The Reasons I Won't Be Coming Page 17

  This all changed quite abruptly when Spitalnic found somebody new, somebody with the potential to restore his self-respect. He met her at a party to which his friends had talked him into coming. Alison was an aspiring journalist who had recently moved from another state in order to further her career. She had short black hair and pale skin that contrasted with her deep blue eyes. She was two years his senior.

  They were introduced in a crowd and never given an opportunity to speak alone. Spitalnic took mental notes of their conversation, clutching at any sentence, phrase or glance that could be construed as a sign of interest.

  It was, of course, impossible under the circumstances to get her phone number; but, remembering where she worked, he was, after some little research, able to contact her. Their first private meeting was arranged after a brief yet friendly telephone conversation. It was a dinner engagement.

  Spitalnic, surprised at the ease with which he found her place, arrived early and so waited in the car until he was five minutes late. He was nervous on entering and his mouth was dry, but when he saw her in the doorway he knew that his apprehension had to be overcome. She was, after all, quite beautiful. Her voice was loud and warm. She offered him a drink and this almost threw him. No girl he had taken out previously had offered him a predinner drink, and he did not know what he should answer. He declined the offer after consideration.

  The restaurant he chose served French cuisine. The waiters called him sir, which embarrassed him. The conversation flowed easily even before they had been served with wine. Alison was ambitious, vivacious and likely to succeed as a journalist. He thought that if she could put at least two words together, her looks and personality would do the rest. She was politically active, left of center. Spitalnic, too, was left of center but was certainly not politically active. Spitalnic did not feel comfortable as a member of any organization or committee. The prospect unsettled him. He was not a joiner.

  Alison argued that the best way to bring the Left back around to the side of the Jews was to get involved at the grass-roots level, to infiltrate. She spoke convincingly and with enthusiasm. Spitalnic suggested that her words would not seem out of place in a passage from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Alison laughed and sipped her wine.

  As a student, she had organized a counterdemonstration against a National Action demonstration. She had contacted the mainstream press and television stations and generally organized sufficient support to outnumber the fascists. It had been a major success. She was then nineteen.

  After dinner they drove to the city to browse in a bookshop that closed at midnight. They discussed fiction with that combination of heartfelt sincerity and genuine one-upmanship that would have amused an observing third party. She was impressed with the breadth of his reading and he was heartened by this. He bought her two books, inscribed them in the shop and regretted it immediately.

  “You have to rush things!” he heard his father say. “Are you trying to bribe her?”

  Maybe he was. Spitalnic hoped it wasn’t obvious. She thanked him and he was embarrassed. Was this a form of prostitution? he wondered. Two books for a cup of coffee in her lounge room and a good-night kiss upon which to ponder.

  But she was not a party to this contract. Spitalnic did get a cup of coffee and finally a peck on the cheek, but between these two events Alison had entirely deprived him of his initial hopes. He was informed that her life was too hectic to give a relationship any sort of a chance and that, in fact, at this stage of her career, she did not really regret that this was so. Furthermore, she had recently extricated herself from a relationship with a person only twelve months younger than her and that age difference had proved too big an obstacle. The boy was far too immature. Not that she was suggesting that Spitalnic was too immature. Did he understand that? What had he understood?

  Spitalnic had switched off almost immediately after the spiel had started. He felt the same numbness he had felt when Celia spoke to him over the phone on the day of his Economics exam. This time it was less justified. How could he really be hurt? He had only seen her twice. He had already, midway through dinner, recognized her as the beautiful and ambitious owner of a potentially lethal pisk. But he had not expected to be wounded by it so soon.

  Alison kept talking. Spitalnic looked through the steam emanating from the coffee mug at the novels he had bought her and held back a tear that would be born in the car on the way home, but which was conceived with Celia weeks ago.

  At the door of her house Alison told him that she still wanted to see him, to keep next Saturday night free and that she would call him during the week. Then came the peck on the cheek.

  With one day left before the commencement of the new university year, Spitalnic had only one summer Sunday afternoon completely to himself that did not need to be shared with the tools of Keynesian or neoclassical economics. He had seen, advertised in the Yiddish paper, the opening of a museum to commemorate the Holocaust. Having failed in attempts to persuade his friends to go to the opening, he went alone. There was already a large crowd when he got there and he was forced to walk a considerable distance from his car to the museum. Police were patrolling the adjacent streets in large numbers. Was there nowadays a large police presence at the opening of all museums, or only those commemorating the slaughter of Jews? he wondered.

  Spitalnic had no choice but to stand at the back, almost in the street. There was a crowd of maybe three hundred packed in between the platform in the courtyard of the museum and the street. Most of the three hundred were elderly European Jews, most likely survivors. The sun was hot and the sky was bare. With the highly visible police presence, the nearby railway lines and the high density of perspiring Jewish bodies within a barbed-wire periphery, Spitalnic wondered if anyone else had noted the similarity of the surroundings to those of the events they were commemorating.

  On the raised platform at the front of the courtyard sat eight dignitaries from various Jewish organizations and a politician from each of the major parties. All of the speeches, other than those by the politicians, were in Yiddish. Survivors of the Holocaust were being told the importance of Remembering in a language only they could understand. They were not likely to forget, so why weren’t they using English? Spitalnic mused.

