The Kiss of the Prison Dancer

by Jerome Richard

  His whole body began to shake with the cold until he had to go home. On the way he stopped to see what was playing at the local theater. It was a musical and he didn’t like musicals, but that night he went anyway.

  Sunday looked like it would be a nice day. He turned the radio on to get some news and the weather report, but all he got were music and church services. He started breakfast and on the hour he tried the radio again. The news was sensational. Out of the jumble of noises Max heard as he worked the dial back and forth one word leaped out at him: “Nazi!” He twisted the dial back through the hymns and commercials until he captured the right voice again: It was just describing a picture police had found of a group of men wearing uniforms with swastika armbands. Holtz was in the picture. The announcer went on to other news, but after trying a few more stations, Max went out to get a newspaper.

  Downstairs, Max met Mr. Thompson working on the rose bush in front of the house.

  “Did you hear?” Max asked him.

  “Where? What?” the old man responded, looking around.

  “Never mind. Good morning.”

  The old man nodded and Max walked very quickly until he was out of sight and then ran a little until he was on Geary Boulevard where he bought a newspaper. It was true. The headline said: MURDER SUSPECT A NAZI, and there was the picture the announcer had talked about, a row of young men wearing uniforms with boots and armbands and in front of them an older man wearing the same uniform but with a cap on his head and a Sam Browne belt across his chest and his arms planted on his hips as if defying the photographer to capture him on film. And there was Holtz standing in the row, second from the right according to the caption. Max juggled the bulky Sunday paper to read the story. Police said they suspected Holtz of being a member of the organization when they arrested him, but that he denied it until they discovered the picture, cut out of a newspaper, when they searched his room. The picture was taken at a rally held in Union Square about a year ago; the rally ended in a riot and police said they had kept watch over the group ever since. They held maneuvers in the hills south of San Francisco and they picketed several speakers in the past year. Police said as far as they knew the murdered girl was not connected with the organization.

  Max hurried home. When he got to his room he read the story in the magazine section where the news of the week was reviewed. It told again how the girl was discovered and how detectives quickly closed in on Holtz, but the story about Holtz being a Nazi wasn’t included, that was in the main news on page one and Max read that story again. A Nazi, he told himself, and laughed. He read the story for the third time, spit on the picture, and then, believing he had met justice, Max went to the park, whistling a German hiking song.

  It was not yet noon, but already the grass was patched with blankets bearing couples or families, their children skipping between the islands of food. The walks too were filling with people and Max picked his way among them like a mushroom gatherer in a forest of unfamiliar plants. Crowds reminded him of Germany and the camp. Even in the bus on the way to work he would sometimes feel his heart beat faster, especially when the driver asked everyone to move to the back and he was swept along in the mass of obliging people. When the man sitting next to him had not bathed or used his deodorant liberally enough, Max would move near an open window if he could. Now he ducked out of the crowd and into the aquarium where he had never been before.

  The aquarium too was crowded and Max pushed along, smelling the ocean and thinking of Sarah, wishing she were there so he could tell her about Holtz being a Nazi. He felt so old without her. The voices of the crowd echoing off the tile walls reminded him of the Berlin subway and he could almost feel her hand as they ran for a train and tried not to lose each other in the rush of people. He pushed through the crowd in the aquarium hall and found himself facing an ugly black creature resting on the sand at the bottom of a tank. It was a lungfish, a living fossil, the sign said. Max stared at it a long time. “How did we survive?” he asked it.

  The benches at the music concourse were nearly empty. Max took a seat and stared at the stage. No one appeared in the band shell. In the row in front of Max a man with a knotted handkerchief on his head slumped in his seat and snored and farther down Max’s row a fat woman with butcher-shop arms busily pulled sandwiches and hardboiled eggs and fruit from a paper bag and spread them on the seats around her. She reminded him of a waitress in a café the students patronized. One of his friends told him she was a whore and Max had sexual fantasies in which he saw himself rolling in her arms. Looking at this older reproduction of the waitress it occurred to Max that the sins of the flesh were as nothing compared to the sins of the imagination. The fat woman smiled at him over a hardboiled egg and Max got up and began to walk. He stopped as he often did before the statue of Goethe and Schiller and briefly bowed his head.

