Actually, Germany had ceased to exist for her; only Berlin was left In connection with Berlin she saw the human reality of the war, the blood and horror. She marked the bombings on a large map of the city and suffered. She wept and raged because children had been put into uniform and sent out to fight Like a melancholy owl she stared at us out of great horror-stricken eyes, unable to understand why her Berlin and her Berliners wouldn't surrender and drive out the parasites who were sucking their blood.
"How long will you be away?" she asked me.
"I'm not sure. Two weeks, maybe more."
"I'll miss you."
"I"ll miss you, too, Betty. You're my guardian angel."
"A guardian angel with a cancer in her belly."
"You haven't got cancer, Betty."
"I can feel it," she whispered. "I feel it gnawing at night I hear it. Like a silkworm gnawing mulberry leaves. I've got to stuff myself, or it will eat me away too quickly. I eat five meals a day now. I mustn't lose weight I've got to have reserves. How do I look?"
"Well, Betty. Flourishing."
"Do you think I'll make it?"
"What, Betty?"
That I'll make it back to Berlin."
"Why not?"
She looked at me with her hungry sunken eyes. "Will they let us in?"
"Who? The Germans?"
Betty nodded. "I was thinking about it last night Maybe they'll arrest us at the border and send us to a camp."
"That's impossible, Betty. They won't be giving the orders any more. The Americans and the English and the Russians will be there. They'll be giving the orders."
"The Russians? But haven't they got concentration camps, too? And they'll be in Berlin. Won't they send us to the mines in Siberia? Or to their death camps?"
Her lips trembled. "I wouldn't think about all that now, Betty," I said. "Wait till the war is over. Then we'll see what happens. Maybe it will be entirely different from anything we can imagine now."
"What do you mean?" asked Betty anxiously. "Do you think the war will go on after Berlin is taken? In the Alps? In Berchtesgaden?"
She thought of the war only in relation to her quickly ebbing life. I saw she was watching me and I knew I had to be careful. Sick people are very keen-sighted. "You think the same as Kahn," she said accusingly. "That I only think of Olivaer Platz, instead of worrying about victories and defeats like other people."
"Why shouldn't you, Betty? YouVe suffered enough. You have a perfect right to concentrate on Olivaer Platz."
"I know. But . . ."
"Dont listen to those people, Betty. Our refugee friends are a lot of armchair generals. Do you think the war will be won any sooner because of their grand strategy, or that our General Tannenbaum is doing any good with his blood list? Just be your own self."
Great raindrops splashed against the windowpanes, and the room darkened. Suddenly Betty giggled. "That Tannenbaum! He says if he ever has to play Hitler in a movie, he'll play him as a cheap seducer out to bamboozle elderly widows. He says that's what he looks like, with his Napoleon hairdo and the little brush under his nose."
I nodded. I was sick of these cheap refugee jokes. When a man had come so close to destroying the world, you couldn't dispose of him with a joke. "Tannenbaum is a card," I said.
I stood up. "Good-by, Betty, m be back soon. By then youll have forgotten all your black thoughts—it's just your imagination. You should have been a writer. I wish I had half your imagination."
She took this as the compliment I had intended. Her eyes lit up. "That's a good idea, Ross. But what should. I write about? Nothing interesting has ever happened to me."
"About your life, Betty. The full life you've lived for us alk"
"Do you know what, Ross? I think I might actually try."
"You really should."
"But who would read what I write? And who would publish it? That was the trouble with Moller. He was desperate because no one would publish him in America. That's why he hanged himself."
"I don't think so, Betty," I said quickly. "I believe it was because he couldn't write over here. He had no more ideas. The first year he was still full of indignation and protest and he did write. But he had nothing to say. The danger was over, his indignation had no new personal experience to back it up, it turned into rebellious boredom and impotent resignation. Most of us are satisfied to have saved our lives; he wasn't. He wanted more, and that destroyed him."
Betty had listened attentively. "like Kahn?" she asked.
"Kahn? What has it got to do with Kahn?"
"I don't know. Just a hunch."
"Kahn isn't a writer. He's a man of action."
"Exactly," said Betty hesitantly. "But maybe I'm mistaken."
"I'm sure you are, Betty."
I wasn't so sure as I descended the dark stairs. In the doorway I met Gräfenheim. "How is she?" he asked.
"Not so good," I said. "Are you giving her sedatives?"
"Not yet She'll need them soon enough."
The rain had stopped, but the sidewalk was still wet I headed for Fifty-seventh Street, but after a few blocks I decided to look in on Kahn.
