The Kiss of the Prison Dancer

by Jerome Richard

  Max went on working, but he could not get his mind off the scene in the newspaper photograph, a scene he increasingly saw colliding with another scene, a young man with terror in his eyes leaping from the bushes, the two scenes coming together like two trains on the same track, though he tried to keep them apart. A little before five o’clock, he put on his hat and coat and hurried past Shmuel and out of the office. The receptionist said goodnight, but he only waved a hand at her as, head down, he pushed through the doors and out into the street.

  The agency occupied what had once been a private house; only the sign outside distinguished it from neighboring houses. Max was glad he did not work downtown where crowds of people swept blindly along the gaudy streets and the rush hour buses were packed like cattle cars. Here in a neighborhood of stucco houses with gabled roofs Max could come to work and leave as if he were visiting a friend and ride a nearly empty bus well ahead of the tide that was gathering downtown. Children played in the streets and housewives hurried home with the day’s shopping clutched to their breasts. Some wheeled the groceries along like infants in little carts while the actual infants ran along behind, crying because they had been displaced. Sometimes Max would sniff the air and be rewarded with the odor of chicken roasting or even, from one particular house, and there only on Friday evenings, the rich, thick smell of baking bread. Usually he enjoyed walking the two blocks to the bus and he took his time, watching the children play or deliberating about his dinner, but this time he burst into the street and hurried away while children stared after him as if a fish had leaped from the water. He had to know if last night he had stood outside the grove in which the girl was killed.

  The bus took Max to the green lace wall of the park. He got off and watched the bus proceed into the park, but he did not go in. Suppose it is the same place, he thought, what is it my business? He walked back and forth a little on the sidewalk. Traffic was picking up and there was a loud honking of horns as someone failed to respond to a green light. Other people were going into the park, perhaps to see where the crime had been committed. Max said to himself, Why look for trouble? And then, as often happened, another voice sounded in his mind and started talking to the first and Max stood on the sidewalk and listened.

  Suppose the boy is in there?

  And the first voice said, Suppose he is? So what?

  So what! The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime!

  “You getting on or aren’t you?” A bus had pulled up and the driver yelled at Max.

  Max shook his head and moved away from the bus stop. Then he was moving away from the park too, crossing the street and going home. He could picture the boy, could see every detail of his face, the blue eyes, the blond hair, the pimples, the fear that ripped his mouth open and narrowed his eyes. That boy was not a murderer. He was scared, Max told himself, scared. Probably he went into the bushes looking for something and he found the body and got scared just like anyone and he ran away. “Just a boy,” he said out loud, and the silent voices agreed.

  At the door to the house, Max had an idea. Instead of eating at home, he would treat himself to dinner at the Russian restaurant on Geary Boulevard. Eating out was something he ordinarily did only on Sundays when he spent the day at the beach or the zoo and could not bear his own room after all that space, or else he celebrated his birthday by eating at the Jewish restaurant downtown, but he could not face his room tonight and anyway he felt somehow that he had earned a dinner out. Besides, he thought, how do I know it’s even the same grove?

  He ordered borsht and, though he knew he should not have fried foods, piroshkes, and finally, after some hesitation, an éclair to go with his tea and then he sat back and wondered why he let himself eat these things as fingers of acid began to claw at his heart. He drank two glasses of water, but it didn’t help and when he left the restaurant fog was creeping over the city and Max knew his sinuses would close and he would have a headache. The lights of the stores on Geary Boulevard melted in the fog and people walked ghost-like, shifting gray shapes that loomed out of the mist and disappeared again. Max buttoned his coat up to the collar. He found the corner drugstore and bought a roll of stomach mints and then he hurried home.

  Sleep was the only release Max ever found from the pain of a sinus headache, but the old couple were watching television when he came in and Max heard the announcer say: “Police report no clues yet in last night’s brutal rape and murder of seventeen-year-old Linda Jordan.” Max put one foot on the stairs to his room. “Hello, Mr. Friedman,” the old woman called. “Shush,” her husband whispered. Max went into the living room. The picture of the grove was on the television screen though the body was no longer there.