  At the lake he bought a frankfurter and a cup of coffee and went to watch the boats traffic on the clear water. Some ducks swam by and he pulled pieces from the frankfurter roll, calling, “Here, duck. Here, duck, duck, duck,” until he looked up and saw a small boy watching him very seriously. Max moved away and ate his lunch at the refreshment stand.

  After lunch he started walking again. The park stretched itself out before him, sun splashed lazy green hills and sentinel trees with fewer and fewer people the farther he went. He decided to walk all the way to the ocean.

  A great fog met him at the beach, rolling in on its own tide, huge and slow and devouring everything in its way. Max could see the clear air behind him, over the Park, and then it was gone as the fog swept past, condensing on his glasses and causing him to shiver in its cold wet embrace. Stepping down to the beach, he walked out to where the water died at his feet He could count the number of times he had seen the Pacific, even after so many years in California. This was his fifth visit to the beach. Swimming was not allowed here because of the undertow and the ocean was too big to look at for very long without some part of him drowning. He reached down and accepted a gift of seaweed.

  In Tel Aviv he had stood on the beach where his ancestors must have stood when they wanted relief from the desert. Watching the gray Pacific leap at the shore, he remembered Israel and his boundless history. Some eternal grandfather had skimmed stones into the Mediterranean and Max faced this strange ocean not even sure any more what tribe that ancestor belonged to. Well, Max, he told himself, this is as far as you can go.

  Now his lungs wheezed with wet air and he wondered why he made himself come. The lights of the amusement park reached out through the fog. That’s where the bus would be and he hurried, feeling his sinuses beginning to close.

  As the bus shot along the misty street, Max leaned his forehead against the window to press away the pain that grew there. Nothing was clear in the fog, but at one stop, running for the bus as it pulled away from the curb, Max thought he saw the boy from the park, though he could not be sure. He opened the window and leaned out, but the figure vanished in the fog as the bus rolled down the street. Max could see his face more clearly when he closed his eyes. He remembered how he almost called the police to tell them about the boy and now that they found the one who did it, the Nazi, he was glad he hadn’t. He had the idea that what happened was connected somehow to the years he spent in the concentration camp and he wondered if the boy might be Jewish. He closed his eyes: the blond hair, the short nose. He guessed not.

  Max settled back in the seat, his stomach beginning to compete with his head for attention. He had not had anything to eat since the frankfurter at the lake and it was Sunday so he decided to treat himself to a big dinner at the Russian restaurant on Geary Boulevard, but as the bus pulled up to the stop it occurred to him that he did not have enough money with him. A quick check of his wallet showed him he was right; he would have to go home first.

  His own street was only two stops farther, but when he stepped off the bus into the chilling grip of the fog and thought of the walk to his house and then the longer walk back to the restaur
ant he fingered the money in his pocket again, thinking there was enough for a hamburger; but he had promised himself a big dinner and with his lungs already choking and his head beginning to throb he made himself as small as he could and hurried home.

  For a few minutes he stood in the middle of the room and forgot why he had come. Then his stomach announced itself and he remembered dinner and the money, but the little purse he kept in the drawer with his underwear contained only four dollars. It was the end of the month. He would need at least four dollars more for dinner and with the change he had he was still short almost fifty cents. An empty purse, he told himself, speaks louder than an empty stomach. He took two aspirins and considered doing without dinner; he could, he knew the small hunger that gnawed at his stomach was a joke. He remembered the time they had gone three days with nothing to eat and the fat Kommandant blamed it on the Allied planes, then on the fourth day they were given potato soup that was so thin one of the young people in the camp tore a notice off the wall and sunk it in his bowl and then went up and down the lines showing everyone that the notice could be read right through the soup until he was seized by a guard and beaten and later sentenced to solitary confinement for destroying an official notice. Max sighed, the slightly vocal gasp of air that expressed sorrow and disgust and weariness with being sorrowful and disgusted. The hunger was a bad joke, and the aspirin was not doing any good. He tried to think of where he might find fifty cents.

