Roger Freeman, our chair, was a small, dapper man of about fifty, with sparkling blue eyes and a thick mane of white hair. He had a dry, fluent way of talking, as though his words had formed themselves long before he actually spoke them, and he was merely reporting his side of a conversation that had already taken place.
‘Here’s what I think we need to do,’ he began. ‘Number one, we need to talk informally to this young man, give him a chance to explain what’s going on here. Number two…’
It was my job, as the newest member of the committee, to keep the minutes at these meetings. I was an assiduous clerk, and in my efforts to write down everything that was said, I often didn’t take any of it in until after the meeting was over. I didn’t, for instance, register the name ‘Trumilcik’ – a name that was to become increasingly important to me over the next weeks – until later, when I was checking the legibility of my minutes prior to giving them to the department secretary to type out.
What we need to avoid at all costs, I saw that Roger had said, is letting things get to the point where we find ourselves with another Trumilcik on our hands.
‘Who’s Trumilcik?’ I asked Marsha, the department secretary.
‘Bogomil Trumilcik? Oh God! What do you want to know about him for?’
I smiled. ‘You’ll see when you read this.’ I handed her the minutes.
Marsha was a large woman with a resonant voice.
‘He was a visiting professor. Some kind of poet or novelist from Romania or Bulgaria or one of those places. He was an awful man. I mean just awful!’
‘What did he do?’ This was Amber, looking up from her desk at the side of the room. Remembering my near-blush of the other day, I refrained from looking at her. But I was strongly conscious of her presence – her sleepy eyes, her short reddish-orange hair dividing in soft feathery wisps down the fluted back of her neck, her skin freckled and unnaturally pale, almost silvery. Acknowledging to myself that this young woman had begun to have an effect on me, and preferring to confront such things rather than sweep them under the rug, I made a mental note to think about the precise nature of this effect, and to construct a suitable attitude in response.
‘What didn’t he do!’ Marsha was saying; ‘He made passes at practically every female he taught. Then when someone finally complained about him to the President, instead of being embarrassed, he went totally crazy. He made this terrible commotion right out there on campus. I mean the most truly awful scene you can imagine. Him yelling at the President, calling everyone the most horrible names, students yelling at him… Just awful! Finally he ran off down Mulberry Street, screaming and yelling like a madman.’
‘What happened to him?’ I asked.
‘He never showed up again. They had to find another instructor to take over his classes.’
It wasn’t until I got back to my office that the real significance of Marsha’s story struck me. I was sitting down at my desk, when the bronze bowl on one of the black-stained shelves caught my eye, and I remembered the Bulgarian coin I had seen in it.
I went over to the bowl to look again at the coin. The pebbles were there as I had left them, as were the quartz, the fir-cone, the key-ring and the jay feather. But the coin was gone.
Given my recent spate of slips and lapses, my first inclination was to think I must have made another mistake. Either there’d been no coin in the first place, and I had somehow fabricated a memory of it, or else there had been a coin, but for some reason I myself had spirited it away, behind my own back.
The first seemed inconceivable: I could remember with absolute clarity the physical appearance of the coin – the high-domed head of some dignitary on one side, the bunch of grapes on the other, the Cyrillic letters I had partially deciphered using the smattering of ancient Greek I still remembered from school. Also the feel of it in my hand – the almost total weightlessness of the silver-gray alloy it was cast in; more like plastic than metal. How could I have invented such a vivid and detailed memory? It simply wasn’t possible. As to the latter, that I myself had got rid of the coin, although it seemed far-fetched, I had to admit that on the basis of my having moved the bookmark and misread the phone number – if those were indeed what had occurred in these cases – not to mention misidentified Dr Schrever on the street, which indubitably had occurred, this too was possible. But what reason could I have had for doing it – especially since I’d have had to have done it before I’d heard of Trumilcik, or at any rate learned that he may have been Bulgarian? I had no prior connection to Bulgaria, and I could think of no other earthly reason why I should want to conceal a coin from myself. It didn’t make sense.
And yet I still couldn’t give myself entirely to the belief that someone else had been in the room and taken it.
Mystified, I set off for the train station, a ten-minute walk.
Last week’s snow had mostly melted, leaving just a few rags of soot-flecked white in the shadows of walls and hedges. The campus was landscaped to give the impression of a pastoral setting, though it was in the middle of a dreary town that was itself part of the uninterrupted sprawl running west and north from New York. It had been founded by a local sugar merchant at the turn of the last century, as a memorial to a beloved nephew, Arthur Clay, who had died young, and after whom the college was named. Something of the flukey nature of its origins (if the boy hadn’t died, the college presumably wouldn’t be there) still clung to it despite its massive shade-trees and thick-walled gothic buildings. In winter especially, with the traffic and nearby housing projects unhidden by foliage, you felt the thinness of the romantic illusion of itself – something between a country estate and a medieval seat of learning – that it seemed intent on purveying; its closeness to non-existence.
In the car park I saw Amber, heading out on to Mulberry Street. She was drifting along at her usual sleepwalker’s pace. I hadn’t had a chance to think about her effect on me yet, and by default fell into the perhaps regrettable but, alas, necessary attitude of caution a man in my position needs to adopt in such situations. I felt that it would be unwise to be seen walking with her off the campus, but on the other hand I didn’t wish to seem unfriendly by passing her by, so I slowed down to a dawdle, letting her get a couple of hundred yards ahead of me. As a result I missed my train, and had half an hour to wait till the next one.
Time to kill. I disliked having nothing to do. I walked to the end of the platform and back; looked at my watch: a minute and a half had passed. A familiar vague restlessness came into me. The blank oblong of time ahead of me seemed to thicken, forming a viscous, impenetrable emptiness. I didn’t want to have to think about the things I inevitably thought about during these dead stretches. Up above the opposite platform five cold pigeons snuggled in a row on top of a rain-puckered billboard with a podiatrist’s ad on it: 1-800 WHY HURT? 1-800 END PAIN.
Trumilcik… the name stirred in my mind again… I thought of him running off down Mulberry Street, screaming and yelling like a madman. Where had he run to? The train station? Had he stood here like me, waiting for a train into Manhattan? And if so, then what? Packed his bags and booked the next flight back to Bulgaria?
I doubted that. I had met very few visiting workers in this country who had the slightest interest in returning to their native land unless they were forced to. The mind abhors a vacuum: into the total vacuum that represented my knowledge of Bulgaria, spread the one detail I had recently encountered, namely the coin – its sub-metallic substance, pallid color (as if leached of any purchasing power), the squat, handicapped-looking lettering, the blandly pompous face on one side of it, the bunch of implausibly circular grapes on the other… And it seemed to me distinctly unlikely that a man who had put all that behind him would choose to return to it if he could possibly avoid doing so.