The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

  Looking out into an open stretch of grass, he told her that he had something important to tell. He took a breath, still staring out into the distance, and she said nothing. He told her that, without meaning to or even realizing it, he had fallen in love with her. He said that he knew she was attached, that their relationship had been platonic up until then and he had never wished for more. He said that gradually he found himself thinking of her to the exclusion of everything else and cursing all his living hours other than the few he spent with her. He now looked at the ground and told her that he did not expect anything by telling her this but, if he was in love with her, he thought she should know.

  There was a silence. Spitalnic’s mouth was dry. He continued to look at the ground as she looked out into the distance. Then she turned to him and their eyes met. She fixed a hard stare so uncharacteristic that it frightened Spitalnic and would forever remain in his catalogue of disturbing memories. Then she spoke. She was in love with her boyfriend and did not want to leave him. For a brief moment Spitalnic thought he loved him too. She said that she loved Spitalnic but that she was not in love with him. She suggested that Spitalnic was not in love with her, either, but only thought he was. Then she looked at the ground again. She was visibly upset. She said people had been talking about the two of them, asking if there was anything in it. She had scorned their suggestions. Can’t two people of different gender spend some time together without there following a torrent of wild insinuations? She had assured people that, while Spitalnic may have become one of her closest friends, they had remained only friends, the way they had both wanted it. Spitalnic had wanted more. The chorus of insinuations had only expressed the things he had wanted to say. Sandy felt foolish and even a little betrayed. It had happened before that males had attempted to get close to her under the guise of Plato-approved affections, only to spoil it with confessions of romantic love. But never had any male friend been as close to her as Spitalnic.

  Spitalnic was engulfed in shame. What if she was right? What if he was not in love with her? Had he just killed a friendship that had become so dear to him? Sandy was now late for a lecture. Spitalnic walked her to her lecture theatre in silence. The door to the theatre could only be reached by a flight of stairs. She ran up the stairs. She was crying. At the top of the stairs she turned before opening the door and said good-bye.

  It rained almost continuously during the period set aside by the university for students to study for their final exams. Spitalnic sat in isolation in his mother’s house poring over the notes he had made for “the bastard” in much the same way as his grandfather would have studied the Talmud. He remained unshaven during this period and had difficulty sleeping. He thought of Sandy and wondered how she would be thinking of him. He was nervous about sitting for “the bastard.” His hatred of it had reached the point where the sight of his notes sickened him. He felt he knew less about the subject than he did the first time he had studied it. Problems arose that never used to exist. He speculated on his fate were he to fail it again. Would the university throw him out for having failed it twice even if he passed his other subjects? And what if he did not pass his other subjects? What would he do if he left university unqualified? What could he do? Red sores developed on his scalp. Their irritation could only be relieved by scratching, which made his scalp bleed. His neck and back pain was exacerbated by sitting at his desk all day. His face was white except for the stubble that grew and no matter how many times he washed his face he could not wash away the tiredness that stemmed from his lack of sleep. How it rained.

  He fasted on the day he was due to be examined on “the bastard,” not for religious reasons but to avoid being disturbed during the exam. He looked over his notes for a while in the morning and then lay down. He was determined to relax. This was his last exam. He was not overly concerned about the others. It was this one that stood between him and the rest of his life. He drove slowly to the exam. He had plenty of time.

  The corridor leading to the exam hall was crowded. People were pushing up against each other. There was a nervous desire to get into the hall as early as possible, almost as if the earlier one sat down the better one would do. Spitalnic stood in the middle of a sea of people. He did not recognize any of the faces around him. He looked at his watch. He was early and so was everyone else. He felt a bead of sweat glide around the crevices of his rib cage. He was reminded of the line in Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol in which every day is described as being like a year in which each day is long. For Spitalnic each minute was such a day.

  Finally the doors were opened. Spitalnic sat second from the front on the extreme left of the hall that could seat five hundred and was filled to capacity. There was a seemingly innumerable number of rows and three hours and fifteen minutes between him and the door. Nothing he could do now would increase his knowledge. The best he could do was to keep calm and answer the questions as efficiently as possible. One of the legs of the desk at which he sat was shorter than the others. He tried to gain the attention of one of the invigilators to help him rectify the problem but was unsuccessful. His desk wobbled. He took the watch his father had given him off his wrist and placed it on the desk. It was not synchronous with the clock on the wall. This would involve him in a calculation to rectify the disparity each time he looked at either the clock or his watch.

  Upon the first reading of the questions, Spitalnic felt that he was unable to answer all but one, but after rereading them a few times he felt the shape of passable answers forming in his mind. Reading time was over and it was time to write. Spitalnic sat with his pen poised above the page for half a minute before etching the first words on the paper that he felt would determine the future course of his life. He wrote quickly, frenetically, pressing hard on the page and holding his breath between sentences.

