"Sometimes I get pretty sick of being a refugee," I said with mounting irritation. "IVe been one all day. First with Silvers, then with Kahn. Couldn't you and I try to be plain people?"
She laughed. "As soon as people stop having to worry about food and lodging, they stop being plain people, my dear Rousseau. Even with love, complications set in."
"Not if we take it the way we do."
"How do we take it?"
"Universally. Not individually."
"Good grief!" said Natasha.
"like the sea. Not like a single wave. Isn't that the way you feel about it?"
"Me?"
"Yes, you. With so many boy friends."
"Do you think a drink of vodka would kill me?" she asked.
"No," I said. "Not even in this ghastly lounge. You look as cool as the Alpine snow."
Melikov was on duty. "Vodka?" he exclaimed. "In this heat?" But he produced a bottle and two glasses. "There's a storm in the air, and that makes it worse," he commented as I was walking away. "These damn fans only churn up the air."
"Before we start fighting," I suggested to Natasha, "lefs decide where to go. Well be able to fight much better in a cool place. Ill drop the European village and the lake. Besides, I've got money. Silvers has given me a bonus."
"How much?"
"Two fifty."
"Shabby," said Natasha. "It should have been five hundred."
"Nonsense. The part I didn't like was his saying he really didn't owe me anything because he'd known Mrs. Whymper all along. As though he were making me a present That went against my grain."
Natasha put down her glass. "Would it always have gone against your grain?"
The question surprised me. "I don't know," I said. "Probably not Why?"
She watched me closely. "I don't think you'd have minded a few weeks ago."
"Think so? I have no sense of humor. That must be it."
"Your sense of humor is all right. Maybe you haven't any today."
"Who has a sense of humor in such heat?"
"Fraser," said Natasha. "He bubbles over in this kind of weather."
Several thoughts came to me at once, but I was careful not to express them. "I thought he was very nice," I said instead. "I'm willing to believe that he bubbles over. He was very amusing the other evening."
"Give me two fingers more," said Natasha, laughing.
I poured the vodka in silence. "Won't you have some?" she asked.
"Why not? I've heard that liquor is as cooling as coffee in hot weather. Only the first glass heats you up. After that it dilates the blood vessels and makes you feel cool."
"There's a scientific explanation for everything," said Natasha. "But is it necessary?"
"No. But it responds to the noblest of human aspirations: the desire to know why."
"How German!"
"This seems to be my German day. I only hope it will be a short one."
"Short and universal. Not individual."
I looked up. "You're right, Natasha. That was tactless German nonsense. Forgive me."
She stood up and came close to me. I could feel that she had practically nothing on under her dress. "I worship you," I murmured.
"Where do you want to go?" she asked.
"I can't drag you up to my room. Too many people."
"Drag me to a cool restaurant."
"Good. I know a little French place on Third Avenue. The Bistro."
"Expensive?"
"Not for a man with two hundred and fifty dollars. Even if it was a present, it belongs to me."
Her eyes grew tender. "That's the way to talk, darling. To hell with morality."
I nodded. I had a feeling that I had narrowly escaped a wide range of perils.
Melikov had been right about the storm. When we left the restaurant, the wind was whipping up dust and papers, and flashes of lightning shot across the sky. "We'd better grab a taxi," I said.
"What for? The cabs stink of sweat. Let's walk."
"It's going to pour. You're not dressed for it"
"Who cares? I was going to wash my hair tonight, anyway."
"But you'll be soaked through."
"It won't hurt this dress. It was too cold in the restaurant. Let's walk. If it gets bad, we can duck into a doorway. Oh, the wind! It's so exciting!"
We walked close to the house fronts. Great streaks of lightning seemed to shoot down from the tops of the skyscrapers, followed by claps of thunder that drowned out the sound of the traffic. Then came the raindrops, big dark spots scattered over the sidewalk, and a moment later the deluge.
Natasha held out her face into the rain. Her mouth was half open, and her eyes were closed. "Hold me tight," she said.
People scurried into doorways, and in an instant the sidewalks were deserted. The street was transformed into a dark frothing lake.
"My God!" cried Natasha. "You've got your new suit on."
"Too late," I said.
"I only thought of myself. I'm stark naked." She lifted up her skirt to the waist, revealing nothing but bare skin and her infinitesimal white panties. "But you! Your beautiful new suit!"
"Too late," I said. "Anyway, a little water won't hurt it. If it'll just need pressing. So let's rejoice in the elements. How about a swim in the Plaza fountain?"
She laughed and pulled me into a doorway. "Come on. It's no good to get the lining wet We can rejoice in the elements right here. Look at the lightning! And it's so blissfully cool! We're lucky our stomachs are full of good food and wine!"
