Bobcat and Other Stories Part 3

"To experience," Hans said, smiling, and lifted his gla.s.s.

"To the party." Sta.s.selova looked pleased, his eyes shining from the soft lamplight.

"The Party?" Hans raised an eyebrow.

"This party," Sta.s.selova said forcefully, cheerfully.

"And to the committee," Hans said.

"The committee?"

"The Committee for Political Responsibility."

In one of Sta.s.selova's lectures he had taken great pains to explain to us that language did not describe events, it handled them, as a hand handles an object, and that in this way language made the world happen under its supervision. I could see that Hans had taken this to heart and was making lurching attempts in this direction.

Mercifully, Solveig appeared. Her drunkenness and her dignity had synergized into something quite spectacular, an inner recklessness accompanied by great external restraint. Her hair looked the color of heat-bright white. She was wearing newly cut-off jeans and was absently holding the disa.s.sociated pant legs in her hand.

"The professor," she said, when she saw Sta.s.selova. "The professor of oppression."

"h.e.l.lo, Solveig."

"So you came," she said, as if this had been the plan all along.

"Yes. It's nice to see you again."

"You as well," she said. "Why are you here?"

The whole scene looked deeply romantic to me. "To take you home," he said.

"Home?" she said, as if this were the most elegant and promising word in the language. "Yours or mine?"

"Yours, of course. Yours and Margaret's."

"Where is your home again?" she asked. Her eyes were glimmering with complexity, like something that is given to human beings after evolution, as a gift.

"I live downtown," he said.

"No, your real home. Your homeland."

He paused. "I am from Poland," he said finally.

"Then there. Let's go there. I have always wanted to go to Poland."

Sta.s.selova smiled. "Perhaps you would like it there."

"I have always wanted to see Wenceslaus Square."

"Well, that is nearby."

"Excellent. Let us go." And Solveig swung open the front door and walked into the snow in her shorts and T-shirt. I kissed Hans good-bye, and Sta.s.selova and I followed her.

Once outside, Sta.s.selova took off his coat and hung it around Solveig. Underneath his coat he was wearing a dark jacket and a tie. It looked sweet and made me think that if one kept undressing him, darker and darker suits would be found underneath.

Solveig was walking before us on the narrow sidewalk. Above her, on the hill, hovered Humanities-great, intelligent, alight. She reached into the coat pocket and pulled out, to my astonishment, a fur hat. The hat! The wind lifted, and the trees shook off a little of their silver snow. Humanities leaned over us, interested in its loving but secular way. I felt as sure about everything as those archaeologists who discover a single bone and can then hypothesize the entire animal. Solveig placed the hat on her head and turned to vamp for a moment, opening and closing the coat and raising her arms above her head in an exaggerated gesture of beauty. She looked like some stirring, turning simulacrum of communist and capitalist ideas. As she was doing this, we pa.s.sed by the president's house. It was an old-fashioned house, with high turrets, and had a bizarre modern wing hanging off one end of it. Solveig studied it for a moment as she walked, and then suddenly shouted into the cold night, "Motherf.u.c.ker!"

Sta.s.selova looked as if he'd been clubbed again in the back of the head, but he kept walking. He pretended that nothing had happened, didn't even turn his head to look at the house, but when I turned to him, I saw his eyes widen and his face stiffen with shock. I said "Oh" quietly and grabbed his hand for a moment to comfort him, to let him know that everything was under control, that this was Minnesota. Look-the president's house is still as dark as death, the moon is still high, the snow sparkling everywhere.

His hand was extraordinarily big. After Hans's hand, which I'd held for the past few months, Sta.s.selova's more ordinary hand felt strange, almost mutant, its five fingers splayed and independent.

THE NEXT NIGHT, IN the cafeteria, over a grisly neon dish called Festival Rice, I told Hans about the hat. "I saw the hat," I said. A freshman across the cafeteria stood just then and shouted, in what was a St. Gustav tradition, "I want a standing ovation!" The entire room stood and erupted into wild applause and hooting. Hans and I stood as well, and as we clapped, I leaned over to yell, "He's been telling the truth about that night overlooking Warsaw: I saw the hat he was wearing."