  The old woman motioned him to a seat and said, “Isn’t it awful? If they catch whoever did it, they ought to shoot him.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” the old man cackled, as the picture changed and the announcer began the commercial. “Something more appropriate.”

  His wife turned to him with a look that warned him to stop, but he swished his hand through the air with a cutting motion and then laughed and slapped his thighs. Max took another mint.

  Now Max felt trapped. He didn’t want to see the rest of the news or sit there in that gloomy room, but he couldn’t jump up and leave. The room depressed him; china animals were everywhere, a large cocker spaniel slept on the television set, a deer stood on green china grass on the coffee table, over the bureau hung a plastic tree, its branches sporting tiny china birds, and worst of all, next to Mrs. Thompson sat a life size china cat, its pale green eyes fixed forever on the television set, its mouth cast in an eternal smile. The Thompsons collected china animals; more were scattered about the house and one sat in his room, a giraffe with a tree on a green china oasis that he was afraid to put away because he did not want to offend the Thompsons.

  “I wouldn’t go in that park at night for all the money in the world,” the old woman said.

  “Mr. Friedman goes all the time,” the old man replied.

  He saw that Mrs. Thompson was watching him, waiting for him to say something. “I don’t go there all the time,” Max said. “To tell you the truth, I’m afraid of going there when it’s dark too.” He wanted to tell them it was none of their business, but he could see that their minds were working now. He smiled to show the old woman that he shared her fears of the park.

  “But you do go?” she asked.

  Should I deny it? Max considered. They both turned to face him now, the television announcer spoke to their backs. What if the old man follows me? “Well, I was there last night, but that was the first time in a long time.”

  “Were you near where it happened? I mean, did you”

  “No,” Max said. “I didn’t see anything.” And he excused himself, complaining of his headache.

  “I hope they catch him,” the old woman said.

  “Me too.”

  The old man made the cutting motion in the air and winked at Max who hurried upstairs.

  His room was cold. Max locked the door and put the electric heater on. He put the milk on to warm while he undressed and then he drank it still warm and threw himself on the bed and tried to sleep.

  3

  Max awoke the next morning with a thin film of sweat coating his body. No light showed at the window and when he looked at the clock he saw that it was still an hour until the alarm would ring. He turned the pillow over and pulled his pajamas away from his sweating chest and then lay face up, staring at the ceiling. A strange feeling spread from his heart to every corner of his body and he lay without moving even a finger. He knew the feeling, just as he recognized the terrible silence that had seized the room. It was the feeling one got in the camps when someone had escaped during the night, the same sensation the prisoner must have felt as he crawled through his tunnel or slipped through the barbed wire: The silence was the vacuum between the prisoner’s leaving and the arrival in the morning of the Kommandant. Everyone knew when there had been an e
scape, the silence spread from the missing man’s barracks to every barracks in the camp and there was nothing to do but wait for the Kommandant to come and see what new reprisals he had invented. But when one knew how the prisoner had managed his escape, then one woke up an hour before the rest and stared at the ceiling. Max never knew how he survived the camps: He supposed it was because he didn’t really care, not since the day he learned that his wife had been killed, or as the Sonderkommando had put it, was den Schornstein hinauf. For a while he hated the old grimacing Jew who had given him the news, but then he did not see him around any more and he knew he had gone where his wife had gone and he stopped hating him. Then he would stand at the double row of barbed wire and stare out at the peaceful plains of the German countryside and there was nothing left to hate. He worked in the munitions factory because they told him to and once he stole a pair of pliers from the factory and slipped it to another prisoner in exchange for a piece of bread, lying in bed the next morning staring at the ceiling not so much for himself, though he knew what they did to anyone aiding in an escape, but for the prisoner looking desperately for a place to hide on the peaceful plain.

