Blind Mr. Pitski

          It was the middle of May and all the creatures of the earth busied themselves with preparations for summer. Already, he could sense, winter clothes had been packed away (though the nights were still chilly), as the neighbors walked their dogs and led their children about in lighter wardrobes and slightly longer leashes. The maintenance crews of the Complex were mowing lawns at ungodly hours, announcing the official onset of the season by sticking blossoming azaleas into the softening ground. The sprinkler systems were also activated, so that if he were not careful when opening his door at eight a.m., he would receive a wet morning surprise, a wake-up call courtesy of whatever mysterious group of residential bureaucrats decided the appropriate hour at which to render the compromise between efficiency and convenience.

          Mr. Pitski did not much look forward to the change of seasons. The things that used to matter to him — that once charged his heart and excited his senses — did not matter much anymore beyond the stage of petty annoyances about which he complained by muttering to himself in undecipherable mixtures of Russian and Yiddish. He was now living out his days (being eighty years of ripened old age) in a world that had too much of everything, whereas he had grown up in a world (before his wizening) that had offered him very little besides a bounty of worry. (You think your Depression was bad! he’d upbraid his American contemporaries. I would have paid to be so depressed!) Before he completely lost his sight, Mr. Pitski had been congenial enough (and not pesky, one of his favorite words), standing outdoors talking with neighbors and even hosting bridge parties in his dining room, a beloved activity of Mrs. Pitski up until her death twenty-seven months ago from a more than treatable ailment that nonetheless went undiagnosed because of the couple’s Old World phobia of doctors (or any occupation deserving of mistrust that built its fortune upon human misery). Perhaps mindful of not entertaining witnesses to his own decline, which often turns the most extroverted personalities into embittered misanthropes, Mr. Pitski’s reception of visitors faded away with the colorless leaves one autumn day when he refused to answer a familiar knock at the front door. After that episode, his daughter procured her own key from the main office through the nefarious lie that her father now seemed to be on his way to losing his hearing as well.

          Busy Lila was here now, basking in her unheralded and abused martyrdom, sweeping and tidying with the ferocity of a Napoleonic invasion. She was taller than her shrunken patriarch and wore her hair, the color of burnt grass, pinned in a bun upon her head as her mother did at her age. Of course, all of these nostalgic touches meant very little to her optically challenged father (who preferred to remember her at the age of ten, anyway), except that she smelled of lilacs and spoke in a cacophony of accents, the most recent addition being a thick-soled Bavarian influenced by her German husband of five years.

            “Papa, it’s spring outside,” she announced, flinging open window after window. “The fresh air will do you some good. Besides, it smells like burned cabbage in here. Did you leave the oven on again?”

            “Bah!” he dismissed her with a wave as he did the prattlers on television, the politicians and preachers who pretended to be authorities on situations they had not experienced. “There are bugs outside. I do not need to be sitting down on the cocoons of butterflies.”

            “There are screens on the windows, Papa.” Lila laughed through her words as at a child engaged in a serious project unaware that its architectural plans for a Lincoln Log skyscraper are a source of amusement for adult onlookers. “How about some coffee? I bought some fresh French beans for you.”

            “Coffee, yes,” agreed Mr. Pitski; he very much enjoyed the scent of brewing coffee. It then struck him that he hadn’t the last word on the previous subject. “They will get in, screen or not. They always do.”

          Lila exhaled an exasperated sigh and surrendered the argument. She continued the conversation from the kitchen where the high-pitched buzz of an electric bean-grinder added to a steady banging that seemed to be coming from the Taylor apartment upstairs.

            “Good gracious! What now?” Mr. Pitski raised his voice above the pounding. “All the time they are banging up there. Seven o’ clock in the morning. Midnight. Bang-bang.”

            “Papa, you know the Taylors are expecting again,” Lila reminded him, though she doubted he’d forgotten at all. “Perry is building the crib and the nursery, just like the last time.”

            “Already?” Mr. Pitski groaned. “Isn’t it enough — one baby?”

            “Sometimes I wish I had a brother or a sister…” The water was now running full-throttle as Lila rinsed cups for the coffee and cleaned the grinder.

            “Bah!” Mr. Pitski couldn’t stand the thought. “They want and want and then do nothing but complain when they get. America…”

            “Oh, Papa!” Lila cackled. “It’s not to do with Americans. Everybody wants children.”

            “Bah!”

