Novelties & Souvenirs (23 page)

“So we all
did
go swimming,” the woman said. “That night, by the bridge where there’s the embankment. Well, I said I’d go. And then she said she and her new friend, the other one from the one she came with, the one she’d just met, didn’t want to—but they said, Oh, come on, everybody needs to cool off. You know.”

Hare was listening carefully now.

“So they all took their clothes off. And they’re really very young.” She laughed. “And, well. With
her
it never bothered me, but you know they can be so unkind, or no, not that, I just couldn’t. I mean I’m too old really for those games they play, you know? Girls together, like in school. You get beyond that kind of thing. I laughed about it, you kids go ahead, I just like to watch, I’m an old grandma. And they just let me sit.”

Hare put down his bowl. He was smiling, too, and nodding, as though sharing with the woman this amusing part of the story, where she’d tried to act her age with offhand grace; and trying to feel the other feeling that the woman felt: exclusion from happy comradeship, and jealousy; and trying also to transmute his own sudden strong feelings, by careful attention to her, into sympathy. He shook his head, smiling at how life sometimes goes on.

“Kids,” she said. “At that age you just don’t care.”

Hare wanted to ask: What did they do together in the water? But he could not have asked this and maintained his air of casual interest; and he thought that if she told him he would not understand her answer rightly anyway, because what the young women did together in the water would be three times masked from him: by their own young feelings, by the feelings of the woman who watched them from the bank, and worst of all, by the obstruction of his own feelings, so irrelevant to the young women in the water and what they did together, and yet so fierce.

“I know what you mean,” he said, remembering a day in spring years ago, when he was at school.

The school Hare had gone to as a boy was built in the shape of a T. In one branch of the T the girls were taught by female teachers; in the other branch the boys were taught by men. Where the branches met, the corridor of Hare’s part ended, crossed by the
corridor of the girls’ part running at right angles. Going from class to class, coming near this juncture, boys could watch the girls walking in their part: books under their arms, or held up before them, embraced in that way that girls so often held their books but boys for some reason never did; talking together in groups or walking singly. Glances and waves could be passed from one part to the other, and brief conversations held there. There was a gymnasium in the school—Hare could not remember now just how it attached to the body of the school building—where alternately through the day boys’ and girls’ exercise classes met; it could also be filled with folding chairs when visiting cadre came to lecture. For these events the boys used one half of the floor, and the girls the other, separated by a wide aisle.

On fine days, after they had had their lunch, older students who had permission from their teachers were allowed to walk outside for a while on a strip of pavement that ran before the wide back doors of this gymnasium, to talk and smoke cigarettes. There was a proctor to watch them, but he usually absented himself. These were good students; they were being given a taste of the sort of privileges cadre had, and that they themselves might someday have. The boys understood that, and talk was usually serious. On a burning spring day, a first summer afternoon, Hare was walking with three or four other boys, smoking and talking. They were all laughing too loud, because of the day, and the sun, and summer coming. Then—either blown open by a gust of wind because they hadn’t been properly closed, or opened from within by someone on purpose to bring cool air into the hot gymnasium—the double doors of the gymnasium opened.

There was a girls’ class in progress. A girl Hare knew slightly, a cheerful laughing girl, stood framed in the doorway, legs wide
apart, hair lifted by the sudden inrush of air. She wore only a band across her breasts and a sort of strap around her waist and between her legs. She waved to Hare, surprised but unashamed. Beyond her, in the comparative darkness of the gymnasium, were the others in the class. There were mats laid out on the floor. Two girls on each mat were wrestling; some wore the same breast band that the girl standing in the doorway wore, some who didn’t need them yet didn’t. Those not wrestling stood to watch the others. Hare saw all this in a moment. The girls within shouted and laughed, the wrestlers stopped and looked, some of the girls ran to hide. Around Hare the boys were laughing. Hare only stood staring, having become eyes, his heart become eyes, his hands and mouth become eyes. Then the girl pulled the doors shut with a boom.

