The Acrobats

  Juanito noticed a big, somnolent figure detach himself from the strollers-by. Colonel Kraus was not sweating, his walk was brisk, and he hardly seemed to feel the heat or what a fine figure he cut among the exhausted crowd. Kraus nodded at Juanito. “Good afternoon,” he said.

  “Please sit down, Colonel. Join my American friend and myself for a drink.”

  Kraus sat down. He turned his rheumy eyes on Derek, mockery and doubt curdling on his doughy face. His English was hard. “I have been to your country,” he said. “I was in New York in 1928. I was introduced to Henry Ford. We had dinner together.”

  “Colonel Kraus has been in the Olympics three times. Once as captain of the German team,” Juanito said. He turned to Kraus, smiling.

  “Do you know the Canadian?” Kraus asked.

  And there was the old unerring military sharpness in his voice. For he was rediscovering himself, even as if the drums were booming again, the voices singing again, throbbing again in his ears, finding himself after six years of slipshod living, sleepy living, rediscovering himself because here again in the shape of André was the enemy. And Kraus knew, just as André knew, what would have to come. The moment under the window had been a moment of recognition.

  “The Canadian?” Juanito no longer felt inferior to André. The fact of his theft had endeared him to Juanito. “André?” he said, as if André was not a man but a restaurant vaguely recommended. “You mean the artist? The boy from Montreal?”

  Derek giggled inanely. He did not know Kraus but he knew his history. Eric had spoken of him, so had Kleber, so had Gus. Afterwards, Kraus had been briefly at Maidanek where his sister was engaged at the Vernichtungslager. Indirectly, she had been connected with the crematoriums. She had been in charge of the checking and stamping of the dead for gold teeth, overlooked rings, and so on. Derek was drunk, and Kraus frightened him. In the old days I would have been angry, he thought. “If you ask me André is a queer,” he said. “Queer as a goat.”

  “He is just a silly boy, Colonel,” Juanito said. “He pretends to come from a good family but … Well, there is no explaining the old Jew’s likes and dislikes. Perhaps he hopes the paintings will be of some value later on.”

  Chaim is finished, Kraus thought. I will see about the boy too. “Does the girl love him?” he asked.

  “The girl,” Juanito said disparagingly. “How can one account for the passing whims of such a child? Perhaps at one time … But surely Colonel, you are not interested in such a child. There are many more attractive girls at the club. I would gladly undertake …”

  “That is enough!” Kraus turned to Derek. “Does Spain please you?”

  Derek, who was pale now, smiled. “I have been here before,” he said. “In fact, Colonel, I was at Quatro Caminos. You know, on the other side of the Manzanares.”

  Kraus did not seem to hear. In fact, he had already prepared what he was going to say. “You must pay no attention to what the street Arabs have to say about Franco. There are many malcontents about.” Kraus frowned. “You do not know what the Reds did here during the War of Liberation. What they would do again if they had the opportunity. I remember, very well, the campaign around Bilbao.

  “I was a captain then. We had just taken a small village near the city. The Reds had fled several hours previous and as usual they had set fire to the whole village. A thirteen-year-old girl had been crucified on the church door. Her stomach had been slit open. Just as we were unpinning the poor child a drunken old man hobbled out of a cave. I forced him to kiss the feet of the murdered child. Now, I said, cry Viva Franco. He refused. One of my comrades kicked the old man in the stomach. The old drunk fell on his knees and begged for mercy. I pushed my pistol to his forehead, and said, now! cry Viva Franco. He refused. I shot him.

  “Everywhere we went we came across murdered priests and raped nuns. The Reds were mad dogs, and we had to shoot them. It was the only way to clean up the country.”

  Derek stared coldly at Kraus. He remembered the damp nights, the comedy of a handful of chatos pitched against the Stukas and Capronis, and he remembered the noble men and the fine songs and the Salud! Compañeros. And he realised now and for ever that those days at the front constituted the only moment of truth he had known (not the ideas or the lies or the speeches or the poems or the machines, but the men all together and angry and beautiful). Derek, you are dead: morte: kaput. You are Judas, and you have been gypped out of your gold. Derek smiled, Derek laughed. “It’s all right, Colonel,” he said. “We are allies now. We’re all in it together now, but we are screwed. For in the end, that very last battle, will be theirs.” And then mentally, to himself, he added: God pity us. And he said: “I was only joking, Colonel. We’ll be okay. They haven’t got a chance.”

