Collected Fiction Page 3

  “Yes,” the ski-instructor said. “Don’t tell me any more. Still, he sounds very nice. Are you going to marry him?”

  Margaret shrugged. “We’ve talked about it. But … No decision yet. We’ll see.”

  “Are you going to tell him about last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “And about how you got the cut lip?”

  Margaret’s hand went involuntarily to the bruise. She looked sidelong at the ski-instructor. He was squinting solemnly out at the hills. “Frederick paid you a visit last night, didn’t he?” he said.

  “Yes,” Margaret said softly. “You know about Frederick?”

  “Everyone knows about Frederick,” the ski-instructor said harshly. “You’re not the first girl to come down from that room with marks on her.”

  “Hasn’t anything ever been done about it?”

  The ski-instructor laughed harshly. “Charming, high-spirited youth. Most of the girls really love it, the story goes, even the ones who take some argument. A little, quaint individual touch to Mrs. Langerman’s hotel. A village character. Everything for the skier. A funicular, five hand tows, eighteen feet of snow, and some mild local rape. I suppose he never goes too far. If, finally, the lady is really firmly opposed, he quits. He quit with you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Margaret said.

  “You had a bad night altogether, didn’t you? Bring the New Year in with joy and song in happy old Austria.”

  “I’m afraid,” Margaret said, “it’s all of a piece.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Horst Wessel song, Nazis, forcing yourself into women’s rooms, hitting them …”

  “Nonsense!” Diestl’s voice was loud and angry. “Don’t talk like that.”

  “What did I say?” Margaret felt a little returning unreasonable twinge of uneasiness and fear.

  “Frederick did not climb into your room because he was a Nazi.” The ski-instructor was talking now in his usual, calm manner, patient and teacher-like, as he talked to children in his beginners’ classes. “Frederick did that because he is a pig. He’s a bad human being. For him it is only an accident that he is a Nazi. Finally, if it comes to it, he will be a bad Nazi, too.”

  “How about you?” Margaret sat absolutely still, looking down at her feet.

  “Of course,” the ski-instructor said. “Of course, I’m a Nazi. Don’t look so shocked. You’ve been reading those idiotic American newspapers. We eat children, we burn down churches, we march nuns through the street naked and paint dirty pictures on their backs in lipstick and human blood, we have breeding farms for human beings, etcetera, etcetera … It would make you laugh, if it weren’t so serious.”

  He was silent. Margaret wanted to leave, but she felt weak, and she was afraid she would stumble and fall if she got up now. Her eyes were hot and sandy and there was a tingling, uncertain feeling in her knees as though she hadn’t slept in days. She blinked and looked out at the quiet white hills, receding and less dramatic now as the light grew stronger.

  What a lie, she thought, the magnificent, peaceful hills in the climbing sun.

  “I would like you to understand …” The man’s voice was gentle, sorrowful and pleading. “It’s too easy for you in America to condemn everything. You’re so rich and you can afford so many luxuries. Tolerance, what you call democracy, moral positions. Here in Austria we cannot afford a moral position.” He waited, as though for her to attack, but she remained silent, and he went on, his voice low and toneless and hard to understand, losing itself quickly in the immense shining emptiness. “Of course,” he said, “you have a special conception. I don’t blame you. Your young man is a Jew and you are afraid for him. So you lose sight of the larger issues. The larger issues …” he repeated, as though the sound of the words had a reassuring and pleasant effect on his inner ear. “The larger issue is Austria. The German people. It is ridiculous to pretend we are not Germans. It is easy for an American five thousand miles away to pretend we are not Germans. But not for us. This way we are a nation of beggars. Seven million people with no place to go, no future, at anyone’s mercy, living like hotel-keepers off tourists and foreigners’ tips. Americans just can’t understand. People cannot live forever in humiliation. They will do whatever they have to do to regain their self-respect. Austria will only do that by going Nazi, by becoming a part of the Greater Germany.” His voice had become more lively now, and the tone had come back into it.

