Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [75]
“They’re her things. Leave me your address and I’ll have them shipped to you.”
“What things, for example?”
“Clothes. Her notebooks. Poems. Diaries. Her ink drawings.”
“What would I need them for?”
“There are people who think highly of her work. You should have a publisher look at it.”
“Diaries, you said. Full of lies about us, I’ll bet. Filth. Making us out for monsters.”
“Maybe it would be better if I handled this.”
“No. Ship them. I’ll leave you my card. My nephew should look at it. He’s a professor of literature at NYU. Highly thought of. He used to encourage her.”
“Like you did.”
“Like I did. Oh, very nice. Thank you, I’m sure. After all Mrs. Charnofsky and I suffered. The shame she brought on us.”
“Electro-shock therapy. My God.”
“What if I told you those times she wouldn’t come out of her room for ten days, maybe two weeks, we left food for her outside the door. Once Mrs. Charnofsky goes to pick up the empty plate, she lets out a shriek, I thought somebody had died. And you know what was on that plate? You should pardon me, her number two. Yes, mister. That’s what she did. At the hospital they recommended that operation — what do you call it? A frontal laboratory. But my nephew, the professor, said no. I mustn’t allow it. Do you think I did wrong to listen to my nephew?”
“Oh, you did wrong, Mr. Charnofsky. Bloody wrong. But not about that, you damn fool.”
“You damn fool. Is that a way to talk to an older man, I just lost a daughter?”
“Get out of here, Mr. Charnofsky.”
“Get out of here. Did you think I was going to invite myself to dinner in such a dump?”
“Get out of here before I throw you on the floor and wash your mouth out with soap.”
I grabbed him, frog-marched him out of the door, and slammed it shut. Then he started to pound on the door. “I want my homburg,” he said.
I retrieved it, whacked open the door, and thrust it at him.
“You couldn’t have made her so happy,” said Mr. Charnofsky, “if that’s what my Clara did to herself.”
“You know, Mr. Charnofsky, I’m quite capable of literally throwing you down the stairs.”
“Pish pish.”
I took a step toward him.
“The man at the embassy told me she was dead two days32 when you found her on Thursday. But the table was set for dinner for two. There was a burnt chicken in the oven. So, I ask myself, where were you that night, Mr. Panofsky?”
I took another step toward him. He started down the stairs, stopped in mid-flight, shook his fist at me, and hollered, “Murderer. Oysvorf. Momzer. I wish makkes on you and your unborn children. Plagues. Deformities. Phew,” he said, spitting on the floor, and turning to flee once I started after him again.
15
Paris. Nov. 7, 1952. Now that she has fecundated, I cogitated that the thickening Clara would be less promiscuous, if not precisely celibate.33 But this afternoon she brought me her latest poem, accepting my corrections comingled with encouragement, and then she subjected me to those ministrations at which she is so gratifyingly proficient, with that serpent’s tongue, and then smearing my sperm on her face afterward. Good for her complexion, she said.
P —— must suspect that he is a cuckold. Friday night, ambling down the boulevard Saint-Germain, something made me turn around. My third eye, Clara would say. And there he was, loping along less than a block behind, and when he caught my reproving glance, he stopped at a bookshop window, pretending he hadn’t seen me. Et voilà, last night there he was again, trailing along behind me on the boul’ Mich. I think he has taken to following me in the hope of discovering us together. Increasingly, he turns up uninvited at my door, pretending to be concerned about me, taking