Flotsam (39 page)

“Very likely that’s what they’ll say. After all they haven’t anything against you, Otto.”

“No, but I have against them.”

Brose rested his head against the bedpost. He remembered the time when his superior had come into the drafting room and had spent a long while talking about the times and about Brose’s ability and what a shame it was that they would have to give him notice simply because he had a Jewish wife. He had taken his hat and left. A week later he had given a bloody nose to the janitor, who was also Party ward-heeler and spy, because he had called Brose’s wife a dirty Jewess. That had been very nearly a disaster. Luckily his lawyer had been able to prove that the janitor had made drunken speeches against the Government; whereupon the janitor had disappeared. But his wife no longer felt safe on the street. She did not like being jostled by prep school boys in uniform. Brose could not find another position, and so they had left for Paris. On the way his wife had become ill.

The apple-green sky beyond the window lost its color. It became misty and dark. “Have you been in pain, Lucy?” Brose asked.

“Not much. I am just dreadfully tired. Way inside.”

Brose stroked her hair. It gleamed in the copper reflection from the Dubonnet sign. “You’ll soon be able to get up again.”

The woman slowly moved her head under his hand. “What can it be, Otto? I’ve never had anything of this sort before and this has lasted for months!”

“It’s just one of those things. Nothing serious. Women often get something like this.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be well again,” his wife said in sudden despair.

“You are going to get well soon. You just have to keep up your courage.”

Outside night crept over the roofs. Brose sat quietly, his head still resting against the bedpost. His face, which had
been distressed and fearful during the day, became serene and peaceful in the last vague light.

“I love you, Lucy,” Brose said softly, without changing his position.

“No one can love a sick woman.”

“A sick woman is doubly to be loved, for she is a woman and a child at the same time.”

“That’s just it!” The woman’s voice grew small and constrained. “I’m not even that. Not even your wife. You don’t have even that. I am only a burden, nothing more.”

“I have your hair,” Brose said, “your beloved hair.” He bent over and kissed her hair. “I have your eyes.” He kissed her eyes. “Your hands.” He kissed her hands. “I have you. Your love. Or don’t you love me any more?”

His face was close above hers. “Don’t you love me any more?” he asked.

“Otto—” she murmured weakly and pushed her hand between her breast and him.

“Don’t you love me any more?” he asked softly. “Say it. I can understand you might no longer love a worthless fellow who isn’t able to earn a living. Just say it once, Beloved, Only One!” he said threateningly to the wasted face.

Suddenly her eyes overflowed with happy tears and her voice was soft and young. “Do you really love me still?” she asked with a smile that tore his heart.

“Must I repeat it every evening? I love you so much I am jealous of the bed you lie on. You ought to lie in me, in my heart and in my blood!”

He smiled so that she would see it and once more bent over her. He loved her and she was all he had—but nevertheless he often had an inexplicable reluctance to kiss her. He hated himself
for it. He knew the cause of her suffering and his healthy body was simply stronger than he was. But now in the tender warm reflection of the
apéritif
sign the evening was like an evening of years ago—beyond the dark power of the disease—a warm and comforting reflection like the red light from the roofs across the way. “Lucy,” he murmured.

She pressed her wet lips against his mouth. Thus she lay quietly, forgetting for a while her tortured body in which, in ghostlike silence, cancer cells ran riot and, under the spectral touch of death, uterus and ovaries were slowly falling like weary coals into gray amorphous ash.

* * *

Kern and Ruth were strolling along the Champs Elysées. It was evening. The shop windows blazed, the cafés were full of people, electric signs glittered; and dark, like an entrance to heaven, stood the Arc de Triomphe in the clear air of Paris which is silvery even at night.

“Just look there to the right,” Kern said. “Waser and Rosenfeld.”

In front of the huge show window of the General Motors Company stood two young men. They were shabbily dressed. Their suits were threadbare and neither of them wore an overcoat. They were arguing so heatedly that Kern and Ruth stood beside them for some time without being noticed. They were inmates of the Hotel Verdun. Waser was a technician and a Communist; Rosenfeld, the son of a banking family from Frankfurt, who lived on the third floor. Both were car fanciers. Both lived on almost nothing.

