A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [82]
She is not hanging on to his arm. Nothing like that. They are walking beside one another, but disconnected, as though it were sheer chance that they happened to be on the same sidewalk at the same place. Yet when I look again I can see that she keeps glancing at him, checking his bearings, making sure he’s there. He walks as though the rest of the world were an interesting but unlikely story he had once told himself.
Nick said she was the one who could live by faith although she didn’t look it. I haven’t seen her in a long time. She certainly doesn’t look it. She is short and squarely solid, a low stone tower of a woman. And yet there is an ever-onwardness and thrust about her.
Nestor Kazlik is not so immense a man as I used to see him when I was a kid, but he is still large. He hulks along the sidewalk. He is a head at least taller than his wife, and he is dressed in a dark-brown suit and yellow tie, pressured into this decent garb by her, probably, for he looks as though he wouldn’t notice what he happened to be wearing. He has a wide hard bony face, high-cheekboned as a Cree’s, a crest of thick grey hair and a grey ferocious moustache. What a crazy man he is, Nick said. I’m not going to speak, or ask them. I won’t.
“Hello –”
“Hello.”
“I’m – Rachel Cameron. You remember me?” I am speaking only to him, the old man, I don’t know why. His face comes back from its inner tale, focuses and recognizes.
“Sure, sure.” His voice is rasping, as though from a half century of tobacco. “I know. I never – how is this? – I never see you for a long time. But I know. Your father, he is a good man, eh? I say to him, it is my son, and he says don’t worry, Nestor, it will be done very nice. A good man. You tell him hello for me, eh?”
He smiles at me, confidently. Nick said He’s not senile or anything. Nick could bear to feel that Nestor was difficult, eccentric, even a giant buffoon, but not diminished. Not saying Steve because he no longer knew. Nick could look at everything. But not at that.
“Yes, all right. I’ll tell him. Thank you.”
He shrugs massively, as though it were nothing, no more than he owed, a recognition for a well-performed rite. Mrs. Kazlik turns away, not wanting to see him betray himself in this way, not wanting to hear my playing along with it, my acceptance of messages for the dead. But what else could I say to him? This man whose voice no longer in the raw frosty dawn roars his princely cursing at kids and horses. Nestor the Jester.
I remember all at once that Steven Kazlik died of polio. There used to be epidemics, scares of a month of so, and kids kept out of school because of the thing that threatened like the medieval plague. My mother would bring out the syringe bottle with the squeeze-bulb top and the dark-yellow liquid within, and would command Stacey and me to spray our throats. And we would spray – piff! piff! – a magic potion against fate, death, hell, damnation, putrefaction. We never worried about ourselves. We were young enough to believe ourselves immortal. When we heard that someone we knew had died, we would feel queasy for a little while, then put it from mind or pretend the person had never been.
Nick’s spine was slightly twisted. They both had the plague. But Steve was the one who died.
I have to draw away from the old man, and so I turn to her.
“How is Nick?”
“He is well.”
“How – how is his family, his wife?”
Teresa Kazlik looks at me, not with a great deal of animation, only as though looking disinterestedly at an outsider who could not be expected to know.
“Nick is not married.”
“I – how stupid of me. I thought he was.”
“No. He’s never married yet.”
We speak some more words but not about Nick. I don’t hear what I’m saying, the necessary phrases of departure that people use to get away from one another. Then they’ve gone, and I can go on, too, to wherever I’m