You've Got to Read This (49 page)

The new teacher—he never knew his name—was almost as silent as he was himself. He moved with calm, determined steps between the tool cabinets and the benches, kept the paint cans and the lumber in order. He always looked him in the eye when he gave him something to do, a board to carry, a floor to sweep. He looked him in the eye and let it be known that he actually existed. When he handed him a pail of wood shavings to empty, it became a living sign saying that he existed.

The students in this workshop were of different kinds and different ages. Some things happened that frightened him a bit and that amused him
LARS GUSTAFSSON • 267

almost as much. Clumsy as calves, older and younger boys moved around each other, joked, butted each other. Jokes and taunts occurred, glue pots in the hair and boards nailed to the floor when you went to pick them up.

It disturbed him and frightened him when it was directed against him.

The laughter was something they tried to force on him.

The board in the floor was a surprise directed at someone they wanted him to be. Something to laugh at. But that wasn't where he was.

The new teacher knew how to quiet such things down; with a calm hand, without harsh words, he separated the combatants when the boys got into a fight, dragging each other around a bench, keeping a strong hold on each other's hair. Patiently, he showed that you can't plane a board from both directions without ripping up the fibers. He never allowed dirt to accumulate under his short, broad nails.

He was, in a way, the center of the world.

In a world that had no center, he reigned like a quiet monarch, too self-evident ever to feel that his own order was being threatened, too rich to demand anything from the poor, an envoy in chaos serving an order so noble that it was also able to accept the necessity of disorder.

There were those who urinated in the pails of wood shavings because they didn't have time to get to the toilets inside the main entrance.

They had to clean it up themselves, but no harsh words were spoken.

It was somewhat different with the women aides. They were so divided between disgust and maternity, or locked into a maternity which was disgust at the same time, that they always created anxiety.

They smelled different. Their large, white forearms, often a bit reddened, fascinated him, and he often tried to touch them, but they nudged him gently aside. He was "in the way," as they called it.

He suspected great secrets in them, sniffed out that he was only seeing a narrow strip of their lives, but he wasn't able to formulate it.

They changed often, so that there was no possibility of keeping a face in your memory: as the years passed, their faces merged into a single face, and it was gentle and mute.

He himself slipped away, too. The wood shop teacher moved after a couple of years; the shop was closed, since the students who had worked there moved to another kind of institution. Quite a few disappeared, and only the hopeless ones remained.

The traffic along the road increased during those years. In the spring of 1952, a trailer truck loaded with grain lost control swerving to avoid a youth on a Husqvarna 125 cc; the trailer went through the loose sand on the shoulder of the road, and the whole thing turned over in their hedge.

The driver climbed out, a bit shaken up, and saw two hydrocephalic boys tumbling like little seals in the yellow grain that filled the ditch.

He thought he'd landed in another world.

268 • GREATNESS STRIKES WHERE IT PLEASES

The salvage went quickly, but they scooped up wheat for weeks down in the ditch, played with it, filled their pockets with it. The aides found wheat under the beds, in the pillow cases, everywhere.

It was a mysterious gift, and it came from outside.

It was the last big event for a long time. His senses were asleep: there was nothing that made enough of a claim on them. He lived for mealtimes, and when he was around thirty, he became grotesquely fat. His blue carpenter's pants with suspender buckles had to be let out.

Traffic along the road increased. He was always led across the road when he was going to help in the apple orchard on the other side. He wasn't much use. For the most part he walked around raking, and often he would rake under a single tree until the ground was all torn up and some laughing foreman came and moved him.

He had a profound horror of the motorized cultivator that arrived in 1956: one of the regular gardeners had got his foot caught that spring, and it looked awful: toes hanging loose, blood flowing, but that wasn't what frightened him. It was the helpless cry when everyone came running. After that, he refused to stay in the orchard when the cultivator got going and rushed back to the Home, across the road. They let him be.

