A Week in Winter Read online

  Week in Winter

  Barth Landor

  New York

  To my parents—my mother and the memory

  of my father—I dedicate this book

  PART ONE

  MONDAY

  Evening

  –Will you tell me a story?

  –Not tonight. It’s late.

  –Just a short one. Please?

  –I’ll sing a song instead.

  –No—a story.

  –Then I’ll sing a story.

  –How can you sing a story?

  –“Ramblin Boy” is a story, and it’s also a song.

  –No it’s not. It’s just a song.

  –Well, some people sing their stories. Hop on down and flush.

  –Wait, Daddy. I’ve got a great idea. First you can tell a really short story—

  –Flush. Teethbrush.

  –I want to brush my own teeth.

  –No. Open up.

  –Mommy says I can when I’m six.

  –When you’re six.

  –Daddy?

  –Don’t talk. Now spit out. OK, Jack, get into bed.

  –Daddy?

  –What.

  –Do grownups’ teeth ever fall out?

  –They do sometimes.

  –Do new ones grow back?

  –No. Grownups have to go to the dentist for new teeth.

  –Are they real?

  –You mean the dentists?

  –No, the teeth.

  –No. But sometimes they’re made of gold.

  –They are really?

  –Sure. And silver, too.

  –Wouldn’t it be funny if I grew a gold tooth?

  –You will if you get to bed on time.

  –No, I won’t.

  –Come on, under the sheets we go. I’ll tell you a very short story.

  –Tell one about kindergarten.

  –Only if you’re quiet.

  –About a boy in kindergarten.

  –Shh … Shh … We’ll have lots of talking tomorrow … now it’s listening time … Put your head on the pillow … Once there was a boy …

  One arrives at this hour hardly able to go on. Here it is only Jack’s bedtime, and already I’m sinking under the accumulations of a day: the working, commuting, caretaking, what one heard and said and saw, and wished one hadn’t, and then too much wine at dinner. I’ve spent my energy hauling around the day’s rags and bones, so that now, with an evening before me to provide some peace and solitude, I have just enough strength to go flop on my bed and utter a short prayer for the revival of my spirit tomorrow. It’s only now, when all the activity of the day is finally behind me, that I realize the full cost of my exertions, like that Greek runner setting off eagerly from Marathon with his news of victory in war, dreaming as he ran of a bath and a meal and the joy of regaling his countrymen with tales of triumph, who reached Athens after all those miles only to drop down dead. Here I am at last at Athens—I’ve gotten food into Jack and Jack into bed—and now I think I’ll give up.

  –Daddy?

  –What, honey?

  –Will you come lie next to me?

  –No, Jack, we’ve had our story and now it’s sleeptime. I’ll give you a kiss, though.

  –Will you come back to check on me?

  –I will if you go to sleep.

  Directly to bed, then—there’s nothing else I could do, not even stop to undress. I’m too weak to occupy myself any longer in this day. I want only to be released from it, delivered into the hours of forgetting, those sweet hours of succumbing, left to lie here in my crumpled clothing until morning comes. Tonight it’s either oblivion or pottering about, which is all I could hope for, and I choose sleep. I won’t stir unless Jack cries out.

  That long-distance messenger at Marathon, dimmed almost into darkness by the millennia: he really did live. You could have talked with him about the weather or asked him about his running. He was human like us, until that day he became far more human. The last three or four miles of that lonely run must have tortured him, his body racked with pain, unlike any he would ever have known. Perhaps he was desperate to stop and rest, but thought that every minute spent in not getting closer to Athens meant a minute of disloyalty to Greece. My own weariness has precious little in common with his; on the contrary, far from having exhausted my strength on some higher purpose, I have only shuffled my way from dawn to dusk, through the office talk and office tensions, work, and the conversations about work. Heroism has not figured into my waking hours. I have had to endure nothing worse than the spectacle, a displeasing one to be sure, of my colleagues working themselves into various states of anxiety over the announcement that we would be honored this very Friday by a visit from the ambassador. It would have been much easier to announce that on Friday the world would turn to ice. Was it really true: Ambassador Todd, that prominent personage, distant head of our hierarchy, was actually making a trip in a few short days to our remote site, this little satellite of the Embassy? I couldn’t help but appreciate the comic possibilities here, starting with the old case of mistaken identity: the first person to arrive at the gates of our consulate on Friday is not the ambassador himself but some vagabond whom we confuse for the esteemed guest, etc. It’s a situation begging for farce.