"What does that mean? That means nothing. I have a fur hat."

"No," I said. "It was this big Russian hat. You should have seen it. This big, beautiful Russian hat. Solveig put it on. It saved his life."

Hans didn't even try to object; he just kind of gasped, as if the great gears of logic in his brain could not pa.s.s this syllogism through. We were still standing, clapping, applauding. I couldn't help thinking of something Sta.s.selova had said in cla.s.s: that at rallies for Stalin, when he spoke to crowds over loudspeakers, one could be shot for being the first to stop clapping.

I AVOIDED MY PAPER for the next month or so, until spring crashed in huge warm waves and I finally sought it out, sunk in its darkened drawer. It was a horrible surprise. I was not any more of a scholar, of course, than I had been six months earlier, when I'd plagiarized it, but my eyes had now pa.s.sed over Marx and a biography of Stalin (microphones lodged in eyegla.s.ses, streams of censors on their way to work, b.l.o.o.d.y corpses radiating out of Moscow) and the gentle Bonhoeffer. Almost miraculously I had crossed that invisible line beyond which people turn into actual readers, when they start to hear the voice of the writer as clearly as in a conversation. "Language," Tretsky had written, "is essentially a coercive act, and in the case of Eastern Europe it must be used as a tool to garden collective hopes and aspirations." As I read, with Solveig napping at the other end of the couch, I felt a thick dread forming. Tretsky, with his suggestions of annexations and, worse, of solutions, seemed to be reaching right off the page, his long, thin hand grasping me by the shirt. And I could almost hear the wild mazurka, as Sta.s.selova had described it, fading, the cabarets closing down, the music turning into a chant, the boot heels falling, the language fortifying itself, becoming a stronghold-a fixed, unchanging system, as the paper said, a moral framework.

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY I WAS on my way to Sta.s.selova's office, but not before my mother called. The golden brochures had gone out in the mail. "Sweetie!" she said. "What's this? Keynote speaker? Your father and I are beside ourselves. Good night!" She always exclaimed "Good night!" at times of great happiness. I could not dissuade her from coming, and as I fled the dorm, into the rare, hybrid air of early April, I was wishing for those bad, indifferent parents who had no real interest in their children's lives. The earth under my feet as I went to him was very sticky, almost lugubrious, like the earth one sometimes encounters in dreams. Sta.s.selova was there, as always. He seemed pleased to see me.

I sat down and said, "You know, I was thinking that maybe somebody else could take my place at the symposium. As I reread my paper, I realized it isn't really what I meant to say at all."

"Oh," he said. "Of course you can deliver it. I would not abandon you at a moment like this."

"Really, I wouldn't take it as abandonment."

"I would not leave you in the lurch," he said. "I promise."

I felt myself being carried, mysteriously, into the doomed symposium, despite my resolve on the way over to back out at all costs. How could I win an argument against somebody with an early training in propaganda? I had to resort finally to the truth, that rinky-d.i.n.k little boat in the great sea of persuasion. "See, I didn't really write the paper myself."

"Well, every thinker builds an idea on the backs of those before him-or her, in your case." He smiled at this. His teeth were very square, and humble, with small gaps between them. I could see that Sta.s.selova was no longer after a confession. I was more valuable if I contained these ideas. Probably he'd been subconsciously looking for me ever since he'd lain on the muddy banks of the Vistula, Warsaw flaming across the waters. He could see within me all his failed ideals, the ugliness of his former beliefs contained in a benign vessel-a girl!-high on a religious hill in the Midwest. He had found somebody he might oppose and in this way absolve himself. He smiled. I could feel myself as indispensable in the organization of his psyche. Behind his head, in the sunset, the sun wasn't falling, only receding farther and farther.

