Silvers seemed to have guessed my thoughts. "You've done all right for yourself," he said. "But forget about the dinner jacket If you need one, you can rent it."
I went to see Vriesländer to pay back a hundred dollars of the money I owed him. "Sit down," he said, absently slipping the bills into his wallet. "Have you had dinner?"
"No," I said without hesitation, remembering that the Vriesländers ate very well.
"Then stick around," he said. "There'll be a few more guests. I don't know who they are. Ask my wife. Can I offer you some Scotch?"
Since his naturalization, Vriesländer drank only whisky. I would have expected the contrary—that he would have drunk whisky beforehand, to demonstrate his intention of becoming a good American, and then gone back to Steinhäger and kiimmel. But Vriesländer had his quirks. Before naturalization, on the other hand, he had refused to speak anything but broken English and insisted on the whole family doing the same. Malicious tongues even claimed that he enforced this ruling in bed. Once naturalized, however, the family reverted to Babylonian—a mixture of German, English and Yiddish.
"Tell me," he said, "are you homesick?"
"For what?"
"Germany."
"No. I'm not a Jew."
Vriesländer laughed. "You've got something there."
I thought of Betty Stein. "Yes," I said. "The Jews were the most sentimental patriots of all."
"Do you know why? Because we were well off in Germany until 1933. The last Kaiser ennobled any number of Jews. He even received Jews at court. He had Jewish friends. The Crown Prince had a Jewish mistress."
"Under His Majesty you might have become a baron," I said.
"That was a long time ago," he said sadly.
I was ashamed of my insolence, but Vriesländer hadn't even noticed it. For a moment the conversation of a man who had owned a villa on Tiergartenstrasse had regained possession of him. "You were still a child in those days, my dear Ross. But one thing you can't deny: under the Kaiser we wouldn't have had this mess."
"He lost a war, too."
"I'm not talking about the war. I mean the Nazis."
Where am I? I thought. In New York, in the Black Forest hunted by the S.S., in Brussels, or in some never-never land? I felt as I often did at night, when I woke up in the dark. I gave myself a jolt and looked into Vriesländer's watery eyes.
"A drop of vodka would hit the spot," I said.
"Excellent. Suppose we join the ladies."
The "ladies" consisted of Tannenbaum and Ravic, the surgeon. "How are the twins?" I asked Tannenbaum. "Have you pinched the wrong one in the ass yet?"
"I never pinch young ladies in the ass. But while we're on the subject, do you think it's only their faces that are alike or . . ."
"You mean their temperaments?"
"Yes, call it their temperaments."
"Well, there are two schools."
"But wouldn't it be terrible to take the wrong one. Suppose one were a cold fish and the other a sex fiend."
"It's been known to happen," I said. "Even in Siamese twins. They both have the same smile, but one turns out to be a nun and the other a whore."
Mrs. Vriesländer appeared in a high-waisted Empire gown, as bulky as Madame de Staël. She was wearing a sapphire bracelet with stones the size of hazelnuts. "Cocktails, gentlemen?"
The remaining guests arrived, the twins, an actor by the name of Vesel, and Carmen, who was munching a chocolate bar. I wondered whether it would spoil her appetite for the inevitable herring. It didn't.
"I'm leaving for Hollywood in two weeks," Tannenbaum announced as the goulash was being served. Preening himself like a peacock, he leered in the general direction of the twins.
"What will you be doing there?" Vriesländer asked.
"Acting, of course. The usual S.S. man. A Gruppenführer, in fact."
"I suppose they picked you for your name?" I suggested.
"I act under the name of Gordon T. Crane. T is for Tannenbaum."
"A Gruppenführer?" said Vriesländer. "Isn't that the equivalent of a general? Have you had military experience?"
"I don't need military experience. All I need is hatred. Naturally the guy is a stinker. If he weren't, I'd have to turn down the part."
"Gruppenführer," said Mrs. Vriesländer. "That's very impressive; I'd have expected one of the big American actors to play a part like that."
"American actors refuse to play Nazis," said Vesel. "It's bad for their image. We have to or we'd starve."
"Art is art," said Tannenbaum loftily. "Wouldn't you do Rasputin or Genghis Khan or Ivan the Terrible if they asked you?"
"Don't quarrel," said Vriesländer. "You ought to be helping each other. What have we got for dessert?"
"Sachertorte."
We ate till we were foaming at the mouth. After the Sachertorte the cook brought in an enormous dish of Salzburger Nockerl, as light as an angel's nightgown. "Nobody eats in this crazy country," she complained. "They're all dieting. They live on raw carrots and celery. It's pathetic."
As usual there was plenty, of goulash left over, and the guests were offered jars of it to take home. Ravic and Carmen declined, he because of his dignity, she because she was too lazy to carry it. The cook, who had a special liking for me, perhaps because I made no secret of my admiration for her talents, gave me two jars of goulash and a whole box of cake.
