The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  “My wife is at the root of my troubles,” Pokorny said. “It sounds ungallant, not the sort of thing an artist from romantic Vienna ought to say. But I love her, so I can be ungallant about her. She is at a meeting tonight, but she will be home soon. She’ll look at the soup and tell me I had too much and she’ll threaten me that she won’t bring white bread into the house any more. She’s always at meetings. She’s a Communist. She’s very important; it’s surprising how they listen to her. That’s why they’re getting after me, the Immigration, they see my wife’s name on everything. I will get deported because I married an American lady who was born in Davenport, Iowa. Love is upside-down, too. When there was the strike on the waterfront, she brought a boy here with his head split wide open. Another quarter of an inch and you could have seen his brain. The police were looking for him and we hid him. He slept in our bed and we put a mattress on the floor in here for ourselves. She would walk through blood for her ideas. She would be very dangerous if she got the chance. She should never be put in charge of anything. If I get deported, she will lead a parade to the dock, with signs about the warmongers. I would never recover from it.”

  “Look, Manfred,” Archer said, dazed by the complexity of the life he was uncovering and feeling that he had to interrupt and warn the man, “you don’t have to tell me anything about your wife. That has nothing to do with the program or with you.”

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Archer,” Pokorny said formally, “that is where you’re wrong. It has everything to do with it. She is well known. She is extreme. She draws attention to me. I cannot bear attention. I had one hope—to be quiet, to be anonymous. My wife has a file in the FBI this thick …” Pokorny’s pudgy hands indicated ten inches in the air. “What does it say in the file? Mrs. Manfred Pokorny, married to a refugee, who entered this country on an alien’s permit in 1940. Never took out citizenship papers. Now working on the radio. Next step, Mr. Hutt. Next step—good-bye. I tell you all these things about my wife because it doesn’t make any difference. It’s all known. And even if it isn’t, all they have to do is ask me. I’m excitable, I’m weak, I’m afraid of prison. The only time I’m calm is when I am composing music. Even when I eat—you noticed—it is like a whirlpool.”

  “Still,” Archer said, almost successfully hiding his dislike of Pokorny’s voluble terror, “you haven’t told me anything that would warrant deporting you.”

  “No,” Pokorny said, automatically reaching for the grapes again, “not yet. So—in 1940—I made out my application for entering the United States. I was in Mexico. I was living on seven dollars a week. I had a violin, a good violin, a Guarnerius, and I sold it. It was the last thing I had to sell. The Mexicans were getting ready to put me out of their country. My wife—my first wife, I married her in Vienna in 1921—kept telling me she was going to kill herself if we were pushed out again. We had been in France, in Morocco, in Santo Domingo. Some musicians in America—people who had played some of my music—I had a little vogue before the war—in the style of Schoenberg—they vouched for me. On the application they asked me—was I ever a member of a communist party, anywhere …”

  He hesitated. Archer watched him intently. Pokorny was sweating, little rivulets sliding down the loose rolls of fat on his neck.

  “What should I say?” Pokorny asked. “I have seventy dollars in my wallet. I am a Jew. My mother and father are already dead in the crematoriums … it sounds calm when you say it like that. It almost sounds natural. Neat. But when you remember what your mother looked like, standing over the stove, cooking dinner. Dressed up for Sunday in a black lace dress. When you remember going to hear your father in the symphony orchestra … He played the flute. He never was very good, really, speaking as a musician, now, not as a son …”

  Pokorny’s mouth, stuffed with grapes, was trembling, and Archer realized that the composer was on the verge of tears. “Look,” Archer said gently, “you don’t have to tell me anything more just now. You’re feeling badly tonight, your wife told me you had a fever. You probably ought to be in bed. Maybe this is too painful for you. I don’t have to hear it now. I’ll come back some other time, Manfred, when you’re feeling better.”

  “What do you put on the application?” Pokorny said, ignoring Archer. “America is just over the border. Twenty miles away. Everybody is being kind. Everybody is being sympathetic. Everybody wants to help. If you say yes …” He shrugged. “You vanish. You sink. You are obliterated. If you say no—two little scratches of the pen—you’re alive, you’re a musician, you exist … Yes or no. On a form, the questions sometimes are too simple. Whatever you say is the wrong answer. A man’s life can’t be described sometimes in yes or no. In Vienna, in 1922, I joined the Austrian Communist Party. There. Now you know. But does yes or no tell anybody what it was like in Vienna in 1922? Inflation, strikes, starving, speeches, promises—can you put that in yes or no? And I quit two months later. Even my wife will have to admit that, and I know she’s told the Immigration about me, because she said she would, when I divorced her and married Diana …”

  Diana. Archer felt himself being hypnotized by the name. Diana and Manfred Pokorny. Names for the low-comedy servants in a musical comedy. It was almost impossible to assign them to tragic parts. Diana Pokorny, with a cornbelt accent, commissar for the waterfront regions. Parents, Archer thought, must have more respect on the day of christening, for the mortal possibilities lying in the future for their children.

