(I don’t understand why milkmen insist on carrying out their job so inexorably, so mechanically, even though they can see that the milk already there is going bad. The person who delivers the newspapers — I’ve seen him — is a boy who goes by on a bicycle and expertly tosses the paper onto the porch. His careless haste is understandable, whereas the milkman is announcing to the world that the house is uninhabited. That anyone could go in and rob it. Milkmen are always accomplices: in adultery, in robbery.)
I touched the copper doorknob apprehensively. The door opened. Nobody had locked Mr. Plotnikov’s house. I walked into a perfectly ordinary foyer, no different from ours: an umbrella stand, a mirror, the stairs to the second floor right by the door, inviting one to go up. It was a house in the so-called Federal style, symmetrical in design but secret in its details: an old window unexpectedly looking out over an impenetrable tropical garden of bamboo and ferns; a window protruding like a mysterious island from the rest of the continent; the plaster eagles, escutcheons victory banners, and military drums. And on each side of the narrow vestibule, a salon, a dining room.
I went into the Russian’s dining room, with its heavy furniture, an ornate samovar set up in the center of a table with massive legs and a white tablecloth; its dishes with popular Russian decorations, and the walls holding not the icons I had imagined there but two paintings in that academic style that was equally popular with Czarist nobility and Soviet commissars: one of the paintings depicted the quintessential outdoor scene, a troika, a family going out for a ride: excitement, overcoats, fur rugs, caps, covers, the snowstorm, the steppe, birch trees, an endless horizon … The other painting, all interior, showed a dim bedroom, a bed in which a young woman lay dead. By her side, standing, a doctor, his satchel on the floor, feeling for her pulse. The composition called for her pale arm to be extended, for the doctor to hold her long, thin hand. In a film (for example, Anna Karenina with a different ending) the doctor would have shaken his head sadly. Here, the dramatic commentary was provided by a babushka sitting in a wing chair in the foreground, consoling a child in a nightgown who stares heavenward with angelic eyes to the infinite that infuses the bedroom.
The room on the other side of the foyer was the reception room and it was decorated in a conspicuously Spanish style. There was a piano with a lace shawl tossed over it. The furniture was Moorish and the painting, in the style of Romero de Torres, showed bullfighters and gypsies, gold flowers and red satin capes. On the shawl were a group of photographs in silver frames. I didn’t recognize their subjects; all the photos, I realized as I looked at them, were from the period before the Spanish Civil War. There were men in the uniforms of the Imperial Russian Army, and others in uniforms of the Moroccan infantry. The women, all dressed in white, belonged to a generation caught between the virtues of the past century and the unavoidable (and anticipated) sins of the new one; they resisted giving up their bustles, cameos, and elaborate hairstyles, just as Monsieur Plotnikov clung to his old-fashioned clothing.
The dancers were the exception: there were two or three portraits of a spectacularly beautiful woman, all long legs, narrow waist, filmy clothing, smooth arms, swan’s neck, bright makeup, dark gemstones in equally black hair cut short: her body arched passionately and gracefully toward the ground, poised to give life or to lose it: who knows. I couldn’t identify Mr. Plotnikov in these photos; who knows, who knows. There were no photos of the man acting such and such a role. I understood the reason. He wanted a complete life, not a fragmentary one, he had told me. History wanted to divide it; he resisted. There would be no photo of him in Uncle Vanya or The Seagull (was he blessed with the self-critical humor necessary to play Konstantin Treplev?).
I heard an invisible wingbeat in the salon, as my attention was drawn to a photo: Mr. Plotnikov standing, in almost the same pose as the ballerina, but this time he was the one leaning — gray hair, his youth gone — over Constancia, dressed in white, my wife at fifteen or sixteen, radiant, holding a child in her lap, a child whose features were difficult to make out, blurry, as if he had moved just as the photo was being taken — but also blurry, I suspected, because of his unformed youth: his age was impossible to determine, but he seemed to be about a year or fifteen months old.
The three of them, I thought to myself, all three of them, I said over and over again, as I ran upstairs, just as Constancia does when she is mad at me.
I say ran. It’s not true. The deeper I penetrated into Monsieur Plotnikov’s nineteenth-century house, the more completely I was gripped by torpor, an unaccustomed sluggishness that possessed and divided my body and soul. My body seemed to go in one direction and my soul in the other, a strange mood rose within me as I climbed the stairs, as if the vapors given off by the two rooms, the Russian dining room and the Spanish living room, had united to create a thin but suffocating atmosphere, heightened by the constant noise, a sound of wings beating against the roof of the house. I climbed to a height greater than the distance from one floor to the other, I was aware that I was entering another region, another geographic zone, unexpectedly cool, with the air so thin that I was filled with a false euphoria, though I knew that this signaled the advent of something horrible.
13
I needed a rest. I informed my office and the hospital that I would be taking a long vacation. Nobody wanted to point out to me that I could have retired years ago; but I knew what they were thinking: a man like me, so reserved and unsociable, married to a woman no more outgoing, needed his work to feel alive. Retiring is almost redundant for a man like me. Besides, I’m still an excellent surgeon.
Those mornings, I examined myself in the mirror as I shaved, something that I had not done before; I had always shaved mechanically, without really looking at myself. Now I seemed to be seeing myself for the first time with a clarity brought about by my feeling of abandonment, a feeling that might be Constancia’s way of punishing me for having dared to violate the secret of her friend, Mr. Plotnikov, her friend before I knew her, if the photo in the Spanish room could be believed.
I looked at the old man in the mirror who was finally seeing himself as others saw him. The old man was me.
How often we refuse to recognize the advent of old age, putting off what is not only inevitable but also obvious; with how many lies we reject what others can see perfectly welclass="underline" these eyelids permanently sagging, the dry, bloodshot eyes, the thinning, graying hair that no longer can even feign a youthful virile balding, the involuntary rictus of disgust with oneself; what has become of me, my neck was never flabby, my cheeks were not covered with a web of veins, my nose didn’t used to hang this way. Was I young once?
Was I once Dr. Whitby Hull, native of Atlanta, Georgia, student of medicine at Emory, soldier in the invasion of Sicily and the Italian boot, student at the University of Seville, on the G.I. Bill, husband of a Spanish woman, resident of Savannah on the shores of the Atlantic after my return, surgeon, man of letters, passionate man, secretive man, guilty man? Old man. A man surrounded by mysteries, things he can’t understand, trying to see across the ocean to the other shore through a bathroom mirror that repeats its accusation: Old man; trying to look past the steam on the glass to the other side of the Atlantic, a razor in my hand.