THE DAYS BEFORE THE symposium unfurled like the days before a wedding one dreads, both endless and accelerated, the sky filled with springtime events-ravishing sun, great winds, and eccentric green storms that focused everyone's attention skyward. And then the weekend of the symposium was upon us, the Sat.u.r.day of my speech rising in the east. I awoke early and went to practice my paper on the red steps of Humanities, in whose auditorium my talk was to take place. Solveig was still sleeping, hung over from the night before. I'd been with her for the first part of it, had watched her pursue a man she'd discovered-a graduate student, actually, in town for the symposium. I had thought him a bit of a bore, but I trusted Solveig's judgment. She approached men with stealth and insight, her vision driving into those truer, more isolated stretches of personality. I had practiced the paper countless times, and revised it, attempting to excise the most offensive lines without gutting the paper entirely and thus disappointing Sta.s.selova. That morning I was still debating over the line "If we could agree on a common language, a single human tongue, perhaps then a single flag might fly over the excellent earth, one nation of like and companion souls." Reading it now, I had a faint memory of my earlier enthusiasm for this paper, its surface promise, its murderous innocence. Remembering this, I looked out over the excellent earth, at the town below the hill. And there, as always, was a tiny Gothic graveyard looking peaceful, everything still and settled finally under the gnarled, knotty, nearly human arms of apple trees. There were no apples yet, of course: they were making their way down the bough, still liquid, or whatever they are before birth. At the sight of graves I couldn't help thinking of Tretsky, my ghostwriter, in his dark suit under the earth, delightedly preparing, thanks to me, for his one last gasp.

By noon the auditorium had filled with a crowd of about two hundred, mostly graduate students and professors from around the Midwest, along with Hans and Solveig, who sat together, and, two rows behind them, my long-suffering parents, flushed with pride. I sat alone on a slight stage at the front of the room, staring out at the auditorium, which was named Luther. It had wooden walls and was extremely tall; it seemed humble and a little awkward, in that way the tall can seem. The windows stretched its full height, so that one could see the swell of earth on which Humanities was built, and then, above, all manner of weather, which this afternoon was running to rain. In front of these windows stood the reformed genius of martial law himself, the master of ceremonies, Sta.s.selova. Behind him were maple trees, with small green leaves waving. He had always insisted in cla.s.s that language as it rises in the mind looks like a tree branching, from finity to infinity. Let every voice cry out! He had once said this, kind of absently, and water had come to his eyes-not exactly tears, just a rising of the body's water into the line of sight.

After he introduced me, I stood in front of the crowd, my larynx rising quite against my will, and delivered my paper. I tried to speak each word as a discrete item, in order to persuade the audience not to synthesize the sentences into meaning. But when I lifted my head to look out at my listeners, I could see they were doing just that. When I got to the part where I said the individual did not exist-citizens were "merely shafts of light lost, redemptively, in the greater light of the state"-I saw Hans bow his head and rake his otherworldly hand through his hair.

"And if force is required to forge a singular and mutual grammar, then it is our sacred duty to hasten the birth pangs." Even from this distance I could hear Sta.s.selova's breathing, and the sound of blood running through him like a quiet but rushing stream.

And then my parents. As the speech wore on-"harmony," "force," "flowering," "blood"-I could see that the very elegant parental machinery they had designed over the years, which sought always to translate my deeds into something lovely, light-bearing, full of promise, was spinning a little on its wheels. Only Solveig, that apparatchik of friendship, maintained her confidence in me. Even when she was hung over, her posture suggested a perfect alignment between heaven and earth. She kept nodding, encouraging me.

I waited the entire speech for Sta.s.selova to leap forward and confront me, to rea.s.sert his innocence in opposition to me, but he did not, even when I reached the end. He stood and watched as everybody clapped in bewilderment, and a flushed floral insignia rose on his cheeks. I had come to love his wide, excited face, the old circus man. He smiled at me. He was my teacher, and he had wrapped himself, his elaborate historical self, into this package, and stood in front of the high windows, to teach me my little lesson, which turned out to be not about Poland or fascism or war, borderlines or pa.s.sion or loyalty, but just about the sentence: the importance of, the sweetness of. And I did long for it, to say one true sentence of my own, to leap into the subject, that st.u.r.dy vessel traveling upstream through the axonal predicate into what is possible; into the object, which is all possibility; into what little we know of the future, of eternity-the light of which, incidentally, was streaming in on us just then through the high windows. Above Sta.s.selova's head the storm clouds were dispersing, as if frightened by some impending goodwill, and I could see that the birds were out again, forming into that familiar pointy hieroglyph, as they're told to do from deep within.

