He had become so inured to this feeling that he reckoned that when the day came, she would say to him. Come on, it’s time go out to the café, and he would trust her command, blindly, almost superstitiously, and would follow her without the slightest hesitation.
Without moving his head, he rolled his eyes upward, as he sometimes did, to look at her portrait. From this obtuse angle, she looked quite different, especially the top of her face. The slant of her eyes, which now seemed to suggest some elegant deception, matched and complemented the change he had noticed under her arms. But like everything else late that Sunday afternoon, that suspicion was devoid of pain.
He thought of the table waiting for him in that dingy little restaurant, and then of his walk home through the town, when, despite all the excitement aroused by the holdup of the bank, lights would go out in the apartments and houses, one after the other, at exactly the same time as on any other Sunday.
As people went back to work and offices reopened, Mondays would bring their own corrections to Sunday’s gossip about every little weekend scandal and event. In the old days, the phenomenon was easily accounted for. In fear of the State, people altered their opinions to fit what they heard from official sources. By the same token, their own explanations were often quite divergent. A suicide for thwarted love? It was reckoned that something deeper was involved. Or conversely, that such and such a quarrel had no political motive at all, but was just a spat between sisters-in-law.
In the early days of the new era, people no longer gave a penny for official opinion, as they became free, from one day to the next, to adopt the opposite point of view. But to their great surprise, no significant change occurred. As in the past, once they got home from work, they would hear about events in such a mangled way that the stories were often completely distorted. Gradually, it became clear that, as for many other things, such distortions of the truth had nothing to do with politics. Apparently, for reasons still not understood, rumor, vivified over the weekend by the smells of good food and Grandmas burps, had a hard time when it first encountered the atmosphere of the office, the clacking of typewriters, the secretaries’ lipstick, and, last but not least, the stern gaze of the boss.
Even if you could never say that the office had won out completely (as soon as people got home, they had to negotiate the mule-like persistence of grandmas, often reinforced by the children just back from school), even if, in this constant ebb and flow of home and office, office and home, rumor was never quite exempt from further shaping before it settled down into its definitive form, the first major impact on it, what might be called “the Monday spin,” was always the principal determining factor.
That was all going through Mark’s head as he walked toward the City Arts Center, where he worked. The music section head’s office door, next to his own, was ajar, and voices could be heard from within. He opened it wider, and even before he was actually inside, the words “safe” and “gangsters” reached his ears.
“Morning,” he said. “Have the robbers been caught?”
“No, not yet,” the head of music answered. “The director was just telling us about a bank holdup that took place in Madrid while he was there.”
“Oh, sorry to interrupt.”
“No, not at all, you’re not interrupting us, Mark,” the director said.
He was still wearing a white shirt with a “Boss” logo on the front, and his sky blue tie made his smile even more radiant.
He’s not finished boring the whole place with tales of his trip to Spain, Mark said to himself.
Even so, he didn’t dislike the man. Quite the opposite, in fact. There was something touching about the way his face expressed sheer joy at the memory of the jaunt that had, apparently, turned his life upside down. The sunny feelings that he had experienced over there suited him to a tee, just like his saying “No problem!” It was the most common expression these days in the whole ex-Communist empire, and it seemed to have been coined especially for him.
The director looked at his watch.
“Okay, you guys, let’s go into my office for a moment to get this concert straight.”
This was surely one of the most exhilarating moments of the day for the director: moving down the corridor with his posse of underlings, as straight-backed as any rising executive, casting words of greeting and cheer to left and right.
On this occasion things took their habitual course, except that the director refrained from saying “Okay.” His office was littered with souvenirs from Spain, but Mark was convinced — he would have sworn to it — that not a soul felt any resentment or even the slightest condescension toward the director. Professionally inclined toward harmony, Mark had long thought that there was a perfect match between the director’s harmless vanity and pet expressions, on the one hand, and the elegance of his wife, who dressed as carefully as he did, and who had opened the first ladies’ hairdressing salon in B—, and the way the couple complemented each other so well had quite extinguished any animosity he might have felt toward his boss.
Sometimes Mark seemed to read in the director’s eyes a silent question: So why don’t you share my enthusiasm? A. new era has begun, what’s stopping you from enjoying it?
So what is stopping us? Mark wondered when he got back to his own office. Obviously he didn’t know, or rather, he didn’t want to know.
He puttered around for a while between his desk and his window, picked up the telephone to make sure the line was connected, then went out.
“If anyone wants to get hold of me, tell them I’ve gone back to the studio,” he told his secretary.
Once he got outside, he did not follow the avenue of lindens that led to his studio, but instead turned left. All the shops were open. He stopped in front of a low shack. There was a sign outside: “Kol Koleci — Keys and Locks.”
“I thought I’d be seeing you,” said the craftsman.
“Oh, did you? And why so?”
The shopkeeper gave a vulgar laugh.
“How, why? As soon as people have got two pennies to rub together, they beat a path to my door. And you …”
“Really, so why me? You know I don’t have any money.”
“Yes, I know you haven’t got a dollar to your name. But you’re a painter. And there’s no one who knows better than you how much your Mona Lisas are worth. That’s what you call valuable paintings, isn’t it?”
“Ho, ho!” Mark burst out laughing. “You think I could be burgled?”
“In the old days, no. But nowadays, yes,” the locksmith replied. “In the old days, they didn’t even bother to rob banks!”
“By the way, have you heard anything more about that? Have they nabbed the robbers?”
“Not yet,” the locksmith replied. “Not yet,” he repeated a moment later. “There’s a heap of unanswered questions. How did they manage to smash the outer gate without the caretaker hearing? How did they manage to tie him up? Not to mention how they managed to penetrate the safe, and the essential question: Where is their hideout? But let’s come back to what brings you here. I guess it’s for your studio?”
Mark nodded. He tried to explain what was wrong with his door, but the locksmith interrupted him: “I’d better go see for myself.”