Mother Night (18 page)

“Yes,” she said.

“Have you enjoyed your little stay in our country?” said the boss.

“What am I supposed to say?” said Resi.

“Anything you like,” said the boss. “If you have any complaints, I’ll pass them on to the proper authorities. We’re trying to increase the tourist trade from Europe, you know.”

“You say very funny things,” she said unsmilingly. “I am sorry I can’t say funny things back. This is not a funny time for me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said the boss lightly.

“You aren’t sorry,” said Resi. “I am the only person who is sorry.

“I am sorry I have nothing to live for,” said Resi. “All I have is love for one man, but that man does not love me. He is so used up that he can’t love any more. There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.

“I can’t say anything funny,” said Resi. “But I can show you something interesting.”

Resi seemed to dab her lip with a finger. What she really did was put a little capsule of cyanide in her mouth.

“I will show you a woman who dies for love,” she said.

Right then and there, Resi Noth pitched into my arms, stone dead.

I
WAS ARRESTED
along with everyone else in the house. I was released within an hour, thanks, I suppose, to the intercession of my Blue Fairy Godmother. The place where I was held so briefly was an unmarked office in the Empire State Building.

An agent took me down on an elevator and out onto the sidewalk, restoring me to the mainstream of life. I took perhaps fifty steps down the sidewalk, and then I stopped.

I froze.

It was not guilt that froze me. I had taught myself never to feel guilt.

It was not a ghastly sense of loss that froze me. I had taught myself to covet nothing.

It was not a loathing of death that froze me. I had taught myself to think of death as a friend.

It was not heartbroken rage against injustice that
froze me. I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair.

It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.

It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.

What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.

Now even that had flickered out.

How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.

Somebody did.

A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, “You all right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ve been standing here a long time,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“You waiting for somebody?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Better move on, don’t you think?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

And I moved on.

F
ROM THE
E
MPIRE
State Building I walked downtown. I walked all the way to my old home in Greenwich Village, to Resi’s and my and Kraft’s old home.

I smoked cigarettes all the way, began to think of myself as a lightning bug.

I encountered many fellow lightning bugs. Sometimes I gave the cheery red signal first, sometimes they. And I left the seashell roar and the aurora borealis of the city’s heart farther and farther behind me.

The hour was late. I began to catch signals of fellow lightning bugs trapped in upper stories.

Somewhere a siren, a tax-supported mourner, wailed.

When I got at last to my building, my home, all windows were dark save one on the second floor, one window in the apartment of young Dr. Abraham Epstein.

He, too, was a light ning bug.

He glowed; I glowed back.

Somewhere a motorcycle started up, sounded like a string of firecrackers.

A black cat crossed between me and the door of the building. “Ralph?” it said.

The entrance hall of the building was dark, too. The ceiling light did not respond to the switch. I struck a match, saw that the mailboxes had all been broken into.

In the wavering light of the match and the formless surroundings, the bent and gaping doors of the mailboxes might have been the doors of cells in a jail in a burning city somewhere.

My match attracted a patrolman. He was young and lonesome.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“I live here,” I said. “This is my home.”

“Any identification?” he said.

So I gave him some identification, told him the attic was mine.

“You’re the reason for all this trouble,” he said. He wasn’t scolding me. He was simply interested.

“If you say so,” I said.

“I’m surprised you came back,” he said.

“I’ll go away again,” I said.

“I can’t order you to go away,” he said. “I’m just surprised you came back.”

“It’s all right for me to go upstairs?” I said.

“It’s your home,” he said. “Nobody can keep you out of it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “It’s a free country, and everybody gets protected exactly alike.” He said this pleasantly. He was giving me a lesson in civics.

“That’s certainly the way to run a country,” I said.

“I don’t know if you’re kidding me or not,” he said, “but that’s right.”

“I’m not kidding you,” I said. “I swear I’m not.” This simple oath of allegiance satisfied him.

“My father was killed on Iwo Jima,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I guess there were good people killed on both sides,” he said.

“I think that’s true,” I said.

“You think there’ll be another one?” he said.

“Another what?” I said.

“Another war,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Me too,” he said. “Isn’t that hell?”

“You chose the right word,” I said.

“What can any one person do?” he said.

“Each person does a little something,” I said, “and there you are.”

He sighed heavily. “It all adds up,” he said. “People
don’t realize.” He shook his head. “What should people do?”

“Obey the laws,” I said.

“They don’t even want to do that, half of ‘em,” he said. “The things I see—the things people say to me. Sometimes I get very discouraged.”

“Everybody does that from time to time,” I said.

“I guess it’s partly chemistry,” he said.

“What is?” I said.

“Getting down in the dumps,” he said. “Isn’t that what they’re finding out—that a lot of that’s chemicals?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s what I read,” he said. “That’s one of the things they’re finding out.”

“Very interesting,” I said.

“They can give a man certain chemicals, and he goes crazy,” he said. “That’s one of the things they’re working with. Maybe it’s all chemicals.”

“Very possible,” I said.

“Maybe it’s different chemicals that different countries eat that makes people act in different ways at different times,” he said.

“I’d never thought of that before,” I said.

“Why else would people change so much?” he said. “My brother was over in Japan, and he said the Japanese were the nicest people he ever met, and it was
the Japanese who’d killed our father! Think about that for a minute.”

“All right,” I said.