  After an hour his neck was stiff and sore. He massaged it as vigorously as he could with one hand. The back of his head throbbed. Nausea burrowed in his stomach and clutched at his throat. The questions themselves were not going too badly, but Spitalnic was not sure that he could last the distance. Forty minutes later he became aware of the rapidity of his heartbeat. He took several deep breaths to slow it down but it didn’t help. He had a sudden fear that he had answered the first question incorrectly, that he had failed to mention an important concept that was relevant to the topic. His pulse quickened. He stopped answering the question he was in the middle of answering and turned back to the first question. Certainly there was no mention of the concept, but was it relevant? He had to decide immediately. He was wasting valuable time. And what of the second question? It was only by chance that he thought of checking the first question. Perhaps the second question was deficient?

  He began to consider how crucial the result of this exam was to his life. If he passed he would qualify for a degree. This would enable him to go on and do a postgraduate degree. And that, he knew, was a necessary although not a sufficient condition for a secure and adequately paid job; adequate, that is, to satisfy the mother of his children, whoever she would be. His children—how vulnerable they appeared in his mind. He would make sure that their parents were never divorced. He would make sure that they would never have to sit an exam like this.

  Everything depended on how things went for him now. He no longer had any idea of how he was going. He had no faith in his previous answers. He turned back to the third question and resumed writing. His mouth was dry and he felt giddy and weak. Again he tried to recapture his breath and again was unsuccessful. He noticed he was heaving. It grew increasingly audible. Several people around him looked up from their papers and stared at him briefly. He tried to soften his breathing but was unable. The words on his page were blurred. He had difficulty writing. This difficulty increased until he had lost all dexterity in his digits and could not write at all. Spitalnic was afraid. Now he could not breathe at all. He was certain he would die within a few minutes.

  He managed to raise his arm slightly and attract the attention
of one of the invigilators. Seeing he was in distress, she came with a plastic cup of water. Spitalnic shook his head and mouthed the word doctor. The woman alerted two male invigilators, who helped Spitalnic from his chair and grabbed him, one man under each arm. They led him across the front of the hall past each row of desks, his legs dragging along the floor like rubber. He attempted to shelter his face like a criminal from the four hundred and ninety-nine other students in the hall.

  It was not a heart attack. One general practitioner and two specialists told him it was not. They said it was a nervous reaction to the strain of the exam. Nonetheless they recommended that his heart be tested. It was tested many times. It was monitored on an ECG. It was listened to. It was even photographed. His pulse was taken before and after situations of physical stress. Finally it was decided that the hole in his heart, which had grown bigger as he had grown, would have to be closed. No one, not his parents nor the physicians nor even Spitalnic himself, ever talked about the consequences of not having the hole closed.

  His mother became very silent after the day the fourth cardiologist had recommended surgery. She smoked more heavily, as heavily as she had when her first son had been hospitalized. It made Spitalnic cough. His father spoke loudly and convincingly about what a routine operation it was now and how the quality of Spitalnic’s life would improve. Spitalnic knew that he was just as afraid as his mother. What he did not know was that his father, the logical positivist, the atheist who destroyed with ease the first cause and teleological arguments for the existence of God, was crying in a synagogue on his way home from work on the nights he did not spend with his son.

  Reuben and Sara visited Spitalnic the night before he was due to be operated on. They brought chocolates, which he was not allowed to eat. He was not allowed to eat anything. They did not stay long. Spitalnic watched television for a while and then read but could concentrate on neither. Where was Sandy? Where was Celia now?

  Spitalnic lay in the hospital bed. It was night now and the reassuring sounds of human activity were scarce. All visitors, including his parents, had come and gone. Even the night nurses had said good night to him. The next time he would speak to anyone would be in the morning when they woke him to prepare him for surgery.

  A TALE IN TWO CITIES

  1. Moscow

  Where we came from you woke up early and bribed the coming day to be kind to you. Without this you were certainly done for. We could rely on that. But we could not rely on that anymore, not here. In Australia the days were not corrupt. There was no certainty.

  I didn’t know about the rest of my family, but sitting there I realized that I had taken the waiting with me. Waiting is Russian. Russians know how to wait. It is learnt in queues from an early age. We queued for everything, often without knowing why. I remember as a very small child walking in a street in Moscow with my mother. We came upon a queue. It stretched way down the street, and from where we stood at the back, my mother could not see the shop into which it headed. We joined it immediately and asked the people in front what they were queueing for. They weren’t sure but thought it was for children’s socks. No one this far back could be sure. My mother left me to keep our spot while she scouted up ahead to verify the socks rumor. I started our waiting, looking down at my cold, cold feet. They were wet from snow and my galoshes kept coming off, a perennial problem with me then. I stood there listening to the people in front without really understanding what they were saying. I was five.

  Eventually my mother came back. Yes, it seemed there were socks at the end of the queue. She resumed her spot next to me and we waited, all rugged up, moving only occasionally, almost imperceptibly while she told me stories. They were children’s stories, classics, fairy stories and impromptu stories based on people in the queue and surrounding streets. Why was that old man limping? Was it a real limp? What did I think would make him laugh at the end of a hard day of limping?