  But I’d say there was a total lack of mirth at that meeting. No scenarios of merry mix-ups could have stood in the way of that stampede of questions: What was he coming for? Had something happened? Were we being subjected to a review? Why had we been given such short notice?—none of which was answered with any assurance. I wish I’d posed a few questions of my own: Would we be quite sure that the chap who arrived was actually Ambassador Todd, and would it not be prudent to ask him to bring along some identification, a driver’s license or a set of fingerprints? And perhaps we should also check for distinguishing marks on his person, which was not to say that he had to submit to a physical exam, one just didn’t want to be deceived by some impostor.

  However, I did not add my own voice to the clamor, and I suppose I appeared inadequately affected. I had only a moment of uneasiness, and not over the news itself; when Fitch informed us all of the ambassador’s visit—and quite brusquely, too, not in the manner of one who wishes to inform, but rather to warn—he had been staring straight at me. It was an improbable scene: Fitch facing us at the conference table along which all ten or eleven of us were ranged, gripping a sheaf of papers while he delivered almost all of his little speech with his gaze fixed squarely upon mine. But this visit can have nothing to do with me personally. I’m not acquainted with the ambassador at all, I’m pretty sure I haven’t bungled some administrative matter requiring the fellow to come sort it all out, and I certainly don’t merit any special commendation from him. And it’s clear that Fitch is also in the dark about the reason for the visit. Despite the bluster in his tone and the rather violent way he waved about those papers, all of his responses were just variations on the theme of not having a damn clue, a virtuoso performance elaborating richly on the phrase ‘I don’t know’.

  What could have been the meaning of that look of his? Even though there seems to be ill will between us, in the circumstances it makes no sense to me. Maybe I only imagined it. No one else seemed to notice; at least no one said anything to me when the meeting broke up, nor did he himself address me afterwards. I could more easily shrug off the episode if there wasn’t a history here, but I can’t say if it’s a history of Fitch’s disdain for me or just of my suspecting it.

  My mind tonight is a crowded cattle-car, thoughts herded in pell-mell, pushed against each other, restless, making a commotion. I can’t sleep, and yet I’m too weary to move. I feel as I do when I’m down with a fever: images jostle energetically, but my own strength is missing, my anima, the agent which puts motion in my limbs. If I could I would reach for a book, or put on some music, or light a cigar and ponder things, but my wherewithal’s not there, and I don’t know what’s happened to it. It’s not possibly on account of that silly meeting today that all the air’s gone out of me—why, that was nothing more than passing half an hour. Afterwards I gave the matter no more attention, but went back to my desk and busied myself with paperwork, leaving others to hash over the news. I could, however, hear some of my colleagues from my cubicle, their talk loud and verbose, and whether or not this event was truly important to them I couldn’t say, but it did definitely give them a topic to warm themselves with. My only comment on the subject all afternoon was made to Fitch, whose customary bustle seemed to have suddenly acquired a raison d’être. Seeing him in the corridor, I offered lamely, “That’s quite an event we’ve got”, and I regret having said even that, the way it so overstated my feelings. I believe that innocuous little remark of mine has chafed at me more than anything today; but is one instead to keep one’s dignity intact by maintaining a contemptuous silence? It seems a waste of perfectly good silence.

