Ask No Question

by MARY HOCKING

  The writer could remember the name of the displaced persons’ camp where he had first met his wife; but the more personal question as to the names of the three people who had been present at their wedding had not been answered. Nor had the questions relating to the apartment in East Berlin where they had lived during the first year of their marriage. On the other hand, he had remembered quite a lot about the clinic; but then these were matters which were probably recorded somewhere—Miriam herself would recall only the outstanding cases, she was not interested in the small change of clinic routine. And her husband, it seemed from the long series of unanswered questions, had not been interested in the small change of life outside the clinic. Mitchell, reading slowly down the page, found himself saying, ‘Mikail Kratz is dead. Undoubtedly, he is dead.’ It was then that he came to the last question. ‘What names did Naomi give to her rag dolls?’ In answer to this question, the man had written, ‘Did Naomi give names to her dolls? She seemed to me not to be interested in names, even her own.’ Mitchell’s racing pulse missed a beat. A clever get-out? Yet the reply came across with an asperity that had a certain authenticity about it. As Mitchell sat staring down at the paper, he knew beyond reason that Kratz had written this and that he had found out something about the man that he had not known before. His belief was not shaken by Miriam’s bewilderment when she saw the paper with its series of unanswered questions.

  ‘How could he forget that gas stove?’ she said.

  ‘Probably food was not important to him.’

  She shook her head, unconvinced. She had been an inexperienced cook and the gas stove had been obsolete, obstinate and sometimes positively dangerous; to her, it had been a monster whose malign inhumanity was quite terrifying. It seemed incredible that Mikail should not have understood this and should not himself have been haunted by the gas stove. When she thought of their year together in this place, no visual picture of the apartment emerged. There was only the persistent smell of gas. It was because of this that she remembered so vividly every small detail of the park opposite to which they had escaped on the rare occasions when they had time to spend together. Here the smell of rotting leaves and damp grass had brought a tremendous relief which subsequently she always experienced when surrounded by damp vegetation. And Mikail had not remembered the park! He had not remembered the broken seat where they sat to watch children playing precariously on the rickety swings and ramshackle roundabouts or fishing in the stagnant pond. Even now, she could see the green slime clinging to their thin, blanched legs as the children scrambled out of the pond. And yet, to the question ‘Where did you go every Sunday afternoon?’ there was no answer. Mitchell broke into her thoughts saying:

  ‘Was he an impatient man?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘I had thought of him as being gentle.’

  ‘He was. But he was impatient, too.’

  ‘What made him impatient?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Things that didn’t matter. He was wonderfully kind and understanding over important things . . .’

  ‘What made him impatient?’

  ‘Messages about patients.’ She dismissed them with an irritable movement of her hand; one could imagine her doing this to Mikail himself. ‘It annoyed him if I got messages wrong. “Fraulein Heller is worse . . .” “Fraulein Heller is no better . . .” It is all the same, I would say; but he would not have it. When people were rude to him, he never shouted or lost his temper; but if someone expressed an idea badly, he would argue and argue and argue until he had the right words. Even if it was something that he did not agree with, he had to have it expressed properly . . . only “properly” isn’t what he would have said . . .’ While she searched for the right word, Mitchell said abruptly:

  ‘Did Naomi give names to her rag dolls?’

  ‘Of course! There was Gretchen and Magda . . .’

  ‘How did she come to choose a name like Magda?’

  ‘The old woman in the room below us was Hungarian and she made the doll and gave it to Naomi. I can remember well, she said, “What will you call it? Magda?” ’

  ‘So Naomi did not choose the name.’

  ‘But the doll’s name was Magda!’ she shouted, her face suddenly flushed with anger. ‘Mikail knew that as well as I do.’

  He looked down at the paper in his hands. ‘So you don’t think your husband wrote this?’

  ‘So this . . . so that . . . so and so and so . . . Why do you keep on with your silly questions!’ She turned away and beat her fists on the window frame. ‘How do I know? How do I know? There is nothing there . . .’