  “She’s crazy,” Pokorny said. “My first wife. She is always coming up here making scenes. She brought a pistol once, but it didn’t have a hammer on it, but we didn’t find that out until later. I give her sixty dollars a week in alimony, but she’s always sick and she always keeps trying the most expensive medicines. Now it’s cortisone. She knows a doctor who wants to experiment on her, but it costs three hundred dollars for a treatment. And she went to an analyst for six years.”

  Archer felt a grin pulling at his mouth and turned his head so that Pokorny wouldn’t see it. It was heartless to smile, he knew, but the complexities Pokorny had brought about in his life by his choice of women were, considered at all objectively, melodramatically ludicrous. And somehow, and Archer was displeased with himself at the realization, Pokorny with all his agony did not touch him. Perhaps, Archer thought, if he combed his hair and stopped stuffing his mouth with Argentine grapes … If he has to go before the Immigration board, Archer resolved, I will make him go to a barber first, and make certain he puts on fresh linen.

  “I quit because they were idiots,” Pokorny was saying. His voice had become tired and he was resting his head in his hands, his elbows on the table. His skin was flushed now and he looked as though his fever were mounting. “The Communists. They began to tell me what kind of music to write, what kind of music I should listen to, what I should applaud, what I should not applaud. Politicians who didn’t know the difference between a sonata and a bugle call. I was writing an opera then and I found out the librettist had ten thousand collaborators. They didn’t listen to an opera with their ears—they listened with a copy of Lenin’s collected pamphlets. I figured if they were that wrong in my field that I knew about, they were probably almost as wrong in other fields that I didn’t know about. So I drifted out. I wasn’t important, I was twenty-three years old—so they didn’t bother me and I didn’t bother them … I tell Diana, but it will take an explosion to change her mind. She says I’m an unreliable intellectual.” Pokorny essayed a wan smile. “She’s half-right, anyway. Still—sitting in that hot little room in Mexico, living off the last of the violin, what do you do when you see the question, ‘Were you ever a member of any communist party in any country?’ Yes or no. How truthful do you have to be? Who do you hurt? What does a man do to survive? How much are you expected to suffer for two months of your life seventeen years before when you were twenty-three years old, in another country? Now …” Pokorny shrugged helplessly. “They will produce the paper. They will say is this your signature. They will say is e
verything written on this paper true. My first wife will be sitting there, looking at me, hating me, knowing all about me. My advice to you, Mr. Archer, is keep away from me, don’t try to help me. Deny you ever knew me. Say that the music was delivered by an agent and that he told you it was being written by a man called Smith. Say that you didn’t know I was a Jew.”

  “Now, Manfred,” Archer said, remembering that Barbante had warned him about this, “that’s unfair. Whatever else is behind this, it has nothing to do with being Jewish.”

  “Yes, it has,” Pokorny spoke softly, but stubbornly. “It always has.”

  Archer stared exasperatedly at Pokorny. Atlas, Pokorny, comedian, composer, both remote, untouchable, lost in their private dementia. No matter what food was served them, they always tasted the same single, bitter flavor.

  “You say that Mr. Hutt wants to fire four other people, too,” Pokorny was saying, using logic to torture himself. “But with the others he is willing to give them a chance, wait two weeks. But with me—” He smiled unhealthily. “I have the honor to be particularly chosen. I am treated promptly. There is no waiting on line for me. The others, now, they are not Jews, I gather?”

  “No.” This is the worst so far, Archer thought. I knew it would be.

  “Why do you think I get this personal service, Mr. Archer?” There was even a small smile of triumph on Pokorny’s face, as though he were delighted with his success in debate.

  “I don’t know,” Archer said.

  “I do,” said Pokorny, almost in a whisper. “Mr. Hutt hates the Jews.”

  “Oh, God, Manfred,” Archer said, “that’s outlandish. I’ve never heard him say a word.”

  “He doesn’t have to say a word. He looks. When he looks at me, I see the same expression on his face I used to see on the Nazis in Vienna. Waiting. Hating. Confident. Five years later they pushed my father into the furnace.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Archer said. “And that’s not just a way of speaking. I mean it. You’re demented.”

  “Maybe.” Pokorny shrugged. “I hope you’re right. I don’t think so. I have had experience. You couldn’t know, Mr. Archer. You’re an intelligent man, but you haven’t had the experience. Also—you’re too good. There’s nothing in your character to answer to that look—to understand it even. And do you know what the worst thing is?”

  “What?” Archer asked, wearily feeling that he might as well get the whole thing out now, get it done once and for all.

  “When I see Mr. Hutt look at me like that, even for a minute, even just passing him in the hall, I suffer from a trick. It makes me see myself with Mr. Hutt’s eyes. I look at myself and I’m dirty, my face is ugly, my voice is bad, my accent is unpleasant, I am too anxious to please one minute and I yell too loud the next minute. I am not nice to have sitting at the next seat in the theatre or in a restaurant and I understand why it is impossible to allow me into a good club or a hotel. I’m a miser, worrying about money all the time. I’m extravagant, wearing diamonds, throwing my money around. I’m a plotter, I can’t be trusted, I understand the necessity for the furnace …”

  “That’s enough, Manfred.” Archer stood up. He felt shaken and furious and he realized it would give him pleasure to slap the fat, aging, disagreeable face on the other side of the table. “I’m not going to listen to any more of that. You’re behaving like a fool.”