  “It’s not the only way,” Margaret said, arguing despite herself. But he seemed so sensible and pleasant, so accessible to reason …“There must be other ways than lying and murdering and cheating.”

  “My dear girl,” the ski-instructor shook his head patiently and sorrowfully, “live in Europe ten years and then come and tell me that. If you still believe it. I’m going to tell you something. Until last year I was a Communist. Workers of the World, peace for all, to each according to his need, the victory of reason, brotherhood, brotherhood, etcetera, etcetera.” He laughed. “Nonsense! I do not know about America, but I know about Europe. In Europe nothing will ever be accomplished by reason. Brotherhood … a cheap, street-corner joke, good for mediocre politicians between wars. And I have a feeling it is not so different in America, either. You call it lying, murdering, cheating. Maybe it is. But in Europe it is the necessary process. It is the only thing that works. Do you think I like to say that? But it is true, and only a fool will think otherwise. Then, finally, when things are in order, we can stop what you call the ‘lying and murdering.’ When people have enough to eat, when they have jobs, when they know that their money will be worth the same tomorrow as it is today and not one-tenth as much, when they know they have a government that is their own, that cannot be ordered around by anyone else, at anyone else’s whim … when they can stop being defeated. Out of weakness, you get nothing. Shame, starvation. That’s all. Out of strength, you get everything. And about the Jews …” He shrugged. “It is an unlucky accident. Somehow, someone discovered that that was the only way to come to power. I am not saying I like it. Myself, I know it is ridiculous to attack any race. Myself, I know there are Jews like Frederick, and Jews, say, like myself. But if the only way you can get a decent and ordered Europe is by wiping out the Jews, then we must do it. A little injustice for a large justice. It is the one thing the Comrades have taught Europe—the end justifies the means. It is a hard thing to learn, but, finally, I think, even Americans will learn it.”

  “That’s horrible,” Margaret said.

  “My dear young lady,” the ski-instructor swung around and took her hands, speaking eagerly and candidly, his face flushed and alive, “I am speaking abstractly and it sounds worse that way. You must forgive me. I promise you something. It will never come to that. You can tell your friend that, too. For a year or two, he will be a little annoyed. He may have to give up his business; he may have to move from his house. But once the thing is accomplished, once the trick has done what it is intended to do, he will be restored. The Jew is a means, not an end. When everything else is arranged, he will come back to his proper place. I absolutely guarantee. And don’t believe the American newspapers. I was in Germany last year, and I tell you it is much worse in a journalist’s mind than it is on the streets of Berlin.”

  “I hate it.” Margaret said. “I hate them all.”

  The ski-instructor looked into her eyes, then shrugged, sorrowful and defeated, and swung slowly around. He stared thoughtfully at the mountains. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You seem so reasonable and intelligent. I thought, maybe here is one American who would speak a good word when she got home, one American who would have some understanding …” He stood up. “Ah, I suppose it is too much to ask.” He turned to her and smiled, pleasantly, his lean, agreeable face gentle and touching. “Permit me to make a suggestion. Go home to America. I’m afraid Europe will make you very unhappy.” He scuffed at the snow. “It will be a little icy today,” he said in a brisk businesslike voice. “If you and your friend
are going to ski, I will take you down the west trail myself, if you like. It will be the best one today, but it is not advisable to go alone.”

  “Thank you.” Margaret stood up, too. “But I think we won’t stay.”

  “Is he coming on the morning train?”

  “Yes.”

  The ski-instructor nodded. “He’ll have to stay at least until three o’clock this afternoon. There are no other trains.” He peered at her under his heavy eyebrows, bleached at the ends. “You don’t wish to remain here for your holiday?”

  “No,” said Margaret.

  “Because of last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand. Here.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and a pencil, and wrote for a moment. “Here is an address you can use. It’s only twenty miles from here. The three o’clock train stops there. It’s a charming little inn, and a very good slope, quite advanced, and the people are very nice. Not political at all.” He smiled. “Not horrible like us. There are no Fredericks there. You will be made very welcome. And your friend, too.”