  The politicians used different terms and expressions to convey that they regretted the Holocaust; that the larger community is indebted to the local Jewish community for so many things that to mention one in particular would be to trivialize the Jewish community’s outstanding contributions in the areas of . . . ; that their Party is committed simultaneously to assimilation and to the maintenance of distinct ethnic identities; and that the tragedy of this current generation is its failure to remember what it is that future generations should never forget. Each politician received generous applause from an audience that had, almost to a person, not understood the words, let alone the meaning behind this verbiage. But they were not applauding the speeches, nor even the speakers. They were applauding the country in which gentiles courted Jewish votes; they were applauding the fact that today they could move freely on either side of the barbed-wire fence. They were applauding because they had survived Hitler.

  Spitalnic had paid the entrance fee, although by standing in the street he had not actually entered the museum. There was a mini-trestle at the entrance where one could buy programs. A fleshy woman in her sixties sat behind the trestle selling the programs. She had been listening to the Yiddish speakers and had not noticed the acute shortage of programs with which she was now suddenly faced. She called out to a tired-looking man whose concentration camp number showed below the right sleeve of his short-sleeved shirt. From the woman’s mouth came a high-pitched whisper full of inappropriate panic.

  “Mietek, get more from the car. We’ve run out!”

  The man could not make out her words but recognized the tone. He had to make his way from deep within the crowd. He began with “Excuse me” but soon took to pushing and prodding his way towards the
entrance. He was visibly perspiring, but those around were oblivious to his exertions despite the fact that the speeches were now in English and therefore harder for them to understand.

  “Mietek, get more from the car—and hurry!”

  Spitalnic, being at the head of the queue for the booklets, saw the little man turn one hundred and eighty degrees one way, see no path ahead, and turn one hundred and eighty degrees back. There were numerous beads of perspiration on the man’s head now. He was level with Spitalnic when he began to gasp for breath. His legs gave way like ice under the hot sun. His body slapped the pavement and Spitalnic caught his head. The woman rushed out from behind the trestle to where Spitalnic held the gasping man’s head.

  “Mietek, what’s wrong? Get a doctor!”

  The word doctor rippled through the immediate layers of the crowd. A young officious-looking man made his way brusquely to where Spitalnic held the gasping head, now partially screened from the sun by the little man’s numbered forearm. The doctor undid the buttons of the man’s short-sleeved shirt and started thumping on the man’s chest. He told Spitalnic to place the man’s head on the ground with the face pointing up and ordered the woman to call for an ambulance. The woman immediately delegated her authority.

  “Call an ambulance for Mr. Hillel—and hurry!”

  The opening of the Holocaust Center proceeded in ignorance of the events taking place on the street side in the barbed-wire periphery. Mietek Hillel died as the wheels of the ambulance came to a stop outside the museum. The body was placed on a stretcher, put inside the ambulance and shunted quietly away with few people at the opening being any the wiser. The Nazis had finally got Mr. Hillel, and Spitalnic looked for somewhere to wash his hands.

  The university year began without the least shame for its inauspiciousness. Alison did not call as she had promised, nor did Spitalnic expect her to (although hope is something altogether different). The lecturers repeated the nagging demands they had made the previous years. Spitalnic settled down to his courses without much procrastination. He referred to the economics course, which he had failed and was forced to take a second time, as “the bastard,” the illegitimate and unwanted child of Celia’s new relationship. Since neither “the bastard” nor Spitalnic had any connection with Celia now, Spitalnic was forced to be its sole guardian. He had driven to her house with a gift for her birthday but she was out. She never called to thank him.

  Spitalnic spent the first six weeks of university mostly in the company of Reuben, his friend of seven years. They had gone through secondary school together. Reuben had seen Spitalnic put on weight during his parents’ divorce and lose it and his virginity at sixteen. Spitalnic had seen Reuben stop growing and gain admission to the law school. Lunch with Reuben was the best part of each day. If it was sunny, they would eat outside; if not, they would eat in the “caf,” the culinary institution where the reputations of the socially mobile students were made, discussed and embellished. Reuben was equally disenchanted with university life. One had to be either a wealthy establishment socialite or a Marxist of sorts from an alternative establishment in order to walk straight into any prefabricated social circle. Since both he and Spitalnic were Jews, they were indigenous to neither establishment. There were Jewish students on campus willing to sell their birthrights for a place within one or other of the establishments, but they were not two of them.

  Their circle of friends included anybody, regardless of race, sex or faculty, who possessed a clearly recognizable ounce of sincerity. It was a small circle. Spitalnic introduced people he liked to Reuben, and the favor was reciprocated. Within a few months their circle had widened a little. Spitalnic had introduced Reuben to Greg, a short boy with straight black hair who proudly admitted to having no religion but whose nose (it was said) had made him the frequent target of anti-Semitic jibes and thus an honorary Jew. Greg was a third-year arts student majoring in politics with leftist leanings, but, as Spitalnic was fond of saying, he was no meshuggener.

