Bibi now let Roma lead her back to us. Julius poured wine as if nothing had happened, and he answered Michael’s question. He said, “An idea similar to yours was discussed, but we have decided against it.” We all let Julius have the last word.
Bibi finally died in America, by gas. She had gone out to an American branch of Possner at her own request. She left her passport and bankbook and some loose money on her kitchen table. The money was weighed down with the marble darning egg I had brought her from Italy years before. She named Julius as her closest living relative and Roma as her direct heir. There was also a sealed letter for Julius, which the police had opened before he arrived. Julius flew over, of course, though he was not a relative. After twenty years of Bibi we still did not know if she had any real family. In the letter she said she willed her body to a medical school, but since she also said she hoped there was enough money on the table to pay for a modest funeral, no one could tell exactly what she had wanted. Because of the circumstances there was a police autopsy. Julius brought back a photocopy of her letter — the police kept the original. Instead of telling why she had wanted to kill herself Bibi explained that she had chosen early morning so that she would be discovered at some time during the day and not after dark. She knew of accidents that had been caused by someone’s turning on a light in a room filled with gas. I said to Julius that all she needed to have done was turn off the electricity; there must have been a switch somewhere in the apartment. But no, said Julius, Bibi had probably thought of that too. What if she remained alone and undiscovered for days, as she had after that first failed mess of a try with gardénal? Some stranger might have broken down the door, tried a light, and, failing to find one, might have absentmindedly struck a match. This sounded involved, not very sensible. Actually, she was found in broad daylight and no one was hurt.
Later, much later, on an evening when Julius was in a pleasant mood, I asked him about that girl’s diary — if he knew how it had come to be on the shelf of a linen cupboard. It took him minutes to understand what I was talking about, and then he said the diary belonged to a silly uneducated person. He could not recall anything about a shelf. He was certain, in fact, that he had thrown the diary, unread, in a wastebasket.
“What did she mean by ‘everything’?” I said.
He did not remember.
“You can see how unimportant she was,” Julius said. “I wanted to have nothing to do with her, and so she sent me the diary so I could read about her soul. We are discussing an imaginary situation. There was no evidence that I was involved. My name was not mentioned anywhere,” Julius concluded.
We were sitting on the terrace during this conversation. Julius, not yet fifty, had been made a general, and we drank to his triumph and his life. I had the nausea and dizziness of the repeated moment, as though we had sat in exactly the same position once before and I had heard Julius explain the same portion of his past. I saw the water lilies.
“I have dreams about Bibi,” I said.
“She had an incurable illness,” he replied.
This had never been mentioned. The water lilies seemed enormous. “Was it in the autopsy report?”
“Naturally.”
Divinities invent convenient fables, but they are never mistaken. It must have been true; Bibi had an incurable illness and died to spare herself useless pain. Our conversation could have ended there, since we had no further use for it. Unfortunately I had still another question.
“That first time,” I said. “The first time you traveled over there with Bibi for company and left her and came back alone. You remember? The day you were to leave, something happened. I was in the living room with Roma when we heard shrieks of hysterical laughter from the hall. Roma ran out ahead of me and began to scream in the same strident way. Bibi was in front of the looking glass trying on a hat. It was a hat specially bought for the journey. An ignoble hat. A disgusting and hideous hat of cheap turquoise jersey. She had no taste — any salesgirl could fob off anything. The salesgirl had told her she had a bad hairline, and this criminal hat covered her head from the eyebrows to the nape of her neck. Michael the subaltern, having already seen that you were laughing, was doubled up, yelling, outdoing himself in laughter. You said to Roma, ‘I shall take you to a corner of the airport where the wind can blow it away.’ Roma — she was fifteen or sixteen — said, ‘Aunt Bibi looks like a little piglet dressed up as an actress.’ At that, Bibi, who had been laughing too, moved away from the mirror and said, ‘That was unkind.’ All at once you saw I was not laughing at all. You turned and knelt down to buckle a suitcase as if the scene did not concern you anymore. Bibi was finished then. Michael had felt the shift of power too. I mattered.”
All this had been meant to lead up to a question, but I had lost it. Anyway, Julius had stopped listening almost from the beginning. He sipped his wine and looked attentive, but his thoughts were floating. In the same voice, as if continuing my boring anecdote, I said, “… and tigers and zebras and ants and bees …”
“Yes, yes,” said Julius, pretending to hear.
“Oh, Julius, Julius,” I said in the same voice. “Now a general, tomorrow a field marshal. Last night in a dream I had you were nothing but a little dog who kept on barking, and Bibi had to thrash you to make you stop.”
THE END OF THE WORLD
I never like to leave Canada, because I’m disappointed every time. I’ve felt disappointed about places I haven’t even seen. My wife went to Florida with her mother once. When they arrived there, they met some neighbors from home who told them about a sign saying NO CANADIANS. They never saw this sign anywhere, but they kept hearing about others who did, or whose friends had seen it, always in different places, and it spoiled their trip for them. Many people, like them, have never come across it but have heard about it, so it must be there somewhere. Another time I had to go and look after my brother Kenny in Buffalo. He had stolen a credit card and was being deported on that account. I went down to vouch for him and pay up for him and bring him home. Neither of us cared for Buffalo.
“What have they got here that’s so marvelous?” I said.
“Proust,” said Kenny.
“What?”
“Memorabilia,” he said. He was reading it off a piece of paper.
“Why does a guy with your education do a dumb thing like swiping a credit card?” I said.
“Does Mother know?” said Kenny.
“Mum knows, and Lou knows, and I know, and Beryl knows. It was in the papers. ‘Kenneth Apostolesco, of this city …’ ”
“I’d better stay away,” my brother said.
“No, you’d better not, for Mum’s sake. We’ve only got one mother.”
“Thank God,” he said. “Only one of each. One mother and one father. If I had more than one of each, I think I’d still be running.”
It was our father who ran, actually. He deserted us during the last war. He joined the Queen’s Own Rifles, which wasn’t a Montreal regiment — he couldn’t do anything like other people, couldn’t even join up like anyone else — and after the war he just chose to go his own way. I saw him downtown in Montreal one time after the war. I was around twelve, delivering prescriptions for a drugstore. I knew him before he knew me. He looked the way he had always managed to look, as if he had all the time in the world. His mouth was drawn in, like an old woman’s, but he still had his coal-black hair. I wish we had his looks. I leaned my bike with one foot on the curb and he came down and stood by me, rocking on his feet, like a dancer, and looking off over my head. He said he was night watchman at a bank and that he was waiting for the Army to fix him up with some teeth. He’d had all his teeth out, though there wasn’t anything wrong with them. He was eligible for new ones provided he put in a claim that year, so he thought he might as well. He was a bartender by profession, but he wasn’t applying for anything till he’d got his new teeth. “I’ve told them to hurry it up,” he said. “I can’t go round to good places all gummy.” He didn’t ask how anyone was at home.