Revenge

THE MAN WHO SOLD BRACES

Everything my uncle touched seemed to fall apart in the end. The plastic model airplanes he helped me build when I was a boy, the braces he sold through the mail that were supposed to make you taller, and even the fur coat he left me when he died.

He was the sort of man who changed professions like other men change their socks. He worked for a while at a hat factory, and then became a photographer’s assistant. Next were the braces, followed by a stint teaching table manners. He was a butler for a while, and finally a curator at a museum—though I may have mixed up the order somewhere. In the midst of all this, he was married three times, with several affairs in between. The women came and went, but in his later years he lived alone with no one to look after him. In other words, my uncle never seemed to think twice about abandoning a job or a woman to start over from square one.

If he had one admirable quality (and I’m not sure you could call it that), it was his ability to look dispassionately at the thing that lay broken in his hands, the thing he was about to lose or discard. He never seemed glum or sulky over his losses. He just watched calmly as his treasure, whatever it might have been, vanished from sight—and in many cases there was even the hint of a smile on his face as he watched it go.

I got a call from the police telling me my uncle had died and I should come to claim the body. He had no acquaintances among his neighbors and only a very few relatives, and the police had apparently gone to some trouble to locate me. I had just got back to my dormitory and was preparing for my French class when the phone rang.

“How did he die?” I asked.

“Strangulation,” the person on the other end of the line said.

“You mean he was murdered?”

“No, I’m afraid he was crushed under the garbage that had accumulated in his apartment, the poor soul.” I took some comfort in the sympathetic tone of this unseen caller.

My uncle and I were not in fact blood relatives. We thought of him as my mother’s older brother, but he came into the family at the time of my grandmother’s second marriage and was actually the eldest son of her new husband and another woman. There was also a large age difference between my uncle and my mother, and they had apparently never lived under the same roof. This relationship was explained to me any number of times when I was a child, but I had never understood it very well.

In any event, my uncle was a frequent visitor at our house. He would appear without warning, stay a few days, and then disappear again to parts unknown.

Even as a child, I sensed that he was not a particularly welcome guest. My mother would be nervous the whole time he was there, and my father was noticeably irritable. But my uncle seemed oblivious to all this: he was quite cheerful and ate and drank with great appetite.

I, too, was largely unaffected by my parents’ attitude toward him and looked forward to my uncle’s visits with impatience—primarily because he never failed to bring me some rare and unusual present.

“Now where could it be hiding?” he would say, picking me up in his arms and rubbing his cheek against mine. “Do you think you can find it?” If I squirmed away from his prickly beard, he would rub even harder. Eventually I would manage to get free and search him for my present—a procedure that was also my opportunity to tickle him.

One time I found a bar of imported chocolate in his hat; on another occasion it was a miniature model car up the sleeve of his jacket, or a jackknife tucked in his sock. When I was very young, I believed he produced all these things by magic.

The sheath for the knife was inlaid with semiprecious stones. It was solid and heavy in my hand, and just looking at it sent shivers down my spine. But when my mother found it, she took it away from me.

“What could he have been thinking, giving a dangerous thing like that to a child? He has no common sense at all.” That was what she always said about him.

Even if he wasn’t always welcome, the menu at dinner was a bit fancier when my uncle was visiting. I would crawl into his lap as he sat cross-legged at the table and pretend not to hear when my mother scolded me for it. His legs were quite boney, but for some reason I felt comfortable seated there.

On such evenings, my uncle generally did most of the talking. My father did not drink and was, by nature, somewhat taciturn. My uncle would talk about new business prospects or some strange adventure from his travels, or he would gossip about the family. As he spoke, his voice and gestures were almost theatrical, and he would laugh merrily at his own stories. From time to time he would feed me some tidbit that had been served with his sake. My father said little and asked no questions, content to look on with a bemused smile, while my mother simply shuffled back and forth to the kitchen.