  He folded the paper carefully; when he had done this he still could not put it to one side. He said:

  ‘Of course you can’t know. But how do you feel?’

  She answered through clenched teeth, ‘I don’t feel!’

  He looked at her, her head down, her shoulders hunched, the blades knife-edged beneath the thin dress. He put the paper on the dressing table and went to her, laying his hands on her shoulders. She did not move a muscle. Beyond the window, the sun was white as molten steel; in the room heat pulsed in the air. He rested his cheek against the side of her face; he was more unsure of himself than he had ever been.

  ‘We’ve done all we can,’ he pleaded.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you come away with me?’

  The room vibrated with heat, every nerve in his body quivered. Yet she was still.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I need you so much.’

  She turned and looked at him, a long, unfathomable look; he thought that she seemed much older and more assured than he was.

  ‘Don’t ask anything of me now,’ she warned.

  ‘I won’t. I promise I won’t.’

  She put out her hand and touched his arm.

  ‘You’re shaking.’

  ‘It’s the room . . . the heat . . .’

  The room was too small to hold them apart. She seemed to understand this.

  ‘We’ll go out, then.’

  She stopped to pick up her handbag; he saw her pause, looking at the sheet of paper. She turned away and left it there on the dressing table.

  It was just after noon. The pavements were hot and there was very little shade. It was the beginning of a heatwave. They walked down to the quayside and turned in the direction of Villeneuve. On one side of the path there were hotel lawns, velvet green dotted with scarlet sunshades and striped canvas chairs where bronzed figures reclined contemplating aperitifs in long, frosted glasses; on the other side of the path, tangled beneath tall trees, multicoloured flowers and shrubs crowded the lake’s edge. The exuberant foliage of the trees screened sky and water and the trapped air was heavy with the cloying scent of flowers spiced occasionally with a smell reminiscent of ginger which must, Mitchell supposed, emanate from one of the shrubs. Although it was so hot, an occasional puff of air stirred the leaves of the trees and Mitchell felt dust in his eyes, his nostrils, his mouth. The masked sun was sullen on his shoulders. In the distance, he could hear a loudspeaker on one of the pleasure boats; the water rippled in the boat’s wake and slapped against the bank with a sound that took him back to childhood excursions in the reedy waters of the Môle. He said to Miriam, ‘We could take a boat to Geneva.’ They had time to squander now. She turned her head in the direction of the lake, but said nothing. She was wearing the tangerine dress, exotic as the flowers; as she moved her head the strap of the dress pulled a little so that he saw the red line where the sun had burnt her. He put his hand on her upper arm.

  ‘Your shoulder is very hot.’

  ‘I do not burn.’

  ‘No?’

  He put his arm round her waist; she let it rest there but she did not move closer to him. But there was time for that. Ahead where there was a gap between the trees the path shimmered and every facet of stone in the curb sparked in the sun. A few moments later they came out from the shade of the trees and Mitchell felt an intense excitement throughout his whole body at the
ferocious power suddenly unleashed against him. Beside him, Miriam staggered as though she had received a blow. At the point where they came into the open, there was a splendid view. He held her a little closer while he gazed at the landscape sharply chiselled in the brilliant light. Behind them the land sloped away and the lake was limitless as the sea; but ahead the lake narrowed and above the green valley of the Rhône the mountains shouldered into the sky, every jagged detail of cleft, ridge and crevasse harshly substantiated and, rising above like the highest note of a great arpeggio so pure as to be beyond humanity, the immaculate peaks of Les Dents du Midi.

  ‘Do you like mountains?’ he asked Miriam.

  His senses were stimulated as though the years which had rubbed the bloom off life had been erased and he saw everything new-minted; the extravagant majesty of the mountains, the miniature precision of a delicately veined leaf, the broad ivory curve of Miriam’s cheekbone with that tiny hollow of shadow beneath.

  ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ he repeated, not really thinking about the mountains but wanting her to share his delight in all things. ‘I’ll take you there this afternoon. We could go as far as Martigny by car and then walk. There will be a few flowers in the valleys still.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Do you like flowers?’

  ‘They’re very nice.’

  He looked down at her. ‘You don’t really mean that.’ Her eyes looked into his, he thought they mocked him a little. He bent closer to her so that when she answered he felt her breath against his cheek.

  ‘They don’t do anything.’

  ‘But don’t you sometimes get pleasure in things simply because they look beautiful? That dress, for example.’

  ‘But the dress is useful. I can wear the dress.’

  He moved his hand across her hip, feeling the slight tingling friction as his rough finger tips scratched the fine threads.

  ‘But doesn’t the feel of it please you?’

  She shivered slightly, but whether it was for pleasure or not, she did not say. Ahead a party of youths surged along the path towards them and he drew her on to the grass in the shadow of a tree. The branches of the tree were thick and low, they caught in her hair and she raised her arms above her head to free herself. All the magic of woman was in the upthrust line of her body. He took her in his arms and kissed her eyes, her lips, the hollow of her throat; he laughed at her helplessness as she struggled, her hair still tangled in the branches, and stopped her protests with more kisses. Only the panic in her eyes made him release her at last. She turned away from him and stood with one arm against the trunk of the tree, her head down, her breath coming in harsh gasps.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated over and over again. ‘I’m sorry. I promised, but . . .’

  She turned at last and said quietly, ‘Promises are hard to keep.’ She took his hand and led him back to the path.

  ‘You’re not angry?’

  ‘No.’ She pressed his hand, but there was a heaviness in her step that had not been there before.

  ‘I’ve tired you.’

  ‘A little.’

  After a few minutes they came to a seat overlooking the lake. There was a small inlet here, strewn with rocks over which a few children were scrambling, shouting at one another.

  ‘We can rest here,’ he said.

  She sat down and leaning her head against his shoulder stared up at the sky.

  ‘Why do you like mountains?’

  ‘They represent some kind of challenge, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t like challenges.’

  He laughed. The children splashed and shouted. He said, ‘We could swim, since you don’t like mountains.’ He watched the children idly. Close by, a boy of about five, hovering nervously at the water’s edge, fingered his penis and an older girl said imperiously, ‘Martin, you stop that!’ She had recently been swimming and her short, dark hair was a sculptured frame for a face too agitated for the sculptor’s static art. ‘You’re a disgusting little boy. And when you grow up you’ll have all sorts of horrible things wrong with you . . .’ In the straight, old-fashioned costume, the girl’s limbs wriggled and twisted incessantly like some emergent animal struggling to slough off an old skin. Watching her, seeing the wild, dark eyes stabbing at the little boy with an uncontrolled anger not really occasioned by his misdemeanour, Mitchell could feel the physical pain of unharnessed energy, the bewildering bodily discomfort created by unknown pressures and unreasonable impulses. He said, ‘Oh, the pain of being young!’ This nostalgic sentiment received no answering echo; he glanced down at Miriam, his nerves suddenly alerted. He saw a dark, foreign woman absorbed in the reality of her own pain. Her voice came from a dry, aching throat.

  ‘How old is that girl?’

  ‘About eleven, I should think.’ He tried to sound casual.

  ‘She’s old for her age, surely?’

  ‘They grow up quickly these days.’

  She said under her breath, ‘I wouldn’t know how to talk to her.’

  ‘She wouldn’t want you to talk to her,’ he said roughly. ‘She wants to be alone. Can’t you see that?’

  But it was no use trying to bring her back to him, the distance between them was already too great. The little boy was crying for his mother while the girl sat gazing unconcernedly across the water, her rage spent. Mitchell could not bear to look at them. He turned his head away and looked up at the mountains; the sun was sharp as broken glass in his eyes. After a time, Miriam said:

  ‘I will come with you this afternoon.’ She might have been speaking to a stranger who had offered her a lift on a stony road.

  ‘It’s too late,’ he answered harshly. ‘It’s afternoon already.’

