The Stone Face

by William Gardner Smith

  Raoul’s eyes flashed. “How can you say that?”

  Henri shrugged. “Why try to say anything different? The French are prejudiced, they don’t think of Algerians as human beings. Especially the middle classes.”

  “Let’s not start the class war again.”

  “Have you ever invited an Arab to your home?”

  “There are lots of people I’ve never invited to my home!”

  “Do you have any Arab friends? Would you even consider the possibility of having a serious conversation with an Arab? Don’t you resent it when an Arab sits at a table next to you in a café, or beside you in the bus? If you were renting out a room in your apartment, would you even consider renting it to an Arab? No, it’s racism, Raoul. Let’s face it.”

  “It’s not racism. They’re different. I wouldn’t rent a room to an Arab because he’d probably rob the whole apartment while I was out. That’s a fact. But it’s not racism.”

  Simeon suppressed a smile, and said nothing.

  PART TWO

  The White Man

  I

  1

  THE TALL, stout man with balding head walked down the path toward Simeon and Maria. They were sitting on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens. The stout man halted a couple of yards in front of them and stared. Simeon suddenly felt himself going tense. He looked up at the man’s red intent face, but the man did not move.

  Maria did not seem to notice anything. Simeon continued to glare, but the man did not move or alter his gaze. Brazen bastard, Simeon thought. Never saw a black man and a white woman before? This is Paris, man! Simeon jumped to his feet.

  “What’s the matter, man, see something you don’t like?”

  “Bitte?” the man said, startled. “Please? I am sorry. Is difficult to understand English. You are American? I am Cherman.”

  German. Well, everyone knew their racial ideas! Still, the fact that the man was not an American calmed Simeon somewhat.

  “What’re you staring at?”

  “Staring? Ah I’m sorry. Is just—your young lady has such a remarkable face. The glasses and all, with the bones, you see. I am painter. I was fascinated. Forgive me. I did not mean to stare.” He smiled, bowed stiffly, turned and walked off.

  Simeon sat down, his hands trembling. He felt ridiculous; the man was a painter! Maria was looking at him in surprise.

  “Why did you talk to him so rough? He did nothing.”

  Simeon shrugged nervously. She had not understood.

  “It’s just that he was staring so hard.”

  She laughed. “Staring? But that hurts no one. It is flattering, in fact. It is no reason to be angry.”

  He was furious with himself, but more furious with her for not understanding.

  “No. Only in the States. It’s complicated . . .”

  No she could not understand. He often felt far away from her emotionally and now deliberately pushed her farther into that alien white world. The incident with the Algerians had changed his attitude toward life in Paris—he was more conscious of the distance between himself and the other white people around him, including the French. There has been a return of buried hatreds; forgotten walls had shot up again between him and the world.

  2

  The air was hot and dusty under the trees in the Gardens as Maria and Simeon walked on. The slow sensuousness of Maria’s walk excited him. She was staring with a wistful envy at the children playing ball, sailing boats. But she was more than a child, Simeon thought. She was a prism of changing moods. Very often in her sleep she moaned and talked in Polish. Sometimes she screamed, then woke up.

  “Are you all right, Maria?”

  “Is the light on?” she’d say in terror.

  “No.” He flicked the switch. She closed her eyes and sobbed in relief, her head on his shoulder. For an instant, Simeon knew, she had thought she was blind.

  Was she ever really a self he could grasp, identify? In the act of love? He had always been shy; even in the days of the Chase, he could rarely lose consciousness of himself. But Maria had no shyness, no inhibitions of this sort. Her body gave itself completely and her passion had the power of thawing Simeon, melting the frozen muscles. This lovely child-woman who did not understand him and whom he did not understand.

  3

  They lunched, then took a nap early in the afternoon. Simeon woke before Maria, slipped on his clothes and went out to have a cup of coffee and buy a newspaper. When he came back, Maria was sitting up in the bed, furiously exhaling the smoke of a cigarette. Her legs were covered, her waist and breasts bare, and her dark, fragile eyes were staring at the wall straight ahead.

  “Awake at last?” Simeon said cheerfully. “Hello.”

  She did not reply and would not look at him.

  “What’s the matter?” Simeon said.

  “You are one of such men!”

  “One of what men?”

  “You know what sort of men! Those who must always seduce the maids in hotels!”

  Simeon was stunned and wanted to laugh, but her face was so wrought with anger and pain that he did not have the heart. “My sweet Slavic soul,” he said, “let’s start at the beginning. What man? What maid? What are we talking about?”

  She looked at him now, as though a first doubt were gleaming in her mind. “I heard her, the maid. She met a man in the hall, I could tell it was you, and they laughed and began whispering together and then went together into the empty room across the hall. I knew it was you! Don’t lie. I wanted to go throw open the door and scratch out her eyes, and yours, too, but I was too proud. So I sat here smoking and waiting. Five minutes ago they came out, and whispered and laughed again. And I waited. And now, here you are. Pretending to be innocent!”