  O, work—by the end of the day it has intoxicated me, stupefied me. I come home with large traces of it in my blood and go to bed with it still in my system, and when I wake in the morning finally sober, I get up and go quaff some more. I suppose the whole business of that announcement today, Fitch frowning at me followed by the loud and lengthy colloquies of my rumormongering colleagues, really has acted on me like an extra glass or two. I’ve gone through my working hours reacting reasonably to things, having had no idea that there was another process underway, sapping me.

  Perhaps, though, while I’ve been lying here groggily, some of my strength has returned; not much, bu
t maybe I have something in me after all, enough for a small effort—the cigar might just be manageable. Now there would be a feat of sorts. This day thinks it’s got me beat, but if I can get myself upright, I’ll show it that I’ve got some puff in me. It would make being alive today worthwhile to blow smoke rings around this world-weariness. These moments of my own, so often stolen in the absence of daylight, early in the morning over coffee even before Jack is up, or late in the evening as my cares recede from me, recall me to the fragile possession of a self. To the cigar, then—may my thoughts set me free!

  If Ellen were home tonight, I would try to keep the living room from filling up with smoke, opening windows or going into the kitchen. She doesn’t favor the smell of cigars, unlike me—I luxuriate in this pungent haze, this air-thickening fug, the acrid odor of which seems to wrap around me like a cocoon. It’s one of the few pleasures that I would really be sorry to give up, one that I would include on a list of the good things in life, sheepishly, at least, slipping it somewhere in the middle. I enjoy a kind of kinship with our cigar-smoking mailman, whose fumes are sometimes lingering in the lobby when I arrive home from work, and although he and I have never actually met, I feel that his smoke in our building connects us, especially because a good cigar is almost impossible to come by in this impoverished country which provides for its ordinary citizens only the barest and blandest of necessities. He must go to some effort to acquire them. I might have asked Ellen to pick up a box while she’s in the States, some for him and some for me, but she wouldn’t have had much enthusiasm for bringing back these malodorous objects. I’m happy to procure the tobacco leaf through channels at the consulate, as she does quite enough for me on these trips to America in replenishing our larder with strong things to drink—upon her return she unpacks bottles of whiskey and bags of coffee, which embarrasses me, since the point of these trips is hardly a hedonistic one, visiting her sick mother, but she knows without my having to speak of it that I do relish these scarcities.

  In the lunch room recently I commented to my companions that what I missed most about America were the delights of the palate, most of all the imported foods that you could get in certain shops and neighborhoods in my native Chicago—I was thinking of kalamata olives and stuffed grape leaves, Russian dumplings, kosher pastries. A couple of my colleagues considered my remark rather frivolous; after all, we were living in a country whose inhabitants lacked much larger goods—democracy, freedom of speech, to say nothing of lesser luxuries like fruit and vegetables. Was it only finer foods that I felt nostalgic for? I tried to suggest that one could hardly use one’s liberty better than to esteem things that were excellent; indeed, true gratitude for the richness of one’s table seemed to me like a good way to be free. However, my meaning got distorted in the expressing of it. I said, “Frankly, I think more about a French cheese I once had called St. Nectaire than I do about democracy,” an utterance which did not convey my thought at all, for my colleagues assumed that I was expounding some epicurean philosophy at the expense of our Founding Fathers, and Andrew Priestley looked at me as if I were a very foolish creature before abruptly dismissing me from his field of vision. But I had really been talking about the appreciation of particular things, and I should instead have given a more homely example, like that of the holy simpleton who arrives in heaven and can ask for anything he wants—eternal happiness, release from pain and suffering—but whose only request is to receive every morning a hot roll and coffee. In like manner I would understand it if my mailman ever went to America and spent his first day of newfound freedom searching for a cigar store.

