Augusta Played (3 page)

He did.

“It's nothing personal, you understand,” she said again, packing his bag.

“Farewell,” he said. “Good-bye,
vale, au revoir
, so long,” he said, kissing her plump neck ardently and with some relief.

And that is how he happened to be living alone, in spite of his not liking to, when he began to notice the girl with the flute and the good legs who trekked daily back and forth between Juilliard and the place where she lived.

The day he returned to his apartment after discovering where she lived, he went through the papers to find out what was playing that Saturday night. You do not get to be a cultural musicologist without acquiring a working knowledge of the habits of musicians and music students. Music students went to concerts, either with tickets or passes, or as ushers. But suppose, he thought at once, suppose she stayed home? Maybe she lived with someone. All the class in those good
shiksa
bones, she was the type to shack up with someone who was mildly dissolute and mildly successful, someone about fifteen years older than she was. He had made an informal survey of her kind. You almost had to, out of self-defense; some of these Gentile chicks would eat a man alive—they were seismic at the psychological center, convulsive; they opened up like the San Andreas Fault and then they swallowed up whatever or whoever fell in.

But this one looked different. The matter of the temperature, for instance. The others he had observed, no matter how glacial their makeup or their manners, betrayed their hunger in blood-warm glances, passion pounding at the back of the eyeball, contained and desperate. This one was cool, very cool. Even in a literal sense, she was cool. Even in this heat, when other girls' hair stuck to their foreheads and their makeup turned orange and they had moons of wetness on their tee shirts under their arms, and their hands felt sticky, like
the roof of
a car
parked under a gum tree, she walked down the
street with her chin high, clicking in her high-heeled shoes, her hair bouncing like a commercial, looking as if she smelled of talcum powder. She looked as if nobody had any claims on her—she didn't owe anybody anything, she was free and clear of all obligations, and the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that she didn't live with anyone. Saturday evening, he stationed himself across the street from her building.

She came down at seven, and walked into his life.

6

I
T
WAS
STUFFY
in the store. The clerk was a Gypsy. He wore a gold hoop in one ear, and his eyes and mouth seemed to have been pasted onto his face. He slid up and down the length of the counter on one side and Norman and Augusta moved up and down the other looking at rings and things. Norman whispered to Gus that he felt like a toy magnetic Scottie, and then they both fancied they caused the clerk to move left or right, or that his movements determined theirs. Gus got the giggles; she tried to hide it, but she could feel her face breaking out in smiles like a rash. Then Norman wished she'd hurry up and choose so they could get the hell out, it was too close in the store, and the clerk was too deferential, deference dripped from him like perspiration. Eventually Gus chose a cultured pearl. Norman slipped it onto her finger later, during lunch in the deli, the spot of beauty slamming the eye down toward the nail, which had been chewed to the quick. A flutist should not bite her nails: Norman said this to her. She looked up. “I don't bite all of them,” she said, taken aback. “Just this one.”

And that made it all right?

“Of course,” she said. “I call it containing tension. What would you call it?”

Instead of answering, Norman ordered Hungarian goulash and a root beer. Gus was too excited to eat. She had met Norman two weeks and three days ago (“I can tell you how to get to Carnegie Hall,” he had said, coming up to her on the street. “Practice, practice! Well,” he had gone on, not stopping for an answer, “what else could I say that would let you know I know what you're all about and am not just some nut from nowhere?”), and now she was engaged to him. She had not had time to decide what she thought about this. She felt slightly out of breath, as if she had been running although she hadn't, and her face was always just a little bit flushed these days, her eyes opened a little wider than usual, as if she were on the verge of an adventure. That was how she felt—adventurous, exhilarated, overflowing with capability and a little frightened at the same time.

