Give me another drop of vodka." She turned to me. "You know why the vodka is so good? Because the boss is part owner of a distillery. Thaf s why they sell it so cheap, too. Also because the boss hasn't entirely given up the idea of sleeping with me. He's very patient That's his strong point"
"Natasha!" Melikov protested.
"All right All right We're going."
The chauffeur was standing beside the car, smoking. "Would you like to drive, sir?" he asked me.
"A Rolls-Royce? I wouldn't dare. I haven't got a license and I haven't driven in years."
"How wonderful!" said Natasha. "There's nothing more boring than an amateur racing driver."
I looked at her. Boredom seemed to be the one thing she was afraid of. I loved Natasha. She gave me a sense of security. On the other hand, she probably loved adventure, which I detested.
"Do you really want to go to the park?"
"Why not? The restaurant is still open. You sit outside and watch the seals. The tigers are just going to bed. The pigeons light on your table. Even squirrels turn up now and then. Where can you be nearer to paradise?"
"Will our fancy chauffeur want hamburger and mineral water for dinner? I suppose he's not allowed to drink."
"Don't make me laugh. He drinks like a fish. Not today though. He's got to pick up his lord and master at the theater. Anyway, hamburgers are his passion. Mine, too."
There were few people at the zoo, and it was very quiet Night was falling, and the brown bears were lying down to sleep. Only the polar bears were still swimming restlessly back and forth in their little pool. The chauffeur had settled himself at another table. He ordered three large hamburgers —which he proceeded to drown in ketchup—dill pickles, and coffee.
"What have you been doing today?" Natasha asked.
"Oh, my boss has been telling me how to live."
"Isn't it funny how much advice people dish out? Everybody wants to arrange my life for me. And they're always so sure of themselves. They all have such good ideas—for other people."
"It seems to me," I said, "that you can manage very well without advice."
"Not at all. I need ail I can get. But it doesn't help. Everything I do is wrong. I don't want to be unhappy, but I am. I don't want to be alone, but I always am. That makes you laugh. You think I know so many people. It's true, but the other is true, too."
She looked very sweet, talking this childish nonsense in the gathering dusk amid the last roars of the wild animals. I listened, feeling very much as I had with Silvers that afternoon: how incomprehensibly remote their lives seemed from minel Their emotions were so simple, nothing more distressing then a childlike dismay at discovering that happiness is not a secure possession but a wave in the water; neither was tormented by an Orestean obligation, a mission of vengeance, a dark innocence and involvement in guilt How enviably happy they were with their success, their tired cynicism, their witticisms and little misfortunes that never went beyond a loss of money or love. They twittered like the ornamental birds of another century. How glad I would have been to be like them, to forget, and to twitter with them.
"They say you get used to disappointments," said Natasha. "It's not true. Bach new disappointment hurts more than the last. And each time it takes longer to heal. You're afraid of being burned again, and that makes you afraid to live." She propped her head in her hand. "I don't want to be burned again."
"How will you manage that?" I asked. "Go into a nunnery?"
She made an impatient gesture. "Nobody can run away from himself."
"Oh yes they can. Once. But then there's no coming back," I said, thinking pf Moller hanging from the chandelier on a hot night in New York. As Lipschütz had told me, he was wearing his good suit and a clean shirt He had even put on a necktie, on the theory that it would strangle him more quickly. I found that hard to believe. It was like walking up and down the corridor in a train in order to get there faster.
"You told me a few days ago that you were unhappy," I said. "Then later you said it wasn't true. Do your feelings change as fast as that? How lucky you are!"
"Neither one was true. Are you really so naïve? Or are you making fun of me?"
'I've learned never to make fun of anybody," I said. "And I've learned to believe what people: tell me. It's so much simpler."
Natasha looked at me incredulously. "You're funny," she said. "You talk like an old man. Did you ever want to be a priest?"
I laughed. "Never."
"Sometimes you seem like a priest. Why shouldn't you make fun of people? You're so ponderous..You could use a little humor. But the Germans . . ."
I stopped her with a gesture. "I know. The Germans have no sense of humor. Actually it's true."
"What have they got to take its place?"
"Schadenfreude. That's an untranslatable German word, meaning malicious pleasure in other people's misfortunes. If s the same as what you call humor—making fun of people."
"Touché, Professor. How thorough you are!"
"German thoroughness," I said, laughing.
"But I am unhappy. Or empty. Or sentimental. Or burned. Don't you understand?"
"I do. I do."
"Do the Germans ever feel that way?"
"They used to."
"You, too?"
I had no answer to that.
"Every word has to be dragged out of you," said Natasha impatiently. "Can't we ever have a sensible conversation? Are you unhappy, too?"
"I don't know. Unhappiness is such a tame word."
She looked at me in consternation. Her eyes had grown brighter in the failing light "In that case nothing can happen to us," she said finally. "We're both in the soup."
