The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories Read online

  She raised her head and looked at the squirrel. It hung on the wall among the books, legs outspread, heraldic, immobile. She stood up and took one step toward the squirrel; one more step; it didn’t move, and she stretched out her hand toward the animal, closer and closer, very slowly—and the squirrel bit her, quick as lightning, sharp as a scissors. She screamed and went on screaming with rage in the empty room. She stumbled across the broken bottle and outdoors, where she stood and bellowed at the squirrel. Never ever had anyone forfeited a confidence, misused a covenant the way this squirrel had done. She didn’t know if she had reached out her hand to the animal in order to caress or strangle it. It didn’t matter, she had reached out her hand. She went in and swept up the broken glass, blew out all the candles, and put more wood in the stove. Then she burned everything she had written about the squirrel.

  In the time that followed, none of their rituals changed. She put out food on the rock slope and the squirrel came and ate. She didn’t know where it lived and didn’t care. She no longer went into the cellar or up to the woodpile on the hill. It showed her contempt, an indifference that didn’t stoop to revenge. But she moved about the island differently, impulsively. She could rush out of the cottage and slam the door behind her. She rattled the pans and stomped on the floor. Finally she started running. She would stand still for a long time, motionless, and then set off across the granite, running and panting back and forth across the island, flapping her arms and screaming. She didn’t care in the least whether the squirrel saw her or not.

  One morning it had snowed, a thin covering of snow that didn’t melt. Now the cold was coming. She must get the motor running, go to town, buy things. She went and looked at the motor, picked it up for a moment and then put it back against the wall of the cottage. Maybe in a few days. The wind was blowing. Instead, she started looking for the squirrel’s paw prints in the snow. The ground was white and untouched around the cellar air hole and the woodpile. She walked the shoreline, walked the whole island systematically, but the only prints she found were her own. Clear and black, they cut the island into rectangles and triangles and long curves. Later that day, she grew suspicious and looked under the furniture in the cottage, opened drawers and the closet. Finally she climbed up on the roof and looked down the chimney. You little bastard, you’re making me ridiculous, she said to the squirrel. Then she went to the point and counted the pieces of lumber, the squirrel boats she’d set out for a following wind to the mainland in order to show the squirrel how little she cared for it. They were still there, all six. For a moment she was uncertain. Had there been six, or maybe seven? She should have written it down. Not writing it down was indefensible. She went back to the cottage, shook out the rug, and swept the floor. Nowadays everything got out of order. Sometimes she brushed her teeth in the evening and didn’t bother to light the lamp. The lack of order was because she no longer had the Madeira to divide the day into proper periods and make them clear and easy.

  She washed every window and rearranged the bookcase, not by author this time but in alphabetical order by title. When she’d finished, she happened to think of a better and more personal system and decided to arrange the books according to herself—the ones she liked most on the top shelf, the ones she liked least on the bottom. She discovered to her amazement that there wasn’t a single book she liked. So she let them stay the way they were and sat down by the window to wait for more snow. There was a bank of clouds to the south. They might bring snow.

  That evening she felt a sudden wish for company and went to the top of the island with her walkie-talkie. She pulled up the antenna, turned it on, and listened. There was a distant scratching and swishing. A couple of times she’d picked up conversations between two boats. It might happen again. She waited for a long time. The night was coal black and very quiet. She closed her eyes and waited patiently. Now she heard something very far away, no words but two voices talking to each other. They were slow and calm. They came closer, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Now she heard that they were winding up their conversation, their tone of voice changed and their sentences got shorter. They were saying goodbye, and it was too late—and she started screaming Hello, it’s me, can you hear me, although she knew they couldn’t, and then there was only the distant swishing noise and she turned it off. Stupid, she said to herself. It occurred to her that the walkie-talkie batteries might work in the radio and she went back to have a try. They were the wrong size. She needed to go into town. Madeira, batteries. Under batteries she wrote nuts and then crossed it out. It was gone. There must have been seven pieces of wood after all and not six, all at precisely the same distance from the water, sixty-five centimeters. She read through her list and suddenly it was an inventory in a foreign language and seemed completely alien. Shear pins, Mobilat ointment, powdered milk, batteries, a catalog of strange, unreal items. The only thing that mattered was the bits of lumber, whether there’d been six or seven. She took her measuring tape and flashlight and went down to the shore again. The shore was barren, completely clean. There were no pieces of lumber at all, not one. The sea had risen and taken them.

