Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [61]
There must have been some virtues, surely. For instance, he had never tried to gain a benefit by fraud. Some people make a whole life out of trickery. They will even try to wrangle a box of the chocolates that the mayor of Paris distributes at Christmastime. These would-be swindlers may be in their fifties and sixties, too young to be put on the mayor’s list. Or else they have a large income and really ought to pay for their own pleasures. Actually, it is the rich who put on shabby clothes and saunter into their local town hall, waving a gift voucher that wouldn’t fool a child. And they could buy a ton of chocolates without feeling the squeeze!
The Wroblewskis, neither prosperous nor in want, get their annual gift in a correct and legal way. About four years ago, a notice arrived entitling Magda Zaleska, spouse Wroblewska, to the mayor’s present. She was just beginning to show signs of alarm over quite simple matters, and so he went in her place, taking along her passport, a lease of which she was the co-signer, and a letter of explanation that he wrote and got her to endorse. (Nobody wanted to read it.) He remembers how he trudged upstairs and down before coming across a hand-lettered sign saying “Chocolates – Show Voucher and Identity.”
The box turned out to be staggering in size, too large for a drawer or a kitchen shelf. It remained for weeks on top of the television set. (Neither of them cared for chocolate, except now and then a square of the bitter kind, taken with strong black coffee.) Finally, he transferred half the contents to a tin container that some Polish friends in England had used to send the Wroblewskis a gift of shortbread and digestive biscuits, and dispatched it to a distant cousin of Magda’s. The cousin had replied that she could find chocolate in Warsaw but would welcome a package of detergent or some toilet soap that didn’t take one’s skin off.
He had used some of last year’s chocolates as an offering for the concierge, packing them attractively in a wicker basket that had come with a purchase of dried apricots. She removed the ribbon and flowered paper, folded them, and exclaimed, “Ah! The mayor’s chocolates!” He still wonders how she knew: they are of excellent quality and look like any other chocolates you can see in a confectioner’s window. Perhaps she is on the list, and sends hers off to relatives in Portugal. It hardly seems possible: they are intended for the elderly and deserving, and she is barely forty. Perhaps she is one of the schemers who has used deceit – a false birth certificate. What of it? She is a worthy woman, hardworking and kind. A man he knows of is said to have filed an affidavit that he was too badly off to be able to pay his yearly television tax and got away with it: here, in Paris, where every resident is supposed to be accounted for; where the entire life of every authorized immigrant is lodged inside a computer or crammed between the cardboard covers of a dossier held together with frayed cotton tape.
When he brings Magda her breakfast tray he looks as if he were on the way to an important meeting – with the bank manager, say, or the mayor himself. He holds to his side of the frontier between sleeping and waking, observes his own behavior for symptoms of contagion – haziness about time, forgetting names, straying from the point in conversation. He is fit, has good eyesight, can still hear the slide of letters when the concierge pushes them under the door. He was ten months in Dachau, the last winter and spring of the war, and lost a tooth for every month. They have been replaced, in an inexpensive, bric-a-brac way: better than