The boys around Hare laughed together, pummeling each other and shouting in an access of energy, until the proctor came smiling to see what was up, what the joke was. Hare turned away from the closed doors, feeling an almost unbearable sense of loss and exclusion; feeling withered and desiccated within, made old, by loss.

Hare wanted to ask the woman Dev if that was what she had felt by the river, watching her friend and the other young women: that sense of loss and exclusion.

But it couldn’t be. Because she had, once, herself been one of those girls on the mats, among others. She had always been in the other part. The young woman swimming with the others was her friend; they were all her friends. Hare couldn’t imagine then what she felt, whether her feelings were of the same kind as his, or a different kind altogether, and whether it hurt as much, or more, or less: her loss of what he had never had.

“I know what you mean,” he said again.

Willy said to him: “You look tired. You always look tired now. You look as though someone knew something terrible about you, and you were afraid he was going to tell all your friends, and you can’t stop worrying about it. But I know everything about you, and there isn’t anything terrible at all.”

Willy shared Hare’s room in the dormitory building where the project staff were housed. Willy wasn’t exactly cadre, he hadn’t much education, he was good with his hands and worked in the project maintenance shops. But Hare, when he saw that he wouldn’t be able to have a room of his own because the project staff had grown too large, had got Willy into his room. Willy didn’t mind living with project cadre, he had no sense of inferiority, and everybody liked Willy, his goodness, his jokes, his sympathy with everyone. Willy got along.

Though they had often lost touch in the intervening years, Hare had known Willy since school. Willy was four years younger than he, and at summer work camp when Hare was proctor, Willy, alone and unhappy at his first camp, had adopted Hare to be his friend and protector. He’d sneak out of his own bunk with the young children and make his way to Hare’s bed, shyly but insistently climbing in with him. Hare, half asleep, didn’t resist the boy’s affection; he was embarrassed to find him there in the morning, as immovable as a log in his deep childish sleep, and the other proctors made fun of him, but they were jealous, too, that Hare had someone so devoted, to run errands for him; once there had been a fight with another proctor over Willy. Willy understood—he always understood the context, the human net of desires and fears, the act-field, in a concrete way that Hare never would—and
after that when he crept into bed in Hare’s cubicle, he would be silent; would lie with Hare almost not moving, and with his face pressed into the hollow of Hare’s shoulder would masturbate him with small motions, sometimes seeming to fall asleep amid it. When Hare made noises, Willy would whisper
shhh
in his ear, and giggle.

Willy called it playing. He always did. It was more intense pleasure than eating, without that daily compulsion but no less automatic; as refreshing as football or hard calisthenics, but imbued with affection and intimacy. The continuum in Willy from simple affection and shared good times to those cryings-out, those spasms, was unbroken; it had no parts; it was the social calculus in reality, and Hare loved it in Willy and envied him for it.

Because for all he, Hare, knew the integral social calculus, in him there was such a division. There was a breaking into parts, as in the oldest and wrongest paradoxes; an infinite number of discrete distances to cross between himself and what he desired.

“It’s because I want the other,” he told Willy when long ago he’d tried to say it in words. “You want the same. So it wouldn’t occur to you.”

“That’s not it,” Willy said, laughing. “Because I’ve been with women, too. I bet more than you have. I like people, that’s the difference. You have to like people. If you like people, they’ll like you back. Men or women. If you’re interested in them, they like you for it. It’s simple.”

Hare had laughed, too, shamefaced, uneasy with the humility he had to learn in order to take advice from the boy whom he’d protected and taught. Pride: it was a fault cadre were liable to, he knew, a fault that must be erased. Why shouldn’t he take advice from Willy? While Hare had grown up in the thin atmosphere of
schools, study camps, and project dormitories, Willy had been moving in the sea of the people, the endless flux of the Revolution, with all its accidents and coincidences. Never cease learning from the people: that was a maxim of the Revolution grown old and unfeelable for Hare.