  He tried his coat pocket and was rewarded by sixty cents in change and a button. He quickly put on his coat and prepared to go out to eat when he took a closer look at the button: it was not his. It was a strange button and even before he held it against the buttons on his coat he knew it was not his. This button was light blue and there was a pink flower engraved on it. It was clearly a girl’s button. Max held it in his hand and wondered where he got it. He tried it again hopelessly against the buttons on his coat and then he set it down and stared at it as if it had come from another world. Max tried to remember when he had worn the coat last. It had been that night in the park and remembering that, Max tried to hold back what came next; the boy had thrown it away. Max remembered it hitting the tree and rolling back on the path. And what was the boy doing with a girl’s button? And then Max did hold it back. He jammed the button back into the pocket it had come from and he hurried down the stairs and out into the foggy night. On his way to the restaurant he stopped and took the button out and threw it as far as he could across the wide street.

  The few people left in the restaurant were finishing their dinners and the first two dishes Max ordered were all gone, so he ordered piroshkes which he knew would lie heavy on his stomach but it was the one treat left to him and then that was spoiled because he found himself staring at the buttons on the waitress’ uniform and then at the buttons on the coats on the coatrack and when his soup came he thought for a minute he saw the pink and blue button floating in the soup. Then the piroshkes came and they were dry and tasteless as sand in his mouth.

  “Anything wrong?” the waitress asked.

  He shook his head, paid for the dinner, and left the restaurant, leaving most of the meal on the plate. He did not go straight home. On legs that had turned to jelly he crossed the street and began looking for the button. Among the trash at the gutter’s edge he looked and along the fog shrouded sidewalk. “Damn thing,” he cursed, stooping and poking at the old newspapers and candy wrappings. He tried going back to the other side of the street and standing where he stood when he threw it. Then, following the arc it must have followed, he crossed to the other side again and looked in doorways and tried scraping his foot along the sidewalk. People stopped and asked what he was looking for. Max waved them away, but some of them started looking anyway. “What are we looking for?” a man said on his knees, combing the sidewalk with his hand. “The Golden Gate Bridge,” Max shouted, and while people laughed he found it finally alien and waiting, balanced on the edge of the sewer. One kick would send it away forever. He picked it up and with people beginning to crowd around to see what he had found he thrust it into his pocket and went home. Behind him, people continued to search the sidewalk.

  5

  Shmuel stood in front of Max’s desk holding a three-page letter written in green ink. “It’s from Mrs. Katz,” he said.

  Max pointed to his in basket and went on working.

  “You don’t feel well?” Shmuel observed.

  “I feel fine.”

  His mouth was dry and his stomach empty and he could not remember having fallen asleep last night.

  “You look terrible,” Shmuel observed.

  “Don’t look so much,” Max said, but later he wished he had someone to talk to and he was sorry he had sent Shmuel away. There had been nothing in the paper that morning about the case and again Max had the feeling that it was a dream, something that came and went like the fog. All morning he mechanically shuffled papers, then, on his way to lunch, he stopped at Shmuel’s desk.

  “I want to ask you something, Shmuel.”

  Shmuel waited, crouched behind his desk like a man in a trench. “Nu?”

  “Nothing,” Max said, and he hurried to the luncheonette. He had a grilled cheese sandwich and a milk shake, but the waitress with the big hands was not there.

  It worried him that there was nothing in the papers about the case. All afternoon he tried to reconstruct the murder. In his mind the boy and the young Nazi took turns climbing on the girl until he yelled “Stop!” and the office seemed to shudder and go very still.

