[76] Leave chance to the shy one

In the Dream City, subtract all the poor people, all the outer district people, the aristocrats, the howling shopkeepers, the numbing bureaucrats – in other words, all the people you don’t know – and you’re left with the people you can’t avoid knowing, and in any city there are ten of them. Add to those ten Emma’s ten, and those twenty hook up to ten each, and so on, and pretty quickly one of them is going to know someone who heard we went to Prague without telling anybody.

Telegram from Emil, she tells me when I get back from somewhere. He’ll be here tomorrow on the 1430 train. And he’s bringing daddy.

Emil appears at doors – some people do. You think about people and they’re always, to start, doing the same thing: sitting at a rolltop desk, or at a coffeehouse table, or standing in front of an easel in a blue smock. Emil always appears at a doorway and waits for you to invite him in. He’s leaving it up to you, and his face is always telling you, do or don’t, kiss the hand, if not now then later. And he’s always perfectly dressed when you notice, which is the first thing you always do, in a tailored suit of no memorable colour and a carefully knotted tie of a shade only Emma ever remembers and his hair painted down.

We’ve two days to get ready for them. Emma goes out right away to dress us for this. No painted sweaters and buckled leather boots for me, no. No slim-and-easy belted shift for her. She knows what to do at times like this. Today, from felt homburg to leather brogues, I’m a mid-ranking clerk in a junior sales office that provides something useful to intelligent shopkeepers, and Emma’s just on her way to see someone helpful to us, perhaps my boss’s wife, in a pleated cotton blouse trimmed with lace, and a little plaid cape to keep off the morning chill and a skirt of many muted colours.

For a moment, when he appears, Emil looks as if he believes all of it – clothes are his weakness, the one thing he can’t see past quickly. I know how to behave, you see. I’m no social hack. I grew up knowing it, I grew up being drilled in not much else. When you know how to lie to people, when you have that gift, you’d better remember every minute who you actually are, what your actual truth is. That’s a horrible responsibility. One slip and you’re a professional liar all your life, which is to say, a slave to the lies you’ve been showing people. A born liar had better learn quick to be honest.

‘Pleasant to see you, Emil,’ I say. Then Emma tells him the same, except she means it.

‘And both of you, as well,’ he says through a twist of the mouth.

‘But where’s father?’ Emma asks, and inquires after his health.

‘The journey was a little tiring for him,’ he says. ‘He was hoping perhaps you could both meet us at the hotel this evening for dinner.’

He sits on our couch and drinks tea with us, and we nibble Emma’s own little raisin biscuits, still warm under their napkin from the oven at the baker’s down the street. Emil has recovered by then from his temporary blindness. He looks exasperated while we ask after our mutual acquaintances (we haven’t any), and talk about the weather (which is rather parched this spring) and the local price for cabbage (which grandfather will want to know). I tell him I’m working terribly hard at my art (true enough) and invite him to observe my métier. I’ve hung my studio that morning and half the night before with edifying pastels of sheep grazing in a mountain pasture, and periwinkle-eyed mountain maidens in straw sun bonnets holding alpine bouquets to their chins, and smoke rising from a mountain hut under a one-starred winter sky.

I remember nothing about the dinner at the hotel that evening. Something about Mr Aaronson kills memory. He’s a ghost, if you believe in those: you’re sure you saw him once, you remember the moment he appeared after he’s gone, but now try to summon him again. People with more practice than me at meeting him have a pretty good idea what he looks like, anyway. It’s said that he is slightly taller than Emil, but otherwise of the same build, that he has the same colour hair but rather less of it. What else? He dresses well, in brown or blue suits, grey on Sundays, and carries a brier cane with a silver ferrule with an ivory head carved as a resting lion. No one remembers his face, but the cane? Perfectly. You look into his face and something happens, or nothing happens. When you look in his eyes, your eyes go straight through. You remember that he spoke, but you can’t remember what he said. What he actually does for a living, I don’t know. I’ve heard something about a furniture factory. I can see Mrs Aaronson going through his company’s books at night, cutting the cheques, hiring managers and disciplining the lathe handlers, while he sits in an office somewhere above a shop floor all day with his face to a wall, moving paper from corner to corner. Sometimes I hear Emma saying, ‘Father told me …’ and I stop everything and listen, because I really am curious. Really. Father told her that the newspaper was late this morning. Okay … Father told her that he likes potato cakes with his dinner. So that’s it … Father told her that the Liberals may win the seat in their district this year. Father told her that … I can’t remember any others. You wonder how I painted his portrait. Well, I succeeded. But I can’t remember what it looks like. Long after I’d met him a few times, I asked Emma, for a parlour trick, to describe him for me. She squeezed her eyes shut, and polished her forehead with fingers and thumb, and told me. But I can’t remember what she said. It’s a gift she has, remembering him. But I know she didn’t learn it from him.

I crumble onto the couch after Emil leaves, exhausted from being well behaved. Without culture we would all be monsters. Art makes humanity possible, yet cultured monsters are still possible. When an artist shows what others can only intuit, the world responds; thereby he holds back the night another day. I’d been ready for him, you see, and it had worn me out carrying all the ammunition I hadn’t expended.

So, we have dinner at their hotel, a wedding-cake palace on Wenceslas Square. If you haven’t noticed, Emil’s the daddy in that family, and is married to mommy, and daddy’s the infant. Once we forget Mr Aaronson, dinner’s rather pleasant, actually. Our waiter looks at the four of us and waits for something terrible to happen, but nothing does. Emma and I are starting to yearn for the Dream City, and Emil is full enough about that. We take what he says, and filter it through the letters we get, and the newspapers we read, and get a pretty good idea of what’s going on. We haven’t visited since we vanished for Prague. I’m thinking that when we go back, we’ll never leave again. Emil’s wearing his affable shell, talks about himself but not too much. After an hour you can tell the strain is getting to him. At the end, a cake comes out. It’s somebody’s birthday. I can’t remember whose, so it must be her daddy’s. Emma lights a cigarette off one of the candles and then someone blows out the candles. Now, I’m thinking … now is when they’ll tell us why they’re here. But it never happens. And when we get back to our flat, Emma goes into a panic attack wondering why they came if it wasn’t to tell us something we didn’t want to hear – something painful and unsettling, something her mother said. When you spend your whole life pressed under a boulder, and suddenly the boulder isn’t there any more, you don’t rejoice it isn’t there, or you do but only for a minute. No, what you do, once you’ve taken a breath, is start to panic that it’s going to fall on you again.