  She was utterly amazed. She stood at the shoreline and shone her flashlight down into the water. The beam broke the surface and lit up a gray-green watery cavern that grew darker as it went down and was filled with very small, indistinct particles that she had never noticed before. She shone the beam farther out over the water and into the darkness. And there the weak cone of light captured color, a clear yellow color, a varnished wooden boat drifting away on the breeze.

  She did not understand right away that it was her own boat. She just stared at it, noticing for the first time the helpless, dramatic bobbing of a drifting boat, an empty boat. And then she saw that the boat wasn’t empty. The squirrel sat on the rear thwart, staring blindly straight into the light. It looked like a piece of cardboard, a dead toy.

  She made half a movement to take off her boots but stopped. The flashlight lay on the rock and was shining at an angle down through the water, a rampart of swollen seaweed that swayed as the sea level rose, then darkness where the rock curved downward. The boat was too far out. It was too cold. It was too late. She took a careless step and the flashlight slid into the water. It did not go out, it stayed on as it sank along the side of the rock face, a smaller and smaller vanishing light that illuminated quick glimpses of a ghostly brown landscape with moving shadows, and then there was nothing but darkness.

  “You damned squirrel, you,” she said slowly and with admiration. She stood there in the darkness in continuing astonishment, a little weak in the legs and vaguely aware that now everything was radically altered.

  Eventually she found her way back across the island. It took a long time. It was only when she closed the door behind her that she felt relief, a great, elated relief. All decisions had been taken from her. She no longer needed to hate the squirrel or worry about it. She didn’t need to write about the squirrel, didn’t need to write about anything at all. Everything was decided, everything solved, with a clear and unconditional simplicity.

  It had begun to snow outside. It snowed thick and quiet. Winter had come. She put more wood on the fire and turned up the lamp. She sat down at the kitchen table and started to write, very rapidly.

  On a windless day in November, shortly after sunrise, she saw a person on the boat beach.

  Translated by Thomas Teal

  THE MONKEY

  THE NEWSPAPER came at five o’clock, as it did every morning. He switched on the lamp by his bed, got into his slippers, and shuffled very slowly across the slippery cement floor, taking his usual route among the modeling stands, their shadows black as holes. He’d polished the floor after the last plaster casting. The wind was blowing, and the streetlight outside his studio made the shadows swing, driving them apart and pulling them together again. It was like walking through woods in a moonlit storm. He liked it. The monkey was awake in her cage, hanging on the bars, whining ingratiating
ly.

  “Bloody monkey,” said the sculptor and went out into the front hall to pick up his paper. On his way back to bed he opened the cage door and the monkey ran up his arm and clung firmly to his shoulder. She was shivering. He put on her collar and attached the leash to his wrist. The monkey was an ordinary guenon from Tangier that someone had bought cheap and sold dear. Every now and then she came down with pneumonia and needed penicillin. The kids in the neighborhood knitted sweaters for her.

  He got back into bed and opened his paper. The monkey lay quietly warming herself with her arms around his neck. After a while, she sat down in front of him, her pretty hands crossed over her stomach, and stared steadily into his eyes, an expression of perpetual, sad patience on her narrow gray face. “Stare away, you damned orangutan,” the sculptor said and went on reading. At the second or third page, the monkey would suddenly and with lightning precision jump through the newspaper, but always through the pages he’d already read. It was a ritual—the paper was ripped to shreds, the monkey shrieked in triumph and then lay down to sleep. It could be liberating every morning at five o’clock to read through all the world’s worst shit and then have the shittiness confirmed by seeing it all shredded and rendered unreadable. She helped him dispose of it. Now she jumped. “You bugger,” said the sculptor. “You cretinous old flea circus!” He invented new insults every morning. He stuffed her in under the quilt to sleep and made sure she had air.

