Simon Dersha was still sitting there as if trying to make his way into the others’ universe, but the unwonted expression on his face prevented Silva from speaking freely. She made an effort and made some comment on Victor’s plight, at which the boss began to laugh louder than ever. Stealing a glance at Simon, she thought she now saw a tinge of irony in his happiness.
He slipped out of the room unobtrusively when the boss’s hilarity was at its height.
“What’s the matter with him, wandering around all morning like a sleepwalker?” said Linda, not even bothering to lower her voice.
“Don’t pay any attention.”
“No, but did you take a good look at him? I’ve never noticed that navy blue suit before, and I think it makes him look very weird!”
Silva nodded.
The boss sighed, as he usually did after he’d been laughing. Then the whole office lapsed once more into silence.
“You think you’re so wonderful, don’t you?” said Simon Dersha inwardly in the neighbouring office. And he indulged in a condescending smile. As recently as yesterday the laughter still ringing in his ears would have made him feel lonely and excluded. But now the mirth, the larking about that had once tortured him like something precious for ever beyond his reach, seemed tarnished and worthless. He felt completely free from the inferiority complex he’d always suffered from in relation to his colleagues. And this miracle had come about in a single night, like something out of a fairy tale.
If they only knew where I was yesterday evening, he thought. All morning he’d been tore between the desire to tell them where he’d dined the previous day and a kind of inexplicable reticence. He’d seen from the way they looked at him that they were wondering what was the matter. And at the thought that what had happened to him was beyond anything they could possibly have imagined, he was filled once again with delight.
The previous evening he’d been to dinner with one of the best-known members of the government. It was like a dream; sometimes he couldn’t even believe in it himself. Perhaps that was why, this morning, he’d tried three times to phone the friend who’d introduced him to the minister in the first place, and then taken him to the dinner party: he just wanted to exchange a few words with him about it, in order to convince himself that the miracle really had happened. But as ill-luck would have it, he hadn’t been able to get through.
The miracle had taken place in stages. It had begun a week before with a phone call from a man with whom Simon had remained on friendly terms since they’d worked together in a commercial firm, and who had since risen to become a vice-minister. The man had told him that one of these days — he’d tell him the exact date in due course — he’d take him to dinner in a place he’d never even dreamed of. When the two of them had eventually met for coffee and the other man had said what that place was, Simon had been dumbstruck. Was it really possible, he kept stammering, that an ordinary pen-pusher like him, a person of no importance…?
“But that’s just it,” the other had replied. “Ordinary people, honest unassuming workers, are the very backbone of both the Party and the State. Do you see, Simon?”
Then, lowering his voice:
“I don’t mind admitting I don’t know myself why the minister suddenly felt the need, or the desire, whichever you like, to set up more direct relations, outside ordinary office routine, with workers from various areas of activity. If you ask me, politicians think that kind of contact helps them keep their finger on the pulse of public opinion. Well, a few days ago he told me he’d like to meet someone from the Ministry of Construction, an ordinary worker, not a senior official — he was already up to his eyes in senior officials! In short, when he told me he wanted to find out what went on from just a humble, honest, ordinary worker. I thought straight away of you.”
As he remembered these words, Simon felt as if his eyes were still misty with tears. He’d spent days afterwards waiting anxiously for a phone call from the vice-minister. Sometimes it seemed to him their conversation had never taken place. Other doubts followed. What if the minister had changed his mind? What if he really had said that about wanting to get to know ordinary people, but had only been speaking generally, and Simon’s friend had been mistaken in trying to invoke him? At one point he decided it was all wishful thinking on the part of his friend, and foolish naivety on his own. He’d almost given up hope when his friend finally phoned. Not only had he thus kept his promise, but he also gave Simon the exact date and time of the dinner party they were to attend together. Even now, several days later, it gave Simon a pleasant glow inside to think of that phone call.
He was alone in his office now. He could hear the sound of doors opening and shutting along the corridor, but they seemed very far away. He thought again of his colleagues in the other office, and it filled him with sardonic satisfaction to remind himself that from now on it was they who should be envying him, and not the other way round. Henceforth he could look down on their humdrum existence, with its chatting and joking and noisy laughter over their morning coffee. Up till today, when they passed him — greeting him, if they did so at all, as if he were almost beneath their notice — they’d probably asked each other how the devil the poor wretch managed to get along, apparently devoid of any object in life. The contrast was so striking he’d often agreed with them: “They’re quite right, really — I wonder, myself, why I’m alive at all.” And he used to reflect thus quite humbly, with a resignation untinged with resentment, placidly accepting the role of unobtrusive spectator of other people’s lives. Sometimes, seeing them burst gaily in and out of one another’s offices, he’d try to imagine the relationships that existed between them. If one of them looked especially bright or tired first thing in the morning, he scented a special significance in the fact, as in the tone of his colleagues’ voices when they exchanged furtive phone calls. Sometimes his imagination ran away with him even further, and he had visions of them naked in one another’s arms, their faces buried in shadow and mystery. Then he would heave a sigh, and say to himself under his breath: “No, I can’t be cut out for that sort of life.”
But now the situation was reversed, A single dinner party, and everything was turned upside down as if by an earthquake. And he could feel within himself not merely a combination of euphoria and scorn, but also the first stirrings of blind rage. He couldn’t have said whether his anger was directed against the others or against himself. It was a frustrated wrath, provoked by the length of time he’d been living in a kind of limbo because of his own submissiveness and lack of jealousy. And it was accompanied by the dim stirrings of a desire for revenge. But this feeling was still very faint indeed: it was alien to his nature, and found it hard to take root there.
They’d been talking about China, he mused. He’d heard other discussions on that subject lately: it had been mentioned at the dinner party itself, though he hadn’t been able to concentrate sufficiently to catch exactly what was said. Everything seemed dim and vague, apart from what had actually been happening to him, which he couldn’t get out of his mind. It must be like that, he thought, when you were in love. Not that he’d ever been in love himself, but other people were always going into such raptures on the subject it must be pretty wonderful But he was sure his present feelings were more wonderful still, and more lofty, because more rare.
Most people, if not all, had been in love. But very few had had the experience of dining with a minister.
Yet again he recalled what he’d felt like just before it was time for him to set out. He’d decided to wear a navy blue suit which he’d had made some years back out of some expensive Polish material. He’d kept it for special occasions, and in due course it had come back into fashion again. He remembered trying to select a shirt, and how his wife had hovered around him with an expression that struck him as somehow disagreeable. Looking at himself in his dressing-table mirror, he’d been struck by something rather pitiful about the rawness of his carefully scraped cheeks and the redness of his neck inside its stiffly starched collar. Just as he was leaving, his wife asked him for the umpteenth time if he’d remembered to take a handkerchief, and all the way to his destination he’d worried about what he would do if he suddenly sneezed in the middle of dinner. He tried to dismiss the incongruous thought from his mind, but it was no good: he kept remembering a story he’d read at school, about a minor official who sneezed in the presence of some bigwig. The grown-up Simon quickened his pace and told himself he was a civil servant in a socialist country: his situation had nothing in common with that of a bourgeois pen-pusher who swooned away in terror because he’d sneezed in the presence of a superior.