The delicatessen wasn't kosher; it was run by a mesomorphic Berliner with a ruminative turn of mind. The Berliner wore a large tablecloth tucked into his belt, and used it as a napkin when serving hot dishes, as a towel to dry his hands, and, if he thought he was unobserved, as a handkerchief. The broad tip of his nose was bristly. His eyes were small but candid; when he spoke about his wife, they became expressive. His wife, the Berliner told them, was responsible for the mural, five feet high and winding around all four walls of the establishment, which depicted in somewhat sketchy fashion a winter scene of unspecific locale, including reindeer and a profusion of holly berries, anachronistic in late summer. The low ceiling to the landscape lent it a comic-strip character, although it was evidently meant to be taken seriously. The Berliner certainly took it seriously. He explained to Norman and Augusta that his wife had studied in Munich. Studied what? Gus wondered. To avoid having to praise the painting, Gus asked the Berliner if he and his wife missed Deutsch-land, and how they came to be on the Upper West Side, instead of in Yorktown, for example.

But Gus supposed that from one point of view, an omniscient point of view, all places would be equally peculiar. It was like that spurious mathematical case for creation: since the odds against the existence of this particular world were astronomically high—to be precise, infinite—the theory of probability, so this argument went, favored a belief in the existence of God. But the odds were exactly the same with respect to any instance of the particular, and it wasn't the theory of probability which favored a belief in the existence of God; it was just people, who had always been on the side of religion, with or without the theory of probability.

Nevertheless, whatever the odds against it might be, here she was, herself, at a table with a groom-to-be named Norman Gold in a deserted restaurant with wooden floor (the delicatessen was too new to have caught on yet with the students in the neighborhood), and so completely mesmerized by the moment that it was as though nothing had existed before or would follow. She wheeled the ring around her finger. In her reverie, from seeming miles away, like a man on a mountain top hallooing into the heavens, the Berliner could be heard saying, in answer to her question about whether he missed Germany, “Does a man miss his mother? His father? His wife, if she's away?”

“I don't know,” Gus said—then blushed. She didn't know what prompted her to answer rhetorical questions. She glanced at Norman, to see if he had been disturbed by her mistake.

Norman had stopped eating and was looking at the Berliner. The man's nose, he thought, looked like a live entity separate from the rest of his face. It had something of the character of a hedgehog. “It's interesting,” Norman said, “that you think of your mother first.”

“And isn't it a pity more people do not.”

“But your childhood can't have been very, uh—”

“Often there was not enough to eat, this is true.”

Norman looked down again, reflecting on the goulash on his plate. Suddenly he was angry. He didn't want to be—he had just got engaged, for Christ's sake, and coming into this cool darkness from the gaudy sunshine, the blue skies overblown and expansive like Anna Magnani in last night's movie, he had felt fine. Really fine. Now he emptied his eyes of emotion and looked again at the Berliner, impassively, thinking, You liar, you pig. The man reeked of self-satisfaction, and nobody achieved that in middle age who hadn't been born to it. Norman felt the muscles on the right side of his neck contract; his shoulders knotted. There was a film of soap on the spoon he hadn't used. Shifting his gaze, he shivered at the prospect of snow. There were images in that landscape which the Berliner's wife had failed to paint; they were there, hidden, waiting to be ferreted out, like the objects in one of those drawings for children. If he searched hard enough, he could make out hovels half-buried under mud and icicle, men on horses, men in tanks, the mangy cur licking its wounds beneath a fallen log, flash of bone jutting through the torn skin. Sometimes Norman dreamed this same scene. There was no excuse for it, no cause contiguous enough to serve as explanation, and yet the scene existed as a part of his brain's terrain, he had a map imprinted on his cerebrum, he knew every crevice in the snow-laden fields, every turning of the town, knew Levke, knew Sammele the beadle, the rabbi, and hot-eyed Rebecca. He also knew better than to take any of it seriously, the woman's mural or the mural in his mind. To the man, he said: “You were there during—”

The man wiped his hands on the tablecloth.

Gus lowered her eyes.

“You must have known,” Norman said.

The man said, “We didn't know.”

“How could you fail to know? You knew…”

“There were rumors, but there are always rumors. If not about Jews, then Communists. Your neighbor's wife, the skinny old man who never talks. Maybe he doesn't talk because his dentures fit not quite right and embarrass him.”