  Kraus wrinkled up his brow. “Were you in the war?” he asked.

  “Yes, I was in the war.” And he stood up, pale and shivering and giggling, clutching the crotch of his pants in his fist. “I was wounded three times. The last time – Here!”

  Then uncorked misery wringing his face, his raving soul unzippered, naked, he collapsed in his chair, whimpering.

  Juanito shrugged his shoulders. “I think he is drunk.”

  “He is filthy!” Kraus said.

  IV

  It was time for the afternoon siesta.

  The sky was hot and cloudless and moist. The trees along the paseos drooped in the heat and the flowers in the plazas and gardens were wilted and forlorn.

  There had been no rain for ten days.

  A parade of soldiers erect and proud came marching down the Calle San Vincente. Black boots hit the pavement all together, coming up again in unison; trumpets blew. A young captain, unsmiling, led the band down the street. His drawn sword glittered in the sun.

  The band passed, leaving behind it a beating echo; and from her window Fräulein Kraus watched. She drew the curtains quickly. He is only a barman, she thought. It would not do for him to see me watching by the window. She cracked her knuckles; and in her belly she felt the fluttering again. What am I coming to? What am I coming to? What if Roger finds him here and guesses?

  I won’t answer the door. I will pretend I am out.

  She turned away from the window and stopped short in front of the mirror. She smoothed out her black dress and remembered her mother’s injunction: after a certain age there was only one colour for a woman, and that colour was black. Alfred, who was dead, had thought differently. He had liked bright colours.

  And he had liked laughter.

  He had laughed when she had told him that she had informed about the meeting and that there would be many men with lead pipes and gas bombs. Saying: “You found me with Martha so you are jealous. But you would not inform. You are too good for that.” Still laughing when he had gone off to Spain carrying freshly won scars, burnt gums and small perforations on his thighs. A Star of David burnt into his flesh although he had been the son of a pastor.

  The shades were drawn. There were flowers and a bottle of cognac on the table. The bureau which was in need of repair was in the bedroom.

  What does it matter, she thought?

  She laughed. Her eyebrows hurt where she had plucked them. Suddenly, not understanding, she held her head in her hands. There was a lump in her throat.

  When her weakness finally subsided she walked over to the window again, peeking out from behind the shade. What if I gave him the wrong address, she thought? What if …

  She walked up and down the room. She rearranged the chairs and straightened out the tablecloth. She wrung her hands. Then, when she thought that she could stand it no longer, he knocked at the door. She opened the door and smiled at him. “It is so kind of you to come,” she said.

  Luís nodded. There was a somnolent look in his eyes and his body seemed relaxed and powerful. He stepped into the parlour. “Where is the bureau?” he asked. “I must be back at work soon.”

  She laughed. “There is no hurry. Won’t you sit down first?”

  Before he
could protest she had poured him a glass of cognac. “It is so hot,” she said. “But you are so strong. Perhaps you don’t feel it as a woman does?”

  Suddenly, Luís was embarrassed. He realised that he was angry with her only because she was ugly. If she had been younger or more attractive he would not have minded. He felt restless and unsure of himself. “I think I’d better look at the bureau,” he said.

  She got up. “It is in the bedroom,” she said.

  She had lost her way in the winding streets behind the Plaza del Mercado and there the heat had a special smell to it.

  The heat smelled of rancid food, children with soiled underwear, uncovered garbage, venereal diseases, sweat and boils, pimpled adolescents with one leg and a stump for another, remedies exchanged across washing-lines, cheats, cross-eyed whores, dirty persons, and no privacy.

  Jessie inhaled the stink of the poor which was the stink of her grandfather from Ireland and she felt sick.

  Where am I going and why?

  What if I divorce him?

  No.