Natasha was working that night. She had given me the keys to her apartment. I deposited my goulash and cake and went back down for beer.
It gave me a strange feeling to let myself into the empty apartment As far as I could remember, this had never happened to me before. It was like having an apartment of my own. The place was cool. I heard the hum of the air conditioning and of the icebox, and they seemed like friendly guardian spirits. I turned on the light, put the beer in the icebox, emptied the goulash into a saucepan, and put it on a low gas flame. Then I switched off the light and opened the windows. A wave of warm air poured in. The little blue flame of the stove diffused a faint magical glow. I turned on the radio and tuned in on a program of Debussy preludes. I sat down in a chair beside the window and looked out at the glittering city. It was the first time I had waited for Natasha like this. I felt deliciously calm and relaxed. I hadn't told her yet that I was going to California with Silvers.
About an hour later I heard the key in the lock. For an instant I thought the owner of the apartment had come back unexpectedly—then I heard Natasha's step. "Is that you, Robert? Why are you sitting in the dark?"
She flung down her suitcase. "I'm dirty and very hungry. What should I do first?"
"Take a bath. And while you're in the tub, m serve you a dish of goulash. I've got it on the stove. And there's Sach-ertorte for dessert"
"Have you been visiting that wonderful cook again?"
"Yes, and like a good mother bird I've brought home plenty for the family. We won't have to shop for three days."
Natasha had already thrown her clothes off. The bathroom was full of steam and smelted of Mary Chess carnation. I brought in the goulash. For a moment the world was at peace.
"I was Anna Karenina this evening. All done up in furs. When I came out I was surprised not to see any snow on the ground."
"You look like Anna Karenina."
She laughed. "Everybody has his private Anna Karenina. I'm afraid the original was a good deal stouter than the women of today. That was the style. Built like a Rubens, long whalebone corset, full-length skirt. You wouldn't have been likely to see her in a bathtub. But why were you sitting in the dark?"
"Because you'd left the newspaper on the table and I didn't want to look at it."
"Why not?"
"Because there's nothing I can do about it."
"Who can? Except the soldiers."
"Yes," I said. "Except the soldiers."
Natasha handed me her empty plate. "Would you like to be one?"
"No. It wouldn't change anything."
She watched me for a minute
or two. Then she asked me: "Are you very unhappy?"
"I'd never admit that. And besides, what difference does my unhappiness make when other people are dying?"
She shook her head. "What is it you really want, Robert?"
I looked at her in surprise. "What I want? That's a funny question." I was stalling for time.
"What do you want to do later on? What's your aim in life?"
"You can't ask questions like that in the bathtub," I said. "Come on out."
She stood up but refused to be diverted. "What do you really want out of life?" she asked.
"Nobody knows that. Do you?"
"I don't need to know. I'm only a reflection."
"A reflection?"
"Don't try to sidetrack me. What do you want? What do you live for?"
"Who knows that? And if I did know, it probably wouldn't be true any more. For the present I travel light and I don't think about such things."
"You really don't know?"
"I really don't know. Not the way a banker or a priest knows. And in that sense I never will." I kissed her wet shoulders. "You've got to remember, Natasha, that for years my whole life was a struggle for survival. It kept me so busy that I never got around to asking what I wanted to survive for. Satisfied?"
"That's not true and you know it You don't want to tell me. Or maybe you don't want to admit it to yourself. I've heard you screaming."
"What?"
She nodded. "In your sleep."
"What did I scream?"
"I don't remember. I was asleep myself. Your screaming woke me."
Thank God she didn't remember. "Everybody has bad dreams now and then."
For a time she was silent. Then she said thoughtfully: "I don't really know anything about you."
"You know too much already. It's not good for love."
I pushed her gently out of the bathroom. "You have the most beautiful knees in the world."
"You're trying to change the subject"
"Why should I want to do that? Haven't we got our pact? You reminded me of it yourself not so long ago."
"Forget about our pact. That was only a pretext. We both wanted to forget something. Did you succeed?"
Suddenly I felt a cold pang in my heart. Not the violent blow I would have expected—more like the touch of a shadowy hand. It lasted for only a moment but the chill remained. "I had nothing to forget" I said. "I was lying."
"I shouldn't ask you such stupid questions," she said. "I don't know what got into me. Maybe it's because I was Anna Karenina all evening, wrapped in furs. It made me feel so romantic and sentimental, I saw myself riding through the snow in a troika. Maybe the fall has hit me harder than you. In the fall all pacts are suspended. In the fall people only want ... What do we want in the fall?"
"Love," I said.
She laughed. "What would you do right now if you had your choice?"
"Make love to you."
"Why don't you then? Can't you see that's what I've been waiting for the whole time?"
XXIII
The dream came more than a week later. I had expected it sooner and then I had started thinking it wouldn't come. Very cautiously I had toyed with the hope that it was gone forever, and tried to persuade myself that the attacks of sudden faintness, which made me feel as if the. earth were trembling, were mere aftereffects.