  Reuben brought Sandy into their circle. She was a blond girl with slight features and a cherub’s smile. A second-year science student, she did not look old enough to have gone through secondary school. Spitalnic took to her immediately, but not in a romantic way, for this would have seemed almost immoral or sacrilegious. Her smile, her laugh, her seemingly unlimited good nature, made her the object of Spitalnic’s paternal attentions.

  At first she was intimidated by him. His sense of humor seemed to her offbeat if not at times sick. He made obscure references to things she had never heard of. Was he laughing at her? Was she expected to know of these things? What did these people see in such a little girl? But it was not long before she warmed to Spitalnic. As the weeks and then months progressed, they became closer. Spitalnic would do little things for her. He would often buy her lunch. If the group was laughing and he saw she was sad, he would change places and sit next to her, give her his lunch, his coat and scarf in winter. The others affectionately referred to him as her grandfather. Spitalnic laughed at this with the rest. But when the laughing was over, he wondered about his relationship with Sandy. He did sincerely love this little girl, but he was not in love with her. What Spitalnic felt for Sandy was unique in his emotional experience and he could not explain it. She, too, loved him, but was not in love with him. She had a boyfriend studying pharmacy whom she had been seeing for close to a year. She was in love with him although they fought a lot.

  Indeed, all the members of the lunchtime circle fought intermittently with those with whom they were in love, “since that is the wont of those of such an irrational state of mind,” and Spitalnic thought all the members of the circle possessed such a state of mind. By and large their partners were not associated with the university, and so the meeting of the lunchtime circle was a lighthearted event, a communal midday sigh of relief, free from the complexities, uncertainties and melodrama associated with daily romantic interplay. All those present at lunch could hug and hit, kiss, fight and make love at other times. All except Reuben and his friend Spitalnic.

  Enrolled in one of Spitalnic’s tutorials was a girl with shoulder-length snow-white hair. She wore heavy eyeliner. Spitalnic was aware she was not beautiful but he was attracted to her nonetheless. She had a certain scent that mesmerized him. He thought of this as a standard feature nature issues as compensation to those women who are almost beautiful. Spitalnic looked forward to these tutorials and was disappointed when the girl missed them, as she often did. But he knew she would attend on the day she was due to read her tutorial paper. It was a poorly researched paper riddled with grammatical errors, read in a voice embarrassed by its own frailty. Spitalnic made sure he was the last to leave the room and he complimented her on her paper before asking her to have coffee with him. She accepted.

  Over coffee he found her friendly and more self-assured than he had expected. She was a political animal, left of center and disappointed with the mainstream. What was the mainstream and how did one enroll in it? Spitalnic wondered to himself. Her name was Christine. She liked old movies and jazz and lived around the corner from Spitalnic’s mother, and that was enough for him. He ask her out three days later.

  Over a period of five weeks, Spitalnic saw Christine on three occasions outside of university. On each occasion he was too busy being witty, concerned, compassionate, humble, pensive, vivacious and, sometimes, solemn to notice that she was never any of these. From the time he invited her out to the time he left his mother’s house to pick her up, he lived in fear of her regular phone calls to cancel or postpone their engagement. These inevitably came with excuses so lame that they fell on Spitalnic with a heaviness that caused a tightness in his chest. But by the next morning he had always found a way to justify her behavior, to forgive her and even to feel sympathy for her because she was so tired or had left an assignment so late. Perhaps he could help her with her studies or help her better organize her time? Could he make such suggestions without seeming condescending? She had already ribbed him f
or being too conscientious and much too concerned with academic success.

  A physical relationship of small proportions had developed by the end of their third encounter. Spitalnic was reluctant to begin it, not because he was not strongly attracted to her, but so that he could offer his lack of forwardness as proof of the sincerity of his feelings. And it was for this reason that he was content not to hurry things. But what were his feelings for her? By the end of the third night, buoyed with the lust of their trivial frolic and intoxicated by the prospect of a semipermanent relationship, Spitalnic had completely forgotten about Christine herself, about who she really was. He was besotted with the hope that his nagging loneliness, Celia’s other abandoned child, “the bastard’s” sibling, was about to die.

  Their fourth nocturnal meeting was scheduled two weeks after the victorious third. When Spitalnic arrived at Christine’s house she was barefoot in torn overalls, her hair disheveled. Her natural scent struggled against his aftershave and eventually overpowered it. Spitalnic wondered at the chemistry of such a scent. He wanted to make love to her then and there on her living room floor. Christine told him that she was frantic. It was Saturday night and she had a three-thousand-word assignment worth forty percent due in on Monday that she had, for various reasons, not been able to begin. Did he know that the midyear exams were only three weeks away? She was very sorry, but there was no way she could go out with him that night at all. She would be working through the night.

  What could Spitalnic say to this? He was very disappointed, but by the time he turned the key in the front door of his mother’s house his thoughts had reached sympathy, the final stage in their regular evolutionary process. He went inside and watched television. He imagined Christine at home in her bedroom at her desk. He knew the difficulty of writing essays under the pressure of time. How desperate she must have felt to have left the decision to the very last moment. Spitalnic felt obliged to reassure her that he understood, that it made no difference to them.