trap, where the Colonel would swoop down on the deathbed and grab them? But what would he want to do that for—why arrest old Gigi? No, Corde saw that he was beginning to think like those women who imagined themselves locked in a mortal struggle with this police colonel, who, right now, must be dining in his luxurious villa, eating delicacies and drinking special vintages. The New Class, or new New Class, lived like Texas millionaires. Corde with his twenty-odd years in Europe understood this. Millions of Americans of his generation had gone out into the world. There were robustious theorists who maintained that this was one of the luckiest developments in history and had done humankind nothing but good. There was a very different point of view. Folks from Trenton, Topeka, Baton Rouge, who lived in Japan, Iran, Morocco, were, as he had read in a magazine, “representatives of the fantasmo imperium of corporate dollars.” It was in his dentist’s reception room that he had found this piece on American mercenaries and arms salesmen, “high-technology killers operating in Africa and Central America.” He had picked up this magazine from the top of the lighted tropical fish tank.
He must ask Dewey Spangler about the “fantasmo imperium.” It would amuse him. “Why would corporate dollars be spent on these twerps? Americans living abroad are always supposed to ‘represent’ something. But there’s you, for instance, Albert—what would you be representing?”
That would be a good question. What did Corde represent? Who was this person sharing the bench with Ioanna’s nephew Traian? He carried a U.S. passport and money and credit cards. He was dressed in coat, gloves, muffler and an encircling fedora over his radar-dish face, his somewhat swelling eyes and plain mouth. He seemed to be picking up signals from all over the universe, some from unseeable sources. His neck was long; his back, too, seemed to go on longer than was strictly necessary. He was a mid-American of mild appearance. He was aware of that. He called this “the Pullman car gentility” and believed he had inherited it from his Wilson-era grandfather. (Corde didn’t admire Woodrow Wilson. Wilson had done great harm.) Anyway, he, Albert, was a Corde. Six generations in Joliet, Illinois, two in Chicago, and he had just told a dying old Macedonian woman in a Communist hospital that he loved her. This was the measure of the oddities life had compiled for him. “I also love you, Valeria.” But although she must have been longing to hear this, and although it was true (it was, dammit, one hundred percent true!), she was nevertheless so shocked that the machines began to flash and yammer and the doctor was scared witless. Why had he upset her? He must have reminded her again of her fears, which she would carry into the life to come, or at least up to the gate of death. Perhaps there was no need to take this personally, or to compare himself, as he sometimes did, to a longtime sexual offender still on probation, though the most exacting parole officer would have been satisfied with him. Oh, those sexual offenses! He was by the strictest marital standards decent, mature, intelligent, responsible, an excellent husband. But within the historical currents he could not be viewed from a positive aspect because he was a representative of the rotten West, lacking ballast, the product of an undesirable historical development, a corrupted branch of humanity. One needn’t go as far as the extremist Eastern dissidents who called Europe an incorrigible old whore and America her most degenerate descendant, in the stage of general paresis. That was going far. But it was possible to suspect him of being incapable of sustaining a serious relationship, as seriousness was defined by the older, indeed archaic, branch of humanity with its eternal fixtures. Valeria would therefore be thinking that the world Corde came from was the world in which her daughter must live out her life. She must depend now on that world and on this man. So Corde had been moved that in dying she should still be in torment over her daughter, and so Valeria heard his bass voice assuring her, and she was pierced with doubts. This “I also love you,” which made her squeeze his hand, might be true, but it might be the truth merely of an agitated moment, no good within an hour. He could see that, yes. It was very painful to him, too.
If we could say what we meant, mean what we said! But we didn’t seem to be set up for it. We were set up instead in a habitual state of hypnotic fixity, and this hypnotic fixity was the real fantasmo imperium. Well, never mind the philosophy. But on her deathbed an old woman hears the deep voice of her son-in-law, and it tells her that he loves her. Loves! With what! Nevertheless it was true, however queer. There was nothing too rum to be true. He depended on that now. Although Valeria—she wasn’t going to have time to verify his declaration. She’d have to take his word for it, because for her this world of death was ending. World of death? He surprised himself when he put it that way. More of his poetry, Dewey Spangler would have said, and bared his teeth in a grin—Spangler still had those sharp and healthy teeth. Same dazzling teeth; the ginger marmalade beard was their new setting.
Still Dewey had asked him one really hot question: Why a professor in Chicago? Corde might have answered that the reason was coming, it was on its way. There were hidden and extensive fantasy ambitions and grand designs connected with it. At the moment of decision, it had been convenient that he should have no clear outline. He remembered how surprised his sister had been when he moved back. “Why a college, and why here?” El-frida inquired.
He couldn’t really answer, but he did say, “For me it’s more like the front lines. Here is where the action is.”
“I wouldn’t have left Paris, not with an apartment on Rue Van-eau. Did you sell it for a fortune?”
“No fortune.”
“Then getting away from some French broad or other?”
“No, that wasn’t it, either, although there are plenty of broads that can inspire leaving—even going into hiding, or taking holy orders.”
“Who said, ‘When you’re tired of Paris you’re tired of life’?”
“It was said about London. And the same party said that no man of what he called ‘intellectual enjoyment’ would immerse himself and his posterity in American barbarism. But that was two hundred years ago.”
“That’s a real book answer,” was Elfrida’s comment. “You want to spend the rest of your life reading books in a college? Don’t expect me to swallow that. I know you better. You’re not a retirement type. You don’t look it, but you’re a combative type. You just said you were looking for action.”
“When I was a kid I had martial instincts.”
“You do still. I can’t dope you out, Albert. What advantage do you see here?”
“There’s the big advantage of backwardness. By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they’re worn thin and easy to see through. You don’t have to bother with them and it saves lots of trouble.”
He stopped these thoughts and recollections, for he now caught sight of Minna and Gigi walking carefully, slow, down the slope under the pines. Corde went out to meet them. He asked no questions. No one spoke. It hadn’t been a long visit. Maybe the doctor, frightened by Minna’s boldness, had asked them to leave. The Colonel hadn’t surprised them. No, the Colonel now cared nothing about any of them.
Traian opened the dark green doors of the tub-shaped Dacia. The interior was freezing.
At home, too, it was too cold to get into bed.
“Albert, I can’t take my clothes off.”
Corde poured from the pálinca bottle. “Let’s swallow some of this.”
They sat in their coats. When Corde removed his hat, he felt the cold on his bald crown. “You didn’t stay long….”
“Because of Dr. Drur. I took her completely by surprise with Gigi. I think there were watchers everywhere.”
“And what did Gigi say?”
“She didn’t say anything, just put her hand on Mother’s arm. Lie down with me, Albert.”
He pulled the heavy covers from his bed and piled them on hers. Then he turned off the tiny orange-tinted light bulb under the big parchment lampshade. Minna presently fell asleep. Corde, stretched beside her along the edge of the bed, went into a state of blankness for the rest of the night.