Shadows in Paradise

  Vesel glared at him. "What if you can't find work? You've got a horrible accent, and when the war's over there won't be any more of those parts."

  "Wrong again. They'll be rehashing the war for years."

  "You know everything," said Vesel. "You must be God."

  "I'm not God," said Tannenbaum. "But at least I've got a job."

  "Gentlemen!" said Mrs. Vriesländer. "You mustn't fight Now that our troubles are over."

  "Are they?" asked Kahn.

  "Not if you go back," said Tannenbaum. "What do you think the old country looks like now?"

  "Home is home," said Vesel.

  "And shit is shit."

  "I've got to go back," said Frank. "What else can I do?"

  That was the keynote of this dismal evening. Suddenly Kahn's prediction had come true. Because it would soon be possible to go back, those who wanted to stay were beginning to have their doubts, to fear that they would be losing something. America had not changed, but the prospect of staying there no longer seemed so attractive. And those who wanted to go back and still looked upon Germany as their home suddenly realized that, far from being a paradise, it was a devastated country, where life would be very difficult. Both those who had decided to go back and those who had decided to stay felt like deserters.

  "Lissy wants to go back," said Kahn. "Lucy, the other twin, wants to stay. They've hardly ever been apart. They each accuse the other of selfishness. It's tragic."

  I didn't know how he stood with Lissy. "Couldn't you talk to her?" I asked.

  "No. It's in the air. Some go, some stay, and all will be disillusioned."

  "What will you do?"

  "Me?" he said, laughing. "I can't go either way. I'll just burst like a balloon. What about you?"

  "I don't know. I've still got time to think about it"

  "You've been doing that ever since you got here."

  "Thinking is no help. It only complicates matters. One day you suddenly do something."

  "Yes," he said. "Suddenly. That's it."

  Vriesländer took me aside. "Don't forget what I told you about German stocks. After the armistice they'll be dirt cheap. And they'll go up and up. Even if you hate Germany politically, you can count on the German economy. The Germans are a schizophrenic people, proficient in industry, commerce, science, and mass murder."

  "Yes," I said. "And sometimes you find all those gifts combined in the same individual."

  "Exactly. Didn't I say they were schizophrenics? You be one, too: hate the Nazis and make a fortune."

  "Wouldn't you call that opportunism?"

  "Call it whatever you like. But why should we let the German corporations, which benefited by the Nazi regime and worked their slave laborers to death, pile up another fortune?"

  "They will anyway," I said. 'They'll be subsidized, and their directors will be honored and decorated. We saw what happened after the First World War. Are you going back, Mr. Vriesländer?"

  "Certainly not. I can handle my business by phone. If you need money, I'll be glad to lend you a thousand dollars. That will be a lot of money over there."

  "Thank you. I may take you up."

  For a fraction of a second something seemed to have gone wrong with the light It did not go out, but the people and objects around me were blanketed in mist In that moment an anguished desire, which I had been able to live with until then because it seemed half-unattainable, became reality. I had no thought of investing the money Vriesländer offered me. What it meant to me was the possibility of going back to the country that was the substance of my nightmare, a lowering black cloud that threatened to engulf me. I stood dazed in the glare of the chandeliers..The room and everyone in it twisted and turned uncontrollably. Then in the midst of the confusion I heard Kahn's voice: "The cook is getting your goulash ready. You can pick it up in the kitchen, and then we can make our getaway. How about it?"

  "What? Getaway? When?"

  "Whenever you like. Preferably right now."

  "Oh!" I blinked. At last I understood what he was saying. "I can't go yet," I said. "There are some things I want to attend to." I wanted to pull myself together and I thought I could do that most easily with people around me. And at that particular moment I had no desire to be alone with Kahn.

  "All right," said Kahn, "but I'm leaving. I can't take any more of this atmosphere, this mixture of excitement, sentimentality, and uncertainty. All these people make me think of blind birds that keep dashing against the bars of their cage; then one day they discover that the bars are not made of steel but of cooked spaghetti. And they don't know whether to sing or weep. Some have started to sing. They'll soon find out that there's nothing to sing about, that they've only been deprived of their last possessions; romantic nostalgia and romantic hatred. It's not possible to hate what has been destroyed. Good night, Robert."

  He was very pale. "Maybe I'll drop in on you later," I said.

  "Don't. I'll just take two sleeping pills and go to bed." Then he saw the alarm in my face and added: "Don't worry. I won't do anything foolish."

  "Good night, Kahn. I'll drop in tomorrow at lunch hour."

  "Do that."

  I had an impulse to run after him, but I was too befuddled by the dismal absurdity of this whole gathering and by what Kahn himself had said. I sat there, listening absently to Lachmann, who was telling me confidently of bis recovery; for four weeks now he had been having an affair with a widow, and he felt that his performance, though not brilliant, could be qualified as normal.

  I asked him if he was going back.

  "Maybe in a few years. For a visit. There's no hurry."

  I looked at him enviously. "What did you do before?" I asked. "Before Hitler."

