Читать книгу The Silence on the Shore - Hugh Garner - Страница 13

CHAPTER SIX

The first intimation Sophia Karpluk had that the room next to her’s was rented was when she heard somebody whistling from behind the thin wallboard partition that separated her “kitchenette” from the clothes closet next door. She knew immediately it was a man, for the whistling was a man’s: strong, in tune, each note made with an expulsion of breath. It was happy whistling, a woman’s kind, but it was deliberate unlike feminine whistling which is almost always an adjunct to faraway thoughts. She knew by the sound of it that the man was used to living alone, for his whistling voided aloneness. She did not recognize the tune, an American ballad, but she found no self-pity in it. It trilled with a surety that was much more than hope.

Without wanting to she became quieter, almost tiptoeing from the ancient icebox to the double-burner hot plate on its homemade stand. For the past six weeks while the room next door was unoccupied she had revelled in the freedom to make her little household noises without fear of being overheard. Freedom to her was not an expansion of living, but a retention of its privacy, and this included being able to live without her movements being monitored, even mentally, by others.

She cut a half-pound veal cutlet into cubes and placed them in a frying pan on the hot plate, browning them in margarine. The sizzle drowned out the sound from next door, yet revealed to its occupant the secret fact that she was cooking. She stopped tiptoeing and chopped some onions and mushrooms into the pan, letting the increased noise hide her other movements from her unwanted neighbour. While the mixture was sautéeing she retreated from the kitchenette and sat down on the old davenport which opened as a bed. She could no longer hear the whistling, and she quickly dismissed it from her mind.

Tonight she was attending an amateur ballet performance of Petrouchka, presented in a much diminished version by the pupils of the Lotta Iwachniuk School of the Dance. She had looked forward to it all week, as a brief bit of beauty in the long crawling hideousness her life had become. These brief snatches of cultural pleasure were all that kept her sane and hopeful. Several times a year she dipped into her meagre savings and squandered her money recklessly but without regret on the ballet, concerts, and recitals. It also bought her a brief retreat into a past with its promise of what might have been.

It was this search for beauty that had made her notice the music box first of all. On a Thursday afternoon several weeks before, she had wandered down the aisle of the department store and into the gift department. Among the aesthetically beautiful bric-a-brac she had spied the little musical jewel box sitting on a top shelf behind the counter. It was made of wood, lacquered to a high finish, its sides scored with intricate golden designs. Poised on its top was the tiny figure of a ballerina. It was so beautiful, and so in tune with her tastes and memories, that the sight of it made her pause open-mouthed. She had known then that she must buy it, no matter what it cost, no matter what sacrifices she would have to make.

A saleslady came between them, and followed Sophia’s stare to the music box. “It’s cute, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It’s beautiful.”

The woman lifted it down and laid it on the counter. Sophia examined it, smiling at its workmanship, its true artistry, its perfect proportions. She squeezed the hem of the ballerina’s minute costume between her thumb and forefinger. The saleslady picked it up and turned the clockwork key beneath it, and opened its lid. The tiny ballerina began to pirouette on her toes as a series of gentle little chimes played Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty.

“It … it’s …” Sophia began.

“Yes, it’s exquisite,” said the saleslady, supplying the word.

“How much is it?” Sophia asked, her eye fixed on the weaving figure, her ears tuned rapturously to the fairy music.

The saleslady didn’t even have to consult the price tag. “It’s a hundred and forty-nine fifty,” she said. “It’s the only one we have. A special purchase which a customer failed to pick up.”

Sophia raised her eyes, repeating the unattainable price beneath her breath. “Thank you,” she said before tearing herself away.

From then on she visited the store nearly every week to gaze at the little ballerina. Its price was ridiculous and she knew she could never afford it, but it had become an obsession and she was always afraid she would find it gone. She had never handled it again, or heard its music, but merely to see it, to glance at it in passing was enough.

At an all-Chopin recital by a world-famous pianist one evening she fell into conversation with a woman in the seat next to hers, and they left the hall together, both surreptitiously wiping the tears of Polish happiness and sorrow from their cheeks. The woman’s name was Lotta Iwachniuk, and she invited Sophia to join her in a cup of coffee.

From then on they became good friends, going to concerts and the ballet together, entertaining each other, sometimes in Sophia’s shabby “apartment” or in Lotta’s comfortable living quarters behind the School of the Dance.

During the winter Sophia had often gone to the evening classes at the school, watching with interest and envy the beautiful-bodied young girls practising their steps. Too middle-aged heavy now to don maillots herself, she would operate the record player and let its music and the rhythm of the dancers take her back into her girlhood, and forward into the future that never was.

She hurried into the kitchenette, her fear for the browning veal making her ignore the noise, and pulled the pan from the hot plate. Then over the meat she poured a mixture of flour, soup stock, sour cream, salt and pepper, mixing it with the meat, onions, and mushrooms. She turned the heat low beneath it, covered it with a plate, and left it to simmer. From the other side of the wallboard she heard the sound of a heavy bag being scraped along the floor, then dropped upon the bed. She poured a glass of tea and carried it back with her into the larger room.