  Margaret took the paper and put it in her pocket. “Thank you,” she said. She couldn’t help thinking, how decent and good this man is, despite everything. “I imagine we’ll go there.”

  “Good. Have a pleasant holiday. And after that …” He smiled at her and put out his hand. “After that, go home to America.”

  She shook his hand. Then she turned and started down the hill toward town. When she was at the bottom of the hill, she looked back. His first class had begun, and he was crouched over on his skis, laughing, patiently lifting a seven-year-old girl, in a red wool cap, from the snow where she had fallen.

  Joseph got off the train, bubbling and joyful. He kissed her and gave her a box of pastries he had carried with insane care all the way from Vienna, and a new skiing cap in pale blue that he hadn’t been able to resist. He kissed her again, and said, “Happy New Year, darling,” and “God, look at your freckles,” and “I love you, I love you,” and “You are the most beautiful American in the world,” and “I’m starving. Where is breakfast?” and breathed deeply and looked around him at the encircling mountains with pride and ownership and said, his arm around her, “Look! Look at that! Don’t tell me there is anything like this in America!” and when she began to cry, helplessly, softly, he grew serious and held her, and kissed the tears, and said in his low, honest voice, “What? What is it, darling?”

  Slowly, standing close to each other, in a corner of the little station, hidden from most of the people on the platform, she told him. She didn’t tell him about Frederick, but about the singing the night before and the Nazi toasts, and that she couldn’t stay there for another day, no matter what. Joseph kissed her forehead absently and stroked her cheek. His face lost the holiday bustle and gaiety that it had had when he got off the train. The fine bones of his cheeks and jaw suddenly showed sharp and hurtful under his skin, and his eyes looked sunken and deep as he spoke to her. “Ah,” he said, “here, too. Indoors, outdoors, city, country …” He shook his head. “Margaret, Baby,” he said gently, “I think you had better get away from Europe. Go home. Go back to America.”

  “No,” she said, letting it come out, without thinking about it. “I want to stay here. I want to marry you and stay here.”

  Joseph shook his head, the soft, closely-cropped hair, graying a little, glistening where some drops of melting snow had fallen on it. “I must visit America,” he said, softly. “I must visit the country that produces girls like you.”

  “I said I want to marry you.” Margaret held his arms tight and hard.

  “Some other time, Sweet,” Joseph said tenderly. “We’ll discuss it some other time.”

  But they never did.

  They went back to Langermans’, and had a huge breakfast, quietly sitting before a sparkling sunny window, with the Alps a majestic background for the bacon and eggs and potatoes and pancakes and coffee Viennese style with globs of whipped cream. Frederick waited on them, discreetly and politely. He held Margaret’s chair when she sat down and was quick to refill Joseph’s cup when it was empty.

  After breakfast Margaret packed, and told Mrs. Langerman that she and her friend had to leave. Mrs. Langerman clucked and said, “What a shame!” and presented the bill.

  There was an item on the bill of nine schillings.

  “I don’t understand this,” Margaret said. She was standing at the shiny oak desk in the lobby as she pointed out the neatly inked entry on the bill. Mrs. Langerman, bobbing, starched and brilliantly scrubbed, behind the desk, ducked her head and peered near-sightedly at the piece of paper.

  “Oh.” She looked up and stared without expression at Margaret. “Oh, that’s for the torn sheets, Liebchen.”

  Margaret paid. Frederick was helping with her bags. She tipped him. He bowed as he helped her into the cab and said, “I hope you have enjoyed your visit.”

  Margaret and Joseph checked their bags at the station and walked around, looking at the shops until it was time to get their train.

  As the train pulled out she thought she saw Diestl, graceful and dark, at the end of the platform, watching. She waved, but the figure didn’t wave back. Somehow, though, she felt it would be like him to come down to the station and, without even greeting her, watch her go off with Joseph.