He didn't want to hear that cry again.

He had another peculiarity which amused the men in the market garden: he was afraid of birds.

Not birds flying, not flights of wild geese and cranes and swifts tumbling high in the air in the summer evenings.

It was birds that flew up suddenly out of bushes that frightened him, sparrows fluttering up from a new-plowed field would make him beside himself with terror. Even after he had turned thirty, he would still, in spite of all prohibitions, run into the kitchen, babbling incomprehensibly.

Good-natured aides would try to comfort him with a piece of coffee-cake: he could sit for a long time, trembling and stiff, until his terror slowly wore off.

He had no words for the world, and birds' suddenly flying up was one of the thousand ways in which the world would turn
unreliable.

The bird wasn't something that fluttered through the world, the bird was a corner of the cloth of the world which had worked loose and started to flutter.

Of course there was terror in it, but also liberation: the dream he was dreaming would have an ending.

At the end of the '50s, his parents died. Nobody tried to explain it to him, and he didn't know in what order they died or when, but when he hadn't seen them for a few years—his mother would visit him regularly twice a year and always brought him candy and apples, an anxious lot of apples, as if the lack of apples were his problem—he started to miss them, in some
LARS GUSTAFSSON • 269

vague fashion, about the way you might all of a sudden long for mustard or honey or a certain kind of floury gravy with just a taste of burned pork.

He remembered the buildings better than he did his parents—the horse, the woodshed—the only thing left of his parents was the sound when they shut the door to the porch and stamped the snow off their boots in the winter.

But this sound was an important sound. It meant that the lamps would be lit, that the atmosphere in the room would change.

At the end of September every year, the willow herb, the evening prim-rose, has no more flowers left, but its seed pods ride on the wind, and if they get into a yard, they respond to even the slightest changes in temperature by rising and falling rhythmically. And at last they settle down, in small, quick drafts, which the wind can easily carry off again.

That was the way September was that year, in 1977.

He was sitting in the dayroom in the new Home, sixty miles from the old one, which had been torn down in 1963.

He had his favorite spot by the window. Here was an asphalt yard, without trees, without flowers, only a wilted flowerbed edging the drive and the three parking places.

Here the seeds of the willow herb came drifting in. It was the kind of September day when the air is
quite still and waiting.

He was shapeless in his lounger; he swelled over its edges. For ten years he had been quite empty.

The drifting seed pods, unbelievably light, moved on winds so slight that no one could discern them.

Slowly the shadow of the curtain moved across the polished floor of the dayroom.

The hourglass-shaped ribbon of light moved across the surface of the planet, dawn line and dusk line rushing forward like great wings across distant plains and mountains. Slowly or swiftly, depending on how you chose to measure it, the earth moved in its orbit and would never return to the same point where it had once been. Slowly or swiftly, the solar system moved in its orbit, and with silent, dizzying speed; like a disk of light, the galaxy moved in its mysterious rotation around itself.

In the wombs of the mothers, unborn embryos were growing, mem-branes and tissues folded and pleated themselves cleverly around each other, exploring without sorrow, without hesitation, the possibilities of topo-logical space.

Of this he knew nothing: heavy and huge like a boulder in the woods, he sat in his chair, moving it with effort a few inches every hour so that it always remained in the patch of sun.

He was as slow as the galaxy and as mysterious.

In the shadows of the leaves which moved more and more insistently against the wall, he saw the old mushrooms growing once more, from the
270 • GREATNESS STRIKES WHERE IT PLEASES

first soft mound shooting up through the moss to the last black-brown pyramid of shapeless, pungent tissue in December.

For years, he allowed them to grow freely as he sat there; he made them more and more remarkable, more and more fantastic; each and every one the only one of its kind, saw them live and die; knew since long ago that all time and everything that grew were as mysterious and great as he was himself.

