I'm Not Stiller (23 page)

Everyone knows how Negroes dance. Her partner at the moment was a U.S. Army sergeant. The couple danced so well that a circle of spectators formed round them, and the enthusiasts in the circle began to clap their hands in an ever faster rhythm, and finally in a frenzy. The U.S. Army sergeant—a tall fellow with the slender hips of a lion, with two legs of rubber, with the half-open mouth of pleasure and the sightless eyes of ecstasy, a fellow who had the chest and shoulders of a Michelangelo slave—reached the end of his strength; Florence danced alone. Now I could have taken over—if I'd been able to. Florence was still dancing alone when another came and spun her around, scarcely touching her fingers, circled around her, then took hold of her with the palm of his hand and swung her almost to the parquet floor, and then picked her up by the waist and lifted her so that her head almost struck the low ceiling; as she was poised in mid-air Florence made such a regal gesture with her arms, a gesture of such joyful triumph, that I felt like a cripple with my inexpressive white man's body; then she landed on the parquet floor as weightless as a bird. Now there was nothing to be heard but a dull jungle drumming, a soundless tremor, a kind of frenzied silence, while she went on dancing. A third partner was used up, and a fourth. Then suddenly, without being in the least exhausted, Florence laughed and stopped. As unselfconsciously as a child, a very happy child, who has been allowed on the roundabout and is still beaming with pleasure, she made her way out between the little tables, no doubt to powder her nose, and saw me. 'Hallo,' she said, 'Hallo'; she even added, 'Nice to see you,' and it almost consoled me for the bitter-sweetness of my confusion. For I knew very well that I could never content this girl.

This filled me with all the greater longing.

And then, one hot Sunday, I heard the long-missed tapping of her high-heeled shoes again and dodged behind the curtains. I saw her father, the docker, in a black suit that made him look like a cross between a waiter and a clergyman, walking round with a broom tidying up the back garden; the bushes were decorated with coloured ribbons, so was my tar-barrel fence, and Florence, dressed in an exaggerated evening dress, as gaudy as a parrot, was carrying arm-chairs out of the house. Florence's mother, a kind of mother earth, came with a gigantic cake, put it on the table with the white cloth, raised a black umbrella over it to keep it from being ruined by the sun, and placed flowers all round it. From behind my curtains I shared her excitement. While the docker was only concerned to have clean stairs and no litter in his garden and no dry twigs and certainly not an old tin (he threw it over my fence) and not even a match, in short, while the father was exclusively attendant upon his broom, mother and daughter had all four hands full; a great bowl of punch came out on to the table and under the umbrella, also glasses of every shape and size, and gradually the guests arrived too, families with children of all ages, all the women in gaudy evening dress, so that the back garden soon looked like an aviary, but all the men, of course, were in black with white shirts. One of them drove up in a Nash, and not a model from the year before last either; he also wore horn-rimmed spectacles. It was very hot.

Once the first greetings were over, the clan did not seem to have much to say to one another. The U.S. Army sergeant was also standing about. Even the tiny tots with their fuzzy hair and big eyes, the boys in white shirts, the girls with coloured ribbons round their short pigtails, all behaved with model good manners. The grown-ups sat down and crossed their legs; some of them were smoking cigars. Besides a few ladies who were no longer Negresses in colour, who were recognizable as Negresses only by the modelling of their faces, by their teeth, by their improbably slender fetlocks, but above all by the animal grace of their movements—the hand never moves without the movement flowing out of the arm, the head never turns without the movement rising up out of the back and radiating out into the shoulders; whether slow or quick, it is always a perfect movement, unconscious and without fidgeting, without rigidity in some other part of the body, it flows or hurries or rests, it is always in harmony with itself—in short, besides girls like Florence, who had already rid themselves of the frizzy hair, this clan also contained others, Africans with grey-black skin and greyish-purple lips, with hands like boxing gloves, fathers to whom their de-frizzed daughters were an embarrassment. The man with the new Nash no doubt set the tone; it was very hot, as I have said, but no one took off his black jacket, and this tediously conventional conduct, the standing around with cigars swapping small talk, the perfect behaviour of the countless children, which reminded me of performing animals in a circus, the stiff politeness between relations, the general uneventfulness, the restraint, and a joyless effort on the part of every family to keep its end up, despite unequal abilities, in the whole clan's demonstration of refined comportment, this utter caricature of white middle-class respectability without the faintest hint of Africa, was itself the great event for them, I believe: now they were really acting like white people.

When my doorbell rang and the docker invited me over for some punch, I went across, naturally not without first also putting on a white shirt and the darkest jacket I had. Everyone said, 'Nice to see you', and in more personal conversation, 'How do you like America?' The U.S. Army sergeant with the slender loins of a lion and the shoulders of a Michelangelo slave, I learnt, was only here on leave, normally he was in Frankfurt, so that the Russians shouldn't come too close to America. I asked in return, 'How do you like Frankfurt?' and I could see from his studied expressions of admiration that he lumped all us Europeans together. Then, at last, came my glorious Florence, who gave me a glass of punch and said:

'This is Joe, my husband—!'

I congratulated them.

'And how's your cat?'

They were married that Sunday, and Joe remained on leave another three full weeks, that is to say Florence was not to be seen in her father's house for three more weeks....