“Rosenfeld!” Waser said imploringly. “Just try to be sensible
for a minute. A Cadillac—not bad at all for old people! But what do you want with a sixteen-cylinder job? It drinks gasoline the way a cow drinks water and isn’t a bit faster for all that.”

Rosenfeld shook his head. He was staring in fascination at the brightly lighted show window, in which a tremendous black Cadillac was slowly turning on a revolving stand. “Suppose it does use up gas?” he exclaimed excitedly. “By the barrel, as far as I’m concerned! That’s not the point. Just see how marvelously comfortable the body is, as safe and reassuring as an armor-plated turret!”

“Rosenfeld, those are arguments for a life insurance policy, but not for a car!” Waser pointed to the next window which belonged to the Lancia agency. “Just take a look at that. You have breeding and class there. Only four cylinders, but a low-slung nervous creature, like a panther ready to spring. In it you could run straight up the wall of a house if you wanted to.”

“I don’t want to run up the wall of a house. I want to drive to the Ritz for cocktails,” Rosenfeld replied unmoved.

Waser disregarded this objection. “Take a look at its lines,” he cried enthusiastically. “The way it seems to creep along close to the ground! An arrow, a bolt of lightning—by comparison even the eight-cylinder job strikes me as too heavy. A dream of speed!”

Rosenfeld broke into derisive laughter. “And how do you expect to get into that baby’s coffin? Waser, Waser, that’s a car for Lilliputians! Picture a woman in evening clothes with an expensive fur coat and perhaps a dress of gold brocade or sequins. You’re coming out of Maxim’s—it’s December, say, with snow and slush on the street—and you in this radio cabinet on wheels. Can’t you see you’d just be ridiculous?”

Waser got bright red in the face. “Those are the ideas of a capitalist. For pity’s sake, Rosenfeld, you’re dreaming of a locomotive, not an automobile. How can you get any satisfaction out of a mammoth like that? It’s all right for captains of industry, but you’re a young fellow. If you have to have something heavier, then for God’s sake take a Delahaye. It has breeding and can always turn up one hundred sixty kilometers without trying.”

“Delahaye,” Rosenfeld snapped. “And fouled sparkplugs every few minutes. That’s what you like, eh?”

“Not a chance, if you know how to drive! A jaguar, a projectile! You get drunk listening to the song of the motor. Or if you want something really marvelous, then take the new Supertalbot: it’s good for one hundred eighty kilometers. You’ve really got something there.”

Rosenfeld sputtered with indignation. “A Talbot! Yes, I’ve got something there! That’s a car I wouldn’t take as a gift. A machine with so much compression it boils in traffic. No, my friend. I’ll stick to the Cadillac.” He turned back to the General Motors window. “Just look at its quality; for five years at a time you don’t even have to lift the hood. Luxury, dear Waser! Only the Americans really understand luxury. The motor is sleek and noiseless, you can’t even hear it.”

“But, man alive,” Waser broke out, “I want to hear the motor. That’s music when a nervous beast like that starts.”

“Then buy yourself a tractor! That’s even louder.”

Waser glared at him wild-eyed. “Listen to me,” he said, controlling himself with difficulty. “I propose a compromise: take a Mercedes Compressor! Heavy, but with breeding too. Agreed?”

Rosenfeld waved aside the suggestion. “Not for me, thanks.
Don’t waste your words. A Cadillac or nothing.” He lost himself again in contemplating the black elegance of the huge car on the turntable.

Waser looked around and caught sight of Kern and Ruth. “Listen, Kern,” he said in despair. “If you had a choice between a Cadillac and one of the new Talbots, which would you take? It would be the Talbot, wouldn’t it?”

Rosenfeld swung around. “The Cadillac, of course. There’s no doubt at all about that.”

“I’d be satisfied with a little Citroën,” Kern grinned.

“With a Citroën?” The car fanciers looked sadly at the black sheep.

“Or with a bicycle,” Kern added.

The two experts exchanged a quick glance. “Aha,” Rosenfeld commented in disgust, “so you don’t know much about cars, eh?”

“Or about motor transport in general?” Waser asked coldly. “Well of course there are people who are interested in postage stamps.”

“I’m one of them,” Kern announced cheerfully. “Especially if the stamps are uncanceled.”

“Well, then, we beg your pardon.” Rosenfeld turned up the collar of his coat. “Come along, Waser, we’ll step over there and take a quick look at the new models of the Alfa Romeo and the Hispano.”