I found him in his shop. He was reading Grimm's Fairy Tales. "Amazing how bloodthirsty German fairy tales are," he said. "Have you ever thought about it?"
"No. I haven't read them since I was a child."
"They drip with blood. Knives, poison, torture. No wonder the Germans are a people of executioners, growing up with such stuff."
He slammed the book shut "You might say that the Bible isn't exactly a tea party either, but that's history! Fairy tales are imagination. Some imagination! When are you off to Hollywood?"
"In two days."
"You may see Carmen turning up there."
"Carmen?"
Kahn laughed. "Some little assistant director has given her a contract. Three months at a hundred dollars a week. She'll be back again before you know it No talent whatever."
"Did she want to go?"
"No, she's too lazy. I had to persuade her."
"Why did you want to do that?"
"So she won't think she's missed something. She'd never have forgiven me. Let her find out for herself. Wasn't I right?"
I said nothing. He was uneasy. "Wasn't I right?" he asked again.
"I hope so. She's very beautiful. I wouldn't have risked it."
He laughed again; it sounded rather forced. "Why not? There are thousands of beautiful women in Hollywood. Some of them even have talent. She hardly knows a word of English. I hope you'll kind of keep an eye on her after she arrives. You will, won't you?"
"Of course. Insofar as it's possible to look after a beautiful girl."
"With Carmen it's easy. She sleeps most of the time."
"I'll be glad to. But I don't know anybody myself. Except maybe Tannenbaum."
"Just take her out to dinner now and then. And when the time is ripe, persuade her to come back to New York."
"All right. What will you do while she's away?"
"The same as usual."
"What's that?"
"Nothing. Sell radios. What else can I do? Enthusiasm over being alive is like champagne. Once the cork is drawn, it goes stale. Luckily, most people don't notice. Good luck, Ross. Don't turn into an actor. You're one already."
"When you get back," said Natasha, "this little love nest will again be the home of a melancholy homosexual. I had a letter from him this morning on the loveliest stationery. It smelled of Jockey Club."
"Where from?"
"Does that suddenly interest you?"
"No. Just an idiotic question to hide my confusion."
"From Mexico. Where one more great love has come to an end."
"What do you mean; one more?"
"Is that another idiotic question to hide your confusion?"
"No, this time I'm interested."
She propped herself up on one arm and looked into the mirror, so that our eyes met. "Why do we find unhappiness so much more interesting than ha
ppiness? Are we such envious animals?"
"That, too. But mostly because happiness is boring."
She laughed. "There's something in that. It would be hard to talk five minutes about happiness. What can a happy person say except that he's happy? About unhappiness we can talk day and night."
"That's true of trivial unhappiness," I said hesitantly. "Not of the real thing."
She was still looking straight at me. The light from the living room shone in her eyes,, making them strangely bright and transparent "Are you very unhappy, Robert?" she asked.
"No," I said after a while.
"I'm glad you didn't say you were happy. Usually I don't object to lies. I'm a pretty good liar myself. But sometimes I can't stand a lie."
"I wish very much that I were happy," I said.
"You're not, though. Not the way other people are happy."
We were still looking at each other in the mirror. It seemed easier than to face each other directly. "You asked me the same question a few days ago," I said.
"That time you lied. You thought I was going to make a scene and you were trying to head me off. I wasn't going to make a scene."
"I wasn't lying," I said almost automatically, and immediately regretted it. Sad to say, I had acquired certain principles that had helped me to survive but were of no use in my private life; one of them was never to confess a lie. It was axiomatic in my battle with the police but sadly out of place in my dealings with the woman I loved.
"I wasn't lying," I said. "I only expressed myself clumsily. We have taken over certain terms from a more romantic century. One of them is 'happiness.' When a romantic was happy in love, he was completely happy, and the universe with him: the birds sang madrigals, the heavens kissed the sea, even the most distant stars celebrated. Today things, or maybe I should say people, are a little more complicated. We're never more than partly happy, maybe a third, maybe half, and I suppose the part of us that isn't happy is unhappy."
"Thank you, professor," said Natasha, releasing my eyes and lying back on the pillow. "But don't you think the old way was better—anyway, simpler?"
"Probably. The old total happiness was a lie, but it was easier to live with."
"No," she said. "Why must you always be so reasonable? In those days people had imagination. They took their fantasies seriously, and nobody thought of calling them lies. What counted was feeling, and feeling was measured by its intensity, not by ethical standards. The trouble with you is that you've lost faith in feeling, but you're still ready to fall for high-sounding phrases. Well, you'll hear plenty of those in Hollywood."