  This time Simeon did laugh. She looked at him and frowned, still uncertain. “I never even saw the maid. I was downstairs, buying a paper and having a coffee.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “Here’s the paper.” He held up a copy of the London Observer. Maria, still frowning, stamped her cigarette out in the ashtray, then stared again at the wall. Finally she threw off the covers and walked toward the washstand. As she passed him, she grinned sheepishly and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

  Simeon lay across the bed and admired her long legs and high, uptilting breasts. Her skin was bronzed and smooth to the touch, not waxen like the skin of Ingrid the Swedish girl. Naked, Maria always moved him to a tender, protective feeling.

  He said, “And now explain, mon trésor. Where did you hear about ‘such men’ as sleep with maids in hotels?”

  “I read about it.”

  “Where?”

  “In . . . French novels I read in Poland.”

  He laughed. He adored her. He wanted suddenly to kiss her, to commit himself, place himself in her power. But he was afraid of her. He knew he could easily become the slave of that somber face and long careless body. He was certain he would lose her one day to another world.

  He laughed and said, “And you think of me like the people in those novels? Me? And I’m not French!”

  She raised a leg to wash a foot in the washbasin. “No, but you live in Paris. You are one of these Paris men. Sophisticated. Many women before.”

  He studied her mobile face in the mirror. She was so full of contradictions. She was shy in company, yet on hot summer days she liked to wear only a thin dress without underclothes. When Simeon raised an eyebrow she would shrug and say: “It’s too hot; I want to be comfortable.” She was careful with money, but at the Enghein gambling casino she would throw away hundreds of thousands of her Paris mother’s francs on a turn of the wheel. He had not taken her aspirations to be an actress seriously until he went to see her in Lorca’s Noces de Sang. He had received a shock seeing her without her glasses in the role of the Fiancée, dressed in a Spanish costume. She was electric and convincing
.

  Now she studied herself critically in the mirror. She had completely forgotten her accusation about the maid.

  He said with mock solemnity, “Now, Maria, I want the truth. How many men have you slept with?”

  She frowned “Slept with? Lovers?” She turned and looked at him and, as always, he could not tell what was behind the film over her eyes. “Two men, Simeon. You are the second man. This is the truth. But there is something else. I cannot tell you now. I tell you another time. . . . And you? How many women?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A guess.”

  “I couldn’t even guess. Honestly. I can’t remember about when I was young.”

  She laughed. “You are still young. Looking at yourself with your black patch in mirror, like a little boy pirate. I bet you had this fantasy when you were a child.”

  “Yes.”

  “I as a child always imagined I was an actress. As a child in Poland, in German labor camp, my mind was always far away in America or France.” She looked at the unfinished portrait of the monstrous white face, which Simeon had propped on the easel. “Why you paint such a terrible face?” she asked. “It looks like somebody I knew before.”

  Simeon stood up and looked at the portrait. What are they doing now, he wondered—Chris, Mike, the sailor? “No,” he said firmly. He removed the canvas from the frame, rolled it up and snapped a rubber band around it, and tossed it into a closet.

  “You should burn it,” she said.

  “No. I want to keep it.”

  She dressed and they went out. Simeon said, “I want to take you someplace. Show you something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve found an apartment.”

  It was a studio apartment on the rue Saint-Sulpice, just around the corner from his hotel. He had paid three months rent in advance, and could move on the first of the month.

  The apartment consisted of a large, light studio, a smaller room, kitchen and bath.

  “Do you like it?” Simeon asked.

  “Very much.”

  He felt awkward. “Maria, there’s not much sense in your keeping your room while I have this apartment. Come live here with me.”

  She laughed. “Ah, and your male freedom!”

  “I’ll be free enough.”

  She looked out of the window. Her face had changed again. “No, I think it is better for both of us, especially for you, if I keep my room.” She looked at him and smiled. “But I bring toothbrush here, if you like. And bedroom slippers. That way, if you bring another woman here, she knows you belong to me!”

  Late in the afternoon they strolled along the Seine and through the Tuileries and then along the Champs-Élysées. It was a splendid warm day, the café terraces were filled, children played in the parks and hundreds of people were also out walking. Simeon always felt an intense pleasure when he walked through Paris. How had this miracle happened? Why wasn’t he back on South Street, in the sweltering slums, where he belonged? He felt both happy and uneasy.

  “Champs-Élysées!” Maria said. “Since I was child, and read about in books, I dreamed how I would love walking on this street.”

  She stopped at every shopwindow, staring happily at everything from women’s clothes to automobiles. When well-dressed women passed, she would squeeze Simeon’s hand. “Look at that beautiful dress! The woman is so elegant! I would like to be like her!”

  “She’s probably shallow, conceited, stupid . . .”

  “Maybe. But such clothes! And the way she walks! She probably has a big house and cars and servants!”

  He sometimes found himself wondering whether Maria ever thought of anything else. And then he remembered the murmurings, the sobs at night.