  Now he lay on a bed in an upstairs bedroom in San Francisco waiting for the alarm to ring as he had once waited for the Allied troops to free him. The prisoners weren’t even sure if they would be Russian or American or British troops, though the sounds of the big guns had come from the west and someone said that would mean either British or Americans. Max was in the hospital when they came. He was lucky. They were American troops and they arrived just in time to interrupt a slaughter of the camp’s survivors. He remembered the American soldiers coming into the barracks the Germans had called a hospital and how quietly they went from bed to bed, as if the prisoners might be sleeping. He remembered that one of the soldiers cried and another vomited.

  Afterwards he went to Israel, but there was nothing for him to do there. He applied to the university, but he did not have his degree and anyway they had enough teachers of German literature, so he learned Hebrew and got a job as a translator at one of the resettlement agencies, but the young Israelis did not talk to him and the old survivors talked only about the camps, comparing conditions and asking over and over if he had seen their wife or sister or brother, so one day he decided to resettle himself again and he came to America. He lay in bed remembering it all until the alarm rang and he jumped as if he had been asleep. At first he thought he had been dreaming, but then he knew he was not dreaming and he was surprised because he had not thought about the camp for a long time. He had died back there in the camp, probably on the day he learned about his wife. Gradually he stopped talking to his friends and after a while his friends stopped calling him Professor, and then he had no friends and he went through the daily routine because there was nothing else for a dead man to do. So he was surprised to find he could think about it at all, though he knew that night in the park that he was coming back to life because he was afraid.

  He was brushing his teeth when he remembered that. He had almost forgotten what happened in the park. The thing to do was to go to the police and tell them about the boy; if he is innocent the police will know, or at least they will find out. But then he remembered the old man’s obscene gesture and he shuddered, and that made him think of the waitress with the big hands who talked of strangling. A voice in him whispered, Suppose he’s guilty? And another voice answered, He’s just a boy, how could he be guilty? Max looked out the window. The city was choking on fog; in the street, people disappeared in it, the whole city disappeared in it, leaving only the bush and the thin row of red carnations that the old man had planted in front of the house, and a small piece of sidewalk not yet engulfed. The boy and the murdered girl seemed to disappear like the park itself in the fog. Max pulled down the-shade. Why should I get involved? he thought. It’s not my business.

  He made coffee, but he found his hand trembling and when he raised the cup the coffee spilled. He tried holding the cup with both hands and that way he got the cup to his lips and sipped it. He became angry with the cup, with his hands. They seemed to conspire against him and when he held the cup out in front of him, still holding it with both hands, it dropped, hitting the saucer and carrying that to the ground with it where cup and saucer both broke and Max watched the hot coffee spread on his lap and said over and over to himself: Das geht mich nichts an!

  Das geht mich nichts an! The words spun round in his head and when he said it aloud they came out in English, but his eyes were wet with tears. “It’s none of my business.” He still remembered the first time he said it, after the first political arrests when his father read the story in the newspaper and asked what he thought about it and he said they were communists who were arrested and it was none of his business. Then it was Jehovah’s Witnesses and it was even less his business. By the time the first Jews were arrested and taken to the camps he was going with Sarah and she flung the paper at him, saying, “Is it still none of your business, Max?” He said, “Yes, Sarah. That’s right. It’s none of my business.” Only then he started to hear it all over the city, in the streets, the streetcars, even in the university, long past the time he realized it was his business and it was too late to say so. He wondered what the neighbors said the day he and Sarah were arrested. Das gehen unseren nichts an?

  Max sighed deeply and wiped his eyes. For another minute he stared at his coffee soaked pants and wondered whether to wipe them off first or dry his own wet legs. Finally, he shrugged and got up, taking off his pants and limping to the nearest towel. He dried himself and then tried to wash off the coffee stains, giving up after he could no longer tell the coffee from the water and hanging the pants up to dry and be taken to the cleaners. It occurred to him to try the radio for news and he put it on and listened while he put on a new pair of pants and cleaned up the broken cup and saucer but it was too early for news, or too late, and he was going to be late for work.