  Shmuel dropped the pile of outgoing mail when Max yelled The receptionist looked in she saw Shmuel picking up the mail and asked if anything was wrong. Shmuel shook his head and she left.

  “What’s the matter, Max?” Shmuel asked. He put the mail back on his desk and came to Max cautiously, as if he were approaching a barking dog.

  “Nothing. I was thinking out loud.”

  Shmuel stood a minute. He shuffled his feet and asked, “Can I help, Max?”

  “Go away,” Max said. “Get out of here and leave me alone for once. You can’t help. You stink. You know that Shmuel? Don’t you ever take a bath?”

  Shmuel stared. He smelled himself and shrugged his shoulders. “Max?”

  It was five o’clock. Max got up and left, brushing past Shmuel and turning so that Shmuel could not see that he was weeping. Outside, he leaned against the building and bit his cheek. When he heard someone coming out, he ran to the corner, thinking, Tomorrow I’ll apologize. He blamed his lack of sleep.

  He bought a newspaper, praying there would be a story on the case, but though he scanned each page while waiting for the bus and examined each page again closely on the bus, he could not find anything about it. His hand trembled as he turned the last page; the paper made a noise that annoyed the man sitting next to him and Max tried to fold it quietly, but the last page was covered by a full-page advertisement for cigarettes, just as he remembered it was. Max saw that his hand was covered with newsprint. Although a cool breeze blew through the city, he was perspiring.

  The bus was in the park before Max realized he had passed his stop. He got off at the next stop and walked slowly and fearfully toward the place where the murder had occurred, watching the bushes as if he expected someone to jump out at him again. On his way he discovered the newspaper still in his hand and, cursing in German, he hurled it into the nearest trash basket. His hands were still trembling though he knew he would find nothing but a plot of grass.

  The bushes were beaten down and candy wrappers and a beer can lay on the grass. Max walked around the little clearing, but there was nothing to see and he did not know what he was looking for anyway. He stayed until the first passerby noticed him, peering into the clearing and saying “Excuse me?” as if he had caught Max doing something obscene.

  That evening he gave up his book to watch television with the Thompsons. He had set out to read all of Thomas Mann over again, in English this time, but he found it slow going and now, h
alfway through The Magic Mountain, he kept thinking how pleasant it would be to have tuberculosis. He imagined giving his body over to germs and doctors. Everything out of his hands. Finally he put the book away and went downstairs to watch the news on television.

  “Been to the park lately?” Mrs. Thompson asked.

  “The park?” Max shook his head.

  There was a variety show on and Max was sorry he had come down so early. He wanted to go back upstairs and wait for the news, but the old man told him to have a seat and Max was trapped. He sat through the program, Mrs. Thompson knitting and her husband laughing and slapping his thigh at each joke, but none of them spoke. Then at eleven o’clock the news came on, but there was no mention of the case.

  “Do you remember that murder in the park?” Max asked, but the opening credits for an old movie began and the old man put his finger to his pursed lips and turned up the volume while his wife went on knitting besides the china cat. Max said good night.

  There was a story in the paper the next day that said Holtz appeared in court where he pled not guilty and was denied bail. Half-way to work Max got off the bus and took a taxi to the Hall of Justice.

  The gray stone building stood huge and mausoleum-like in a graveyard of rotting homes and old warehouses; even the windows could not keep it from looking solid. Max hesitated. He expected to see prisoners handcuffed to policemen being dragged into the building, but there were only peaceful-looking people alone or in groups of two or three. Occasionally a woman with a small child walked briskly towards the building with no more fear or deliberation than if they were going shopping. Some looked up as they walked, inspecting the neat rows of windows as if to see what was on sale. With these people walked a few well dressed men with briefcases; they did not look up. Max fell in step behind a middle aged couple who were having difficulty keeping up with their lawyer already pushing his way through the bronze door.