Eventually my father would make some excuse about an early start in the morning and leave us. I was told to put on my pajamas, and my mother would begin to clear away the dishes—but my uncle would linger on at the table.

And if I got up in the night to go to the bathroom, he would still be sitting there—with his whiskey, slumped over the table and mumbling incomprehensibly. But from time to time he would sit up and laugh to himself, the same laugh we’d heard all through dinner.

During the day, he would loaf about the house. Whenever my mother asked him to help with some chore that required physical strength, he would respond enthusiastically, although she would rarely ask him to do more than carrying a box of my father’s books to the second floor or opening the sticky lid of a jar. Clearly, she did not consider him very useful.

When he got bored, he would wander over to my room.

“Well then, shall we build that model?” he once proposed.

The model in question was one my father had bought me for my birthday. He and I were planning to build it the following Sunday. I was suddenly filled with anxiety; not so much over breaking the promise to my father, but because I just knew my uncle would ruin the model. He seemed completely unaware of my feelings as he tore open the box and spilled out the parts.

“Let me help,” I urged.

“No, this is pretty tricky. A bit much for a kid. You’d better let me do it.” I was not permitted to touch the propellers or the wings or even the tube of glue.

The instructions were printed in a tiny typeface, and he was constantly adjusting his glasses or moving the lamp as he worked. He spread out the pieces on the desk and fitted them together, then pulled them apart again. He would put them together another way—and then start over with a different set of pieces, muttering the whole time about how confusing it was.

“Is everything all right?” I asked, overcome with nerves.

“Be patient,” he said, nodding. “It’s going to be fantastic.” A bead of sweat dangled from the end of his nose.

Unable to stand it anymore, I went outside to play. When dinnertime came, he was still working on the model—which bore only the vaguest resemblance to an airplane.

“It’s all right if you don’t finish it,” I said, trying to be as diplomatic as I could. Unfortunately, he was not about to give up. It was sometime the next morning before he was done.

“There,” he said, coming to find me with the plane in his hands. “What do you think?”

“It’s great,” I said. It looked nothing like the photograph on the box, but I was reluctant to disappoint him. Traces of glue clung to his fingers.

The plane was oddly out of kilter, as though none of the pieces were in quite the right place. The cockpit had gaps, the wheels were askew, and, worst of all, the wings had been attached at crooked angles.

My uncle left after lunch that day. Later, as I was setting the model on top of my bookshelf, the right wing fell off. I let out a little cry and the propeller dropped to the floor, followed by one of the wheels, and finally the left wing, which came to rest at my feet.

One day my uncle appeared with an odd-looking object. It resembled a dog’s collar that had been attached to the end of a long, narrow metal plate. At the other end was a wide belt.

“This is a brace to make you grow,” he said. My parents looked skeptical but said nothing. “Let me show you how it works.”

I was chosen to be the guinea pig.

“Does it hurt?” I asked, somewhat alarmed, but my uncle just shook his head and started loosening the buckles.

“Not a bit,” he said. “You’d like to be taller, wouldn’t you? Short guys never get the girls—which is why men all over the world are going to be clamoring for these.”

The belt that looked like a collar turned out to be exactly that. My uncle buckled it tightly around my throat. The metal plate pressed against my spine, held in place by the belt around my waist.

“How does that feel?” He spread his arms and studied me with obvious satisfaction, but there was a concerned look on my mother’s face. And, indeed, I was finding it hard to breathe; my neck was being forced up, and I couldn’t turn my head to the side or bend at the waist. I was completely immobilized, with only my eyeballs free to move.

“Just thirty minutes a day for six months and you’ll be two inches taller. It stabilizes the neck and pelvis and stretches the muscles, which provides stimulation for the bones and encourages secretion of the growth hormone.”

“Thirty minutes?” I said, nearly in tears.

“And you’ll be taller. What more could you ask?”

“But it hurts,” I said. “I can’t breathe.”

