Free The Seventh Candidate by Howard Waldman Page A

the fragments of the vase,
those words on the wall behind her. He started weeping, for the
first time since she died.
    At that time such words were still limited
to shameful confidential places. The two platforms were empty. He
rummaged in the depths of his worn briefcase and came up with an
eraser. He was vaguely aware that what he was doing was like his
mother’s absurd attempts to piece together the shattered Chinese
vase. The penciled obscenities yielded easily enough. But not the
ball-pointed ones.
    When passengers appeared on the opposite
platform he stopped.
    That night in the new solitude of the flat
the triumphant obscenity troubled him, distracting him from the
totality of his grief. The next morning he slipped white
ink-effacer into the briefcase and the girl – at that time he
hadn’t yet started calling her Helena – was restored to innocence.
He experienced a sense of restoration himself, a cleansing
almost.
    Effacement became a necessary habit. Other
people collected stamps or coins or matchboxes or postcards, he
eliminated graffiti. Which was the most futile occupation? But
while those other hobbies were solitary, his was exercised in the
most public of places. Some (the elderly, mainly) applauded his
efforts, most (the young, mainly) quipped or jeered.
    He soon overcame his sense of shame. The
graffiti had started up clandestinely in the last days of the
monarchy, in the service of subversion that was more than
political. He felt the connection between these new obscenities and
those earlier diagonal triple arrows and clenched fists. His
activity was less individual aberration, he felt, than moral
protest. Paradoxically, his major fear was to be taken for one of
the very vandals he was combating. His early technique of writing
over the obscenity with the effacing brush gave him a troubling
sense of duality, defacer and effacer at the same time.
    When he got another of his senseless jobs
(stock-clerking, this time), what he regarded as his significant
activity didn’t stop. He pursued it very early in the morning
before work and late at night after work instead of returning home.
He spent as little time as possible in the empty apartment.
    The turning point, the unsuspected social
justification of the most intimate of pursuits, came one day
in Crossroads when
a well-dressed fat man with an expensive pig-skin briefcase
congratulated him on his skill. That happened often enough. But
this time it wasn’t for the usual moral or political reasons. The
fat man had seen the capital to be derived from Lorz’s
disinterested efforts. He was an executive in a concern that
specialized in underground advertising posters. He offered him a
job and initiated him to the economic potentialities of poster
rectification.
    For a year Lorz was paid for doing what he
liked best to do. Sometimes he felt a nagging sense of falling away
from the ragged purity of his initial efforts, shame at this
commercialization. His job was, by and large, what he now had his
operators do. He himself invented the wheeled stepladder. He
refined his techniques. In a year’s time he had established contact
with other poster concerns and was in a position to resign and set
up on his own.
     
    That was the story as it happened. In the
modified version he recounted to Silberman he appeared as a
keen-eyed levelheaded entrepreneur, alive to business opportunities
in the most unlikely of places. He sidestepped certain of
Silberman’s questions. The doctor seemed satisfied with Lorz’s
version.
    “If I find myself out of a job one day,” he
said, “would you consider hiring me as a – what is it again? – as
an eradicator? Ho. The marvelous word.”
     
    ***
     
    6
     
    Every day the volume of his white turban was
reduced. Strength was ebbing back to his left hand. Appetite
triumphed over the hospital fare, which he now ate alone. He put on
weight. Release from hospital was set for the beginning of the
following week. As the days passed the