How practical she is, for all her enthusiasm, I thought, and kissed her warm little face. We were standing between two shop windows; on one side, corsets for corpulent matrons quivered in the lightning flashes; on the other, tropical fish were swimming lazily about in the silky green light of their tanks. I had kept such fish in my childhood and recognized some of the varieties: the viviparous cyprinodonts, the guppies that sparkle like jewels, the king cichlids, the cres cent-shaped, silver-and-black-striped scalares making their way like tall exotic sails through the forests of Vallisneria. There amid the phantasmagoric lightnings lay a bit of my childhood, unchanged by their intervening years and events. I held Natasha in my arms and felt her warmth; yet a part of me was far away, crouched over a forgotten spring that had long ceased to flow, harking to a past that entranced me all the more because it had grown so strange to me. Days spent in the woods, or on the lake, as dragonflies with quivering wings hovered motionless in mid-air; evenings in gardens amid the fragrance and freshness of the lilacs. All this passed before my eyes like swift silent film as I peered into the transparent gold and green of the little submarine universe, which to me meant supreme peace, though actually murder and cannibalism were just as prevalent here as anywhere else.
"What would you say if I had an ass like that?" asked Natasha. I turned around. She was looking into the window of the corset shop at a black dressmaker's dummy built like a Valkyrie and girded in an apparatus that looked like armor plate. "You have a magnificent ass," I said, "and you'll never need a corset, even if you're not one of those giraffes you see running around nowadays with buttocks like coffee beans and concave thighs. God bless you. You're the most beautiful fausse maigre in the world. God bless every pound of you."
She nodded happily. 'Then I don't need to diet for your sake?"
"Never."
"It's almost stopped raining. Let's go." Ï turned back for a nostalgic glance at the fish. "Look at the monkeys," said Natasha, pointing into the interior of the shop. In a large cage two excited long-tailed monkeys were doing gymnastics.
"Those are real refugees," she said. "In a cage. You people haven't come to that yet."
"Is that what you think?"
Natasha looked at me. "I don't know anything about you," she answered. "And I don't want to know. It's boring for two people to tell each other the whole story of their lives." She cast a last glance at the Briinhilde corset "Life passes so quickly. One of these days I'll be like that. Maybe I'll even
join a women's club. Sometimes I wake up at night in a cold sweat. You, too?"
"Me, too."
"Really? You don't look ill"
"Neither do you, Natasha."
"Let's get as much out of it as we can."
"Isn't that what we're doing?"
She pressed close to me. I could feel her from her legs to her shoulders. Her dress was like a bathing suit. Her hair hung down in strands, and her face was very pale.
"In a few days I'll have a different apartment," she mur-mered. "Ill be able to bring you in; we won't have to sit around in hotels and bars any more." She laughed. "And if s air-conditioned."
"Are you moving?"
"No. It belongs to some friends who are going to Canada for the summer."
"Fraser?" I asked with foreboding.
"No, not Fraser." She laughed again. "Somebody you wouldn't mind."
A sprinkling of stars could be seen between the clouds. The asphalt glittered like black ice under the headlights of the passing cars. We passed the Lowy brothers' shop: two cloisonné roosters were standing on a Louis Philippe table which, I suspected, Lowy Senior would represent as Directoire, if not Louis Quinze or Seize.
The rain had stopped entirely when I left her outside her door. I walked back to the hotel, savoring the cool air and mulling over the events of the day. I had a sense of danger, but not from outside; no, this danger was inside me. It was as though unsuspectingly I had crossed a mysterious boundary line and now found myself in a region whose values and way of life were very different from those to which I was accustomed. Many things that had been indifferent to me had taken on a new importance. I had ceased to be a total outsider. What is happening to me, I asked myself. Can I be in love? I knew that even an outsider can fall in love, because, perhaps more than others, he is so desperately in need of love. But I also knew that in so doing he is risking his status as an outsider, and, for all the misery it entailed, that status meant a great deal to me.
XIX
"Betty's being operated on tomorrow," said Kahn over the phone. "Go and see her, will you? She's scared."
"Of course. What's the matter with her?"
"They're not sure. Gräfenheim and Ravic have examined her. Some kind of tumor. The operation will show whether it's benign or not Ravic is in charge. He's an assistant at Mount Sinai Hospital now."
"Will he operate?"
"He'll be there. I don't know if he himself is allowed to operate yet. When will you go to see her?"
"At six, when I'm through here. Have you heard from Hirsch?"
"I've seen him. Everything's all right. Gräfenheim already has the money. It was harder for me to give it to him than to get it out of Hirsch. Decent people can be a pain; with crooks you know where you stand."
"Will you be at Betty's?"
"No. I've just been. I had to argue with Gräfenheim for a whole hour. He didn't want to accept his own money from that stinker. And he's on the ragged edge. Talk German to Betty. This is her German day. It's bad enough to be sick, she says, without having to talk English."
It was a warm, gray day. The sky was the color of white ashes. I found Betty sitting up in bed in a Chinese salmon-colored wrapper, no doubt described by the Brooklyn manufacturer as a mandarin coat
"You're just in time to share my execution supper," said Betty. "Tomorrow the guillotine!"
"My goodness, Betty," said Gräfenheim. "It's a little routine examination. A precaution."
"The guillotine is the guillotine," said Betty, with forced merriment, "regardless of whether it cuts off your toenails or your head."
