VI The Tree
34
Breer hated the house. It was cold, and the natives in this part of the city were inhospitable. He was regarded with suspicion as soon as he stepped out of the front door. There were, he had to concede, reasons for this. In recent weeks a smell had begun to linger around him; a sickly, syrupy smell that made him almost ashamed to get too close to the pretty ones along the schoolyard railing, for fear they would put their fingers to their noses, making a “poo-poo” sound, and run off calling him names. When they did that, it made him want to die.
Though there was no heating in the house, and he had to bathe in cold water, he nevertheless washed from head to foot three or four times a day, hoping to dislodge the smell. When that didn’t work he bought perfume-sandalwood in particular-and doused his body with it after each ablution. Now the comments they called after him weren’t about excreta but about his sex life. He took the brunt of their remarks with equanimity.
Nevertheless, dull resentments festered in him. Not just about the way he was treated in the district. The European, after a courtship that had been polite, was more and more treating him with contempt: as a lackey rather than an ally. It irritated him, the way he was sent to this haunt or that looking for Toy-asked to comb a city of millions in search of a shriveled old man whom Breer had last seen scrambling over a wall stark naked, his scrawny buttocks white in the moonlight. The European was losing his sense of proportion. Whatever crimes this Toy had committed against Mamoulian they could scarcely be profound, and it made Breer weak with tiredness to contemplate another day wandering the streets.
Despite his weariness, the capacity for sleep seemed to have deserted him almost entirely. Nothing, not even the fatigue that killed his nerves, could persuade his body to close down for more than a few eye-fluttering minutes, and even then his mind dreamed such things, such dreadful things, it was scarcely possible to call the slumber blissful. The only comfort remaining to him was his pretties.
That was one of the few advantages in this house: it had a cellar. Just a dry, cool space, which he was systematically clearing of the rubbish left by the previous owners. It was a long job, but he was gradually getting the place the way he wanted it, and though he had never much liked enclosed spaces there was something about the darkness, and the sense of being underground, that answered an unarticulated need in him. Soon he would have it all scrubbed. He would put colored paper chains around the walls, and flowers in vases on the floor. A table maybe, with a cloth on it, smelling of violets; comfortable chairs for his guests. Then he could begin to entertain friends in the manner to which he hoped they would become accustomed.
All his arrangements could be effected much more quickly if he weren’t forever interrupted by the damn-fool errands the European sent him on. But the time for such servitude, he’d decided, had come to an end. Today, he would tell Mamoulian that he wouldn’t be blackmailed or bullied into playing this game. He’d threaten to leave if it came to the worst. He’d go north. There were places north where the sun didn’t come up for five months of the year-he’d read about such places-and that seemed fine to him. No sun; and deep caves to live in, holes where not even moonlight could stray. The time had come to lay his cards on the table.
If the air in the house was cold, it was even colder in Mamoulian’s room. The European seemed to exhale a breath that was mortuary-chilled.
Breer stood in the doorway. He’d only been in this room once before, and he had a niggling fear of it. It was too plain. The European had asked Breer to nail boards across the window: this he had done. Now, by the light of a single wick, burning in a dish of oil on the floor, the room looked bleak and gray; everything in it seemed insubstantial, even the European. He sat in the dark wood chair that was the only furnishing-and looked at Breer with eyes so glazed he could have been blind.