Slatland.

I went to Professor Pine for help twice in my life, once as a child and once as an adult. The first time, I was eleven and had fallen into an inexplicable depression. This happened in the spring of 1967, seemingly overnight, and for no reason. Any happiness in me just flew away, like birds up and out of a tree.

Until then I had been a normal, healthy child. My parents had never damaged me in any way. They had given me a dusty, simple childhood on the flatlands of Saskatchewan. I had two best friends-large, unselfish girls who were already gearing up for adolescence, sometimes laughing until they collapsed. I had a dog named Chest, who late at night brought me half-alive things in his teeth-bats with human faces, fluttering birds, speckled, choking mice.

My parents couldn't help noticing my sadness. They looked at me as if they were afraid of me. Sometimes at the dinner table the silence would be so deep that I felt compelled to rea.s.sure them. But when I tried to say that I was all right, my voice would crack and I would feel my face distorting, caving in. I would close my eyes then, and cry.

One night my parents came into my bedroom and sat down on my bed. "Honey," my father said, "your mother and I have been thinking about you a lot lately. We were thinking that maybe you would consider talking to somebody-you know, a therapist-about what is the matter." My father was an earnest, cheerful man, a geologist with a brush cut and a big heart. I couldn't imagine that a therapist would solve my problems, but my father looked hopeful, his large hand tracing a ruffle around my bedspread.

Three days later we were standing outside an office on the fourth floor of the Humanities Building. My appointment was not with a true therapist but rather with a professor of child psychology at the university where my father taught.

We knocked, and a voice called from behind the door in a bit of a singsong, "Come in you, come in you." Of course he was expecting us, but this still seemed odd, as if he knew us very well or as if my father and I were both little children-or elves. The man sitting behind the desk when we entered was wearing a denim shirt, his blond hair slicked back like a rodent's. He looked surprised-a look that turned out to be permanent. He didn't stand up, just waved at us. From a cage in the corner three birds squawked. My father approached the desk and stuck out his hand. "Peter Bergen," my father said.

"Professor Roland Boland Pine," the man said, and then looked at me. "h.e.l.lo, girlie."

Despite this, my father left me alone with him. Perhaps he just thought, as I did, that Professor Pine talked like this, in occasional baby words, because he wanted children to respond as if to other children. I sat in a black leather chair. The professor and I just stared at each other for a while. I didn't know what to say, and he wasn't speaking either. It was easy to stare at him. As if I were staring at an animal, I felt no embarra.s.sment.

"Well," he said at last, "your name is Margit?"

I nodded.

"How are you today, Margit?"

"I'm okay."

"Do you feel okay?"

"Yes. I feel okay."

"Do you go to school, Margit?"

"Yes."

"Do you like your teacher?"

"Not really."

"Do you hate him?"

"It's a her."

"Do you hate her?"

"No."

"Why are you here, Margit?"

"I don't know."

"Is everything okay at home?"

"Yes."

"Do you love your father?"

"Yes."

"Do you love your mother?" A long tic broke on his face, from the outer corner of his left eye all the way down to his neck.

"Yes."

"Is she a lumpy mother?"

"Pardon me?"

"Pardon me, Margit. I meant does your mother love you?"

"Yes."

"Does she love your father?"

I paused. "Yes."

"And does he love her?"

"I guess so."

"Margit, what is the matter?"

"Nothing. I just don't see why we're talking about my parents so much."

"Why don't they love each other?"

"They do-I said they do."

"Why can't you talk about this?"

"Because there's nothing to talk about."

"You can tell me the truth. Do they hurt each other? Lots of girls' parents hurt each other."

"No, they don't."

"Is one of them having an affair, maybe?"

I didn't say anything. "Maybe?" he repeated.