  But I shouldn’t have thrown him out I guess.

  The heat was in the sidewalks and in the buildings and she felt it possessing her body. The heat was in the foreign eyes gloomily staring, in the children who paused at their games as she passed in her high-heeled shoes by I. Miller, the heat was a tightening belt around her stomach, it was in the eyes of the housewives lowering their voices when she passed, on the lips of the men exchanging obscenities as she passed. The heat was in her as she tip-tapped by; a long-legged American woman – and she wanted to scream.

  Two sullen young men were following her.

  In the past, whenever she was faced with a crisis, her father had appeared to her in a dream and told her what to do. But last night she had slept uneasily and there had been no dreams. Somehow the notion of André appealed to her. They were of the same kind, and he could help her. He had such lovely hands, and a kind of gentleness about his mouth. But who knew where he lived?

  She stopped to look into a window and the two sullen young men stopped beside her. Jessie felt that she was going to faint, but she knew she mustn’t. One of the young men, nonchalantly, moved around to her other side. As he passed she caught a sour whiff of his sweat. He doesn’t wash his feet, she thought. The man made an obscene gesture with his hands. His fingernails were dirty.

  Suddenly Jessie flung her handbag at him and fled down the street.

  The man stared after her, open-mouthed. He turned to his friend, and said: “She had such lovely legs.”

  “Yes,” the other man said.

  They reached down for the bag and it felt warm and feminine in their hands. One of the young men, the one who had said she had such lovely legs, held the bag to his cheek.

  V

  He was envying André for being young and in love and pitying himself for having reached an age when desire was incongruous and sensuality a smutty story. He looked at him and he saw a face that was angry and immature, different from the others only because of the eyes, eyes not American but Slavic or Jewish, eyes mirroring a soul that did tightrope dances on high and windy places.

  “Before Christ there were two great teachers among the Jews. Hillel and Shamai. One man was compounded of love and the other only of justice. A Gentile once came to Shamai and said I want to be a Jew. But I am a tailor and I work long hours to earn my living. Teach me to be a Jew on one foot. Shamai was shocked. To be instructed in the great teachings of the Jews in one sitting! He threw the man out of his house. The tailor visited Hillel and repeated his request. Hillel said I shall teach you to be a Jew in one sitting. Do unto your neighbour as you would like your neighbour to do unto you; and you shall be a Jew. And the tailor was proselytised.

  “Most evils originate in ignorance, which is a lack of wisdom. And, tell me, what is an ignorant man? An ignorant man is he who believes the whole universe exists only for him. As if nothing else required any consideration.”

  There was a quality of coolness in the air now.

  The sea churned, heaved, gasped – arms of water flinging themselves heavenwards, falling downwards gloomily. Suddenly a star like a pinprick on a faded blue canvas flickered full of hope in the abandoned sky. Far away, just where the sun fell into the sea, the sea yawned, drowning the sun.

  “But I like you André because you are not bored. You are not intellectual and uncommitted. You are always taking part, even if not always intelligently. The earth is in your hands and you are dirty.”

  Swaggering sea rolled tiny fishing smacks to and fro on its exultant thighs. The tangy stink of seaweed, dead fish, rust, invigorated the breezy air. The resounding roar of the sea, the dying sun captured just now in the sails of the smaller fishing craft, the loud lapping of the waves against the boats, impudent prows jerking upwards then flatly falling, grey gulls swooping down into the foam hungrily, all this traffic was as a song of faith beside the anguish of the unending walk of the unemployed, the stunned men who wandered along the docks with less purpose and no more dignified way of obtaining food than wharf rats.

  They were seated in front of Cosmi’s small café on the waterfront. Chaim leaned back in his chair puffing on a cigar and sipping muscatel. André, seated opposite him, was pale and restless. He scratched his head and puffed anxiously at his cigarette.

  “Jesus, Chaim! What are you going to do? It took you years to build up the Mocambo. How will you get a job? What will you do for money?”

  “Three years to be exact,” Chaim said.

  “Okay!” André said quickly. “So you’re three years older now.”

