She uses his diminutive, says “Maciek and I,” but knows nothing about him. She can play a game of cards, write a letter — it is never clear to whom — and he pretends to stamp and post it. By the time he has invented a plausible address, the incident has dissolved. She stares at the envelope. What is he talking about? She is poised on the moment between dark and light, when the last dream of dawn is shredding rapidly and awareness of morning has barely caught hold. She lives that split second all day long.
This morning, when he brought in her breakfast tray, he found a new letter astray on the carpet. Her writing is larger than before, easy to read:
My Dearest Dear!
Maciek is teaching and so am I! At the Polish high school in Paris! He teaches French. I teach algebra and music. Our pupils are well behaved. We have Nansen passports! They open wide, like an accordion. Only a few lucky people are allowed to have Nansen passports! They are very old! Only a few people can have them. Maciek is teaching French.
Your loving
Magda
Everything in the letter is true, if you imagine that today is unwinding some forty-five years ago. He said, “What a nice letter. Is it for Teresa?”
She sat up in bed, accepted tea. “What is Prussia?”
The Prussia question is new. Perhaps in one of the shredded dreams someone called out “Prussia!” in a dream voice that turned words and names into dramatic affirmations. She looked toward the window, sipped her tea. She could see (if she was taking it in) the big garage at the corner and at least one of the trees on Boulevard Raspail.
“They’ve cut some trees down,” she remarked not long ago, walking with him around the block. She was right: it was he who failed to notice the gaps, even though he goes along the boulevard every day of his life.
Unless you try to keep a conversation alive, nothing shows. When he takes her out in the afternoon for tea and a slice of fruitcake, she looks finer and more self-possessed than most of the old ladies at other tables. They make a mess with crumbs, feed piecrust to their unruly lapdogs, pester the waiter with questions as repetitive and tedious as any of Magda’s: Why is that door open? Why doesn’t someone shut the door? Well, why can’t you get somebody to fix it? The trouble about Magda is only that one can’t leave her alone for a minute or she will be out in the street, trying to climb on a bus, on her way to teach a solfège class in a Polish school that no longer exists.
Morning is the slow time, when she refuses to understand the first thing about buttons, zippers, a comb, a toothbrush. Marie-Louise, who was born in Martinique, arrives at nine o’clock, five days a week. She knows how to coax Magda out of bed and into her clothes. (A bath can take three-quarters of an hour.) At last, neatly dressed, holding hands with Marie-Louise, she will watch a program of cartoons or a cooking lesson or a hooded man sticking up an American bank. Still clutching Marie-Louise, she may say, in Polish, “Who is this woman? I don’t like this woman. Tell her to go away.”
Marie-Louise is sent by the city’s social services and costs them nothing. The rules are firm: household tasks are banned, but she may, as a favor, start the washing machine or make a compote of apples and pears for Magda’s lunch. In the meantime, he does the shopping, walks the dog. If Marie-Louise says she can stay until noon he walks up to Montparnasse and reads the newspapers. The white awning and umbrellas at the Atelier bring to mind the South, when Nice and Monaco were still within his means and not too crowded. He and Magda went down every Easter, travelling third class. He can retrace every step of their holiday round: beach in the morning, even when Easter fell in March and the sea was too cold for wading; a picnic lunch of bread, cheese, and fruit, eaten in deck chairs along the front; a rest; a long walk, then a change into spotless, pressed clothes — cream and ivory tones for Magda, beige or lightweight navy for him. An apéritif under a white awning; dinner at the pension. (In the dining room the Wroblewskis kept to themselves.) After dinner, a visit to the casino — not to gamble but to watch the most civilized people in Western Europe throw their money around. You would have to be a millionaire to live that way now.
In Montparnasse, the other day, a woman sitting by herself turned on a small radio. The music sounded like early Mozart or late Haydn. No one complained, and so the waiters said nothing. Against the music, he tried to calculate, in sums that have no bearing on money, his exact due. He would have sworn before any court, earthly or celestial, that he had never crawled. The music ceased, and a flat, cultured voice began describing what had just been played. The woman cut the voice and returned the radio to her handbag. For a few seconds the café seemed to have gone dead; then he began to take in conversations, the clink of spoons, footsteps, cars going by: sounds so familiar that they amounted to silence. Of course he had begged. He had entreated for enough to eat, relief from pain, a passport, employment. Shreds of episodes shrugged off, left behind, strewed the roads. Only someone pledged to gray dawns would turn back to examine them. You might as well collect every letter you see lying stained in a gutter and call the assortment an autobiography.
There must have been some virtues, surely. For instance, he had never tried to gain a benefit by fraud. Some people make a whole life out of trickery. They will even try to wrangle a box of the chocolates that the mayor of Paris distributes at Christmastime. These would-be swindlers may be in their fifties and sixties, too young to be put on the mayor’s list. Or else they have a large income and really ought to pay for their own pleasures. Actually, it is the rich who put on shabby clothes and saunter into their local town hall, waving a gift voucher that wouldn’t fool a child. And they could buy a ton of chocolates without feeling the squeeze!
The Wroblewskis, neither prosperous nor in want, get their annual gift in a correct and legal way. About four years ago, a notice arrived entitling Magda Zaleska, spouse Wroblewska, to the mayor’s present. She was just beginning to show signs of alarm over quite simple matters, and so he went in her place, taking along her passport, a lease of which she was the co-signer, and a letter of explanation that he wrote and got her to endorse. (Nobody wanted to read it.) He remembers how he trudged upstairs and down before coming across a hand-lettered sign saying “Chocolates — Show Voucher and Identity.”
The box turned out to be staggering in size, too large for a drawer or a kitchen shelf. It remained for weeks on top of the television set. (Neither of them cared for chocolate, except now and then a square of the bitter kind, taken with strong black coffee.) Finally, he transferred half the contents to a tin container that some Polish friends in England had used to send the Wroblewskis a gift of shortbread and digestive biscuits, and dispatched it to a distant cousin of Magda’s. The cousin had replied that she could find chocolate in Warsaw but would welcome a package of detergent or some toilet soap that didn’t take one’s skin off.
He had used some of last year’s chocolates as an offering for the concierge, packing them attractively in a wicker basket that had come with a purchase of dried apricots. She removed the ribbon and flowered paper, folded them, and exclaimed, “Ah! The mayor’s chocolates!” He still wonders how she knew: they are of excellent quality and look like any other chocolates you can see in a confectioner’s window. Perhaps she is on the list, and sends hers off to relatives in Portugal. It hardly seems possible: they are intended for the elderly and deserving, and she is barely forty. Perhaps she is one of the schemers who has used deceit — a false birth certificate. What of it? She is a worthy woman, hardworking and kind. A man he knows of is said to have filed an affidavit that he was too badly off to be able to pay his yearly television tax and got away with it: here, in Paris, where every resident is supposed to be accounted for; where the entire life of every authorized immigrant is lodged inside a computer or crammed between the cardboard covers of a dossier held together with frayed cotton tape.