"How do you know? Have you been there?"
"Yes. Luckily, I wasn't photogenic."
"You not photogenic!"
"Not for the movies, or so they said."
"Would you have stayed there if you had been?"
She kissed me. "You poor innocent. Any woman who says different is lying. Do you think I'm so in love with the work I do now? Persuading a lot of rich fat cows that they can wear dresses designed for nymphs!"
"I wish you could come along," I said without thinking.
"I can't The winter season is starting. And we have no money."
"Will you be unfaithful to me?"
"Naturally." "You think it's natural?"
"I'm not unfaithful to you when you're here."
I looked at her. I didn't know whether she meant it or not. "When somebody's not here," she said, "it's as though he were never coming back. It won't hit me right away— later on . . ."
"How soon?"
"How do I know? Don't leave me alone and you'll never have to ask such a question."
"That's a funny way to look at it," I said.
"It's the simplest way. If somebody's here, I dont need anybody else. If he's not here, I'm alone. And who can stand being alone? I can't."
"Does it happen so quickly?" I asked, beginning to feel alarmed. "You just exchange one for another?"
She laughed. "Of course not If s not one for another; it's being alone for not being alone. Maybe men can stand being alone. Women can't. The ones who say they can are kidding you, or kidding themselves."
"So you can't stand being alone?"
"Not very well, Robert. I'm a clinging vine. When there's no one to cling to, I lie on the ground and rot."
"In two weeks?"
"How do I know how long you'll be gone? I never believe in dates. Especially coming-back dates."
"That's a lovely prospect."
She took me in her arms and kissed me. "Would you rather have a weeping willow who went into a nunnery?"
"Not while I'm here. Only when I'm away."
"You can't have everything."
"That's the saddest sentence in the world."
"Not the saddest, the wisest"
I knew we were playing, but not with blunted arrows. "I'd stay here if I could," I said. "But in a week I'd have nothing to eat. Silvers would take on another assistant."
I hated myself for explaining. I didn't want to put myself in a situation that required me to make explanations like some wishy-washy husband. She was a sly one, I thought angrily, she had forced a change of terrain. I was no longer fighting her on her territory, but on mine, and that meant danger. A bullfighter had once taught me that. "Ill just have to get used to it," I said with a laugh.
That displeased her, but she didn't react "It's fall," she said, with one of her abrupt changes of mood. "It's a hard season to live through even without being alone."
"But for you it's already winter, Natasha. You told me you were always a season in advance."
"You can worm your way out of everything," she said angrily. "You ought to be a lawyer."
"There's one thing I can't worm myself out of," I said. "My love for you."
Her face changed. "I wish you wouldn't lie," she said.
"I'm not lying," I said. "Why should I?"
"You're always so full of plans. You never let anything take you by surprise. I always do. Why don't you?"
"I have. To my regret. You're my first pleasant surprise. A surprise that can never become a habit"
"Are you spending the night here?"
"I'll stay here until I have to double-time to the station."
"I wouldn't do that. Take a cab."
We slept very little that night. We woke up and made love and fell asleep in each other's arms and woke up and talked and made love again, or merely felt each other's warmth and the mystery of two bodies, united and yet forever separate. We wore ourselves out in an attempt to overcome that separation, emitting frantic, senseless cries that welled up from the unconscious. We hated each other and loved each other. We shouted at each other like truck drivers in an effort to penetrate each other even more deeply, to efface all artificial limits from our minds and fathom the secret of the wind and the sea. Exhausted, we waited for the profound brown-and-gold stillness of the final leI'down, when even words are too much trouble and there is no need of them, when all words are far away, dispersed like pebbles after a heavy rain; we waited, and the stillness came, and it was in us and we felt it: the stillness in which one is nothing more than a soft breath that scarcely stirs in the lungs—we waited for it, we sank into it, and through it Natasha sank into sleep, but I lay awake, watching her, and it was a long while before I, too, fell asleep. I looked at her with the secret curiosity I have always felt toward sleepers, as though they knew something that was forever hidden from me. I saw her relaxed face, which, carried away from me by the magic of sleep, knew nothing of me, that face for which all e cries, oaths', and raptures of an hour past had ceased to exist, beside which I could die without its taking notice; with a fascination akin to horror I looked at this stranger next to me, this stranger who was closer to me than anyone else in the world, and I suddenly realized that die only beings we can possess entirely are the dead, because they cannot escape. All others change with every heartbeat; they go away and when they come back they are not the same. Only the dead were faithful. That
was their power.
Shadows in Paradise Page 24