“What in God's name do false teeth have to do with anything?”

“I know someone who has false teeth,” Gus said, “and he's barely thirty. There are people in this country who just don't have even the money it takes to take care of their children's teeth.”

“You see?” said the man.

“See! Do I see? You're fucking-A-right I see.” What he saw was that some irreversibly Aryan line of reasoning homed in on him no matter where he turned. It approached him from the East; it came at him from his left, where Gus hung on his elbow. He could feel the tension in her fingers as she touched his sleeve, five little jabs of nervousness. Don't make a scene, she was saying; he could hear the words in her head.

The man reached over and tapped him on the back of his hand, as if sounding it to find out where to drive the nail. “I tell you, our parents knew nothing at that time, and what does an adolescent ever know? Behind my ears, I was wet.” But his eyes, Norman saw, had adopted a deeper hue, filling with the same sentimentality that the discussion of his absent wife had called up in him. It was as if somebody was pouring soft nougat centers into those chocolate-candy eyes. What can he be thinking of? Norman asked himself, confronting the novel notion that someone might remember the Holocaust with affection. What is he remembering?

“Near the end, when everybody was called up, including boys, I was a member of the
Hitlerjugend
, and to fly the aeroplane I learned speedily. When you are flying, you are feeling less as though you are holding yourself above the ground, and more as though someone is keeping you from falling. You are suspended on a string from heaven. It is superbly beautiful. The puppeteer is as close to you then as ever he will be, and you can almost make out his visage behind the curtain of sky.”

Jerk the string and the bomb hatch opened; jerk on another string, and a dozen shower stalls were soaked in gas; again on another, and Norman, his head flopping uselessly on his body, jigged away a lifetime to tunes he heard but barely, or heard and didn't like. Long before the man across from him had handed him this mirror, this way of looking at himself, Norman had seen himself in search of freedom. Something tugged at him, and something yanked him this way and that. As he grew older, he began to be able to predict the steps in the dance and could make several educated guesses as to the identity of the person or persons who pulled the strings, but he couldn't control the movements of his arms and legs, hold his head up or sit a given number out. Once or twice he had thought (waking in the dead of night, clammy as a corpse shocked into resurrection) that there might prove, ultimately, to be no release in knowledge—and since such a statement ran counter to the basic tenet of his lifework, he dismissed it again at once, as just another expression of his own desperation, an extremity, as it were, with which he had become intimately acquainted during his psychoanalysis. He believed, and knew that he must believe, that if he kept looking, if he dug deep enough, a beam would show and he could come out on the other side, and look back, and make sense of the shadows and fetid air that threatened any night now to suffocate him in his sleep.

Gus shuddered. Unlike Norman, she saw herself, listening to the Berliner, turned loose, floating in deep space, disconnected from everything she loved. “That kind of experience, it seems to me,” she said to the ex-pilot, “hinges on a terrific confidence in yourself.” She blushed. “Or in God. Suppose he tires of holding the string?” She imagined he might have gotten bored with the whole show and walked away. “Or suppose he dozes off and lets your line get tangled up with some others? His hand could cramp.” But she shouldn't be talking in parables. She didn't know Norman well enough yet to know how he might interpret them.

Norman was watching her lips, pink but enterprising even in repose, never really slack, the wayward upper lip full of determination and humor, the way both lips took on purpose and shape in the act of speech. And thinking about her mouth, he lost track of what she was saying. He slipped his hand casually under the table, letting it lie on her lap, not with intent to quicken but just to let her know that he was with her. Maybe, he thought, he had some intent to quicken.

The man said, “I crashed in a meadow but no one would have known it from my face. One would have known it from the aeroplane, which was thoroughly destroyed. I washed my face in a brook. The accident made me thirsty, so I drank also from the brook. Then I walked away, as if nothing had happened. Sometimes I think I imagined it, the descent and the—the sense of it. I will try to describe this sense. It was as if one hundred percent of the universe contracted to a cone, and I was being sucked down into it, to the very narrow tip where things begin.”