  "I was a student. My parents had money. I never learned how to do anything."

  I couldn't ask him what had become of his parents, but I'd have been glad to know what was going on in his mind. Kahn had told me once that the Jews were too neurasthenic to be vengeful. Because they were neurasthenic, their hatred had no stamina; it soon gave way to resignation and, to preserve their self-respect, they turned their energies to understanding the enemy. Like all radical generalizations, this was only partly true. Still, there was something in it. Or maybe they were too cultivated, too sublimated to be vengeful. I wasn't. I was alone, I felt like a troglodyte, but there was a force within me that I could not ignore. All attempts to evade or repress it culminated in an unbearable rage of impatience. It was something in my blood; I hardly understood it myself, but I knew it would lead me to my destruction. I fought against it; I tried to get away from it, and sometimes I thought I was almost succeeding; but then came a memory, a dream, or, as now, an opportunity to set the wheels of destiny in motion, and that was the end of my illusions; then I knew that there was no escape for me.

  "You must try to be more cheerful," Mrs. Vriesländer said to me. "After all this is our last gathering as refugees."

  "The last?"

  "Our group is breaking up. The days of the Wandering Jew are over."

  I looked at her in disbelief. Where had the simple, kind-hearted woman heard that? All at once, for no good reason, my spirits revived. I forgot Kahn and my own thoughts. I looked at her plump, rosy-cheeked, mindless face and suddenly I became aware of the touching, innocent, almost magnificent absurdity of this mournful victory celebration. "You're right, Mrs. Vriesländer," I said. "We must try to get some pleasure out of each other before we all go off in different directions. We're all like soldiers when the war is over—comrades today, tomorrow friends or strangers. So in parting let's give a last grateful thought to what we have meant to each other."

  "Exactly. That's just what I meant."

  I became more and more euphoric. Despair may have entered in, but when doesn't it? It seemed to me that nothing bad could happen, not even to Kahn. Precisely because disaster had menaced me so blatantly, it no longer seemed possible.

  XXXIII

  I found Kahn at noon next day; He had shot himself. He
was not lying on the bed. He had been sitting in a chair and had slumped to the floor. It was a very bright day. The curtains were not drawn. The light streamed into the room, and there lay Kahn on the floor. For a moment the sight seemed so unreal that I could not believe it. Then I heard the radio and, coming closer, saw his shattered head. Seen from the doorway, his face had looked intact

  I didn't know what to do. I had heard that in such cases you must phone the police and that nothing must be moved in the meantime. For a time I stared at the lifeless body, which seemed to have no more to do with Kahn than wax figures do with life. Then suddenly I awoke to myself and to a terrible confusion of grief and remorse. I blamed myself for Kahn's death, and the thought was unbearable. He had been cruelly alone, he had needed me. The signs had been obvious, but in my eagerness to see Natasha I had overlooked them.

  I turned off the radio and looked about for a letter, though it became clear to me almost at once that I would find none. He had died alone, as he had lived alone. I also knew why I had looked for a message. In the hope that it would dispel my sense of guilt Now I saw his shattered head in all its reality, yet as though looking at it from a distance, through a thick pane of glass. In my confusion I was struck with surprise that he had shot himself; this was no fit death for a Jew. But even as the thought grazed my mind I remembered that this might well have been one of Kahn's sardonic remarks; it's not true, I said to myself, and was ashamed to have had such a thought

  I finally pulled myself together. I had to do something. I called Ravic.

  "Kahn has shot himself," I said. "I don't know what to do. Can you come,here?"

  Ravic said nothing for a moment. "Are you sure he's dead?" he asked.

  "Yes. His head is smashed to pieces."

  A hysterical thought passed through my mind: maybe Ravic was thinking that in that case there was no hurry, that he had time to eat lunch.

  "Don't do anything," he said. "Don't touch anything. I'll be right over."

  I put down the phone, settled myself in a chair near the door, and waited. Then it struck me as cowardly to be sitting so far from Kahn, and I moved in by the table. Everywhere I found traces of Kahn's last moments: a displaced chair, a book that lay closed on the table. I opened it, hoping that it would throw some light on his state of mind; but it was neither an anthology of German poetry nor one of Franz Werf el's books, but some irrelevant American novel.

  The silence was made more oppressive by the muffled sound of the traffic. Kahn was dead, and it was inconceivable, just as the death of a bird or rabbit is inconceivable, beyond our powers of thought.

  Ravic came in quietly, but I started up as if I had heard an explosion. He went directly to Kahn and looked at him. He did not bend over and did not touch him. 'Well have to notify the police," he said. "Do you want to be here when they come?"

  "Don't I have to be?"

  "I can say I found him. The police will ask a lot of questions. Wouldn't you rather avoid them?"

  "It doesn't matter now," I said.

  "Are your papers in order?"

  "It makes no difference now."

  "Oh yes, it does," said Ravic. "And it wont do Kahn any good."

  "I'll stay," I said. "It's all the same to me if the police think I murdered him."

  Ravic looked at me. "You think so yourself, don't you?"

