Victor Brook Fiction

He recoiled and dropped to his knees. His action rocked the entire house; somewhere below, a heavy chandelier fell down with a thunderous crash. He threw his hands towards me. His exhausted face proved capable of even greater suffering. He lamented in an imploring whisper and whispered a martyr's lament.

"Sir," he said, "You are one of those people. I beg you! Do you have a mother? Do you believe in God? What do you believe in? What is the holiest thing for you? In the name of what is most sacred to you, tell me why did you come here?"

It was painful to look at him. I would have been glad to admit anything to lessen his suffering. I wished he'd given me a clue as to what I needed to say and how I needed to say it. I remembered he was satisfied with my first answer and I said with greatest sincerity:

We sat listening to the sounds of the rain. I was not in a hurry to get anywhere. And yet, my unexplained presence continued to torment him. He jumped up again, hovered over me and began to change the position of his hands. He placed them in his pockets, folded them on his chest, dropped them to his stomach and intertwined the fingers, threw them behind his back, lowered them completely, that is, he let them dangle around his hips, and there he nervously collected and spilled his mighty fists. Finally, he returned his hands to his pockets.

"I have not been here long," he began in an almost conciliatory voice. "Only three years. Before me, there was no hotel here at all. Even so, you see for yourself that nobody needs this hotel. Two pitiful rooms, vacant all the time. . . . I make my money only on the restaurant. And what kind of money is that? Barely enough to cover my expenses. Why, you would ask, did I drag myself to do business in this hole? I did not come here to do business. I was traveling along the shore. You know, I used to enjoy a slow and painstaking progress along the coastline. I took all kinds of risks to remain as close as possible to the salt water. I had a dream; I wanted to copy the complex outlines of the existing continents with the movement of my amazingly conspicuous body, using it like a thick marker. . . . And how about you?" he asked just to shake me up. "Do you like traveling?"

He did the right thing; I was falling asleep. It was, after all, the middle of the night. I came alive, nodded, and smiled. It appeared I had managed to satisfy him.

"And so, traveling along the shore to achieve the dream of my life, I kept so close to the ocean waves that one late evening, in the thick fog, I did not notice a precipice. In short, I fell down God knows where. Overloaded as usual, we (my car and I) were falling down fast and almost endlessly; we were plunging to be squashed into an example of bloodstained progress. During that fall, I had enough time to recollect all the events of my life, to say good-bye to my family, friends, and even to those whom I had never met. I also had time (if only in my head) to put my affairs in eternal order. On the bottom of that everlasting fall, we suddenly met not an executioner, masquerading as a rock, but a wise and impartial ocean laughing under his gray mustache. While the car was moving here and there, mainly in the direction of the bottom, I managed to get out through the window in a manner not very elegant, but clearly perfectly appropriate under the circumstances. I swam to the shore, shook the water off, undressed, wrung out all my clothes, and put them back on, even though they were still wet. First, I grieved for a while over the loss of my maps, on which very diligently I had outlined with markers my intricate route, the route that agreed as precisely as possible with the outlines of the lands and oceans. In the second place, I grieved over the loss of my documents, money, and a case of Wild Turkey that was my favorite consolation in the absence of human life. . . ."

Again, he yanked me out of some dream. "Well, what's your answer?" he asked with hostility after an adequate wait.

"I like it, yes, I like it," I said at last. "But I don't recall the exact taste. I ate some a long time ago."

"It's whiskey," he said quietly. His face showed abhorrence. Oh, how he hated me for my lies, for my general ignorance, for my presence, and even for my inevitable future absence.

"In the third place, but not in the last, I grieved over the loss of my poor jeep, which, with great strain but loyally, used to transport my oversized body. For a while, I grieved over some other things; then I climbed the nearest rock and saw a small light in the distance. Without delay, I went in its direction. That night was almost like this one. At the same time, it was strikingly different, if only because there was no hotel here. Thoroughly wet, cold, and hungry, like an orphan or a homeless person, I wandered in the cold rain, through the puddles, from house to house. Did I knock on the doors? You bet, I did. I knocked on all the doors I saw. I will not hide the fact that all of them opened. Not right away, but all of them did open. The fishermen, joined by their wives and children, sleepily stared at my huge, wet body. Their not completely awakened bodies and their ramshackle homes aggressively attacked me with assorted smells of fish: raw, boiled, smoked, fried, fresh, and even spoiled a year before. My hunger was fighting with nausea and it was losing this brutal battle. I did not know their language then, but with the help of gestures, I was denying that I intended to rob them, kill them, or violate their women. Categorically, but insincerely, I also denied the truth, that is, I was trying to convince them that I was neither hungry, nor cold.

"Oh no, folks," I kept assuring them, jerking my limbs like a stringed-up marionette, mercilessly dipped in the cold ocean and then left hanging in the wind under a cold foreign rain. "No, I don't need your fish or your beds. What I want is a space on your hard floor, a space the size of my coiled up body (it's huge, of course, but do not be frightened; my wandering life taught me very well how to coil up in any space that was forced upon me). What I want is a roof over my body, for no longer than until the early dawn."

I pointed my finger at their roofs, but they imagined that I poked it into the sky. I don't think I looked like a missionary; yet, the fishermen were sure I had arrived to convert them without their knowledge to some other faith. They smiled with a frown, or frowned with a smile; they shoved me into the rain, turned off the lights, and went to bed. That night has opened my eyes to the true nature of all human beings, and since that time, I have been seized with an endless and boundless depression. Having lost in the ocean depths everything that enabled me to copy the capricious outlines of the land masses and oceans, and having turned into a foreign vagabond of suspiciously large dimensions, I made a difficult decision-to stay here for the time being. Three years have gone by. I am still here. I have a feeling I'll die here, as well."

He started crying. I did not know how to help him. I myself needed help, a roof over my coiled-up body. Meanwhile, he kept shedding crocodile tears. I ran into a man who terribly misjudged people during one rough night of his life. Others suffer and become kinder. But this man was different; he became embittered and woke up a beast inside him.

"Well, here you have it," he said, having dried his eyes. "You refused to help me with the smallest thing-you didn't give me an answer why you came here. For that, excuse me, I will refuse you also. Be so kind as to get out. I want to go to bed."

Urging me with his shoulder, that is, rudely and even painfully initiating bodily contact with me, the scoundrel was able to inject into me an excess of his personal cosmic dejection; and thanks to this, his mood seemed to improve. He was too large for any kind of objections.

I went out to face the bad weather and my own problems. It turned out that I threw off my sheet, and the house cooled considerably at night. I don't remember whether the dogs were barking, but the alarm-clock tic-tocked, as always, and its every tick and every tock underlined the separate moments of the present receding into the past.

Now I was waiting for ten past ten as a girl waits for her first love, a boy for the death of his stepfather, an old woman for the death of her senile, disgraceful husband, and an old man for his last love. Let's not get confused by counting days, rummaging in some chronology and juggling a handful of specific hours or even worse-minutes. We are recalling general blows and caresses instead of the date and exact time of someone hitting us in the face or caressing the hair on the back of our head in a telephone booth. (To be more precise, before this serious illness, I did not yet have a chance to experience the crowding of telephone booths by three participants: him, her and the telephone, which somehow made the telephone completely superfluous. However, once or twice, I did watch similar group encounters from a distance, and I fantasized about their female participants). But let's not get baffled by all the unnecessary details. Better, let's recall what was happening and what I felt during the last days of my illness, after the hands of the alarm-clock created out of the general chaos twenty-two hours, ten minutes, and zero-zero seconds of city time.