“You can’t?” he said, fiddling with the buckle. “I guess I’ve got it too tight. This is just a prototype; I’m still working out the details. But I’ve decided to go into the mail-order business with these, I’m completely convinced they’ll sell. I’ve signed a contract with a factory to produce them, and I’m going to advertise in all the newspapers and men’s magazines. I’m even applying to have them licensed as a medical therapy.”

He pulled some papers out of his pocket and waved them in front of us.

“Is that so?” my father said, sounding even more skeptical than usual. My mother tapped her finger against the metal plate.

“Take it off, please! I can’t stand it anymore.” I was crying in earnest now.

Not long thereafter, true to his word, my uncle began selling the braces through the mail. I have no idea whether he ever fixed the collar, but I started seeing his advertisements in magazines: a shirtless man with well-oiled muscles in my uncle’s brace, striking a confident pose. When I’d worn it, the brace had been terribly uncomfortable, but it seemed to fit the model like a second skin, as though he had been born wearing it.

The prototype sat in the corner of my closet for some time after that, like the molted skin of some misshapen reptile, but I never put it on again. Eventually, the metal plate started to rust. When my mother went to throw it out, the screws in the plate came loose, the belt fell off, and the whole thing went to pieces.

My uncle apparently sold almost none of them at all. I’m not sure whether it was because they broke so easily or because they failed to live up to their advertising, but very soon my uncle was arrested for fraud. It seems the license he had obtained was a fake.

It was some four years later, when I was in middle school, that we next heard from him. Looking back, I suppose this was probably his most prosperous period. The clothes he wore—and the quality of his presents—improved considerably. He smoked cigars, wore French cologne, and he seemed always to arrive at our house by a hired car.

He said he had found work as the butler in a great house, though my mother said she couldn’t imagine he was anything more than a handyman. The house in question belonged to two elderly ladies, twins who had inherited a considerable sum from their father—a coal magnate of some sort. Since they spent most of their time traveling, my uncle’s duties consisted primarily of standing guard over the house.

I recall that one of my aunts spread the rumor that the two old ladies shared my uncle’s sexual services between them. At the time, I couldn’t conceive of what this might mean, but she seemed disgusted when she said it, so I knew it was nothing to be proud of.

“They’re absolutely identical,” my uncle said. “From the build and voice to their taste in clothes and makeup, even their wrinkles. Exactly the same.”

“Do you ever get them mixed up?” I asked.

“No, there’s really nothing to mix up. A or B, B or A—it makes no difference. They’re just one person.”

“But what does a butler do?”

“My job is a bit different from your average butler.” His tone was boastful as ever. “Mostly, I look after the Bengal tiger.”

“Tiger?” I blurted out.

“That’s what I said. He lives in the garden. They got him when they were traveling in India, while he was still young.”

“But he got big?”

“He got huge! So huge you can’t get your arms around him, and his legs are like iron poles. The claws could tear you apart, and the ground shakes when he walks across the yard.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Sure I am! That’s why I have to be on my guard all the time. He could charge at any moment, but that danger is what makes him so beautiful. His fur shines and the stripes on his back ripple, and there’s this deep rumble in his throat. He’s absolutely perfect, but it’s the kind of perfection you can’t touch, even when it’s right there in front of you.”

He closed his eyes, as though trying to remember every detail of the tiger.

“To tell the truth, the biggest problem with the tiger is the odor—it’s overpowering. It gets into your pores, right down the roots of your hair. That’s why I always wear my cologne. It was a present from one of the ladies. Not sure which one. Anyway, it cost plenty.” At this point, he moved closer until his chest was almost touching my face. “Nice, isn’t it?” he said. He had apparently acquired expensive tastes from living among the wealthy, though the experience had made him no richer himself.

“But the old ladies are really more interested in all different kinds of torture,” he went on without opening his eyes. “They go all over the world, buying anything that could be used to inflict pain, and my job is to take care of all the things they bring home.”

“That’s a pretty strange job,” I said.