They went away together, reconciled through Kern’s ignorance, two friends in shabby suits on their way to quarrel about the merits of racing cars. They had time enough, for they had no money to buy supper.

Kern looked after them in amusement. “Aren’t human beings wonderful, Ruth?” he said.

Ruth laughed.

Kern could not find work. He tried everywhere, but could get no employment even at twenty francs a day. At the end of two weeks, their money was gone. Ruth received a small allowance from the Jewish committee and Kern from the Jewish-Christian one; altogether it amounted to about fifty francs a week. Kern had a talk with the landlady and arranged for them to keep the two rooms for this price and to get coffee and rolls in the morning as well. They were not especially unhappy about it. They were living in Paris and that was enough. They kept hoping for what the next day would bring and they felt safe. In this city, which had assimilated all the migrations of the century, a spirit of toleration prevailed; one could starve to death in it but one was harried only as much as was absolutely necessary—and this meant a great deal to them.

One Sunday afternoon when there was no admission charge Marill took them with him to the Louvre. “In winter,” he said, “you need some way of passing your time. The emigree’s problems are hunger, a place to live, and time, which he doesn’t know how to use because he can’t work. Hunger and a place to live are the two mortal enemies he has to fight against—but unprofitable and unused time is the slinking enemy that destroys his energy, the waiting that exhausts him and the shadowy fear that takes away his strength. The others attack from the front and he has to fight them or succumb—but time creeps up from behind and poisons his blood. You are young; don’t sit around cafés; don’t complain, don’t lose your zest. When things get tough, go to the great waiting room of Paris—the Louvre. It is well heated in winter. It’s better to be sad in front of a Delacroix, a Rembrandt, or a van Gogh, than in front of a glass of brandy or a circle of angry, impotent and whining people. It is
I who tell you this—I, Marill, who prefers to sit facing a glass of brandy. Otherwise, of course, I wouldn’t deliver these instructive lectures.”

They wandered through the dim corridors of the Louvre—past the centuries, past the stone Pharaohs of Egypt, the gods of Greece, the Cæsars of Rome, past Babylonian altars, Persian rugs and Flemish tapestries, past the great works of human genius, Rembrandt, Goya, El Greco, Leonardo, Dürer—through endless galleries and corridors until they came to the rooms in which hung the paintings of the Impressionists. They sat down on one of the sofas that stood in the middle of the room. On the walls shone the landscapes of Cézanne, van Gogh and Monet, the dancers of Degas, Renoir’s pastel portraits of women, and the bright scenes of Manet. It was quiet and no one else was there. Gradually it seemed to Kern and Ruth as though they were sitting in an enchanted tower and the pictures were windows opening on distant worlds: on gardens of placid joy, on generous feelings, on magnificent dreams—an eternal country of the soul beyond caprice, fear and injustice.

“Emigrees!” Marill said. “All of those men were emigrees too! Driven about, laughed to scorn, booted out, often without a place to stay, hungry, many of them abused and ignored by their contemporaries, living in misery and dying miserably—but just see what they have created! The culture of the world, that’s what I wanted to show you.”

He took off his glasses and polished them thoughtfully. “What is the strongest impression you get from these pictures?” he asked Ruth.

“Peace,” she replied promptly.

“Peace? I thought you would say beauty, but it’s true—today peace is beauty. Especially for us. And yours, Kern?”

“I don’t know,” Kern said. “I would just like to own one of them so that I could sell it and get some money to live on.”

“You’re an idealist,” Marill replied.

Kern looked at him suspiciously.

“I’m being serious,” Marill said.

“I know it’s stupid, but it’s winter and I would like to buy a coat for Ruth.”

Kern appeared dull in his own eyes; but actually he could think of nothing else and this idea had been in his mind the whole time. To his amazement he suddenly felt Ruth’s hand in his. Her face was radiant and she pressed close against him.

Marill put his glasses on again, then he looked around. “Man is magnificent in his extremes—in art, in stupidity, in love, in hate, in egotism and even in sacrifice; but what the world lacks most is a certain average goodness.”

Kern and Ruth had finished their supper. It consisted of cocoa and bread and for a week had been their single meal aside from the cup of coffee and the two
brioches
that Kern had arranged to have included in the price of the rooms.