A Long Postponed Visit: Reviewed and Extended Edition

Exupéry

Part I

The Visit

cie, in the late afternoon, at peak rush hour in the city. Struggling with traffic, the taxi finally brought him to the front of the Grand Hotel on Krucza Street. He paid for the drive, stepped out of the car, took his luggage from the boot and turned towards the entrance of the hotel. From a distance he could be considered as a relatively young man, due to his tall and rather athletic figure, energetic movement and light but confident step. However, a closer look revealed that he was mid-fifties, with grayish hair and tired eyes behind spectacles.

He went straight to the reception desk and said in faultless Polish, ‘My name is Jerry Hammer, and I believe a reservation has been made for me in your hotel.’

The receptionist looked into a monitor for a moment, and then asked him whether he was coming for the next week’s Conference on Molecular Biology. Jerry nodded and affirmed.

Then the receptionist added, ‘Yes, it is correct, professor; you do have a reservation in our hotel. May I have your passport, please?’

Jerry checked in, took his room key, together with two messages already waiting for him, bought a local newspaper and went to his room on the fifth floor. In the elevator, he quickly glanced through the messages; one was from his cousin Karol, inviting him to dinner the following night. The other one was from Olga, the head of the Institute of Molecular Biochemistry at the local university and the organizer of the conference he was going to attend next week. In her note Olga informed him about the time of his lecture as well as other events, such as the opening reception on Sunday evening and the promotion program of his last book, recently translated from English into Polish. Jerry had been collaborating for several years with Olga and her institute and she had been very instrumental in the initiative to translate his book into Polish.

Once in his hotel room, he unpacked his belongings, called his daughter Helene in Zurich, then Linda, a lawyer in the company he often dealt with, telling her where he had left the prepared technical/scientific expertise of the case she was working on, and then called Helene again, telling her to hand over a blue map with a red stripe to Linda when she asked for it.

*

Jerry had met Linda almost a year ago when she was presented to him by one of the vice-presidents of the company. She was a newly employed lawyer specializing in problems related to the intellectual properties of the company, in other words: patents, licensing of know-how, claims of patent rights and other related problems. He had often collaborated with her as an expert in the substance of matters, as it was officially called. Their work relationship was good and soon became cordial, but so far, they had both carefully avoided any personal involvement with one another. Since their conversations were mainly held in German, that automatically determined the distance between them. However, although they called each other by their first names, they mutually used the rather distant form of ‘Sie’ than the direct and familiar ‘du’ – a comfortable form for a work relationship, combining respect and friendship, but nothing more than that. They often used to meet for a working lunch, during which they discussed most of the problems, except of course, matters of special confidentiality.

In general, they knew about their personal situations; not that they talked about it, but each of them simply checked it discreetly through friends, just as a matter of curiosity and perhaps, a bit more than only that. He knew that she was about forty, divorced, with one daughter; her ex-husband had been a quite famous French actor, whom she divorced because of his frequent adultery, alcoholism and passion for poker. Her current sweetheart, Alexander, was a lawyer too, but Linda’s aristocratic family hesitated to accept him because he was, in their eyes, of the too common descent; just of poor farming stock from the canton of Uri, while they (her mother in particular) wished Linda to remarry within their social class.

She, on the other hand, knew that Jerry was a widower with two children still studying, who preferred to remain a full-time professor at university and only a part-time employee with the company, rather than take back full industrial employment, in spite of constant seductive persuasion from the company.

She also knew that he liked sports and music, and that since the tragic death of his wife a few years ago, he was not keen to remarry, and was not associated for a long time with any particular woman, as far as his friends could tell.

One day, she arrived for their usual working lunch wearing dark glasses, in spite of the raining weather on that day. During lunch, Jerry didn’t remark on it, pretending not to see anything unusual in her new style, but when they started discussing some technical details and she needed to read a chemical formula, Jerry realized that the sunglasses made it difficult for her to read the text.

He gently took her sunglasses off and said, ‘Linda, there is no strong sunshine today and you need your reading glasses, otherwise you will never be able to read that chemical formula correctly.’ He suddenly stopped and noticed that her left eye was black, as of from a rather strong blow.

‘Sorry, I didn’t realize your purpose wearing the dark glasses for. I see, you have got a spectacular blow, and don’t say anything; I know, you accidently hit the corner of a table, don’t you?’

He did not want to embarrass her, and preferred to turn the whole thing into a jest.

‘Thank you, for your good will to cover up for me, but this time you are completely wrong. It was my ex-husband who did it. You see, my daughter Clare, who is thirteen, wanted very much to visit her father, who was not very far away, in Evian, on the French side of the Lake Lemon. I let her go and stayed there for a week. However, on her return, I realized that she had lost her keys to the house. Last night, my ex suddenly appeared unannounced in my house. He was drunk and demanded more alcohol and money because he needed to pay his debts for a lost poker game. I refused, so he struck me a blow in the face, and pushed and kicked aside Clare who tried to stop him. Then I decided to activate a police alarm button, so he disappeared to avoid being caught. Before he left he promised to return. Tell me, please, what shall I do?’