  They sat on the terrace of Fouquet’s, ordered coffee and commented on the passing world of the Champs-Élysées. A group of Africans walked by; they saw Simeon, smiled, and nodded a greeting. Simeon felt warm inside. Black men nearly always greeted black men on the streets of Paris. They knew each other.

  “What did you do in America?” Maria asked suddenly.

  “I worked for a newspaper.”

  “You made much money?”

  “Compared to French standards, yes.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t understand why you left. Oh, I like Paris very much, but I think I will always have little money here. But in the United States, I will make a lot of money and have car. I asked you before why you left, and you told me was because life there was gray. Why did you really go?”

  He did not really want to talk about it with Maria, but tried. “I got tired of waiting for the dream to come true.”

  “Comment?”

  “I’m impatient. I didn’t like the big and little humiliations of being a black man there.”

  She frowned, looking toward the street. “I don’t understand it. I read some things about it, you know, what happens there with the race problem. But I don’t understand it. Is it really so terrible, still?”

  “You mean, do they chase black men down the streets of Philadelphia and New York with lynch ropes? No. And in an ordinary day, nothing striking happens, people don’t even notice you on the street. But a hundred tiny things happen—micro-particles, nobody can see them but us. And there’s always the danger that something bigger will happen. The Beast in the Jungle, you’re always tense, waiting for it to spring. It’s terrible, yes. And, we want to breathe air, we don’t want to think about this race business twenty-four hours a day. We don’t want our noses pushed down in it for the seventy-odd years of our lives. But you have to keep thinking about it; they force you to think about it all the time.”

  “Aren’t you ever going back?”

  “I don’t know.” He was surprised at his uncertainty. It had not occurred to him before that he might never return to America. He was struck by the irony of being with a woman who longed to go to the country he had fled. Still, there was a similarity in their pasts and, in the present, they were fugitives. Paris was a way-station for both of them, and neither could predict anything beyond the present moment.

  Simeon felt close to Maria that night, as she lay in bed smoking a cigarette and looking at the cream-colored ceiling through those condemned eyes, saying, “What you asked me this afternoon, about how many men I slept with before, yes, I must tell you. I said you were the second man. Second normal man, you understand. First was a Polish man I knew.”

  “Who is he?” Simeon asked, jealously.

  “He was the man that I was going to marry, but it could not work. He is builder, enthusiastic about building Poland up from the ruins. I admire him, but I wanted to flee, you understand.” Her fingers gently touched his patch. “My poor Simeon, your eye . . . my eyes . . . our eyes bring us together, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But before you and before the other man there was the war and the labor camp where I was with my parents during the Occupation, and there was a German officer. When I was nine years old. It was not exactly that he made love to me; he had—odd tastes. I am ashamed. . . . You understand, we were so hungry, so cold, so miserable and frightened, we became horrible people, we would do anything to stay alive. You must never see people brought so low, Simeon; you see what we are capable of and it is terrible, savage. . . . The German officer, the camp commander, liked me. I did what he wanted to keep me and my parents alive.

  “I went to his quarters often. I was there often when the officers met and drank and ate and talked. He was strange, the commander. Many times you could think he was an ordinary human being, with human feelings; but then, at times, something would seem to go click inside him, especially when he was drunk. His face would change. I cannot describe it; it was terrible—yes, like the face in your portrait; his eyes would be hard, the blood would go away and his skin would be white like ashes, cold like stone. At such moments he was cruel,
and would smile when he could humiliate or kill or cause pain.

  “You know what is the ‘line-up’? From time to time, they called out all the prisoners of the camp and the commander passed, saying, ‘You, step to the right; you, step to the left,’ until all of the prisoners had been formed into two lines. Then one of the lines was led away, and we never saw those people again. We knew they had gone to the gas chambers. What was terrible was that you never knew which of the two lines would be led away. And each person hoped that the other line would be led away, no matter who was in it; it was horrible how one wanted to stay alive, how one wanted the others to die so one could stay alive!

  “Now, me, after a time, I knew I did not have to worry, for I could feel that the commander was a bit in love with me, and I knew that the line where he put me and my parents would never be led away. But one night, when I was in his rooms, he was very strange. He had received a letter from Germany, and he read it over and over, and at one point I saw tears in his eyes. Very strange, tears in those cold eyes. He looked at me suddenly almost with hate and said, ‘You, you think you know something about suffering! What can you Poles know!’ And he sent me away.

  “The next morning there was a line-up. When the commander came, I could see that he was very drunk and that he had not slept all night. He walked among the prisoners, saying, ‘To the right, to the left.’ I was standing between my mother and father. When he came to me, he said, ‘You, to the right,’ and then he said to my father and to my mother, ‘You, to the left.’ I screamed. The commander turned and stared at me as though he could kill me. I ran to him and whispered, ‘My parents, my parents, you put them in the other line!’ He looked at me as though he did not know me, then pushed me away and walked on, saying, ‘To the right, to the left.’ I screamed, I screamed, I was hysterical, but my father called to me: ‘Be brave, Maria, little Maria.’ My mother was crying, too. Then the commander gave the order that the line with my parents be marched away.