  Pokorny stood up, too, sniffing wetly, wrapping the stained robe around his pudgy body. “I think maybe you better stop worrying about me, Mr. Archer,” he said. “Never mind about being a witness. It wouldn’t make any difference, anyway. On black and white, I committed a crime. Nothing anybody is ever going to say can change that. I will write you from Austria.” Suddenly he broke. He turned clumsily and shambled over to the wall. He put his head against the wall and Archer could tell he was crying. “How can I go back?” he sobbed. “How can I go back there?”

  There was the noise of a door opening in the hall and a moment later Mrs. Pokorny came in. She was at least six feet tall, square set, with a heavy, angry head, surmounted by a closely cut mop of irongray hair. She stood at the doorway, her large hands opening and closing at her sides, staring first at her husband, tragically bent against the wall, and then at Archer.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. Her voice was booming and harsh. “What did you do to him?”

  “I’m Clement Archer,” said Archer, feeling that it was ludicrous to introduce himself so formally at a time like this. “He’s all right …” Archer gestured vaguely at Pokorny. “He worked himself up a bit and …”

  “Manfred!” Mrs. Pokorny shouted. “Stop that!” Her face grew very red. She strode across the room and put her hands on Pokorny’s shoulders and turned him brusquely around. Pokorny barely came up to her shoulder. His face was wet and he took the end of the towel that was around his neck and wiped his cheeks. He was trying to control himself, but he couldn’t raise his eyes to look either at Archer or his wife.

  What a scene, Archer thought, feeling an almost uncontrollable impulse to flee the room, the house, the man, the problem. What a ridiculous scene. How did I ever get mixed up in something like this?

  “Diana,” Pokorny murmured. He patted the large, flat hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.” He half-looked at Archer. “I apologize, Mr. Archer,” he said, “for the embarrassment.”

  “Sit down,” the woman said to Pokorny. Roughly, before releasing him, she pulled the towel close around his throat and yanked the robe tighter around his chest. “Sit down and behave yourself.”

  Obediently, releasing a last few sniffles, Pokorny padded over to an armchair and sat down in it, keeping his head bent and staring at the carpet.

  “What did you do to him?” Mrs. Pokorny turned on Archer.

  “He didn’t do anything,” Pokorny said hurriedly. “He’s a good friend. He took the trouble of coming up here to explain to me …”

  “What did he explain?” Mrs. Pokorny made no attempt to hide the doubt and suspicion in her voice. She stood, enormous, square, ugly, at the other end of the room, looking oversized and out of place among the flimsy furniture and the Tyrolean ornaments on the walls. She had a thick, long nose, with flaring, angry nostrils, and her mouth was wide and thin, cruel as a police sergeant’s.

  “Mrs. Pokorny,” Archer began gently, “I came to try to help Manfred if I could …”

  “How? By firing him?” Mrs. Pokorny laughed flatly. “Is that how you help people these days?”

  “It isn’t his fault,” Pokorny said hurriedly. “He has to do what he is told. He is my friend.”

  The word friend, Archer realized, was a talisman for Pokorny, and he clutched it to him like an infant holding a fuzzy toy animal at bedtime.

  “If he’s such a friend,” Mrs. Pokorny said, “why doesn’t he keep you on the program? Did he explain that?”

  “It’s out of his hands,” Pokorny said, looking up finally. “It’s the old Immigration business again. He was good enough to warn me.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Pokorny said, her large thick face frozen in a grimace of scorn, “they got you to do the dirty work. The tool.”

  “Now, Diana,” Pokorny said mildly, “don’t talk like that to Mr. Archer.”

  Mrs. Pokorny strode toward Archer, ignoring her husband. “It never occurred to your friend to fight for you, though, did it? His friendship doesn’t go that far, does it? He doesn’t raise a finger to keep you from being sent back to a country where all your people have been murdered.”

  “He’s been very good to me, Diana,” Pokorny murmured brokenly. “He’s a very good man, very honest and upright.”

  “I’ll believe that,” Mrs. Pokorny said, standing close to Archer, glaring at him, “when I see him do something for you.”

  “I don’t know what I can do,” Archer said mildly. He felt curiously removed from the scene and untouched. Mrs. Pokorny, he saw, had a talent for removing any element of sympathy and gentleness from a situation. “It’s very complicated
.”

  “Complicated!” Mrs. Pokorny sneered. “If it’s not one excuse it’s another with people like you. I know your type, Mr. Archer. Pretending to help, being so honorable and polite all the time, then always finding a convenient way out when it begins to look as though you might be hurt. I know all about you. Weak, useless, ready to let the bosses use you, giving full value for your salaries, licking their boots, lying down and letting them walk all over you when it suits them. Now they want to drive the artists from the country, they want to shut up the ones they can’t send away, and who is the first one they pick on to do their dirty work …” She turned oratorically to Pokorny and made a stiff, heavy, pointing gesture in Archer’s direction. “Your good friend, Mr. Archer.”