          Mr. Pitski visibly frowned at the prospective interruptions that would be caused him by the next addition to the Taylor family. The first one — a garrulous son — was barely over a year old and already was the source of all varieties of endless disturbances. For the initial six months, Mr. Pitski had to make his bed on the couch because the child cried so in the room directly above him. Now at the crawling stage (or so Mr. Pitski assumed), the toddler was amassing a portfolio of amusements, all of which apparently involved pouncing about so that the ceiling below shook, or tossing his little toys across the room and setting off a chain reaction of breaking objects so that the occasional thumps scared Mr. Pitski to the point of heart palpitations. One evening in particular, around the child’s eighth month of earthly exploration, Mrs. Taylor had virtually reached the edge of sanity and joined in with her son in screaming delight as she apparently tried to outmatch him in volume and duration like some horrid operatic duel. Unable to withstand such an abuse of his patience, innocent-bystander Mr. Pitski began to poke as hard as he could upon the ceiling with the end of a broom handle. Take medicine! Take medicine! he bellowed in his bearish English, chips and flakes of plaster raining upon him like the aftermath of a blitzkrieg. However, he was not rewarded for his tirade against his starless heaven (the next day Mrs. Taylor was hospitalised for severe exhaustion and her mother took up residence and baby duties for a week), except to find himself on the receiving end of a squeaky chiding from Lila for the constellation of holes he had angrily punched into what he argued was a flimsy sheet-rock sky.

          Try as he might (which wasn’t very hard, as Mr. Pitski was a stolid subscriber to the age-equals-automatic-wisdom notion of Old World ancestor worship), Mr. Pitski could not reconcile why something that ceased to concern him long ago should suddenly once again become an unseverable part of his life like a post to which he was tethered that yanked him by the neck whenever he absent-mindedly strayed over the boundary. It is not fair, he mumbled (not quite certain whether he was speaking or simply ruminating); an old man should not be bothered if all he wants is silence in which to fight his battle against…

            “It will be worse,” he addressed Lila, lowering his voice as he smelled her approach with the clinking tray of coffee cups. “Cry all the time. Why do they cry all the time?”

            “Oh Papa, don’t exaggerate. That’s what babies do,” Lila explained. “What do you expect from them, to pop out with spectacles reading Tolstoi? What would you do if you didn’t have a way to communicate what you need or to make people understand you?”

            “Bah!” Mr. Pitski’s guttural betrayed that he was not an aficionado of female methods of child-rearing, or their sentimental puzzles that mixed philosophy with emotion like so much modern art with which one must struggle to separate static from expression. “When the baby cries, it means someone is not doing job properly.”

            “Mrs. Taylor is not a mind-reader, Papa,” Lila challenged. “And a baby is not a pet; you can’t schedule feedings or…anything else.”

          Mr. Pitski registered his daughter’s evasive attack upon his classically regimental way of life, which he had applied (successfully, he thought) throughout its entire long stretch (still not fully extended!). But as it is better not to let them (the young) know what we (the old) know, he decided to temper his strong dose of wisdom with the water of humility. Besides, they will find out soon enough and regret not having listened when they had the chance. At the bottom, when the sweet liquor is drained, the grief over our dead forebears is nothing more than a longing for our own faded youth. Until their time has passed, the young will not understand why their elders are so virulently resistant to change.

          Lila was crinkling and turning the thin pages of the Russian language newspaper her father had neglected to cancel (presumably out of sentiment) after the onset of his blindness. Occasionally, she offered summaries of articles she assumed might be of some interest to him (appalling, he shrugged, how her Russian has deteriorated). The last article he had read in that very same newspaper was a tribute to the surviving soldiers of some forgotten war. (It was probably not the very last, but it was the last one he remembered.) He remembered thinking that the entire ceremony was most likely a pretense rigged by the Soviets, and that the real purpose was to instill in the Russian people a fear of the fate of those who had not escaped death. Parading these wrinkled emblems (they were probably not even real soldiers, Mr. Pitski harrumphed) upon a dais merely reminds the citizenry that their service to the central power never truly ends. They had forced the Pitski family to renounce the religion which they argued drugged believers with the fear of dying, and replaced it with a governmental tyranny that controlled a winter-strong ancient people through the fear of living.

            “More noise!” Mr. Pitski exclaimed as if his remaining senses (especially his more than acute hearing) were being subjected to separate tortures for their dissident defiance which defined their function and existence.

            “They’re mowing, Papa,” Lila informed him. “You used to love the smell of fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle.”

            “They make noise whenever they want,” he ranted. “They should ask.”

            “Oh, Papa. They can’t go knocking on every door to see if you’re sleeping or reading or listening to Mozart.”

            “I hate Mozart.”

            “Tchaikovsky, then.” Lila knew there was no convincing him that an unburdening of responsibilities comes hand in hand with the compromise of certain freedoms, or that a stranger calling at the door was not the secret police, or a car backfiring not a group of his Underground friends lined up before the execution squad. “Besides, it saves a lot of trouble. You get to smell the flowers without having to plant them or take care of them.”

            “Never have I asked to be spared such troubles,” he grumbled. “Only in America do they stick flowers in the cold ground instead of letting them grow by themselves. If I believed them, in February it would have already been June.”

