Why such upset? This was not the first violent end I had witnessed. Was it that it was another of death's heartless demonstrations that even the young are not immune to its capricious singlings-out? No, that is too obscure. Perhaps it was simply because the girl had seemed to be looking at me, had seemed to know or recognise me, might even have been about to speak to me. But why should that make the encounter, if such it could be called, so unsettling? In certain circles, admittedly rarefied, mine is a well-known face. I am used to strangers recognising me. They will pause, the young in particular, and look at me, shyly, or with resentment, or more often just that slow, dull, witless stare, as if it is not the real me they are seeing but a representation of me, an animated model set up for their free and exclusive scrutiny. So why should the girl's attention have made me want to take to my heels? Oh, but I knew, I knew of course, why I was agitated: it was not the girl I was thinking of, it was Magda. When she was alive I could hardly be said to have given her a second thought, while now she was constantly on my mind, if only as a shadow, the solitary spectator sitting in the benches above the spotlit ring where the gaudy and increasingly chaotic performance of who and what I am pretending to be is carried on without interval. She lingers there, unwilling shade, wishing to be gone, perhaps, yet curious to see the not so grand finale, with its tumbling clowns and bowing acrobats and trained animals doing their last lap. Only in death has she begun to live fully, for me.
Strange, but try as I may I cannot remember exactly how or when we met. In my memory of it, that first, long-ago season in an unreally vivid New York is all haste and noise and sullen heat. Even in the streets I felt as if I were trapped inside a huge, smoky, deafening factory. Everything was always on the move, there was never a moment of cessation or stillness. Traffic thudded day and night along the streets above the corner basement room where I lodged; the papers on the scarred old table I used for a work desk shivered and shifted in the draught from the electric fan some acquaintance had given me, as it turned its fuzzy face and fencer's mask slowly from side to side in obdurate refusal of relief. All day a confusion of disembodied legs passed back and forth on the pavement outside the ground-level window above my table, as if there were a riot, or a disordered, shuffling marathon dance, continually going on out there. And then there was the talk, incessant, raucous, plosive with challenge or swollen with sudden declarations of sincerity and fellow-feeling. I would meet them at the end of their working day – work was one of the sacred words then, pronounced with breathy awe – the scrawny young men in open-necked shirts, with their flat haircuts and Zippo lighters, sweating earnestness, the serious-eyed girls in pumps and calf-length skirts clutching paperback copies of Capital to their chests like breastplates. The thin, sweetish beer, the charry cigarette smoke, the sudden squabbles that were as suddenly quelled, the shouts and thrusting forefingers, and that gesture of half-angry dismissal of a contrary opinion, so characteristic of the time and place, a free-wristed, sideways slap at the air and the face turning aside, with wrinkled nose and drooping lower lip: Ndah! – all this was intensely strange to me, and yet familiar, too, I could not think why, at first, until I realised that of course I had seen it all over and over again, for vears, in the cinema, every Saturday night, when I was young. America on the screen had been more intimately familiar to me than the streets of the city where I was born and where I lived. And so, in New York, the actual New York, that was how I chose to present myself, as a character out of the pictures, a fat cigarette lolling in my lips and a tumbler of bourbon at my elbow. I even used to dress the part, in brown fedora and tight, double-breasted suit and two-toned shoes. Oh, yes, it was quite a figure that I cut. The intellectual as tough guy, that was all the rage, in those days. All I lacked was a companion, some big babe, loose and hard-drinking, and as tough as I was supposed to be. People were baffled, therefore, especially the girls, when it turned out to be sweet, silent, undemonstrative Magdalena that I chose to be my moll, my mate. Even then, when she was still in her twenties, there was a massive, stony quality to her, something granitic and unrelievedly grey, that was curiously attractive, to me, at least. I quickly understood, when I first began to notice her, that she kept to the background not out of shyness or fear – although she was shy, she was fearful – but in order to be able to watch and listen to all that went on from the shelter of anonymity. She was unflagging in her obligingness, doing errands for the men and the bossier of the girls, fetching books for them, and packs of cigarettes, and sandwiches and paper cups of coffee; I can still see her, in her sandals and no-colour knitted dress, her hair in fat braids, coming down the basement steps in that odd, elephantine way that she had, turning sideways and lowering one broad foot on to each step and then bringing the second down to join it, her chin tucked into her fish-pale throat and her gaze fixed on whatever it was she was carrying. She was living on the Lower East Side – a placename that in those days still sounded as suggestively exotic to my ears as Samarkand or the Isles of the Blest – with a plumber, a militant Pole of simian aspect with a revolutionist's wire-brush moustache, who was said to beat her. She would not talk about him, even when she had left him and had come to live with me in my basement, bringing a bottle of bourbon as a moving-in present and one not very large suitcase containing everything she possessed. Late one night the Pole turned up in the street outside, drunk and in a tearful rage and calling out her name, and banged on the door and would have kicked in the window had it not been barred. I wanted to get up and chase him away – even with my bad leg I did not doubt I would be well able to see off the little ape – but Magda prevented me.
She did not like to talk about herself or her life; when she did mention some event from the past her voice would take on a tinge of puzzlement, as if what had happened had happened to someone else and she could not understand how she knew so many of the details. Nor did she care particularly to hear about my life before we had met. Others, even the brashest among our acquaintances, regarded me with a kind of wondering respect, with a holy reverence, almost: I was the real thing, a genuine survivor, who had come walking into their midst out of the fire and furnace smoke of the European catastrophe, like Frankenstein's monster staggering out of the burning mill. To Magda, though, herself a survivor, I was simply Vander – she did not care to call me Axel; it sounded, she said, like the name of a guard dog – a man much like any other, more volatile, perhaps, than the ones she was used to, potentially more violent even than her Pole, but still no more than a man. She did not remark particularly my dead leg or my blind eye, and accepted without comment the bragging lies I told her as to how I had come by them – my stand against a rampaging mob, the blow I got from a storm trooper's rifle butt – lies I had rehearsed so often that I had come almost to believe them myself. Early one sweltering morning, though, I woke out of a doze to find her leaning over me – our bed was a mattress on the floor – with her large, soft face propped on a hand, contemplating me in big-eyed, solemn silence. For a minute neither of us stirred, then she touched a fingertip to the pulpy lid of my bad eye and murmured, "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee" and the bristles stood up on the back of my neck, as if it were an oracle that had spoken. Who would have expected Magda, big, slow, flat-footed Magda, to come out with something so grave, so sonorous, so biblically apt to both our states?