  The inn Diestl had recommended was small and pretty, and the people charming. It snowed two of the three nights and there was fresh cover on the trails in the morning. Joseph had never been gayer or more delightful. Margaret slept secure and warm, with his arms around her all night, in the huge featherbed that seemed to have been made for mountain honeymoons. They didn’t talk about anything serious, and they didn’t mention marriage again. The sun shone in the clear sky over the peaks all day long, every day, and the air was winey and intoxicating in the lungs. Joseph sang Schubert lieder for the other guests in front of the fire at night, his voice sweet and searching. There was a smell of cinnamon always in the house. Both of them were burned a deep brown, and even so, more freckles than ever before came out on her nose, and Margaret nearly wept when she went down to the station on the fourth day because they had to get to Vienna. The holiday was over.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IN NEW YORK CITY, too, the shining new year of 1938 was being welcomed. The taxicabs were bumper to bumper in the wet streets, their horns swelling and roaring, as though they were all some newly invented species of tin-and-glass animal, penned in the dark stone and concrete. In the middle of the city, trapped in the glare of the advertising signs, like prisoners caught by the warden’s floodlights in the moment of attempted flight, a million people, clamped together, rolled slowly and aimlessly, in pale tides uptown and downtown. The electric sign that jittered nervously around the Times Building announced to the merrymakers below that a storm had destroyed seven lives in the Midwest, that Madrid had been shelled twelve times at the turn of the year, which conveniently for the readers of the Times, came several hours earlier to Madrid than it did to the city of New York.

  The police, to whom the New Year could only mean more burglary, further rape, increasing death in traffic, added heat and snow, put on a show of bluff jollity at the street corners, but their eyes were cynical and weary as they herded the celebrating animals up one side of the Square and down the other.

  The celebrants themselves, pushing lava-like and inexorable through the paper slush underfoot, threw confetti at each other, laden with the million germs of the city’s streets, blew horns to tell the world that they were happy and unafraid, shouted hoarse greetings with thin good nature that would not last till morning. They had come from the fogs of England for this, the green mists of Ireland, the sand hills of Syria and Iraq, from the pogrom-haunted ghettoes of Poland and Russia, from the vineyards of Italy and the cod banks of Norway, and from every other island, city, and continent on the face of the earth. Later, they had come from Brooklyn and the Bronx, and East St. Louis and Texarkana, and from towns called Bimiji and
Jaffrey and Spirit, and they all looked as though they had never had enough sun or enough sleep; they all looked as though their clothes had originally been bought for other people; they all looked as though they had been thrown into this cold, asphalt cage for someone else’s holiday, not their own; they all looked as though deep in their bones they understood that winter would last forever, and that, despite the horns and the laughter and the shuffling, religious promenade, they knew that 1938 would be worse than the year before it.

  Pickpockets, whores, gamblers, pimps, confidence men, taxi-drivers, bartenders and hotel owners did well, as did the producers of plays and champagne salesmen, beggars and nightclub doormen. Here and there could be heard the crashing of glass, as whiskey bottles were hurled out of hotel windows into the narrow areaways which provided light and air and a view of the world to the two-dollar rooms, five dollars for tonight, in which the old year was being discarded in transient merriment. A girl’s throat was cut on 50th Street and an ambulance’s siren made a brief peremptory contribution to the general celebration. From partly opened windows, yellow and bright, on the quieter streets, came the soprano, desert laughter, of women, the Saturday-night and holiday-evening voice of the city, which, rasping and over-amused, somehow can only be heard in the dark, toward the cold hours of morning.

  Later on, in the ageless January air underground, dank and flickering in the enclosed dark roar of the suburban subway trains, the crowd, by then compartmentalized, swaying and grimy-eyed, silent and bruised by sleep, smelling of street-corner gardenias, garlic, onion, sweat, shoe polish, perfumes and labor, would flee to their lurking homes. But now they flowed up and down the bright streets, making noise with horns and rattles and tin whistles, irresistibly and steadfastly celebrating, because, for lack of a better reason, as the new year came in, they had proof that they had at least survived the old year and were alive for the next.