            “They work very hard to make the Complex a pleasant place for everyone to live,” Lila finalised her side of the story. “And I will ask the Taylors to limit the nursery-building to certain hours. Will that make you feel better?”

            “Murder is hard work, too,” he said, now lapsing completely into Russian and shrugging his shoulders in recalcitrant capitulation. “That does not make it right. Such hard work does not make great men, it makes rascals and tyrants who can fool themselves only as long as they fool others. Yet what is history but rascals and tyrants and the fools who followed them?”

          He did not expect Lila to sit with him and debate the fine points of Russian Literature that had once been his life’s passion. Mrs. Pitski’s Francophilia had prevented him from naming his daughter after Sonya, the angel who brings salvation in the end to the confessed (but unrepentant) Raskalnikov. His wife had detested the somber weightiness of thought and movement bred in generation after generation of Russians. The up-side of her Western refinements (she smoked cigarettes and played bridge — the down-sides) was that her lightheartedness and flammable temper kept him young and in a constant flurry of reevaluation of the dogmas of his profession, an openness to change that gave him a foothold over his contemporaries, whom he considered as merely new learners of old theories. Since she had left him, the spirit of the revolution somewhat doused and Mr. Pitski settled into the comfort of knowledge, the loneliest companion of all when there is no passion to make use of it.


            “He is a criminal himself,” Mrs. Pitski stated over and over in their lifelong argument concerning Dostoevski. “So of course he feels sorry for other criminals. Besides, he is a pervert, the same as Augustine.”

            “Dearest,” he would entreat her, never doubting his own correctness while avoiding quite perspicaciously the patronising tones she reviled. “Justice is like caviar and injustice like crackers, and there are always more than enough crackers on the table even after the bowl of delicacy is emptied. What can the late arrival to the banquet deduce but that some greedy appetite has overstuffed himself? What satisfaction can be had with cracker-crumbs?”

            “At least they are edible cracker-crumbs, my professor.” (She has a whip for a tongue, he’d say to himself) “Also, it is impolite to arrive late for a banquet to which the host has gone great lengths to provide an invitation. There are those who would be quite thankful for just crackers and not stare with anger and jealousy into the empty bowl with their sniveling whimpers of conspiracy.”

            “What would you say if I had quit my position at University without any prospects?” Here is where fiction meets life, he thought, curious as to the progeny of such an unlikely, un-Russian encounter.

            “I would say you were a fool for doing so and a tyrant for forcing me to oblige you,” she answered coldly.

            “Dearest, we must leave before it is too late.” He grasped her hand as tender as when they had met at a family wedding at the age of fourteen where they had been matched for the procession.

            “I know, my professor.” Somehow, her devotion always allowed him to transcend his rascality and set him down on a plateau with heroes. “It is a bad time, I suppose, to be with child.”

          Those were the hard times — the trek on foot through the Caucuses, the phony visas checked by dozens of incompetent roadblock police, the camaraderie with other self-imposed exiles and expatriates, the treacherous Atlantic crossing in the cargo hold of a petrol tanker, the temporary abandonment of his life’s name and calling and the initial unhalcyonic years of the struggle to survive in a New World — when the roar of passion dulled to an almost silent whisper. There was no University position for him in America, so Mr. Pitski worked as a deliveryman for an entrepreneur who had to be a criminal, as he expected Mr. Pitski to ‘guard with his very life’ a package without revealing the contents to him. Lila arrived soon after to a childhood (she would later recall) not so much fraught with misery as demarcated by a scarcity of pleasures. At the age of twelve she was sent to a boarding school for émigré children after Mr. Pitski finally procured a professorship at a small New England college, which she would later attend. Soon, the professor reinstalled in his proper chair and welcomed into a circle starving for the faery-tale experience of his escape, he gained notoriety for a series of papers and lectures upon the Russian Underground Movement of which not only he but also Dostoevski had been a part, all be it under very different regimes. When he might have settled into his naturalised identity of democratic foreigner, it was diligent Mrs. Pitski who did not let him forget the lessons they had learned together.

            “Do you know yet what greatness is?” she asked him one rainy Easter Sunday. “To be great is to be the one man who asks a question for which no other man will ever have an answer.”

          It was not an argument or a debate. She had said it while ladling beet soup into his bowl. Suddenly he noticed how she rarely made eye contact with him; how she took small steps on her tiny slippered mouse-feet so as to avoid causing disturbance when he was busy reading or preparing a lecture; how their home was always immaculately clean even though he never once saw her with a mop or feather-duster. His meals were prompt and his bed was warm. He wanted for nothing when it came to his wife, and he realized, as she sat demurely across from him, that this was perhaps the one person in his entire life and in the conglomeration of opinions and memories that compose history — that Mrs. Pitski might perhaps be the only quiet soul that would ever judge him a great man and believe it to be the truth.