“It
has
to be chemicals, doesn’t it?” he said.

“I see what you mean,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “You think about it some more.”

“All right,” I said.

“I think about chemicals all the time,” he said. “Sometimes I think I should go back to school and find out all the things they’ve found out so far about chemicals.”

“I think you should,” I said.

“Maybe, when they find out more about chemicals,” he said, “there won’t have to be policemen or wars or crazy houses or divorces or drunks or juvenile delinquents or women gone bad or anything any more.”

“That would sure be nice,” I said.

“It’s possible,” he said.

“I believe you,” I said.

“The way they’re going, everything’s possible now, if they just work at it—get the money and get the smartest people and get to work. Have a crash program,” he said.

“I’m for it,” I said.

“Look how some women go half off their nut once a month,” he said. “Certain chemicals get loose,
and the women can’t help but act that way. Sometimes a certain chemical will get loose after a woman’s had a baby, and she’ll kill the baby. That happened four doors down from here just last week.”

“How awful,” I said. “I hadn’t heard—”

“Most unnatural thing a woman can do is kill her own baby, but she did it,” he said. “Certain chemicals in the blood made her do it, even though she knew better, didn’t want to do it at all.”

“Um,” I said.

“You wonder what’s wrong with the world—” he said, “well, there’s an important clue right there.”

I
WENT UPSTAIRS
to my ratty attic, went up the oak and plaster snail of the stairwell.

While the column of air enclosed by the stairs had carried in the past a melancholy freight of coal dust and cooking smells and the sweat of plumbing, that air was cold and sharp now. Every window in my attic had been broken. All warm gases had been whisked up the stairwell and out my windows, as though up a whistling flue.

The air was clean.

The feeling of a stale old building suddenly laid open, an infected atmosphere lanced, made clean, was familiar to me. I had felt it often enough in Berlin. Helga and I were bombed out twice. Both times there was a staircase left to climb.

One time we climbed the stairs to a roofless and windowless home, a home otherwise magically undisturbed.
Another time, we climbed the stairs to cold thin air, two floors below where home had been.

Both moments at those splintered stairheads under the open sky were exquisite.

The exquisiteness went on for only a short time, naturally, for, like any human family, we loved our nests and needed them. But, for a minute or two, anyway, Helga and I felt like Noah and his wife on Mount Ararat.

There is no better feeling than that.

And then the air-raid sirens blew again, and we realized that we were ordinary people, without dove or covenant, and that the flood, far from being over, had scarcely begun.

I remember one time, when Helga and I went from the head of a splintered staircase in the sky down into a shelter deep in the ground, and the big bombs walked all around above. And they walked and they walked and they walked, and it seemed that they never would go away.

And the shelter was long and narrow, like a railroad car, and it was full.

And there was a man, a woman, and their three children on the bench facing Helga and me. And the woman started speaking to the ceiling, the bombs, the airplanes, the sky, and to God Almighty above all that.

She started softly, but she wasn’t talking to anybody in the shelter itself.

“All right—” she said, “here we are. We’re right down here. We hear you up there. We hear how angry you are.” The loudness of her voice jumped sharply.

“Dear God, how angry you are!” she cried.

Her husband—a haggard civilian with a patch over one eye, with the recognition button of the Nazi teachers’ union on his lapel—spoke to her warningly.

She did not hear him.

“What is it you want us to do?” she said to the ceiling and all that lay above. “Whatever it is you want us to do,” she said, “tell us, and we’ll do it!”

A bomb crashed down close by, shook loose from the ceiling a snowfall of calcimine, brought the woman to her feet shrieking, and her husband with her.

“We surrender! We give up!” she yelled, and great relief and happiness spread over her face. “You can stop now,” she yelled. She laughed. “We quit! It’s over!” She turned to tell the good news to her children.

Her husband knocked her cold.

That one-eyed teacher set her down on the bench, propped her against the wall. And then he went to the highest-ranking person present, a vice-admiral, as it happened. “She’s a woman … hysterical … they get hysterical … she doesn’t mean it … she has the Golden Order of Parenthood …” he said to the vice-admiral.

The vice-admiral wasn’t baffled or annoyed. He didn’t feel miscast. With fine dignity, he gave the man
absolution. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s understandable. Don’t worry.”

The teacher marveled at a system that could forgive weakness.
“Heil Hitler,”
he said, bowing as he backed away.

“Heil Hitler,”
said the vice-admiral.

The teacher now began to revive his wife. He had good news for her—that she was forgiven, that everyone understood.

And all the time the bombs walked and walked overhead, and the schoolteacher’s three children did not bat an eye.

Nor, I thought, would they ever.

Nor, I thought, would I.

Ever again.

T
HE DOOR
of my ratty attic had been torn off its hinges, had disappeared entirely. In its place the janitor had tacked a pup-tent of mine, and over the pup-tent a zigzag of boards. He had written on the zigzag boards, in gold radiator paint that reflected the light of my match:

“Nobody and nothing inside.”

Be that as it may, somebody had since ripped a bottom corner of the canvas free of its tacks, giving my ratty attic a small, triangular flap-door, like a tepee.

I crawled in.

The light switch in my attic did not respond, either. What light there was came through the few unbroken window panes. The broken panes had been replaced with wads of paper, rags, clothes and bedding. Night winds whistled around these wads. What light there was was blue.