“You can’t be a Partisan!”
The librarian said nothing. He might well have said nothing even if he had been able to say anything.
She turned the radio down—you could never turn it off, lest you should miss the last act, the denouement—and came up close to the librarian on the bed. Familiar to her now were the round, sallow face, the dark eyes with bloodshot whites, the dark, wiry hair on his head, and the hair on his forearms and the backs of his hands and fingers, and the hair under his arms and on his chest and groin and legs, and the whole of his stocky, sweaty, suffering body, which she had been trying to look after for thirty hours while the city blew itself apart street by street and nerve by nerve and the radio twitched from lies to static to lies.
“Come on, don’t tell me that!” she said to his silence. “You weren’t with them. You were against them.”
Without a word, with the utmost economy, he evinced a denial.“But I saw you! I saw exactly what you did. You locked the library. Why do you think I came there looking for you? You don’t think I’d have crossed the street to help one of them!” A one-note laugh of scorn, and she awarded the well-delivered line the moment of silence that was its due. The radio hissed thinly, drifting back to static. She sat down on the foot of the bed, directly in the librarian’s line of sight, front and center.
“I’ve known you by sight for I don’t know how long—a couple of years, it must be. My other room, there, looks out on the square. Right across to the library. I’ve seen you opening it up in the morning a hundred times. This time I saw you closing it, at two in the afternoon. Running those wrought-iron gates across the doors in a rush. So what’s he up to? Then I heard the cars and those damned motorcycles. I drew the curtain right away. But then I stood behind the curtain and watched. That was strange, you know? I’d have sworn I’d be hiding under the bed in here as soon as I knew they were that close. But I stood there and watched. It was like watching a play!” she said with the expansiveness of inaccuracy. In fact, peering out between the curtain and the window frame with a running thrill of not disagreeable terror, she had inevitably felt that she was sizing up the house. Was it that revival of emotion that had moved her, so soon afterwards, to act?
“They pulled the flag down first. I suppose even terrorists have to do things in the proper order. Probably in fact no one is more conventional. They have to do everything that’s expected of them… Well, I’d seen you go round to that side door, the basement entrance, after you’d locked the gates. I think I’d noticed your coat, without noticing that I noticed, you know; that yellowish-brown color. So, after they’d been all over the front steps, and broken in at the side door—like ants on meat, I kept thinking—and finally all come out again and got onto their damned motorcycles and roared off to go wreck something else, and I was wondering if it was smoke or just dust that was hanging around that side door—then I thought of your coat, because of the color of the smoke,that yellowish brown. I thought, I never saw that coat again. They didn’t bring the librarian out with them. Well, so I thought probably they’d shot you, inside there with the books. But I kept thinking how you’d locked the doors and locked the gates and then gone back inside. I didn’t know why you’d done that. You could have locked up and left, got away, after all. I kept thinking about that. And there wasn’t a soul down in the square. All us rats hiding in our rat-holes. So finally I thought, Well, I can’t live with this, and went over to look for you. I walked right across the square. Empty as four a.m. It was peaceful. I wasn’t afraid. I was only frightened of finding you dead. A wound, blood. Blood turns me faint, I detest it. So I go in, and my mouth’s dry and my ears are singing, and then I see you coming with an armload of books!” She laughed, but this time her voice cracked. She turned left profile to him, glancing at him once sidelong.
“Why did you go back in? And when they were in there, what did you do? You hid, I suppose. And when they left you came out and tried to put out the fire.”
He shook his head slightly.
“You did,” she said. “You did put it out. There was water on the floor, and a mop bucket.”
He did not deny this.
“I shouldn’t have thought books would catch fire easily. Or did they pull out some newspapers, or the catalogue, or the overdue file? They certainly got something burning. All that smoke, it was awful. I was choking as soon as I came in, I don’t know how you breathed at all up there on the main floor. Anyway, you put out the fire, and you had to get out because of the smoke, or you weren’t sure the foe was really out; so you quick picked up some valuable books and headed for the door—”
Again he shook his head. Was he smiling?