Lotta was getting married in August. Yes, Lotta who was six or seven years older than she was. To a Yugoslav contractor, a widower whose daughter had been a pupil of hers for the past three years. Sophia walked over to the dressing table mirror and stared at herself critically. What was wrong with her?

She saw the long straight black hair that was still pulled into a ballerina’s bun; the bright blue eyes now edged with delicate wrinkles; the straight-set mouth that needed to be crushed or laughed into softness, and the stern chin and cheeks still smooth and youthful looking. Once she had been pretty, with a prettiness that would have flowered into beauty in her twenties, if her twentieth birthday had not come in 1939. In a few more years — this she was sure of — she would have been Tamara Karlova, a name known far beyond the city of Lodz, or even the province, or even Poland itself. Tamara Karlova, the nom-de-danse she had chosen when still a little girl at the convent school. The mere repeating of it brought a mist to her eyes, which she blinked away impatiently.

Once more back in the kitchenette she could hear the whistling again, muted now by a closed closet door. He must have heard her cooking and realized that their noisy intimacy was a two-way street. She was torn between the hope that he would let her hear him at times and the fervent wish that he would keep the door shut as a barrier between them. Later, after she had eaten her dinner and washed the dishes, she dressed carefully for her visit to the amateur ballet presentation. From upstairs came the sound of Paul Laramée playing on the floor with his children. Then she heard the door to the next room open, close, and the sound of a key being turned in the lock. Still whistling, its new tenant ran down the stairs.

Walking along the upper hall Sophia noticed that the light was still on in the room next door, but the room at the rear and the bathroom were in darkness in subservience to Grace Hill’s hand-printed orders. The whistler, whoever he was, had chosen to ignore the orders of the landlady, unless by some inexplicable chance he had not been given them yet.

The street was in the midst of the spring calm that came every evening between the rush hour and the switching on of the street lights. The cars on Bloor were no longer travelling in packs, or in convoy, but singly, as if they had lost their way and with it their rush-hour arrogance and haste. A small boy ran up the opposite sidewalk yowling his greeting to the approaching night, his small quick feet jumping the sidewalk cracks and carrying him up and down the steep fronts of the raised lawns. The lights in the upper floors of the houses gave them away to the passers-by as light housekeeping rooms, some hung with lines of wash, some revealing an ironing cord hanging down from a ceiling fixture, others merely stark with the light from unshaded bulbs.

A short stocky man was walking up the sidewalk towards her, carrying a folded newspaper under his left arm. He was well dressed but wore no hat, his thinning hair parted at the side. He had seen her coming, and he stared at her for a moment before letting his eyes wander from her face. She knew who he was, the man who had moved into the back room a couple of weeks before, and had spoken to her that time in the hallway.

It was too late to cross the street and avoid a meeting so she walked on, tense, hoping he would pass by without speaking. She pretended there was something that had caught her interest in an upstairs window farther down the street, but conscious of his approach through the corner of her eye. Suddenly they were only a step or two apart, and she glanced at him without giving a sign of recognition.

As he moved aside to let her pass he smiled and said, “Good evening.”

Once again he had caught her unawares. She realized she couldn’t ignore him a second time, and make every consequent meeting an embarrassing clash of wills or wits. She paused, turned her head, and said, “Oh, hello. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.”

“It’s all right. I live at one-twenty. I didn’t expect you to recognize me; it was pretty dark in the hallway that other time.”

“Yes,” she answered, afraid he might try to lengthen their greetings into a conversation.

“It’s going to be a swell night,” he said, turning to walk on.

“Yes, isn’t it? Good night.”

At the corner of the cross street north of Bloor she looked around. He was just turning up the front walk of the rooming house.

When Walter had seen the woman from the front room coaling towards him he had been of two minds whether to speak to her or not. One of the things he hated most was to have a greeting ignored, especially when it meant little or nothing to him. It was the one way in which a mental or social inferior could best a person more polite than himself, and it always left him angry and critical of his own politeness.

As they had drawn closer together, however, he had decided to speak, for a second snub would have left him able to ignore her completely from then on. Her answering his greeting had been as unexpected as it had been welcome. Suddenly he had felt a boyish urge to escape, to give himself time to think, to arrange his new feelings about her. He had murmured, “It’s going to be a swell night,” the sort of trite thing he would say. He could always rely on himself to end up the loser when it came to a good-looking woman.

When he reached his room he opened the window, took off his jacket and necktie, put on a pair of battered slippers, and sat down to read the paper. Later on he would do some work on his novel, writing in longhand on the paper he had brought home from the office.

He had read his favourite columnists while having supper, so he concentrated on the “human interest” stories about a woman having a baby in a taxi, a bridegroom in London who wished to share his wife with his brother, a man who was crossing the continent on horseback, and a list of the various coins, washers, and slugs that had turned up in the local parking metres.

He put down the paper and thought of the woman in the front room. Her presence in the house excited him, and for a moment or two he gave in to a lascivious fantasy involving them both. Meeting such a woman in the intimate purlieus of a rooming house was one of the dreams he had entertained since breaking up with his wife. Such a possibility, approximating those of his younger days, had been one of his reasons for moving into a rooming house again.