"Nothing can happen," I agreed. "We're both burned children and very cautious."
The waiter brought the check. "I think they're closing," said Natasha.
Again I felt a moment of panic. I didn't want to be alone that evening and I was afraid Natasha wanted to go home. "Haven't you got the car until the theaters are out?" I .asked.
"Yes. Shall we drive around till then?"
"That would be lovely."
We stood up. The terrace and the zoo were deserted. She took my arm. I felt an almost anonymous tenderness, a tenderness that still had no name and was attached to no one. Yet it was not pure, but a mixture of different feelings; there was fear in it, fear that the past might rise up again, and fear that something might yet go wrong in this mysterious interval of helplessness between peril and salvation; there was a blind groping for anything that would give promise of security. I felt ashamed to be dissecting my emotions and ashamed of what the dissection revealed, but I consoled myself rather lamely with the thought that Natasha's feelings could not be far different, that she, too, was a tendril clinging to the nearest support, without even asking herself to what extent her heart was in it She didn't want to be alone in a troubled period of her existence, and neither did I. But for all our hidden motives we were caught up in that light, warm tenderness, which seemed to involve no danger or threat of pain because it still had no name. "I worship you," I said suddenly, much to my own surprise, as we were following the broad shadow of the chauffeur along the leafy path leading to Fifth Avenue. "I don't know you, and I worship you, Natasha."
She turned toward me. "It's not true," she said. "You're a liar. But go on saying it. I like it."
It was some time before I realized I had been dreaming. Little by little I recognized the dark contours of my room, the lighter outline of the window, and the reddish glow of the New York night. It was a slow, difficult awakening, a struggle—like pulling myself out of a swamp.
I dreamed that I had murdered someone and buried the body in an abandoned garden beside a brook. Years later the body had been found, and now doom was creeping up on me. I couldn't remember whether I had killed a man or a woman, or why. Nothing was really clear to me but my terror, which stayed with me long after I was awake. The night and my sudden awakening had swept away the barriers I had built up
around my memories. I saw before me the whitewashed room in the crematorium. I saw the hooks for hanging, I saw the spots under them where quivering flesh had effaced the whitewash. I saw the bony hand moving on the floor and heard a guttural voice commanding: "Step on it! Step on it, you shit-ass, or I'll brain you. And we'll hang you, too, you swine!" I heard the voice and saw the cold contemptuous eyes, and I told myself for the hundredth time that he would have killed me like a fly, as he had killed hundreds of other prisoners, if I hadn't Complied. He was only waiting for a pretext. Nevertheless, I felt the sweat trickling from my armpits, as I always did when this memory hit me. I retched and groaned in my helplessness. That guttural voice and those cruel eyes had to be extinguished. März, I thought, Egon März. Later on I was released—that happened now and then. It wasn't far to the Dutch border, and I knew the country. Soon I was in relative, safety, but I knew that I would have to see that face again before I died.
I sat up in bed, clutching my knees, as though frozen from within on that sultry summer night I thought of everything I had wanted to forget, and once again it came to me that this new life was impossible, that I had to go back, that I must not put an end to myself out of despair and disgust, as Moller had done. I had to preserve my life. I knew that we lose all sense of proportion at night, but I was powerless to dispel my remorse and helpless rage and grief. I sat there shivering, the night turned gray, and I spoke to myself as I might have spoken to a child. I waited for daylight, and when it came I was as broken as if I had spent the whole night driving a knife into an endless wall of black cotton wool.
XIV
Silvers sent me to deliver the Degas to Cooper and help him to hang it. Cooper lived on the eighteenth floor of an apartment house on Park Avenue. I expected a butler' to open the door, but Cooper himself received me in his shirt sleeves. "Come in," he said. "Care for some whisky? Or would you rather have coffee?"
"Thank you, I'd like a cup of coffee."
"I'll have whisky. It's the only thing in this heat."
His face glowed like a ripe tomato though the apartment was air-conditioned and very cool. I felt as if I had stepped into a mausoleum. The furniture was mostly French, Louis Quinze, delicate gilded pieces, with a few small Italian chairs and a magnificent little yellow Venetian dresser. French Impressionists hung on the damask-covered walls.
Cooper removed the wrapping from the Degas and set it down on a chair. "There's something I'd like to ask you," he said. "Silvers gave me a song and dance about this little lady being a present to his wife, said she'd raise hell when she got home. Now tell me: wasn't that just a trick?"
"Is that why you bought it?" I asked.
"Of course not. I bought it because I wanted it Do you know what Silvers made me pay for it?"
"I haven't the faintest idea"
"Thirty thousand."
Cooper gave me a questioning look. I knew he was lying and was trying to pump me. "Well?" he said. "That's a lot of money, isn't it?"
"For me it would be a lot of money."
"What's that? How much would you be willing to pay for it?"