  The monkey began to snore and he turned to the arts column. He knew they’d pan his new show, but he found instead a patronizing generosity that he hadn’t expected. He was so old they had to be kind. Without the monkey, he’d have turned to the arts column at once, but she helped him to read it in passing as if it were just another page. “Sleep, you little bastard,” he said. “You’re too dumb to understand. All you care about is getting attention. And breaking things.” It was true: The monkey was like all the rest of them. The tiniest crack, the least stain or defect, and her fingers were there to make it worse and pick it apart. She noticed everything, every tiny sign of weakness, and that’s where she’d bite and rip and tear. That’s the way monkeys are, but they don’t know any better and so we forgive them. The others are unforgivable.

  The sculptor dropped the newspaper on the floor and turned towards the wall. When he woke up, it was much too late and he got out of bed with the usual awful feeling of having wasted time. He was very tired. First he put the monkey in her cage. She didn’t move, just sat in one corner, her back very narrow in its hand-knit sweater. There was heavy traffic on the street outside, and the elevator was running nonstop. He rinsed out some clay rags and swept the floor. It’s easy to sweep polished cement, a long brush that gets in between the legs of the modeling stands and glides across the floor like silk, then into the dustpan and into the trash. He liked sweeping.

  Out of habit, he went to the window a couple of times, but he could no longer see out because it was covered with plastic to soften the light. He fed the monkey. He decided to change his sheets and considered dragging the plaster box out into the courtyard but decided against it and did a little more sweeping instead. He collected some old scraps of soap too small to get a grip on, dropped them into a jar and poured in water. He took the clay rags from the statuette and looked at it, swung the top of the modeling stand halfway around and back again. He walked over to the monkey cage and said, “You old carcass, you’re so ugly you make me sick.” The monkey screamed a challenge and stuck her hands out through the bars.

  He called Savolainen, but hung up before anyone answered. For that matter, he might as well go eat and get it over with. He decided to take the monkey with him to give her a little change of scenery. But she didn’t want to go, just threw herself back and forth from one side of the cage to the other. “Okay, what do you want?” he said. “Do you want to come out, or do you want to stay here in this mess?” He waited. Finally she came out and sat quite still while he put on her catskin coat. When he tied her cap under her chin, she raised her face and looked at him, a straight, expressionless gaze from yellow eyes placed close together. The sculptor looked away, suddenly upset by the unmoving animal’s attitude of absolute indifference.

  They went out together and he held her inside his coat. The wind was still blowing. Some youngsters were hanging around on the esplanade, and when they caught sight of him they came running, shouting, “It’s the monkey! It’s the monkey!” She jumped out of his coat and rushed back and forth on her leash, screaming at the boys, who hollered back and followed the two of them to the corner. There she bit one of them, a quick, sharp bite. “Shitty monkey! Shitty monkey!” the children chanted. He hurried into the café and put the monkey on the floor.

  “So you brought it back again,” said the doorman. “You know what happened last time. Animals aren’t allowed.”

  “Animals?” the sculptor said. “Do you mean cats and dogs? Or are you referring to your customers and the way they behave?”

  Savolainen and the others were sitting at a table eating.

  “Monkeys,” Savolainen observed, “are known for their destructiveness.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Their need to destroy. They break things.”

  “And for their tenderness,” the sculptor said. “They try to offer comfort.”

  Lindholm grinned. “I’ll bet you could use some of that today. But it could’ve been worse.”

  The monkey sat inside his coat; he could feel her shivering.