‘There is a very simple solution,’ he replied. ‘Just change all the locks without delay.’

‘You are right. I will immediately call the local locksmith to arrange for the change as soon as possible.’ After a while, when she had returned from the phone box, she continued, ‘You know, I still have problems with Clare: she loves her father passionately and always wants to be near him. His visit last night and his behavior devastated her. I don’t know how to deal with that new problem.’

‘As you probably know,’ he said, ‘I have a daughter called Helene. She is eighteen, and a very optimistic and well-organized girl, who is studying music. What do you think about putting them in touch with each other?’

‘I think it is an excellent idea,’ she replied.

‘I will, of course, have to ask Helene whether she agrees, okay.’

When Jerry told Helene about Linda’s problem with her daughter, she thought for a while and then agreed. Clare started visiting them quite often. She was fascinated by Helene’s musical ability and her calm manner, and began to imitate her behavior and manner of speaking. She also demanded that Linda start her piano lessons again. Her strong bond with her father seemed to have vanished as well. During their next working lunch, Linda told Jerry all these pieces of good news and was very grateful for his help. At the end of their ‘session’ she asked him quietly whether he would mind if she invited Helene to her place the following weekend, since he was going on a long trip to Poland. He accepted her proposal, albeit with some hesitation. Indeed, he was not very happy about the idea for a specific reason: he knew that Linda was a descendant of a very wealthy, aristocratic Austro-Hungarian family, and he didn’t want to expose his daughter to Linda’s snobbish, patronizing relatives, who were often around, as Linda had once told him. Jerry also remembered that she once complained that her Alex, as she called him, only rarely dared to visit her because of the snobbishness of her family, and that such a situation was greatly complicating her personal life.

Linda almost read his thoughts, and added, ‘Don’t worry, I will do my best to keep my snobbish relatives away for the weekend, I promised.’

Jerry smiled, ‘You are a very clever girl, Linda, thank you.’ She liked it when he called her ‘girl’; it gave her a feeling of being not only a mother of a troubled thirteen-year-old daughter, but also a woman, young enough to be attracted to men.

*

Although, the conference Jerry had come for should start on Monday of the following week, he arrived in Warsaw on Thursday the week before. It was the first time in about twenty years that he had decided to visit Poland for somewhat longer than just a day or two, always dropping in on the way somewhere. This time, he decided to use the spare time for pure private purposes, as a sort of remembrance part of his life. One of the important things he intended to do during those days was to pay a visit to the city of Walbrzych, where his parents were buried in the Jewish cemetery. So far, his cousin Karol was doing that duty on his behalf, once a year, but this time, he felt, it was high time to do it himself. In Warsaw, on the other hand, he expected to find some cultural entertainment; after all, it is a capital of the country and, as far as he remembered from the past, it always used to contain the most interesting cultural events of the country.

He took the newspaper he bought and opened the page with a heading ‘Cultural events.’ He glanced through ‘Art & Exhibitions’, ‘Musical Events ‘and then ‘Theatre’. Within the latter column his attention was drawn to the title of a short critical note:

"After almost thirty years, the stage adaptation of the famous book ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses,’ written by the eighteenth-century French writer, Choderlos de Laclos, again on stage in Warsaw; new adaptation and very interesting mise-en-scène and scene design. The cast consists of only two actors, who are reading in turns the text written in the form of letters (as it was originally written), gradually building up an extraordinary intrigue that culminates in a dramatic end. Very stylish, eighteen-century costumes, too."

To his astonishment, he found in the note that Catherine, his sweetheart from the old days of almost thirty years, was acting the female part and doing mise-en- scène collaboration. She was mentioned there by a double name – her maid name, which he still remembered well, followed by another one, unknown to him. She probably remarried, he concluded, unless there is another actress in this city with the same name, but that’s very unlikely.

cza, an actor with a strong posture, and with a rather low, somewhat hoarse voice. One could not expect a greater contrast between those two personalities, but still, the contrasting effect further intensified the dramatic development of the plot. Jerry liked the book very much, and remembered well the old stage performance; nevertheless, to see Catherine in the role of La Marquise de Merteuil after about twenty years of not having any contact at all was really a temptation. He took a telephone directory, found the phone number of the respective theatre and called them, asking for a ticket for that particular performance. A sympathetic woman’s voice replied that he might well get a ticket but not for three weeks: ‘Right now, every performance is sold out’, she said. Unfortunately, it was far too early to call his cousin Karol and ask him how to get a ticket to the performance, so in the meantime, he took the telephone diary of the city again, and found Catherine, her telephone number and address, without any difficulty. She was listed there, under the same double name as in the newspaper, and her address was the same as years ago. "So, she definitely must have got married again; there is no case of mistaken identity, but what about her daughter, Nicole? He found her in the same directory, also under a double name – the name of her father (her maiden name) and another one, probably that of her husband. He remembered Nicole only as a funny little girl with a great appetite for ice creams and building sandcastles on the beach. From the telephone directory, and the addresses given there, it seemed that she was living quite close to her mother. A strange, new custom has become fashionable in this country – double names. Is it a new way, in which women are trying to sneak into the nobility?" He thought, rather sarcastically. The information he got from the telephone directory, was for the time being, completely sufficient for his needs; however, it didn’t solve the problem of how to get a ticket to the performance, he was so anxious to see, because he didn’t intend making personal contact with Catherine.