“At first I thought it was torture enough being left alone with the tiger, but I have to admit that some of the devices they bring back are pretty interesting: a hatchet for breaking ankles, a stretcher to rip open your mouth, a knife for flaying human skin.”

He described these “devices” one after the other, and I found it difficult to picture what they looked like. Some of them, though, reminded me of that brace of his.

The image of my uncle that remains clearest in memory for me is of his back as he is leaving our house. No one ever knew where he was going, and no one asked. He left with little more than a “See you later.”

When he returned, he was carrying nothing. He never had a suitcase, and I wondered what he did for clean underwear and the like. Perhaps he kept these things tucked away somewhere in his pockets—like the gifts he brought me.

“I’ve had a wonderful time,” he would tell us when he was ready to go again, and he apparently meant it. And then he might tell me how important it was to study hard. “Even if something seems pointless at the time, you mustn’t take it lightly. You’ll see how useful it is later on. Nothing you study will ever turn out to be useless. That’s the way the world is.”

He would pick me up and rub his cheek against mine. Sometimes I would struggle to escape and muss his carefully combed hair in the process, but he never seemed to mind. Then he would bow and thank my parents, smoothing his hair with his hand.

“When will you be back?” I would ask. It still amazes me that I could have been so blunt as a child—but I truly wanted to know.

“I wonder…” He was incapable of making promises of any sort.

His last visit was after the old ladies had died and the house was turned into a museum of torture, for which he was to serve as curator. I was by then too old for our little games.

That time, too, a hired car came to take him to the station—spotless, black and impressive. He tripped on the front stairs, and when I went to help him he thanked me in a raspy voice. I caught a whiff of his favorite cologne.

It shocked me to realize that he suddenly seemed old—so frail that the slightest push would have sent him tumbling. The body I had felt when I’d gone searching for my hidden presents had been sturdier; and though I had always thought of him as tall, he was now much shorter than me.

I realized I had no idea how old he was—I suppose I’d thought that something as mundane as age could never apply to him.

“Give my regards to the tiger,” I said, leaning in the car window. He nodded, but it was unclear whether he had heard me. “My regards to the tiger,” I said again. He had no other family in the world, as far as I knew.

He waved with his usual theatrical flair, like a king bidding farewell to courtiers. When the car finally pulled away from the curb, I could see him through the rear window, thin and frail and growing smaller in the distance.

“Well then,” said my father, turning to go back into the house. My mother followed him, nodding and muttering. I stayed behind to watch until the car was out of sight. He never turned around.

The funeral was over quickly. Only a few people had attended, and no one cried. They just took their turns lighting incense in front of the family altar, looking a bit lost. Not lost in grief; they seemed to be lost in thought, wondering perhaps what they were doing in such a place.

“They said he wasn’t murdered but he died of asphyxiation,” I heard someone whisper. “It seems odd.”

“He was terribly weak,” said another voice. “A wardrobe fell and trapped him underneath.”

“I bet someone pushed it over. He had plenty of enemies.”

“They said he was nothing but skin and bones, he would have starved to death anyway.”

His troubles had started when one of his neighbors told the police that he was bringing underage girls into the Museum of Torture and doing indecent things to them. In fact he had been involved with an eighteen-year-old woman, a beautician, who had moved into the museum. But she never filed a complaint against him and the whole thing had eventually blown over.

“I’ll bet he was torturing her,” my father said.

“Why do you say that?” I asked, a bit shocked.

“The place was full of that stuff. What else could they do with it?”

But almost immediately after that affair was over, the police arrested him for embezzling from the old ladies’ estate. He had apparently gone through quite a bit of their money in the few years since their deaths, and so, for a second time in his life, my uncle found himself in jail.

Worse still, they closed the museum while he was away and he lost his home.

He had asked me repeatedly to come visit him while he worked there, but I never managed to make the trip. I’m not sure why; I didn’t dislike museums in principle and I wasn’t trying to distance myself from him. I suppose I was preoccupied with my studies and extracurricular activities, and in the end I missed my chance.