  I’m fairly sure that my lunchtime remark made its way to Fitch’s ears, presumably via the indignant Priestley. Indeed, that afternoon I caught a glimpse of the two of them conversing earnestly in Fitch’s office, and for days afterwards I sensed that Fitch was upset with me, but what solid proof did I have of it? If he seemed impatient when we discussed consular matters, even faintly hostile, or if he didn’t bother to acknowledge me when we passed each other, there was nothing blatant in his anger, and I couldn’t even be certain that Priestley had filled him in on the details of le scandak du fromage. I could accuse Fitch of nothing worse than a roughness in manner toward me, not worth thinking about; and yet I often find myself puzzling for half a day over some flash of his annoyance. It’s this absurd worry about the opinion one’s boss has of one which affects me—Fitch might as well be my sweetheart the way I mull over his gestures and non-gestures. And just like a lover he’s distracted me tonight from my cigar, for instead of enjoying it as I intended, I’ve let my thoughts float workward.

  But there’s time left in this day to turn; time to stop the drift of my mind’s flotsam; there’s time yet to focus, focus. It would be an act of salvaging wreckage to collect and direct myself before bed—with a book, perhaps; it would be the achievement of my day, an entirely private one, it’s true, but are the only valid deeds the witnessed ones? I like to think the opposite: the great enterprises take place within oneself. To my book, then—may the reading of it restore me to myself.

  What would I do without these old authors? Who would I turn to if not to them—this smattering of men and women dotted across the millennia, speaking a language that speaks to me. These old books, with their outmoded words and customs and gods—they make a great show of belonging to a vanished time and place, whose ways have nothing in common with ours; but when you draw close the strange spectacle might just fade, and in its place stand a dear companion, and a teacher, too. Here I am reading about a subject whose every term should shoo me away—the intricacies of seventeenth-century Jesuit doctrine—a subject which at this late hour ought to be bringing sleep a lot closer. I would never presume to disturb the settled dust that these tenets have become over hundreds of years, but how I love to watch the way that Pascal disturbed them, and he did it back when such doctrines still had power to do harm. He wrote these lettres provinciates at great risk to himself, daring to suggest that if one Jesuit condemns, say, murder, and another Jesuit justifies the same kind of murder, and they both rely on Jesuit doctrine to make their case, then there is actually a contradiction here. For pointing this out, he had the police on his trail, and a French parliament banning his letters, because the gravest crime of all was not, say, murder, but rather, disagreeing with the Jesuits. As long as you remained within the order, no outlandish notion was denied you. How silly these self-inflating Pooh-Bahs seem today, all their elaborate and multitudinous treatises come to nothing, whereas Pascal: his voice reaches me across the nations and generations; he wakes me up.

  He woke me up this morning, too, as I read this volume on the train, his words like a patch of vivid color on a background of gray—and then with a sigh I arrived at the office and tossed the book on my desk, my now-sharpened wits about to undergo the daily dulling. I prepared myself for the day’s tasks; but the book lying there on the desk, exposed, as it were, made me feel awkward, and so I slipped it into a drawer. But why should I have cared if my coworkers had noticed that I was reading Pascal? The name can hardly mean much to most of them, with the possible exception of Priestley. Whenever I see my colleagues on the train or sitting alone in the cafeteria, I observe that their own reading material is the stuff of the moment: government reports, popular novels, newspapers, nothing older than the decade. A copy of Les Provinciates was not going to spark any literary commentary among the staff, but I preferred to keep the book to myself—it seemed too personal for me to leave lying about. Anyway, I am apparently not the only member of the Foreign Service over here who conceals his reading. I seem to be in good company with no less eminent a figure than Ambassador Todd himself, a man not renowned for his devotion to the written word, who, rumor has it, a few days before he interviewed for his present post rather secretly went into seclusion with an entire year’s worth of New York Times, trying to catch up on all the news he’d missed, and emerged after about seventy-two hours claiming to have had the flu. His wife joked with someone about the lost weekend, and then the anecdote made its rounds, and I’m pleased it trickled down to me, since I can be sure that my covert ways with printed matter would find sympathy in the highest of places.