Foreign Bodies Read online

  FOREIGN BODIES

  Fiction by Cynthia Ozick:

  Dictation

  Heir to the Glimmering World

  The Puttermesser Papers

  The Shawl

  The Messiah of Stockholm

  The Cannibal Galaxy

  Levitation: Five Fictions

  Bloodshed and Three Novellas

  The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories

  Trust

  FOREIGN BODIES

  CYNTHIA OZICK

  First published in the United States in 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York.

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Cynthia Ozick, 2010

  The moral right of Cynthia Ozick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84887 735 1

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 362 8

  eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 583 7

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  But there are two quite distinct things—given the wonderful place he’s in—that may have happened to him. One is that he may have got brutalized. The other is that he may have got refined.

  —Henry James, The Ambassadors

  FOREIGN BODIES

  I

  July 23, 1952

  Dear Marvin,

  Well, I’m back. London was all right, Paris was terrible, and I never made it down to Rome. They say it’s the hottest summer they’ve had since before the war. And except for the weather, I’m afraid there’s not much else to report. The address you gave me — Julian left there about a week ago. It seems I just missed him by a few days. You wouldn’t have approved, a rooming house in a rundown neighborhood way out toward the edge of the city. I did the best I could to track him down — tried all the places you said he might be working at. His landlady when I inquired turned out to be a pure blank. All she had to offer was an inkling of a girlfriend. He took everything with him, apparently not much.

  I’m returning your check. From the looks of where your son was living, he could certainly have used the $500. Sorry I couldn’t help more. I hope you and (especially) Margaret are well.

  Yours,

  Beatrice

  2

  IN THE EARLY FIFTIES of the last century, a ferocious heat wave assaulted Europe. It choked its way north from Sicily, where it scorched half the island to brownish rust, up toward Malmö at the lowest tip of Sweden; but it burned most savagely over the city of Paris. Hot steam hissed from the wet rings left by wine glasses on the steel tables of outdoor cafés. In the sky just overhead, a blast furnace exhaled searing gusts, or else a fiery geyser, loosed from the sun’s core, hurled down boiling lava on roofs and pavements. People made this comparison and that — sometimes it was the furnace, sometimes the geyser, and now and then the terrible heat was said to be a general malignancy, a remnant of the recent war, as if the continent itself had been turned into a region of hell.

  At that time there were foreigners all over Paris, suffering together with the native population, wiping the trickling sweat from their collarbones, complaining equally of feeling suffocated; but otherwise they had nothing in common with the Parisians or, for that matter, with one another. These strangers fell into two parties — one vigorous, ambitious, cheerful, and given to drink, the other pale, quarrelsome, forlorn: a squad of volatile maundering ghosts.

  The first was looking to summon the past: it was a kind of self-intoxicated theater. They were mostly young Americans in their twenties and thirties who called themselves “expatriates,” though they were little more than literary tourists on a long visit, besotted with legends of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. They gathered in the cafés to gossip and slander and savor the old tales of the lost generation, and to scorn what they had left behind. They rotated lovers of either sex and played at existentialism and founded avant-garde journals in which they published one another and bragged of having sighted Sartre at the Deux Magots, and were proudly, relentlessly, unremittingly conscious of their youth. Unlike that earlier band of expatriates, who had grown up and gone home, these intended to stay young in Paris forever. They made up a little city of shining white foreheads; but their teeth were stained from too much whiskey and wine, and too many powerful French cigarettes. They spoke only American. Their French was bad.

  The other foreign contingent — the ghosts — were polyglot. They chattered in dozens of languages. Out of their mouths spilled all the cadences of Europe. Unlike the Americans, they shunned the past, and were free of any taint of nostalgia or folklore or idyllic renewal. They were Europeans whom Europe had set upon; they wore Europe’s tattoo. You could not say of them, as you surely would of the Americans, that they were a postwar wave. They were not postwar. Though they had washed up in Paris, the war was still in them. They were the displaced, the temporary and the temporizing. Paris was a way station; they were in Paris only to depart from Paris, as soon as they knew who would have them. Paris was a city to wait in. It was a city to get away from.