The Interview

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Introduced by Jane Smiley

I READ "THE INTERVIEW" IN THE WINTER OF 1978, WHEN I WAS LIVING

in one room at the University of Iceland and shirking my research duties by borrowing lots of books from the library at the U.S. Information Agency. At the end of January, it was light for about two and a half hours every day, and since I didn't like to rise before dawn, that meant I ate breakfast at about one-thirty in the afternoon and finally fell into bed again around four or five in the morning. I was depressed. I hid out in my room and read S. J.

Perelman, Christina Stead, Tolstoy, Halldor Laxness, and the anthology of
New Yorker
stories from the fifties where "The Interview" was printed. During the daily ration of sunlight, I sat at my portable typewriter and wrote fiction. After a while it dawned on me that on the days I wrote I felt that life was worth living, and on the days I didn't write I felt that it was not worth living. I foresaw that when I got back to the States, life would not present itself to me in such stark terms, but I learned my lesson anyway and returned from Iceland in May a far more committed writer than I had felt myself to be in September. When I recall that period now, I don't remember
being
depressed, only that I
was
depressed. What I remember are all the worlds I visited, self-contained and exquisite and lit by the experience and imagination of writers like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Jhabvala lived for a long time in India. "The Interview" was written in the fifties when she was young, but it struck me in Iceland and it strikes me now as a very wise story. The narrator, a young husband of the educated caste, speaks of his day (and his life) with disarming honesty. He is observant, intelligent, possessed of a degree of self-knowledge. In Iceland, I was transported to Bombay by the picture he draws of the life that swirls around him in his house and out on the street. But what I found both splendid and exciting about the story was how much about the young man Jhabvala made me understand—not only who he felt himself to be but how he came to be the way he was, and how who he was fit into his world. And yet she does not write about him as if he were a specimen. I think two moments in the story are as poignant as any I have ever read: the moment in the office when he sees another applicant tear his dhoti on a nail, and his own final moment of regret. I hesitate to say more about the story because I find one of its best pleasures to be its complex unfolding. I would like to have written something as observant and as wise as "The Interview."

T h e Interview

Ruth P r a w e r Jhabvala

am always very careful of my appearance, so you could not say that I spent much more time than usual over myself that morning. It is true, I trimmed and oiled my moustache, but then I often do that; I always like it to look very neat, like Raj Kapoor's, the film star's. But I knew my sister-in-law and my wife were watching me. My sister-in-law was smiling, and she had one hand on her hip; my wife only looked anxious. I knew she was anxious. All night she had been whispering to me. She had whispered, "Get this job and take me away to live somewhere alone, only you and I and our children." I had answered, "Yes," because I wanted to go to sleep. I don't know where and why she has taken this notion that we should go and live alone.

When I had finished combing my hair, I sat on the floor and my sister-in-law brought me my food on a tray. It may sound strange that my sister-in-law should serve me, and not my wife, but it is so in our house. It used to be my mother who brought me my food, even after I was married; she would never allow my wife to do this for me, though my wife wanted to very much. Then, when my mother got so old, my sister-in-law began to serve me. I know that my wife feels deeply hurt by this, but she doesn't dare to say anything. My mother doesn't notice many things anymore, otherwise she certainly would not allow my sister-in-law to bring me my food; she has always been very jealous of this privilege herself, though she never cared who served my brother. Now she has become so old that she can hardly see anything, and most of the time she sits in the corner by the family trunks and folds and strokes her pieces of cloth. For years now she has been collecting pieces of cloth. Some of them are very old and dirty, but she doesn't care, she loves them all equally. Nobody is allowed to touch them. Once there was a great quarrel, because my wife had taken one of them to make a dress for our child. My mother shouted at her—it was terrible to hear her: but then, she has never liked my wife—and my wife was very much afraid and cried and tried to excuse herself. I hit her across the face, not very hard and not because I wanted to, but only to satisfy my mother. The old woman kept quiet then and went back to folding and stroking her pieces of cloth.