There was a loud knocking on the door of the room next to his. After a short pause it came again, even louder and more insistent this time. Walter got up and stuck his head into the hallway. Mrs. Hill was standing there, her fat face working with anger and indignation.

“Is there anything wrong, Mrs. Hill?”

“Only this guy who has gone out with his light on,” she said.

Walter kept from smiling. “Maybe he’s asleep,” he said.

“If he can’t hear me knocking he must be dead,” she answered, attacking the door once again. “He’s gone out, I’m sure.”

She hunted for a key on the ring she wore attached to her belt, found it and opened the door. Bending her head and shoulders inside she shouted triumphantly, “He’s out! I knew it!”

She pulled her head back into the hallway and said to Walter, “I left a note for him to put the light out when he leaves the room. Smart alec young bastard is making a joke of it. I’ll fix him, you see!” She switched the light off and relocked the door.

She came and stood in his doorway while Walter backed up and sat down in his chair. Grace seemed in no hurry to leave, so he jumped up from the chair and invited her to sit down. She did as she was asked, while Walter sat down on the bed.

“That magazine you work for is all about real estate?” Grace asked.

“Yes.”

“Maybe you could give me some advice?”

“I’ll try,” he said.

Grace walked to the door, shut it, and returned to her chair. “I don’t want to tell everybody my business,” she explained.

She shifted her hips on the chair before she began. “There’s a syndicate going to buy all the houses on this side of Adford, from Berther to Lownard, and on the east side of Bemiral too,” she said, pointing through the window at the houses across the yards. “To build apartment houses.”

He nodded.

“They haven’t come here yet, but they’ve already bought some houses up the street. What I want to know is what to do when they come here to buy this house?”

“If they offer you a fair price, take it,” he said.

Grace smiled craftily, and Walter knew she had been giving a lot of thought to the question. Like many homeowners she had an exaggerated idea of her property rights, and was determined to hold out against the buyers until she could wring every cent she could from the sale.

“Do you own this house outright?” he asked her.

“Yes. Since last December,” she said triumphantly.

“They’ll probably be a pretty powerful bunch,” he said. “There’s ways they can force you to sell, you know.”

She laughed, slapping her hand on her knee. “How? You tell me how they can force a woman to sell her paid property! They can’t make me!”

“They might have the house condemned, or stop you from renting rooms through a change in the city by-laws. There’s plenty of ways that a rich corporation can squeeze the little person,” he said. “Those are only two ways, and God knows how many others they could think up.”

She was suddenly sober. “They can do that?”

“It’s possible. When and if they make you an offer, get a good lawyer,” he said.

She sat in deflated silence.

To cheer her up he asked, “What do you intend to do if they buy your house?”

“I’ll go back to the old country for a visit. I won’t stay there though.”

“You’ll come back here?”

“Why, sure. I won’t stay in Europe. I’ve been a citizen here for —” she bent her head and figured the years on her fingers. “For twenty-four years.”

“Will you buy another rooming house?”

“Who, me!” She laughed, destroying with her scorn the memories of the times she had fought with roomers, over the lights, over the hot water, bringing girls into the house, giving her bum cheques for the rent. “Ha! Never will I own another rooming house. Never!”

“What will you do?”

She clasped her hands on her belly and squeezed a delicious thought. “I’m going to buy some land outside the city and start a nature farm,” she said.

He entertained a picture of several old people sitting on a veranda eating raw carrots and yogurt, with Grace in the background driving them to take exercise, wheedling them to eat their salads, pushing them into silly forms of entertainment. He glanced at her, seeing her metamorphosis from city landlady to tanned Teutonic keeper of a group of elderly nuts.

“That will be pretty tame after this, won’t it?”

She stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“I mean, after all, running a farm for old nature-lovers is not like running a rooming house. I don’t think you’d really like a job like that.”

She got up and walked to the door. Then she turned around, her hand on the knob. “I won’t have old people,” she said. “It will be a regular nature farm, like the Sun Lovers Club I belong to.”

“Oh.” The picture of the old people faded from his mind and was replaced by a photograph of a pair of youthful running nudes, their genitals removed by a retoucher’s brush, the girl’s hair blowing in the wind and her perfect breasts swinging in mid-step.

“You mean a nudist camp?” he asked.

“Sure. Like the Sun Lovers Club.”

He had heard of these places, and had leafed through magazines which catered to such people. He had always felt, while staring at the almost sexless photographs of naked “sun lovers,” that the sun and fresh air were secondary considerations to them. Despite their hysterical claims of cleanliness and purity, the nudists probably enjoyed the sexual side of their exhibitionism almost as much as did the furtive little people who bought the magazines.

He had to smile as he asked her, “And you belong to a nudist colony?”

“Sure. I belonged to one in the old country too. I am going down on Saturday for the weekend. You want to come, Mr. Fowler?”

“Not this week,” he answered, laughing.

“I’ll see you later.”

After she had gone he tried to picture Mrs. Hill gambolling naked down a grassy slope. The mental image made him laugh.