But he had tried to learn. He had tried to meld himself with the common play of desire and pleasure, hope and disappointment, pleasure and work. He became, or seemed to become, wise; became someone to whom others told stories, because of his calm, sensible sympathies. The endless voices: Hare heard stories everywhere, people told him of their plans and desires, Hare nodded and said
I know what you mean.

But he had no stories himself that he could tell.

The dormitories where the cadre that worked in Hare’s project lived were modular, like the people’s housing, though the units were smaller. Above the communal facilities, the refectories and common rooms and workstations, the units were bolted on seemingly at random; but in fact Applications worked and reworked the building’s program to assure that every unit got as much sun and air, as many windows, as short a walk to toilets, as possible; and so optimized along many dimensions it accreted as complexly and organically as a coral reef, and with the same stochastic logic.

Toward the summer’s end the man who had lived alone in the unit next to Hare and Willy was shifted to another project. The people associated with his part in the project gave him a farewell party in one of the common rooms. They gave him a few small gifts, mostly jokes relating to work, and they ate cakes and drank tea spiked with some alcohol someone had got from the dispensary. Willy, to whom things like this were important, who remembered
the birthdays of many people, had spent some time decorating the corner of the room where they sat, and he gave the departing man a real gift, an antiquity he’d found somewhere in the city and made a box for in the shop. The antiquity, a small white-enameled cube of thin metal, had a little door in the front that opened to show an interior space, and four red spirals symmetrically painted on its top, and representations of dials or knobs here and there. It was passed from hand to hand, everyone marveling at how old it must be and wondering what it might have been for. Willy was pleased with the effect. The man who was leaving was very touched, even surprised, Hare thought, and embraced Willy; and then, somewhat clumsily, all the others. Then the party was over.

The next week two young women came to live together in the empty room.

They were young, in training in the project, and inseparable; shy amid new people, but making their way together. Hare talked with them now and then when he found himself opposite them at dinner. They weren’t sisters, though they looked enough alike to be sisters: both dark, with luminous eyes and full, childlike yet maturely sensual faces. Their light clothes of Blue (they had come up from a project in the south) revealed them as though without their knowledge or consent. They had a funny way of finishing each other’s sentences. When Hare came upon one of them alone and began a conversation with her, she talked of little but her friend, her opinions and feelings, and kept looking around to see if she had come. When at last her friend appeared, a calm joy transformed her face. Hare watched her, his polite smile stuck on his face: watched love come and settle on her features and in the repose of her body.

Because they lived next to him, because he could hear through
the thin wall the indistinct murmur of their voices and the sounds of their movements, Hare thought often about the two of them. The time he spent alone in his room was punctuated by the small sounds they made: a laugh over some joke Hare couldn’t hear; obscure sounds of things moved or handled. Without willing it, he found himself growing alert to these sounds, his attention pricking up at them like a dog’s ears. When Willy was also in the room, Hare paid no attention to the next room; his and Willy’s noises drowned them out. But alone he listened; even held still to listen, found himself making the silent movements of a spy with his glass or his book, so as not to miss—What? he asked himself; and went on listening.

There was a night when loud scrapings, sounds of effort, laughter, business, went on some time next door; something bumped against Hare’s wall. He could make nothing of all this until, after general lights-out, he climbed into bed and heard, close by him and more distinctly than before, the sound of their voices, the jounce and squeak of their bed.

They had shifted the few furnishings of their room, and moved the bed they shared from the far side of the room up against the wall that divided their room from Hare’s, the same wall against which his own bed was placed. It was as though the three of them were now in the same bed, with the thin wall between them dividing it in two.

Hare lay still. There were long silences; a word from one of the two of them, a brief answer; the noise of the bed when one of them moved. He heard one of them get up, the pat of her naked feet on the floor; she returned, the bed spoke. With slow care he rolled over in his bed so that he lay next to the wall. Still he could hear no intelligible voices, only the sounds of their speech. But now, with
the lights out, alone next to them close enough to touch them but for the wall, he knew he must hear, hear it all.