He sent me a card every Christmas with a photograph of himself posing in front of the museum displays. Bow tie, starched shirt, his chest puffed out. He was usually pointing at one of his treasures, smiling happily; he seemed to be assuring the viewer that the device was a genuine instrument of torture.

I saw him for the last time in February, after he had been let out on parole. The clouds were low and the wind had been blowing hard all day. I had wandered for a long time, hands in my pockets, head bent in the wind, searching for his apartment. What I found at last was practically a ruin: a long, squat building with two lines of unadorned windows. No flower boxes, not even laundry hung out to dry. The walls were stained, the gutters pulled loose in places, the banisters crooked. It was perfectly silent except for the mewing of a cat hiding in the weeds near the door.

I checked the mailboxes to be sure I hadn’t made a mistake. My uncle’s name was written in magic marker on the box for number 201—though the characters were shaky and smeared by the rain. Peering in the box, I saw nothing but darkness, not a postcard or even an advertising flyer.

I opened the door to the apartment. “Uncle!” I called. “Uncle! It’s me!” From somewhere inside, I heard the sound of labored breathing. I took off my shoes and slid open the inner door, but then I froze, unable to find a place to set my foot. The entire apartment was filled with a mound of garbage—though “garbage” wasn’t exactly the right word for it. These were objects that had once been useful but were no longer so. A mountain of random things, with no discernible connection between them.

“Oh, you’ve come.” His voice sounded weak, muffled as it was by the mound of clutter. “Well, don’t stand there all day. Come and let me look at you.”

“I’d like to, but I’m not sure how,” I said.

“Not to worry,” he said. “Just come past the refrigerator, by the radio, slip behind the chest, and you’re there.” Following his instructions, I made my way cautiously into the apartment.

Worn-out socks, barbecue utensils, a set of encyclopedias, pieces of a clarinet, cans of cat food, pots without handles, dried-up bars of soap, a microscope, a marionette, a stuffed weasel … The sheer variety of items made me dizzy. Tightly packed in a giant mass, they filled the entire room, covering the windows and piled nearly to the ceiling. But somehow I managed to find him inside of it all.

“It’s true, you’re really here,” he said. “But come closer. My eyes are bad and I want to get a look at you.” He was stretched out in a tiny space near the middle of the room, all but buried in his things. His trembling hand reached toward me. I took it and held it to my cheek.

“I remember that face,” he said. “And those soft hands. You haven’t changed a bit.” He, however, was nearly unrecognizable. He had grown terribly thin, his collarbone and shoulders jutting out sharply. I held tight to his hand.

“Thanks for the Christmas cards,” I said.

“I don’t send them to anyone else anymore.”

I hesitated a moment, but then I decided to push back the things near his head and I knelt beside him.

“How are you getting along?” I said. I wanted to talk to him about the disaster in his apartment, but I didn’t know how to broach the topic.

“I can’t complain. Though the cold makes my neuralgia act up.”

He was wrapped in a thin blanket, more a towel really, and so filthy that its original color was impossible to guess. There was no sign of a heater anywhere—but I had the feeling that this mass of objects gave off a warmth of its own.

“You haven’t come to see us,” I said.

“I know, there’s always something…”

“Are you eating?” I asked. “You have to keep up your strength.”

“All of a sudden you’re grown and worrying about me, instead of the other way around. Seems like yesterday you were just a little boy.”

“I’m at the university now.”

“What are you studying?”

“French literature,” I told him.

“Wonderful! Absolutely wonderful.” He closed his swollen eyes and squeezed my hand, apparently on the verge of tears.

“Oh, I almost forgot. I brought you a present. Can you guess where I’ve hidden it?” Not wanting to see him cry, I forced myself to sound jolly. He let out a sound that was something between a cough and a laugh, and I produced a box of chocolates from the inner pocket of my jacket. “Weren’t these always your favorites?”

