Soup for lunch, every day it’s soup, homemade, and he holds his big spoon over the soup bowl, the old-country bowl, in a manner not unlike the child’s, ready to plant a trowel and scoop.
Todd said that Russia was too big for the man. He’d get lost in the vast expanse. Think about Romania, Bulgaria. Better yet, Albania. Is he a Christian, a Muslim? With Albania, he said, we deepen the cultural context. Context was his fallback word.
When he is ready for his walk, Irina tries to help him button his parka, his anorak, but he shakes her off with a few brusque words. She shrugs and replies in kind.
I realized I’d forgotten to tell Todd that Ilgauskas reads Dostoevsky in the original. This was a feasible truth, a usable truth. It made Ilgauskas, in context, a Russian.
He wears trousers with suspenders, until we decided he didn’t; it was too close to stereotype. Who shaves the old man? Does he do it himself? We didn’t want him to. But who does it and how often?
This was my crystalline link, the old man to Ilgauskas to Dostoevsky to Russia. I thought about it all the time. Todd said it would become my life’s work. I would spend my life in a thought bubble, purifying the link.
He doesn’t have a private toilet. He shares a toilet with the children but never seems to use it. He is as close to being invisible as a man can get in a household of six. Sitting, thinking, disappearing on his walk.
We shared a vision of the man in his bed, at night, mind roaming back — the village, the hills, the family dead. We walked the same streets every day, obsessively, and we spoke in subdued tones even when we disagreed. It was part of the dialectic, our looks of thoughtful disapproval.
He probably smells bad but the only one who seems to notice is the oldest child, a girl, thirteen. She makes faces now and then, passing behind his chair at the dinner table.
It was the tenth straight sunless day. The number was arbitrary but the mood was beginning to bear in, not the cold or the wind but the missing light, the missing man. Our voices took on an anxious cadence. It occurred to us that he might be dead.
We talked about this all the way back to campus.
Do we make him dead? Do we keep assembling the life posthumously? Or do we end it now, tomorrow, the next day, stop coming to town, stop looking for him? One thing I knew. He does not die Albanian.
The next day, we stood at the end of the street where the designated house was located. We were there for an hour, barely speaking. Were we waiting for him to appear? I don’t think we knew. What if he came out of the wrong house? What would this mean? What if someone else came out of the designated house, a young couple carrying ski equipment toward the car in the driveway? Maybe we were there simply to show deferential regard, standing quietly in the presence of the dead.
No one emerged, no one went in, and we left feeling unsure of ourselves.
Minutes later, approaching the railroad tracks, we saw him. We stopped and pointed at each other, holding the pose a moment. It was enormously satisfying, it was thrilling, to see the thing happen, see it become three-dimensional. He made a turn into a street at a right angle to the one we were on. Todd hit me on the arm, turned and started jogging. Then I started jogging. We were going back in the direction we’d just come from. We went around one corner, ran down the street, went around another corner and waited. In time he appeared, walking now in our direction.
This was what Todd wanted, to see him head on. We moved toward him. He seemed to walk a sort of pensive route, meandering with his thoughts. I pulled Todd toward the curb with me so that the man would not have to pass between us. We waited for him to see us. We could almost count off the footsteps to the instant when he would raise his head. It was an interval drawn taut with detail. We were close enough to see the sunken face, heavily stubbled, pinched in around the mouth, jaw sagging. He saw us now and paused, one hand gripping a button at the front of his coat. He looked haunted inside the shabby hood. He looked misplaced, isolated, someone who could easily be the man we were in the process of imagining.
We walked on past and continued for eight or nine paces, then turned and watched.
“That was good,” Todd said. “That was totally worthwhile. Now we’re ready to take the next step.”
“There is no next step. We got our close look,” I said. “We know who he is.”
“We don’t know anything.”
“We wanted to see him one more time.”
“Lasted only seconds.”
“What do you want to do, take a picture?”
“My cell phone needs recharging,” he said seriously. “The coat is an anorak, by the way, definitely, up close.”
“The coat is a parka.”
The man was two and a half blocks from the left turn that would put him on the street where he lived.
“I think we need to take the next step.”
“You said that.”
“I think we need to talk to him.”
I looked at Todd. He wore a fixed smile, grafted on.
“That’s crazy.”
“It’s completely reasonable,” he said.
“We do that, we kill the idea, we kill everything we’ve done. We can’t talk to him.”
“We’ll ask a few questions, that’s all. Quiet, low key. Find out a few things.”
“It’s never been a matter of literal answers.”
“I counted eighty-seven boxcars. You counted eighty-seven boxcars. Remember.”
“This is different and we both know it.”
“I can’t believe you’re not curious. All we’re doing is searching out the parallel life,” he said. “It doesn’t affect what we’ve been saying all this time.”
“It affects everything. It’s a violation. It’s crazy.”
I looked down the street toward the man in question. He was still moving slowly, a little erratically, hands folded behind his back now, where they belonged.
“If you’re sensitive about approaching him, I’ll do it,” he said.
“No, you won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s old and frail. Because he won’t understand what you want.”
“What do I want? A few words of conversation. If he shies away, I’m out of there in an instant.”
“Because he doesn’t even speak English.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything.”
He started to move away and I clutched his arm and turned him toward me.
“Because you’ll scare him,” I said. “Just the sight of you. Freak of nature.”
He looked straight into me. It took time, this look. Then he pulled his arm away and I shoved him into the street. He turned and started walking and I caught up with him and spun him around and struck him in the chest with the heel of my hand. It was a sample blow, an introduction. A car came toward us and veered away, faces in windows. We began to grapple. He was too awkward to be contained, all angles, a mess of elbows and knees, and deceptively strong. I had trouble getting a firm grip and lost a glove. I wanted to hit him in the liver but didn’t know where it was. He began flailing in slow motion. I moved in and punched him on the side of the head with my bare hand. It hurt us both and he made a sound and went into a fetal crouch. I snatched his cap and tossed it. I wanted to wrestle him down and pound his head into the asphalt but he was too firmly set, still making the sound, a determined hum, science fiction. He unfolded then, flushed and wild-eyed, and started swinging blind. I stepped back and half circled, waiting for an opening, but he fell before I could hit him, scrambling up at once and starting to run.