  Beatrice Nightingale belonged to neither party. She had been “Miss Nightingale” — in public — for twenty-four
years, even during her marriage and certainly after the divorce, and had sometimes begun to think of herself by that name, if only to avoid the accusatory inward buzz of Bea. To Bea or not to Bea: she was one of that ludicrously recognizable breed of middle-aged teachers who save up for a longed-for summer vacation in the more romantic capitals of Europe. That these capitals, after the war, were scarred and exhausted, drained of all their well-advertised enchantments, did not escape her. She was resilient, intelligent, not inexperienced (marriage itself had taught her a thing or two). She was, after all, forty-eight years old, graying only a little, and tough with her students, high school boys sporting duck-tail haircuts who laughed at Wordsworth and ridiculed Keats: when they came to “Ode to a Nightingale” they went out of their way to hoot and leer — but she knew how to tame them. She was good at her job and not ashamed of it. And after two decades at it, she was not yet burned out.

  She had signed up for London, Paris, and Rome, but gave up on Rome (even though it was included in the agent’s package deal) when she read, in her noisy hot hotel room off Piccadilly, of the dangerous temperatures in the south. London had been nearly bearable, if you kept to the shade, but Paris was hideous, and Rome was bound to be an inferno. “That ludicrously recognizable breed” — these were her mocking words to herself (traveling alone, she had no one else to say them to), though likely parroted from some jaunty guidebook, the kind that makes light of its own constituents. A more conscientious guidebook, the one sequestered at the bottom of her capacious bag — passport, notepad, camera, tissues, aspirin, and so on — was not jaunty. It was punishingly painstaking, and if you were obedient to its almost sacerdotal cartography, you would come away exalted by pictures and sculptures and historic public squares redolent of ancient beheadings.

  On this July day the page she was consulting in her guidebook was bare of Monets and Gauguins and day-trip chateaus. It was captioned “Neighborhood Cafés.” All afternoon she had been walking from café to café, searching for her nephew. A filmy smear greased her vision — it was as if her corneas were melting — and her heartbeat either ran too fast or else meant to run out altogether, with small reminding jabs. The pavements, the walls of buildings, blew out torrid vibrations. Paris was sub-Saharan, she was being cooked in a great equatorial vat. She fell into a wicker chair at a burning round table and ordered cold juice, and sat panting, only half recovered, with her blurry eye on the garçon who brought it. Her nephew was a waiter in one of these sidewalk establishments, this much she knew. It was difficult to think of him as her nephew: he was her brother’s son, he was too remote, he was as uncertain for her as a rumor. Marvin had sent her a photograph: a boy in his twenties, straw hair, indeterminate expression. How to sort him out from the identical others, with their wine-spattered white aprons tied around their skinny waists? She supposed she could spot him once he opened his mouth and revealed himself as an American: she had only to say to any probable straw-haired boy, Excuse me, are you Julian?

  — Pardon?

  — I’m looking for Julian Nachtigall, from California. Do you know him, does he work here?

  — Pardon?

  — Un Américain. Julian. Un garçon. Est-il ici?

  — Non, madame.

  Doubtless there was a more efficient way of finding him. Marvin had written out, in those big imperious letters as loud as his big imperious voice, his son’s precise address. Three times, so far, she had climbed the broken front steps of the squat brown house in the broken brown neighborhood her fastidious guidebook mentioned only to warn its readers away. A bony landlady erupted from a door at the top of the stoop; the boy, she said in a garble as broken as her teeth, lived overhead, one flight up, only no, he was not home, he was not home already four days. Oui, certainement, he worked in one of the cafés, what else was a boy like that good for? At least she got the rent out of him. Dieu merci, he has a rich father over there.

  So! A wild goose chase, useless, pointless, it was eating into her vacation time, and all to please Marvin, to serve Marvin, who — after years of disapproval, of repudiation, of what felt almost like hatred — was all at once appealing to the claims of family. This fruitless search, and the murderous heat. Retrograde Europe, where you had to ask bluntly for a toilet whenever you wanted a ladies’ room, and where it seemed that nothing, nothing was air-conditioned — at home in New York, everything was air-conditioned, it was the middle of the twentieth century, for God’s sake! Her guidebook showed no concern for the tourist’s bladder, and in its fervid preoccupation with the heirlooms of the ages never dreamed of cooling off. It recommended small quaint boutiques in fashionable neighborhoods — if you cared for something American-style, it chided, stay in America. But she had had enough of the small and the quaint and the unaffordably fashionable, and more than enough of that asinine wandering from café to café: what she needed was air-conditioning and a toilet, and urgently. She walked on through the roasting miasma of late afternoon, and when she saw before her a tall gray edifice with a frieze incised above its two stately doors, for a moment she supposed it was yet another historic site smacking of Richelieu. But there were letters in the stone: GRAND MAGASIN LUXOR. A department store! The cold air came rushing at her with its familiar saving breath. The ladies’ room was very much like what she might have found in, say, Bloomingdale’s, all mirrors and marble sinks. Call it American-style, condemn it for its barbarous mimicry, Louis XIII on the outside, New York on the inside — the place was life-giving.