In his own conviction, the attitude towards Catherine, which he developed in time, wasn’t a result of his obstinacy or persistence, but as a feeling that he had no right to bother or intrude in her private life anymore in any way. He regarded their common past from so many years back, as an irredeemably closed chapter in his life and hoped it was the same for her. This time, though, he was really tempted by the coincidental chance of seeing at once the new staging of one of his favorite books and Catherine performing in it. He tried to convince himself that his purpose of seeing her was rather modest: just to have a glance of her from a distance like watching television or going to the cinema, and only to see what she looked like after so many years and to get a reassurance that she was still doing well. Since he completely disregarded the idea of asking Catherine for a ticket as an utterly inappropriate one, his only hope, as he though, rested with his cousin Karol. Such approach however, had to wait till the evening.

*

Jerry still remembered how he met Catherine for the first time around the end of the fifties. They were both students at the time – she had just finished the second term in drama school in Warsaw, while he had passed all his third- year exams at the Technical University in Wroclaw. They both attended a students’ musical festival in a small seaside resort on the Baltic Sea.

They were practically always moving in a large group, singing, dancing, playing music and always drinking a lot of beer or cheap wine. They were attracted to one another in a way, although they didn’t try to be apart from the whole group, even for a while. The fun of being in a large group and meeting so many young people from all over the country in a relaxed, and not ideologically indoctrinated atmosphere, seemed to be far more important to them, as well as to all the others, than any sort of individual engagement. They didn’t even exchange addresses or telephone numbers at the end of the festival; they only knew their first names.

The next time he met her it was two years later in Warsaw, at the wedding of his cousin, Karol. Jerry was invited to attend the civil marriage ceremony and, of course, the wedding party afterwards as well. To his great surprise, he met Catherine there. She was the guest of the bride and her best friend since grammar school. In fact, that evening became the real beginning of their great, long standing and very turbulent attraction, which however, at that time, did not last for too long, was very passionate and totally absorbed them. In their total infatuation, they resembled night moths attracted so much by the light of a strong lamp that they flew too close and got burned by its heat – unfortunately, far too soon. Catherine and Jerry got ‘burned out’ even before they realized how and when it actually happened. Still, years later, Jerry could swear that never in his life was he again so completely in love with anyone as he was with Catherine. At that time, Jerry still visited the students’ clubs, where he often played piano with local bands, and would meet some nice and interesting girls; with some of them he used to flirt in the past, but, since he had met Catherine, they simply didn’t count any longer. His cousin’s wedding had taken place in October, and already by March, the next year, he and Catherine had no time for each other; in April Jerry tried to organize a sort of summer vacation in the Tatra Mountains for both of them, but Catherine had an audition for a part in a movie and could not commit herself at the time; in May she was not sure when the shooting of the movie was going to start, and in June, while on a solitary vacation in the Tatra Mountains, Jerry received a letter from her, informing him that everything between them was finished.

In her letter, she said that she had met somebody who was in a position to help her with her career, he seemed to be somewhat older, but was nice and understanding – a really mature man. She had found, she said, a man on whom she could rely in her life and in her profession for the years ahead. Jerry broke off his vacation, went to Warsaw and tried to convince her that, in his opinion, she was making a major mistake and that she should build her career on merit and her talent, not on the help of older influential man. He knew it might sound naïve and impractical, but he honestly believed in what he was saying. He also wanted to tell her that they should attempt to build their future life together, on their own; unfortunately, he stopped a little short of telling her that, and that he was madly in love with her, too. He thought that the latter was apparent – otherwise why would he come to Warsaw in order to persuade her to give up the plans of marrying somebody else? Besides, the tone of her last letter and her apparent distance during their meeting instinctively stopped him from saying those things, since he felt it would only make him look in her eyes like a losing fool, which was the last thing he would wish for himself.

Indeed, she responded icily to what he said and, to his great surprise, called him an immature young man, and told him that unless he started seriously thinking about his own future, he should not even plan to have a family on his own. More than a mock shudder went through him when he listened to her pompous, patronizing way of speaking. It sounded to him almost funny, as though she were reciting a text prepared for her by somebody else; a cheap, melodramatic closing speech in a stage performance.

He stood up, and looking straight at her wanted to shout in anger, but instead, just almost whispered, ‘You…, with your learned-by-heart role of a stupid old bag, you will regret what you just said to me!’ Then he calmed down and