  I stared at him. "What gives you that idea?"

  "It's not hard to guess. Forget it, Ross. If we were to interpret every accident as fate, we'd be paralyzed for life." He looked at the rigid, no longer recognizable face. "I've always had a feeling that he didn't know what to do with himself when the war was over."

  "Did you?"

  "It's simple for a doctor. We patch people up again so they can be killed in the next war." He picked up the phone and called the police. He had to repeat the name and address several times. "Yes, he's dead," he said. "Yes. All right. When? Good." He hung up. "They'll come as soon as they can. Murders have priority. This isn't the only suicide in town."

  We sat and waited. Time seemed to stand still. I discovered an electric clock on Kahn's radio. Kahn's radio. Kahn's clock, I thought, and sensed my mistake at once. Possession was bound up with life. Those things no longer belonged to Kahn, because he no longer belonged to them.

  "Are you staying in America?" I asked Ravic.

  He nodded and gestured toward Kahn. "He had no illusions. They'll probably hate us the same as before. Do you still believe the fairy tale about the poor Germans who were forced to do all those things against their will? Look at the newspapers. They know the war is lost, but they defend every single house. They defend their Nazis as a lioness defends her cubs; they're perfectly willing to die for them." He shook his head more sadly than angrily. "He knew what he was doing. It wasn't an act of desperation. He simply saw things more clearly." Ravic paused for a moment "It makes me very sad," he said "Kahn saved my life in 1940. I was in a French internment camp. The Germans were coming. The commandant refused to let us go. Kahn found out where I was. He turned up in the camp with two men, all in S.S. uniforms, and bellowed at the commandant, said he had orders to arrest me."

  "Did it work?"

  "Not right away. The commandant suddenly remembered his honor as a soldier. He said I wasn't there any more, that I'd been released. He would have been willing to hand over the whole lot of us, but a single individual touched his conscience and he tried to save me. Kahn turned the camp upside down until he found me. It was a comedy of errors. I was hiding. I thought it was really the Gestapo. Once we were out of the camp, Kahn gave me a drink of brandy and explained. I hadn't recognized him in his disguise. Hitler mustache and dyed hair; It was the best brandy I ever tasted." Ravic looked up. "I've never seen anyone who could be so lighthearted in difficult situations. The peaceful life over here depressed him. It got worse from day to day. He couldn't have been saved. Do you know why I'm telling you all this?"

  "Yes."

  "I have more reason than you to blame myself," said Ravic very slowly. "But I don't. We can't if we want to go on living."

  Heavy steps were heard on the stairs. 'The police," said Ravic. "That's a sound you never forget"

  "Where will they take him?" I asked.

  "To the morgue. They'll want to take an autopsy. Or maybe they won't, since the cause of death is not in doubt." The door burst open. Crude primitive life poured into the rpom. Stupid questions were asked, the sergeant took notes with the inevitable pencil stub (a full-length pencil has never been seen in the hands of a policeman), the body was lifted onto a stretcher and carried away. We were taken to the police station, but dismissed after we had given our addresses. Kahn remained behind.

  "The undertaker greets us like old friends," said Lissy Koller bitterly.

  She was less upset than I had expected. Strangely enough, Kahn seemed to make no lasting impression on women. Tannenbaum had wired Carmen. Later I heard that she had received the news without surprise or emotion and gone on feeding her chickens. Lissy, who had been deeply affected by the death of Betty Stein, looked fresh, pink, and serene. Maybe she had a lover, I thought, an amiable nonentity whom she understands. Neither she nor Carmen had understood Kahn, and he, for his part, had never taken an interest in women who did not understand him.

  It was a cloudy, wind-swept day. I had threatened to eject Rosenbaum bodily from the chapel if he tried to speak, and he had promised not to. At the last moment I had instructed the proprietor to remove the potted plants from the entrance of the establishment and not to play records of German folk songs. The man looked at me as mournfully as if I had wrenched his last crust of bread from between his gold teeth. There was a fee of five dollars for the music. I looked through his record collection and found Mozart's Ave verum. "Play this," I said. "And never mind about taking away the laurel trees."

  The chapel was only half full. The mourners included a night watchman, a masseuse with only nine fingers, a masseur who had been a coal dealer in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a waiter who h
ad operated a corset shop in Munich, and a tearful old woman unknown to me. Kahn had saved them all from the Gestapo in France.

  Suddenly I caught sight of Rosenbaum. He came creeping out from behind the coffin like a black frog. A habitué of funerals, he alone of all the mourners was dressed for the occasion—in a morning coat and striped trousers. He planted himself in front of the coffin and cast a sidelong glance in my direction; then he opened his mouth.

  Ravic nudged me. He had seen me jump. I nodded. Rosenbaum had triumphed; he knew I wouldn't start a fight next to Kahn's coffin. I wanted to leave, but Ravic nudged me again. "Don't you think Kahn would have been amused?" he whispered.

  "No. He even told me once that he'd rather drown than have Rosenbaum speak at his funeral."