  “Worse?” Savolainen burst out with mock horror. “Do you mean, even worse?”

  “Take it easy, you little bastard,” said the sculptor, and then, in the sudden silence, “I was talking to the monkey.”

  “Listen,” Pehrman said. “You shouldn’t care what they say. They write what they think, and so what? Except it’s a shame everyone believes what they say. We’re out, that’s all. Back at the bottom. And it’ll be hell to crawl back up again.”

  “If you’re old,” Stenberg pointed out. “What does it eat? Clay? Sure looks like it. What do you call it?”

  “Bloody shitboot,” he said. “Sadistic fucking birdbrain.”

  All at once the monkey ran across the table, knocking over glasses as she went, bit Stenberg right through the ear and then ran screeching back to hide in his coat.

  “Tenderness,” said Lindholm. “Wasn’t that what you said? A very tenderhearted animal.”

  The sculptor stood up and replied that that was just exactly what he’d said and moreover he didn’t care for the menu at this place and he had things to do.

  “There’s a Tarzan film at the Ritz,” said the doorman. “I assume that’s where you’re headed.”

  “Of course,” the sculptor said. “How intelligent you are.” He overtipped him out of pure contempt.

  The wind had picked up. They walked across the esplanade; the boys had gone. It’s no use, the sculptor thought. There’s nothing in it for me anymore. The monkey was having a fit. He tried to make it warm for her under his coat, but she wiggled her way out and was choking on her own collar. She started to scream, so finally he undid her leash. For a moment she didn’t move, then she jumped out of his hands and up into a tree, held tight to the trunk and hung there like a little gray rat, looking scared. She was shivering with the cold. Her long tail was within his reach—he could have caught her, but he just stood there and did nothing. Then, quick as lightning, the monkey disappeared up into the leafless tree and hung from one of the highest limbs like some dark fruit, and he thought, you poor little bastard. You’re freezing, but you’ve got to climb.

  Translated by Thomas Teal

  THE CARTOONIST

  THE NEWSPAPER had been running Blubby for almost twenty years when Allington quit and they were forced to continue the strip with a different artist. They had material for only a couple of weeks ahead, so the need was urgent. They had contractual agreements with other countries that promised a security margin of at least two months. And Blu
bby was a clever strip that tore along at a furious pace, so not just anyone could do it. They took a handful of artists on approval and gave them office space, which saved time on supervision. The same assignment for all of them, obviously. They dismissed two of them after only a few days and replaced them with others. The editor in charge went around a couple of times a day to have a look and help them get a handle on what the paper was after. He was a tall man by the name of Fried. He had a bad back, presumably because he was forever leaning down over cartoonists’ drawing boards. There was one ambitious young artist who seemed to be the best of them, but he wasn’t good enough yet.

  “You have to remember,” Fried said, “you have to keep in mind the whole time that the tension has to mount. You’ve got a strip of three or four panels, five if absolutely necessary, but four’s better. Okay. In the first one, you resolve the tension from the previous day. Catharsis, relief, the drama continues. You build up new tension in the second panel, increase it in panel three, and so on. I’ve explained that. You’re good, but you get lost in details, commentary, embroidery that gets in the way of the red thread. It has to be a straight line, simple, and move towards a peak, a climax, you see?”

  “I know,” said Samuel Stein. “I know. I’m trying.”

  “Imagine someone opening his newspaper,” Fried went on. “He’s sleepy, he’s in a lousy mood, he’s in a hurry to get to work. He checks the headlines on page one and dives into the comics. He’s in no condition to grasp subtleties right at the moment, that’s too much to ask. But his curiosity needs a little excitement, and he wants a laugh, wants to grin at something funny for a second—natural enough, right? Okay, he gets all that. We give it to him. It’s important. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” Stein said. “I think I got it from the beginning. It’s just that it all has to happen so quickly. I just don’t have the space to get everything in and still do something good—not really.”