  Chaim chuckled. I should have a family, he thought. Kids to comfort me and spend my money when I’m too old myself. I could have a rabbi, a drunkard, a sweet little nympho daughter all for myself, and a skinny jerk with a yiddish kop, somebody serious, who could make money so that the rest of us could enjoy ourselves. “Perhaps I should go to Israel and go into politics?” he said. “I could make a few speeches about the rotten Goyim and maybe get a monument put up in my honour? But those communal farms – Riverside Drive Reds wiping their feet on your towel. You come with me, André. We’ll start a kind of S.P.C.A. to protect the Arabs.”

  André shrugged his shoulders.

  He and Toni had devoted most of the morning to plan-making. They would go to Paris, and he would give an exhibition; Toni would get a job dancing in a small club; later, as soon as they could afford it, they would rent a small place in Provence. After he had left her he had gone down to the Mocambo to consult Chaim. Luís, who had been watching for him, stopped him at the corner.

  “Look, don’t worry about me. I told you a hundred times. It’s easy to make money. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Painting is hard. Being a man is hard. Money? Balls!”

  Several flies settled on a puddle of cognac on the table. Quickly, André shooed them away. “I’d fight it,” André said. “I wouldn’t show so goddam much discretion.”

  “If I hang around they can put me away for the rest of my life for being here illegally. Let them have the club. I’m tired of it anyway. It was very good of Mariano to tip me off.”

  “Who in the hell could have told them?”

  “I don’t know,” Chaim said. “Mariano wouldn’t tell me. There was only so much he could do.”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Don’t be pompous,” Chaim said sharply. “You’ve had far too much to drink.” A breeze swept over the sea: Chaim felt a pleasant draft under his armpits. “It’s all very simple. Take this envelope and on Thursday I’ll be in the Gare du Nord to meet you. A honeymoon in Paris! What more could you want?”

  André refilled his glass. “I can’t take the money. Don’t be silly.”

  Chaim pushed the envelope towards him. He was glad about the wind. In the evening he felt younger and almost slim. “Look, they are probably raiding the club right now,” he said. “If they find me I’m screwed. Take the money if only for Toni’s sake. How could you ever get out? I’ll
have a new passport by nine o’clock. Tomorrow morning I’ll be in Tangier. Wednesday afternoon I’ll be in Paris. It’s all very simple. Take it.”

  “I don’t understand. Why did you have a forged passport? I thought you were an American citizen.”

  Chaim sighed. It seemed so long ago. The silly women on the boat, Le Havre, Isaac thin and worried. Becky, Becky. It has been so long since you left me. So much has happened.

  “I was broke. I sold my American passport in ’47.”

  “You sold it!”

  “There is no need to go into that now. Take the money.”

  André, slightly drunk, stared out at the sea. Bombs had made a ruin of the port years ago. The guts of several maimed sheds raised themselves like ghosts into the cool and darkening sky. About fifty feet out to sea a garden of barnacles climbed out of the oily water and held the hull of a sunken tanker in a death-grip. The rotting hull, wallowing in filth and mud, was bloated and like a corpse. The slogan SIEMPRE FRANCO was painted on it. André lit a cigarette off his butt. “It’s wrong, you know. They have no right. Stay here and we’ll fight it.”

  “Child, fight what? They say I was a smuggler. That’s true. They say I’m here on a false passport. That’s true. You’ve had too much cognac. Also, I’m sorry to say, you are very young. There are the times to fight and the times to run. Knowing that is the difference between being a foolish hero or a useful man. Take the money!”

  André swallowed his cognac belligerently, but he stuffed the envelope in his pocket.

  Chaim called for the bill. “I’m going to miss the flamenco,” he said. “Tell Toni I’m sorry I didn’t see her. Have a nice wedding, Mazel Tov. Thursday night I’ll take you to the Café de Paris for dinner.”

  “Was it Kraus?”

  “Always it has to be your fault. Maybe you’re only an intellectual after all. How could he have known about my passport?”

  “He worked for you. He might have heard gossip.”

  “It wasn’t Kraus,” Chaim said. “But you keep out of his way.”