“You did! You were crawling towards the stairs, crawling on your knees, trying to carry those books, when I came up. I don’t know if you would have got out or not, but you were trying to.”
He nodded, and tried to whisper something.
“Never mind. Don’t talk. Just tell me, no, don’t tell me, how you can be a Partisan, after that. After giving your life, all but, for a few books!”
He forced the whisper, like a steel brush on brass, that was all the smoke had left of his voice: “Not valuable,” he said.
She had leaned forward to catch his words. She straightened up, smoothed her skirt, and presently spoke with some disdain.
“I don’t know that we are really very well qualified to judge whether our life is or is not valuable.”
But he shook his head again and whispered, voiceless, meaningless, obstinate: “The books.”
“You’re saying that the books aren’t valuable?”
He nodded, his face relaxing, relieved at having explained himself at last, at having got it all straight.
She stared at him, incredulous, angrier than she had been at the radio, and then the anger flipped over like a coin from a thumb, and she laughed. “You’re crazy!” she said, putting her hand on his.
His hand was thickset like the rest of him, firm but uncallused, a desk worker’s hand. It was hot to her touch.
“You ought to be in a hospital,” she said with remorse. “I know you shouldn’t talk, I can’t help talking, but don’t answer. I know you should have gone to the hospital. But how could you get there, no taxis, and God knows what the hospitals are like now. Or who they’re willing to take. If it ever quiets down and the telephone works again I’ll try to call a doctor. If there are any doctors left. If there’s anything left when this is over.”
It was the silence that made her say that. It was a silent day. On the silent days you almost wanted to hear the motorcycles, the machine guns.
His eyes were closed. Yesterday evening, and from time to time all night, he had had spasms of struggling for breath, like asthma or a heart attack, terrifying. He breathed short and hard even now, but however worn out and uncomfortable, he was resting; he must be better. What could a doctor do for smoke inhalation, anyhow? Probably not much. Doctors were not much good for things like lack of breath, or old age, or civil disorders. The librarian was suffering from what his country was dying of, his sickness was his citizenship of this city. Weeks now, the loudspeakers, the machine guns, the explosions, the helicopters, the fires, the silences; the body politic was incurable, its agony went on and on. You went miles for a cabbage, a kilo of meal. Then next day the sweet shop at the corner was open, children buying orange drink. And the next day it was gone, the corner building blown up, burnt out. The carcase politic. Faces of people like façades of buildings downtown, the great hotels, blank and furtive, all blinds down. And last Saturday night they had thrown a bomb into the Phoenix. Thirty dead, the radio had said, and later sixty dead, but it was not the deaths that outraged her. People took their chances. They had gone to see a play in the middle of a civil war, they had taken their chance and lost. There was both gallantry and justice there. But the old Phoenix, the house itself: the stage where she had played how many pert housemaids, younger sisters, confidantes, dowagers, Olga Prozorova, and for the great three weeks Nora; the red curtain, the red plush seats, the dirty chandelier and gilt plaster mouldings, all that fake grandeur, that box of toys, that defenseless and indefensible strutting place for the human soul—to hurt that was contemptible. Better if they threw their damned bombs into churches. There surely the startled soul would be plucked straight up to downy heaven before it noticed that its body had been blown to stewmeat. With God on your side, in God’s house, how could anything go wrong? But there was no protection in some dead playwright and a lot of stagehands and fool actors. Everything could go wrong, and always did. Lights out, and screaming and pushing, trampling, an unspeakable sewer stink, and so much for Molière, or Pirandello, or whoever they’d been playing Saturday night at the Phoenix. God had never been on that side. He’d take the glory, all right, but not the blame. What God was, in fact, was a doctor, a famous surgeon: don’t ask questions, I don’t answer them, pay your fees, I’ll save you if I care to but if I don’t it’s your own fault.