The Moslem Wife and Other Stories by Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler

wife, without turning to see what I was staring at.
    “One can, but I don’t go up any more. There’s an hour-and-a-half walk to the middle station, and the road isn’t pleasant. It’s all slush and mud.” I thought they would ask what “the middle station” meant, but they didn’t, which meant they weren’t really listening.
    When I refused a pudding, Peter said, with his old teasing, “I told you she was frugal. Her father was a German professor at Debrecen, the Protestant university.”
    “So was yours,” said his wife sharply, as though reminding him of a truth he forgot from time to time.
    “It never affected me,” said Peter, smiling.
    “That’s where you met, then,” said his wife, taking her eyes from me at last
    “No,” said Peter. “We were only children then. We met when we were grown up, at the University of Lausanne. It was a coincidence, like meeting today. Erika and I will probably meet – I don’t know where. On the moon.”
    It is difficult enough to listen to someone lying without looking shocked, but imagine what it might be to be part of the fantasy; his lies were a whirlwind, and I was at the core, trying to recognize something familiar. We met in Lausanne; that was true. We met on a bench in the public gardens. I told him I had lived in Hungary and could speak a few sentences of Hungarian still. He was four years younger than I. I told him about my father in Debrecen, and that we were Germans, and that my father had been shot by a Russian soldier. I said I was grateful for Switzerland. He told me he was a half Jew from Budapest and had been ill-used. His life had been saved in some remarkable way by a neutral embassy. He was grateful, too.
    He was the first person to whom I had ever spoken spontaneously and without reserve. We met every day for ten days, and when he wanted to leave Switzerland because he thoughtit would be better somewhere else and would not go without me, I did not think twice. The evening lamps went on in the park where we were sitting, and I thought that if I did not go with him I would suffer every evening for the rest of my life, every time the lamps were lit. To avoid suffering, I went with him. Yet when I told my father’s old friends, the people who had taken me in and welcomed me and kept me from starving, I said it was my duty. I said it was Peter who could not live without me. It is true I would never have gone out of Switzerland, out to the wilderness, but for him. My father had friends at the University of Lausanne, and although after the war some were afraid, because the wind had shifted, others took me in when I was seventeen and homeless and looked after me until I could work. I was afraid of telling about Peter. In the end, I had to. I quoted something my father had once said about duty, and no one could contradict that.
    It lasted only a short time, the adventure, and can be briefly and accurately remembered. Quickly, then: He had heard there was a special university for refugees in a city on the Rhine, and thought they might admit him. We lived in a hotel over a café, and discovered we were living in a brothel. The university existed, but its quota was full. We were starving to death. We were so attractive a couple, so sympathetic-looking, that people dulled with eating looked at us fondly. We strolled along the Rhine and looked at excursion boats. “Your duty is always before you, plain as that,” my father had said, pointing with his walking stick to some vista or tree or cloud. I do not know what he was pointing at – something in his mind.
    Because of Peter I was on a sea without hope of landing anywhere. It grew on me that he had been jealous of my safety and had dragged me beyond my depth. There had been floods – I think in Holland – and money was being collected for the victims. Newspapers spoke of “Rhine solidarity,” and I was envious, for I had solidarity with no one now. It took me time to think things out, for I had no