  I was still waiting. This particular day it was in the back of the bookshop in which I worked. I waited for the time when I did not have work there. I catalogued, stacked and sold books. The shame of it was that I loved books. They were my world but when your world was reduced to units, stocks, labels, ISBN numbers and price tags, it was time to move on. That day I also waited for something else, something for which I had never waited before. No one knew about it and I hoped he would be discreet when he called. It was part of his job to be discreet, just as sitting toward the back of the bookshop was part of mine. I had told him to call me there, not at home. I didn’t want my parents to know I’d engaged a private investigator.

  What kind of person became a private investigator? What kind of person resorted to that special blend of pragmatism and discretion that was the unspoken and unwritten warranty of the private investigator? Most of what we knew about them came from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Did they really speak in that slightly colorful but nonetheless direct monotone that made neither a virtue nor a vice of their amorality? How would this one sound? I wondered.

  I first became aware of her by way of an uncertain voice on my answering machine, a voice with unusually perfect English for one so coated in Russian. She was anxiously succinct. She left her name, Rose Gamarkin, and asked me to call her on a number she gave. How did she hear of me? It doesn’t matter. People with desperation in their voices always seem to know how to find me. All I know is she needs help, or thinks she does.

  He got that right.

  He might not even give his real name. I didn’t know. I’d have to wait. I’d waited about an hour and a half with my mother that other day long ago. That’s how she tells it. I wouldn’t know exactly. I wasn’t so good with time. When we got to the head of the queue, we found there were still socks left, good-quality ones from Germany. My mother bought a few pairs. They were adult socks. She made me wear them anyway.

  I have an unfortunate habit of laughing when I’m nervous. I don’t quite know why. Perhaps it has something to do with the circumstances of my upbringing. Perhaps it is the fault of my parents, although, at twenty-eight, I am almost past the stage where you blame everything on your parents. I say stage and not age because some people come late to the realization that everything is their parents’ fault. You can only hope it comes early enough to be rejected for the simplistic explanation it usually is, that it comes while your parents are still young, or at least while they are still sentient enough to forgive you for forgiving them so late, and still capable of loving you when their conviction has been overturned.

  Whatever its origins, I laugh when I am nervous and it has been this way since I was at least six or seven. I remember being taught as early as that never to repeat a joke outside the apartment. When I look at small children today, it amazes me that my parents trusted my brother and me not to repeat anything they discussed. But then, Russian children learned different skills, and Russian Jewish children learned certain other skills again, the learning of which takes away some of the freedom of childhood but can also save a life.

  Everyone but the drunks and my mother knew to shut up in public. Strangely, she was never afraid of anything. If ever she was called a “dirty Jew” in the street, she would smile and say, “A Jew, yes, that’s right.” She knew very little about being Jewish, but it gave her some small satisfaction to show pride in the face of anti-Semitism, especially in its crude street manifestations. She was not often confronted in the street—not as often as my father, who had earned a slight limp from it. This was not so much because she did not look Jewish (whatever that means; she certainly did not look Russian) but because she was beautiful. Even the drunks who kept vigil at the entrances of the metro stations were a little taken aback by this proud and striking woman. They say I look like her; she has dark wide eyes, pale skin and black hair, but I certainly do not have her strength. I don’t carry myself like she does. There is too much of my father in me. Even though I am a woman, I have always felt my brother is more obviously her child.

  My mother could neve
r be relied upon to hide her hatred of the regime, whoever the leader. She lost both her parents when she was four. Her father was a general in the army—no mean feat for a Jew—but she never spoke about this with any particular pride. To stand out is to court disaster. He became a victim of Stalin’s paranoia and was killed in the purges of 1937. Her mother was also killed, for being his wife. I am named Rose after her, Roza in Russian. My mother was hidden by her much older half-brother. She grew up knowing she was a Jew but not knowing what this meant except to people who were not Jewish. She was actually more the archetypical Russian heroine in her demeanor. A colleague at her work once had to fill in her nationality for her on a form. Although they did not know each other well, they had become friendly. He knew she was a Jew but out of genuine friendship offered to put her parents down as Russian. He whispered his offer sympathetically, but she became enraged.

  “Why do this?” she shouted in a voice the whole office could hear. He could see the rage building up in her to the point of tears and tried to placate her, explaining softly that things might be easier for her with Russian parents, which indeed they would have been. But she whispered to her colleague in that white fury so familiar to me that she did not need things any easier. It must have been because of the depth of his fondness for her that he persisted in trying to get her to see reason, his reason, even at risk to himself. He would have been the one responsible for the deliberate falsification, not her. But he did not know her well enough and never got to know her any better, which was probably just as well for him. So what if she was beautiful? This was a woman who danced and sang in the Red Square when Stalin’s death was announced. (She was very nearly assaulted.) To end the discussion, she stood on her chair and shouted again for all the office to hear, “Write down that I’m a Jew!”