I was mistaken. It was the same sticky, dense black dream as before. It began in the musty darkness of the cellar in Brussels. The walls were moving in on me to crush me. I screamed and gasped for air. I thought I was awake but, still in my dreams, the sticky mud had come. I was being hunted. I had secretly crossed the border. I was in the Black Forest, and the S.S. were hunting me with police dogs, led by the man with the cruel smile. They had caught me, and I was back in the crematorium. The breath had gone out of me. They had just taken me down unconscious from one of the meat hooks on the wall. I smelled perfume, I saw the smiling face. The man with the face was speaking to me. He said that he wouldn't kill me just yet; maybe later, much later, when I begged him on my knees, he'd burn me alive. He told me what would happen to my eyes. And my dream ended as it always did: I had buried someone in a garden and almost forgotten about it But then the police had found the body, and I wondered why I hadn't chosen a better hiding place.
It was a long, time before I realized that I was in America and that I had been dreaming. I was too exhausted to move. I lay there staring at the reddish glow of the New York night. I was afraid the dream would attack again and I let myself fall, asleep. That had already happened to me, and the second time was even worse than the first.
I went down to the dimly lit lobby. Melikov's replacement was snoring in the comer. With his furrowed lifeless face and his open groaning mouth, he himself looked like a torture victim who had just been taken down unconscious from the meat hook.
I'm one of them, I thought; I belong to that horde of murderers. Regardless of what I tell myself in the daytime, they were my people—even if they did hunt me and drive me out of the country and take away my citizenship. I was born among them and that was why I tried to make myself believe that an honest, kindly, intelligent people had been hypnotized by invading demons from Mars. How absurd! lie evil had grown from the very heart of the people, a people who had elected to be ruled by drill sergeants and classroom martinets. Those tens of thousands of wide-open, roaring mouths in the newsreels—those were the people; they had cast off their thin coating of civilization and reverted to barbarism. Furor Teutonicus!
I went out into the street and headed for Broadway in quest of light. Here and there an all-night cafeteria cast its cold neon glow over the street. A few weary customers sat livid and motionless at the counters. The street was deserted. Light without people was even eerier than darkness; it was something useless in a utilitarian world, and made me think of the moon, as though the streets were craters between buildings.
I stopped outside a delicatessen. The sausages in the window seemed to be in mourning. A sign told me that the owner's name was Chaim Finkelstein, a man who no doubt had left Europe at the right time. I stared at the name. I didn't even have that excuse. I couldn't claim to be a Jew, I couldn't say I had nothing in common with the Teutons, I was one of them, and in that spectral foggy dawn I wouldn't have been surprised if Mr. Chaim Finkelstein had suddenly appeared with a knife and attacked me as one of the murderers of his people.
I plodded down Broadway through the theater district, past Macy's, and on to Twenty-third Street, where I turned back north on Fifth Avenue. There was little traffic, but the traffic lights kept changing obstinately from red to green and green to red, as though playing some game of their own, unrelated to human purposes. I trudged on, knowing that my only salvation lay in walking and breathing. On the avenue of luxury I felt rather more secure, as though its imposing walls protected me from the dark chaos that seemed to threaten from both sides. The light paled; time seemed suspended between night and morning. Then suddenly the new day appeared, tender and virginal, clad in pink and silvery-gray, and the first rays of the sun struck the uppermost stories of the taller buildings. The night was over, I thought, and felt relieved of a great weight. I stopped outside one of the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, where a group of fur-clad ladies had been struck motionless by a fairy wand—a dozen Anna Kareninas congealed by the Russian winter. Then I was very hungry and I stopped at the nearest cafeteria for breakfast.
By now Betty knew she had cancer. No one had told her, everyone had tried to set her mind at rest, but, suspicious from the first, she had taken note of every troubling indication and gradually pieced the picture together—very much like a general who, disregarding the official optimism of his entourage, carefully coordinates the scraps of information that pour in from all sides and concludes that the battle is lost. But instead of resigning herself, instead of surrendering, she had thrown herself into a heroic- struggle for every single day. She didn't want to die. Death had stood by her bedside during her period of doubt, bu
t now by a supreme effort of the will she banished it. She would live to see Berlin and her cherished Olivaer Platz again. That was where she came from, and she was determined to go back, just as a salmon finds its way from the ocean to the mountain brook where it was spawned.
She studied the newspapers feverishly. She bought a map of Germany and fastened it to her bedroom wall. Every morning after reading the news dispatches she would, mark the position of the advancing Allied armies with colored pins. The Third Reich was dying, and she had made up her mind to outlast it.
Betty had always been the soul of kindness, and for her friends she remained unchanged. She could not see an unhappy face without trying to help. But she hardened her heart to the suffering of the German people and the mass death that foreshadowed the end of the war, a catastrophe which to her frenzied mind had ceased to be human and become mathematical. Why didn't the Germans just surrender? Not for their own sake, but for hers. According to Kahn, she took it as a personal insult.
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