“They were indeed,” he said. “Thank you. But I never thought I’d see the day when you would bring me presents.”

I balanced the box on a toaster, resting on a tricycle, and almost immediately it blended in, becoming part of the pile.

As I studied the mass more closely, I began to feel that it was not the product of random accumulation but that it actually had a coherent form all its own; and while the individual items were dirty and deteriorating, taken together they were like a strange piece of art.

Something else became apparent: many of these scraps of wood and chains and leather were, in fact, the remains of exhibits from his museum. A twisted belt with buckles nearly torn off might have been used to bind the wrists; a whip with a broken handle; a rusted weight that could have crushed bone. But they were ruined, no longer suitable for causing pain; the devices themselves almost seemed to be the victims. They looked exhausted, ready to die.

I looked down at my feet and realized I was staring at the brace. The feeling of suffocation came back to me in an instant—the sweat under the collar, the plate against my back. Then I saw that he was lying next to a knot of old braces that looked impossible to untangle.

“I remember those,” I said, and my uncle seemed to know what I meant without even turning his head.

“You do?” he said. “That was a great invention, even if it didn’t sell. I still get New Year’s cards from clients who are taller thanks to those braces. They think of me as their benefactor, and when I see them, I feel as though my life hasn’t been a complete waste.”

He closed his eyes, pulled his blanket up to his chin, and curled into a ball. When he coughed, a shudder ran down his back.

The wind blew outside, rattling the windows. A tiny creature—a mouse or a cockroach perhaps—scurried along the edge of my vision before disappearing into the instruments of torture. There was a quiet rustling and then silence again.

“Take one with you, if you like. I have plenty. Who knows, it could still help.”

“Thanks,” I said.

The kitchen was at the back of the apartment, but there was no sign that it was in use. The sink was filled with dozens of empty cologne bottles.

“Whatever happened to the tiger?” I asked.

“He died in the garden,” he said. “It was a beautiful death.”

We were quiet then for a moment. The only sound was the wind at the window. His arms reached out from under the blanket. I took his hands in mine, and it seemed to me that we were praying for the tiger.

“It’s started to snow,” he said sometime later.

“How can you tell?”

“The wind has died.”

“Do you have a heavier blanket? You need to keep warm.”

“I’m fine like this,” he said. “You’re the one who’ll catch cold. You should wear this home,” he said, plunging his hand into the mound next to him and pulling out a fur coat.

“It’s wonderful,” I said. “You should use it for a blanket. I don’t need it.”

“Don’t say that. I want you to have it. It’s the only thing I have to leave you.”

“Well then,” I said. “Thank you.”

He closed his eyes again and a look of satisfaction spread over his face. A few minutes later his breath fell into the regular rhythm of sleep.

Where had it all come from? Outside, the world lay under a blanket of white, just as my uncle had said. The air was still, and large snowflakes drifted out of the night sky. The street was empty, and the cat that had been lurking near the entrance had disappeared. I walked gingerly over the unmarked snow. When I turned to look back, the window was dark.

Thanks to the coat, I didn’t feel the cold at all. I felt as though I were being embraced by big, strong arms, and with each step I caught a whiff of my uncle’s cologne. The fur was so soft, I found myself rubbing it against my cheek.

I wasn’t sure how to get back, and the snow had covered and obscured all landmarks, so I could do nothing but walk straight ahead. The flakes that fell on the fur melted almost immediately. I turned one last time, but the building had vanished, and a trail of my footprints in the snow stretched back into the darkness.

Then I realized that the left sleeve had fallen off the coat. As I picked it up, I noticed a loose string hanging from it—and a large black stain on the lining. Before I knew what was happening, the right sleeve dropped off, too, and the cold crept in. I walked along, clutching the sleeves, but then the seams at the sides began to come apart as well. The collar came loose and the pockets fell off.

The fur shimmered in the white snow as I knelt to gather up the scattered bits of the tiger.