I looked around. There were about ten people, most of whom I knew. Ravic was sitting by the window, gazing out at the street. It was very hot, but the windows were closed. Betty was afraid that opening them would bring in still more heat An electric fan was buzzing like a large tired fly. The door to the next room was open. The Koller twins brought in coffee and apple Strudel. They had turned blond, and I didn't recognize them at first. They were wearing short, tight-fitting skirts and striped, short-sleeved cotton sweaters.
"Cute, aren't they?" Tannenbaum asked. "Look at those cunning rear ends!"
"Definitely," I said. "It must be pretty upsetting," I went on, "to get interested in a twin—especially if they look as much alike as these do."
"Double guarantee," said Tannenbaum, cutting into a piece of Strudel. "If one dies, you can marry the other."
"That's a dismal thought." I glanced at Betty. Luckily, she hadn't heard. She was busy looking at some engravings of Berlin.
"I wasn't really thinking of marrying the Koller twins," I said. 'To tell the truth, I wasn't even thinking of death."
Tannenbaum wagged his head. Its bald crown encased in shaggy black tufts suggested the rear end of a baboon. "What else is there to think of? If a man's in love, he's bound to think: one of us will die first and the other will be left alone. If you don't think that, you're not really in love."
Tannenbaum licked the powdered sugar from the Strudel off his fingers. "If a man is really in love, what he dreads isn't so much the thought of dying first What he really dreads is that the loved one should die first and leave him alone. Obviously the best solution is twins. Especially if they're as pretty as the Koller girls."
"How would you know which one to marry?" I asked. "You can't even tell them apart Or would you toss a coin?"
He looked at me over his pince-nez. "All right. Make fun of a man who's poor, sick, bald, and Jewish, you Aryan monster—sitting there like a white raven cackling at people whose culture was at its height when your ancestors were swinging from trees on both sides of the Rhine and shitting into their fur."
"A magnificent image," I said. "But let's stick to our twins. Why don't you forget your inferiority complex and court one of them?"
Tannenbaum gave me a grieved look. "Those chicks are for movie directors," he said. "They wouldn't even look at me."
"Aren't you an actor?"
"What kind of parts do I get? Nazi underlings. I have no glamour."
"What would interest me is to live with twins, not to wait for somebody to die. If you quarreled with one, you'd have the other. If one of them ran away, the other would still be there. Not to mention more tempting possibilities.
Tannenbaum looked at me in disgust "Is that what you've gone through these last terrible ten years for? Is that all the greatest war in history has taught you?"
"But, Tannenbaum," I protested, "you're the one who started talking about cunning rear ends."
"I meant it metaphysically, as a comic dilemma, not in the vulgar sense, like you, you late offshoot of the Nibelungs."
One of the Koller girls came to us with a fresh platter of Strudel, and when the twin's free hand was occupied with putting it on his plate, he gave her well-rounded behind a tiny little pinch. "Why, Mr. Tannenbaum!" she protested, and went off laughing. Tannenbaum was delighted with himself.
"Hm," I said. "Some metaphysician you turned out to be, you late bloom from the dry cactus of the Talmud!"
"You put me up to it," said Tannenbaum in some confusion.
"Sure, sure. It's always the other fellow. Never take any responsibility, you, you German!"
"But I thank you for it. She didn't seem to mind. What do you think?"
Tannenbaum was radiant. His face had turned rust-red.
"You made one mistake," I said. "You should have made a little chalk mark on her skirt. Then you'd know which one of the twins had tolerated your vulgar advances. Because, you see, the other one might not feel the same way about it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if she upset the whole plate of strudel, plus hot coffee, on your head. As you can see, both twins are serving Strudel at the moment. Do you know which one it was? I don't."
"I . . . it was . . . no . . ." There was hatred in the glance that Tannenbaum darted at me. He stared at the twins as though dazed. Then with superhuman determination he forced a sweet smile, thinking no doubt that the pinched twin would smile back. Instead, the
y both smiled. Tannenbaum uttered a muffled curse. I left him and went back to Betty's room.
I wanted to leave. I detested this atmosphere of nostalgia, which no amount of hate or revulsion could stifle. I had heard too many conversations beginning with "The Germans aren't all like that"—in itself an unquestionable truth, but invariably leading to reminiscences of the good old days in Germany, before the Nazis came and spoiled everything. I understood Betty, I loved her for her naïve, kind heart, but still I couldn't bear to listen. Her tearful eyes, the pictures of Berlin, the language of her homeland, to which she reverted in her fear—all this moved me to tears and at the same time turned my stomach. I detested this prison without walls, this living in memory, this shadowy hatred that strikes out at the void. I looked around; I felt like a deserter because, though I knew this atmosphere was heavy with real suffering, with irretrievable loss, I didn't want to live in it. Suddenly I knew why I wanted to get away. I was afraid that I myself would sink into this sort of helpless shadow rebellion and shadow resignation. For one led to the other. I didn't want to wake up one day after years of waiting and find that all the waiting and useless shadowboxing had sapped my strength. I was determined to take real revenge, to exact real retribution with my own hands, not to content myself with lamentations and protests, and I realized that this meant keeping my distance from the Wailing Wall and the rivers of Babylon.