  He did not want to look at her, but he forced himself to do so. There was no expression in her face and her eyes were like those of a blind person; there was no hope and there was no despair either, all emotion had been scoured out leaving an almost idiot vacuity. Only her hand moved; as though it was unconnected with the rest of her being it reached up and touched his face, the fingers traced the furrows in his forehead, the line of cheek and jaw, and rested for a moment against his chest where the shirt opened. She said in that flat, unemphatic voice, ‘You are burnt, too.’ Then she turned and picked up her handbag. She walked away, moving very slowly, but not as though she expected to be followed.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  ‘Not a first class brain.’ Very judicious, Professor Adlam, like a judge passing sentence. ‘A superb administrator, certainly, and, of course, a showman. Not that there is any harm in that.’

  He sounded as though there was a great deal of harm in it and Alperin wriggled with pleasure and took another gulp of wine.

  ‘Of course, he has a first class brain!’ Dr. Scunner, secure in the knowledge that his own claims were beyond question, could afford to be unbiased.

  Professor Adlam studied the stem of his wine glass critically. ‘Yet he sent Alperin here instead of coming himself.’

  ‘With respect,’ Dr. Scunner smiled bleakly at Alperin, ‘these conferences become tedious.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Professor Adlam placed his glass very delicately on the table as though the slightest jar would shatter it. ‘He was not a success in Bonn. In fact, he went down very badly in Bonn. The wrong approach. All right for radio—intellectual discussion for the mass audience. It’s always the showman who makes the appeal on these occasions—witness Joad, discovered not once but twice! One can imagine a similar Gethryn revival taking place some years after his death. But not the right approach to the kind of audience he had to address in Bonn . . .’

  Alperin emptied his glass. He felt an imperative need to say something quite brilliant, but Scunner intervened before he could collect his thoughts.

  ‘It would take showmanship on a godlike scale to stir those stagnant waters!’

  Alperin gazed sadly into his empty glass, a little sediment lay at the bottom. The last of the wine, he thought, and felt an urgent need to cry. He a
lso felt very sick. The room was unbearably hot and the faces of all the men around him were pink and beaded with sweat; at a nearby table he saw a woman in a tight linen dress, dark stains under the armpits. He began to think that he might actually be sick. The German professor, who had looked as though he was asleep, was ordering coffee and Dr. Scunner was ordering brandy. Everything was set for a long discussion. When they had picked Gethryn’s bones dry they would feast on someone else. It had been fascinating to have his opinion of Gethryn confirmed, but he did not want to hear any more of that kind of thing; he was not good at it, for some reason he always sounded small and envious. Besides, he had had much too much to eat and perhaps a little too much to drink. He murmured excuses which, in spite of their earlier cordiality, they accepted without protest.

  He still felt sick when he got outside. It was nearly midnight, but there was no crack in the heat’s burnished armour. He decided that a walk would be good for him. It was a long, uphill walk from the center of Montreux to the suburb of Veytaux; noisy, too, with traffic pounding the main road to Lausanne and Geneva. By the time that he had reached the funicular station his shirt was caked to his back and his heart jumped every time a car hurtled by on the near side. How he hated the continental roads! It was a mistake to have done so much on his first outing. The invitation to join Adlam and the others had been flattering, of course . . . He paused in the arcade beneath the Grand Hotel, staring with unseeing eyes into a jeweller’s lighted window while he recovered his breath. It was wrong to be flattered by the attention of men who, with the possible exception of Scunner, were his inferiors; it was simply their greater social ease that made him feel so desperately lonely and inadequate. He began to walk again; the pavement narrowed unpleasantly and the road climbed more steeply. His mouth was hot as though he was feverish. He was glad when he reached the turning that led up to the village of Veytaux; it was a very steep road but fortunately his hotel was immediately on the left. He turned in at the gate and sat at one of the tables in the empty courtyard. The air was no better here, it was like breathing through a blanket. His room might be cooler, but he did not want to go back to his room.