            “Where are my grandchildren?” Mr. Pitski blurted, shocking Lila as she was buttoning her coat to return to her great man. “There are two, correct? How come you never bring them here?”

            “Papa…I…” Lila stuttered. “You yourself say you don’t like children. Besides, they are scared of you, and you know it. It’s as if you intentionally try to frighten them.”

            “Better to learn truth earlier than later,” he defended, invoking his imperfect English and folding his arms across his chest.

            “Last time you told them stories of starvation and quoted War and Peace.” Lila’s anger at that visitation was resurfacing. ”Children are innocent, Papa. They do not need to hear stories about Stalin and Hitler or live your life for you all over again. They do not understand the fine points of ideology. Injustice to them is me refusing them ice cream before dinner. Exposing them to violent…”

            “Life is filled with violence!” he stood up and shouted, as if he were reiterating the simplest of lessons with divine authority. “Especially the lives of children with wolves in the forest eating little girls and helpless boys killing giants. Do not fool yourself, Lila! You must teach them or they will learn in other ways.”

            “That’s different, Papa. Faery-tales…”

            “Faery-tales are filled with hate and characters rewarded for committing crimes we are punished for in reality,” he spewed in Russian (the only language capable of debunking myths). “Later they will turn on you for your ignorance and lies, as…” Mr. Pitski stopped his sentence short, his tensed facial muscles rebelling against his conscious refusal to translate thought into speech, suspicion into accusation.

            “As I turned on you! Is that what you were about to say, Papa?” Lila could not keep her eyes from tearing or control her temper (both traits inherited from her mother, sparked to blazes in emotional situations). “At least I’m giving my children something to believe in. Hopes. And dreams. Not like you and mama, whose best dress was reserved for funerals. And what did you give, Papa? A treasury of idlers who died either penniless or insane, or both. And I should say Thank You by subjecting my children to a man who has always been blind to what matters to most people even before poetic justice robbed him of his sight! Even if you could see and I said to look at the beautiful flowers outside or the blue cloudless sky, you would see what you see now — storms brewing in the west and roses waiting to wilt. What is the point of going beyond if you cannot first see and appreciate what has always been in front of you?”

         Lila, breathless and exhausted, dropped her arms to her sides, torn between pounding in the last nail (for which she’d been holding the hammer since her girlhood) and an apologetic reversal for accusing an old man of ultimate lovelessness. What if this is the last time I see him? she thought. What if he dies in his sleep tonight screaming, ‘You have killed me! You have killed me!’? Whatever had been his faults, a sense of justice in her (which she took for granted as natural) led her to the couch where she sat by his side. The old blind man was silent, as was, for a few moments, the universe around him. The mowers outside had run out of gas and Mr. Taylor had put down his tools for a cold beer. It was not spring and it was not winter, time being relative to the notice given it. A blind man’s wife was dead and his daughter displayed her loyalty and sympathy by screaming at him when all he was trying to do was divide up among the living what remained of his meager kingdom. What does it mean — to take? to give? — if the spirit and the world (both at eternal odds with one another) never tire of either? How do any ever know thirst if their wells have not run dry?

          They sat in silence for awhile, Lila with her head on Mr. Pitski’s shoulder, muttering half-apologies (for she was also half-right) and avowals of a daughter’s love into her father’s neck (so that even if he did not hear, she was at least content to have said certain things), occasionally kissing his cheek, pulling back the hair sticking to the drying tears on her face. It was not hate she felt for him, or even disapproval; nor could it be called love (of the unconditional variety expected of those connected by blood), or pride. Lila found herself pitying a man she had never truly known, seeking a vague redemption because she hoped for better from her own children. Where was the fault? She could not place it, yet she did not act out of the duty she abhorred and blamed for her mother’s early demise. Perhaps what was needed was, in fact, there (had always been there), and she simply could not identify it in terms of the affinities or prejudices by which she had been taught to classify her beliefs and emotions; something so basic that seems so complicated, bent on making fools of us all.

            “I have to go, Papa.” Lila lifted her head, blinking and fidgeting to regain her composure (because strangers do not take kindly to dishevelment). “On Saturday I’ll bring the children to their grandfather. How does that sound?”

          Mr. Pitski nodded without raising his head (to conceal a smile of victory?), waiting for Lila to extract a promise from him as to what he could or could not talk about during the visit. She did nothing of the sort, however, but simply took a last long look of wonder at him caught finally in the trap set from the beginning to snap upon us all. Nothing can save him, she thought. And nothing could save her. How does it turn against us — Life — what we have fought so long to protect?

          Quietly, Lila opened and closed the door. “Yes, bring them on Saturday,” Mr. Pitski said aloud, as if she were still with him in the room. “I will tell them how it is June in February!”

          From upstairs could be heard the monotone buzz of an electric power saw as Mr. Taylor resumed work on the new nursery.