"Not a cent," I said.
"What do you mean?" asked Cooper almost angrily.
"I mean I haven't got that kind of money. Right now I have all of thirty-five dollars to my name."
Cooper refused to be diverted. "How much would.you be willing to pay if you had the money?"
It seemed to me that I'd answered enough questions for a cup of coffee. "Everything I owned," I said. "You know as well as I do that a passion for painting is good business. There's none better. I bet Silvers would buy it back from you and let you have a good profit."
"The crook! And offer it to me a week later for fifty per cent more."
This little exchange, for reasons unknown to me, seemed to put Cooper in a good humor. "Well," he said. "Where will we hang our little lady?"
Cooper was called to the phone. "Just look around," he called out to me as he was disappearing into his study. "Maybe you'll find a place."
A maid appeared from nowhere and offered to guide me. The apartment was furnished in excellent taste. Cooper must have known his stuff or had good advisers. Probably both. The maid took me to Cooper's bedroom. "This might be a good place," she said.
The center of attraction was a broad bed in the worst art-nouveau style. Above it, in a gtit frame, hung a forest landscape showing a stag and several does, with a spring in the background. I stared at this hideous sketch in speechless amazement "Did Mr. Cooper paint this?" I asked. "Or did he inherit it from his parents?"
"I don't know. It was here when I came. Isn't it beautiful? So true to nature."
"It certainly is. You can see the stag's breath. Is Mr. Cooper a hunter?"
"Not that I know of."
The next thing that met my eye was a view of Venice by Ziem. I realized that I had discovered Cooper's secret, and somehow it moved me. Here in his bedroom he was his own true self. This was what hé really liked. All the rest was pretense and business, with perhaps a little lukewarm inclination thrown in. But this amorous stag was passion; this sentimental study of Venice was romance.
"Let's go," I said to the maid. "Everything is so right in this room it would only jar. Are there more rooms upstairs?"
"Only a terrace and a small drawing room."
She led me up the stairs. I could hear Cooper in his study bellowing orders into the phone. I was curious to see whether the study was furnished like the bedroom. A second amorous stag would not have surprised me.
I stopped in the doorway leading to the terrace. Down below lay New York in the summer heat, like an African city with skyscrapers. One could see at a glance that this city of steel had not grown slowly and organically, taking on the patina of the centuries, but had been built quickly and heedlessly by determined men unencumbered by traditions. And because their aim had been not beauty but efficiency, they had created a new and daring beauty that was neither classical nor romantic.
I heard Cooper puffing up the stairs. "Have you found a place?"
"Here," I said, pointing to the terrace. "But the sun wouldn't be good for it. A ballet dancer above the city!
That would be something. Maybe in the drawing room. On the wall away from the sun,"
We went in. The drawing room was very bright, with white walls and chintz-covered furniture. On a table there were three Chinese bronzes and a pair of Tang dancing girls. I looked at Cooper, wondering if he wouldn't have preferred three beer mugs to the Chou bronzes and a set of porcelain dwarves to the terracotta dancers. "Over there," I said. "On the wall behind the bronzes. The greenish-blue patina matches the color of the dancer's tutu."
Cooper was still panting. I held the picture up in the place I had decided on. "We'd have to make a hole in the wall," he said finally. "If we take the picture away later on, the hole will still be there."
I looked at him in amazement. "You can hang something else in the same place," I said. "Or you can have the hole plastered over." What a penny pincher! But that was probably how he had made his millions. Strangely enough, I didn't hold it against him; the stag in the bedroom redeemed him in my eyes. For Cooper, everything else in the apartment must have been vaguely hostile; I felt sure that he didn't understand it, any more than he understood why he had spent so much money on it That was why he had tried to pump me. He was suspicious because, though he knew there was some connection between art and money, it didn't quite make sense to him.
"All right," Cooper finally decided. "Put it there. But don't make a big hole."
"I'll make it as small as possible. You see these patent hooks. They only need a thin nail and they'll support a big picture."
It didn't take me long. Cooper looked on suspiciously. When I had finished, I looked again at the Chinese bronzes and held them in my hand. I felt the gentle warmth of die patina. They were very fine bronzes and gave me a strange sense of being at home; they were so perfect that they
"Do you know anything about them?" Cooper ask
ed.
"Do you know anything about them?" asked Cooper.
"A little."
"What are they worth?" he asked. I could have hugged him for being so frank and predictable.
"They're priceless."
"What do you mean by that? Are they a better investment than paintings?"
"No," I said; grown suddenly cautious for fear of contradicting Silvers. "But they're very beautiful. There's nothing better in the Metropolitan."
"Really? I can't believe it Some crook palmed them oft on me."
"Then you're just lucky."
"Think so?" He laughed uproariously and gave me an appraising look. I think he was wondering whether he could offer me a tip; if so, he decided against it "Would you care for some more coffee?"