  The ladies’ room led out through a corridor into something like a restaurant, though it resembled more a busy Broadway cafeteria, where shoppers sat surrounded by their newly purchased bags and boxes. The ceiling was misty with smoke; all these people were intent on their cigarettes. She looked around for a seat. Every table was taken. Then she noticed an empty spot strewn with ash-filled saucers, occupied by three noisy men and a woman.

  She put her hand on the back of the vacant chair. “Will it be all right if I settle down here for a minute?”

  The woman gave out a help-yourself-what-do-I-care shrug. It was impossible to know whether she understood English, or whether the gesture with the chair was enough. The men continued what seemed to be an argument. Here there was no heap of overflowing bags: presumably this intense little circle, like Bea herself, had no local purpose other than refuge from the griddle of the streets. Odors of eggs and coffee all around. Floating tongues of perfume: a mannequin sailing by, uncannily tall, feet uncannily long, a trail of silky garments over one long arm, breastless, eyes of glass, Matisse-red mouth, perfection of jaw and limbs and stiffened hair, the very model of a Parisian model, exuding streams of fragrance. The men stared, as if sighting a yellow tiger in a place that smelled of kitchen. “Imbéciles,” the woman muttered; these syllables, addressed to Bea, were roughened by an unidentifiable accent. The accent matched the woman’s hard look: tight black curls sprouting from an angry head. The visionary living robot slid away, and the men resumed their quarrel — if it was a quarrel. Their talk was French and not-French, it had the sound of half a dozen languages all at once: Europe scrambled. A quarrel, a protest, a lament, a bark of resignation? Bea sank into the clear relief of sitting still and shedding warmth — she could almost fall asleep against these enigmatic contentious voices, wavering like underwater flora at the far rim of her fatigue. The deadly walk back to the hotel still ahead. These people, who were they, where did they come from? Too shabby, too provisional, to be ordinary citizens. They didn’t belong, they were out of place and out of sorts. They hung their cigarettes from their lower lips only to let the time pass. The woman, with those impatient furious whorls springing up around a blotched face, stood up and was pulled down by one of the men. She stood up again, to go where? Where had they come from, where could they go?

  Bea left them finally. She had seen their like strewn all over Paris.

  She went one last time to find Marvin’s son. The jagged-toothed landlady materialized as before, only now in cotton hous
e slippers, with a wet mop in hand and a big rag wound round her waist. She was washing down the stairs. The boy was gone, since two days gone for good with his knapsack and a girl to help drag out the duffle bag. What did he have in there, iron bars? The room was his for one week more, it was a blessing anyhow that he owed nothing, that useless boy, because of the father in America. The girl? A quiet little dark thing, like an Arab or a gypsy.

  — How should I know where he went? He didn’t tell me, why should he?

  — I need to talk to him, I’m his aunt.

  — I’m sorry for you, a boy like that. My own two nephews, they have real jobs, not one day here, one day there, a different boss every time. Maybe he moved in with her, that one, not a kid like him, already a wrinkle between the eyes, that’s what they do, after a while they move in with them. If you want to take a look upstairs, I don’t object, only watch the steps, they’re still wet. I looked in up there myself, to see about damage. A couple of nails in the wall, I don’t mind, like if he hung a picture.

  — Well, but did he leave anything behind?

  — I found this up there, if you want it it’s yours, it’s no use to me.

  The landlady held out a battered book.

  In the taxi going back to her hotel, she examined it. Something like a dictionary, an indecipherable language across from a column of French, not a name inscribed, not a sign of anything. It was old; the pages were brittle and loose. Pointless to keep it, so when she paid the driver and got out, she abandoned it.

  The next day she visited the Louvre, and for the rest of the week — as far as her money and the lethal weather allowed — she relied on her guidebook to lead her to storied scenes and ancient glories. Then she went home to her two-and-a-half-room apartment on West 89th Street, where the bulky shoulder of an air conditioner darkened a window and vibrated like a worn drum. And where to Bea or not to Bea was always the question.