  Shmuel was already there reading the paper when Max came in.

  “Anything new?” Max asked.

  “New?” Shmuel glanced around the office and then at Max. “What could be new?” he said at last.

  He wasn’t even trying to be funny, Max realized. “I mean the murder, the rape in the park. They caught him?”

  Shmuel turned the pages of the newspaper; he reached the editorial page before he answered. “I don’t see anything.”

  During the morning break, Max usually read, but this morning he argued with himself about calling the police. Once he even picked up the receiver, but he saw Shmuel watching him and he put it down. The boy was innocent, he told himself, and anyway the police must know all about him by now. But in the luncheonette that noon he began to wonder if it hadn’t all been a dream because no one spoke about it. In the booth behind him two men talked about baseball and at the cash register a woman argued about the price of a hamburger. Even the waitress, the one with the big hands, said nothing when she took his order, and when she brought the sandwich and the milk shake she only smiled and said something about the weather. Even her hands looked smaller. So when on his way home that evening he saw a newspaper headline that said: SUSPECT ARRESTED IN PARK MURDER, he thought, Oh, No! because he was almost convinced that it had been a dream, a mistake.

  He put his money down on the counter and stared at the top half of the paper with its thick black headline. He did not want to turn it over, did not want to see the boy’s face. Someone else came to buy a paper and Max had to pick his up from the counter and move away from the stand. Still he held the top half of the paper towards him. He closed his eyes and the boy’s face swam towards him, pleading, asking for help. Max closed his eyes. He heard the bus drive up and the people getting on and off while he turned the paper over. When he opened his eye he was looking at a picture of someone with dark hair and a moustache and pushed in–eyes. Max tore the page finding the story. This was the one they had arrested, this was the suspect: There was no picture of a blond haired boy with pimples. Police s
aid they were sure this was their man; they had witnesses who had seen him in the park that night, other witnesses who had seen him with the girl, even the girl’s father knew him, had told him to stay away from his daughter. His name was Mortimer Holtz. Max felt grateful to him: He didn’t look anything like the boy Max had seen in the park.

  “It wasn’t the boy,” he said to an old man standing on the corner.

  “What bus did you say?” the old man asked.

  Max hurried up the street to the next stop

  4

  On Saturday Holtz said he was innocent. When Max heard that on the radio he became very angry. He was eating breakfast at the time and he could not finish it, dumping the coffee down the sink and later cutting himself when he shaved so that he had to wear a bit of toilet paper on his chin for an hour and could not go out, pacing his room and anxious to get a newspaper. He calmed down by the time he stopped bleeding, telling himself that of course Holtz would say he was innocent, what else could he do. Still, Max walked very fast, even ran across the intersection, to get the paper which he read in the street.

  The paper was reassuring. Holtz said he was innocent, but a detective was quoted as saying, “This is the man. I’ve never been surer of anything in my career.” They had learned that the girl had tried to break off seeing him and so anyone could see that Holtz had a motive. There were also more details about Holtz’s life. He had gone to college but had not done well and he quit after the first year. One of his professors remembered him as arrogant. That’s good, Max thought; he read that line over. Holtz had been working as a shoe salesman when he was arrested and his employer said he had a good record there. His parents were separated when he was young. No one knew where his father was; his mother died three years ago at which time Holtz came to San Francisco from the small town in Arizona where he had been brought up. An orphan, Max thought.

  He took a book to the park and he stayed there even though a wind came up and his hands shivered with the cold, but he could not read. Why do I want this Holtz to be the killer instead of the boy? he wondered. As if the boy’s blood were redder than the orphan’s. He wished that no one killed the girl. Or that she killed herself. (And raped herself too? a voice in his head demanded.) He wished that he had not gone to the park that night and then he would not even be thinking about it because ordinarily he did not even read the crime stories in the paper.