In love as I was, I couldn't let these weeks slip past without seeing Florence at least in church. I knew now which church she belonged to. It was called the Second Olivet Baptist Church and turned out to be a hut that was almost indistinguishable from the rest of the storage sheds, except for a wooden Gothic front dating, I should say, from the twenties of this century. On the stage inside, to left and right of the microphone, hung two large flags, the Stars and Stripes and a white flag, while for the rest, apart from a black piano, the room was as bare as a drill hall. The large congregation was murmuring in a curious fashion, and right at the front stood a Negro in a light-coloured Sunday suit, asking questions that always contained the word 'sin'. The congregation nodded, one or two called out, 'Oh yes, my Lord, oh yes.' The questions, begun in a casual, matter-of-fact tone, were repeated with slight variations, sounding more and more urgent with every repetition, although the voice grew no louder. Somewhere a young woman cried, 'I know, my Lord, I know.' Most people murmured, a few gazed indifferently into the air, but the woman yelled out and began to shout whole sentences and to moan so that you felt you ought to go to her assistance.

The questioner in his light-coloured Sunday suit, unflinching in the repetition of his questions, was no longer a person but only the human repository of a voice that poured out over the congregation, his questions were calls, songs, and Anally yells that pierced me to the marrow, loud and agonizing. As though from a distance, like an echo, the murmuring congregation answered with lowered heads, some with their hands over their faces. The moaning woman had jumped up from her bench, a young Negress with a ladylike hat, with white gloves which she stretched up towards heaven and holding a red handbag. 'My Lord,' she screamed, 'my Lord,' and then, unhindered by anyone, she fell on her knees, disappeared from my sight and whimpered as perhaps people whimper in a torture chamber, sounds of extreme agony that were now indistinguishable from the sounds of voluptuous delight; her voice melted into sobs.

The prayer, the general prayer, came to an end as the questioner, after becoming more and more pressing, died away into a voiceless ecstasy. Then came a moment of breathlessness, of exhaustion; then relaxation, the heads in front of me bobbed up again, a matron at the piano played a few lazy rhythms, ushers came round distributing gaudy fans, presented, as you could read on them, by a hairdresser 'around the corner', and everyone fanned himself...

I couldn't see Florence, but I caught sight of Joe in his uniform; he was leaning against the wall, his arms crossed, unmoved, as though looking down on these people from the heights of Frankfurt. It was frightfully hot. During this pause a jovial priest at the microphone reminded us that the Lord had also saved the poor children of Israel and the Lord knew very well how hard it was nowadays to earn a dollar, therefore the Lord was not angry with the reluctant, for the Lord had infinite patience, therefore the reluctant would be given another chance to put something in the bowl. Meanwhile the congregation was chatting gaily and freely, like a social gathering in which everyone feels at ease. When the collection had reached a point where the Lord could feel satisfied for today, the matron at the piano played an electrifying prelude, as though in a dance hall, soft-ened the tone as soon as there was silence in the room, and accompanied the sermon with almost inaudible, almost soundless jazz that was just a low rhythm and fell almost imperceptibly but effectively silent when the preacher made solemn pronouncements: 'The Lord knows we are poor people, but the Lord will lead us into the Promised Land, the Lord will protect us from Communism...'

All around the fans presented by the hairdresser as an advertisement were waving and the dust dancing in the rays of the sun. It smelt of gasoline, sweat and scent. I sat stewing in the sunlight that glared in through a torn blind, next to a lady in black silk, next to an old Negro with ashen hair, an Uncle Tom, who restrained with trembling hand a lively grandchild who found it difficult to get used to me, the stranger. In front of me sat a young workman; he listened to the sermon as a soldier listens to the latest bulletin from the front. Beyond him I looked straight at the back of a very pretty girl's neck smothered in white powder. (Oh, this yearning to be white, this yearning to have straight hair, this lifelong striving to be different from the way one is created, this great difficulty in accepting oneself, I knew it and saw only my own longing from outside, saw the absurdity of our yearning to be different from what we are....)

After the prayer, as we sat down again, the side doors opened and from the courtyard, from which came the horrid stink of gasoline, there appeared the choir of angels, some twenty Negresses in white dresses. Florence among them. As well as some twenty Negroes in white shirts and black ties, each of them carrying a black book. Now the stage was full. They started off triumphally, as though we had just entered the Promised Land, first the piano and then the voices; softly to begin with, a hum like a hot summer field, as though we were hearing from a distance a primeval river of lamentation, dull and monotonous as waves, then the sound slowly swelled until gradually it flooded everything, a cataract of voices, half anger and half exultation, a mighty song that sank again and trickled away without really ceasing, an endless river of longing, as broad as the Mississippi; a male voice rang out above the rest like a fanfare, hard, loud, and lonely; then there was only the strange buzz, the voiceless hum as over a burning hot summer field, the heat in the hall, the dancing dust in the sunlight that glared in through the torn blind, the smell of gasoline and sweat and scent.

***

After three weeks Joe disappeared.

***

Once more I heard the tap of high-heeled shoes, Florence was back, even though married, and she actually called up to my window; I rushed down the steep stairs, miraculously without stumbling, although I wrenched a newel post out of the banister, and over to the tar-barrel fence, where Florence was already standing the other side of the brambles.

'What's happened to your cat?' she asked.

She was even holding the creature in her arms.

'D'you know she's hurt?' she said. 'Awfully hurt.'

That was the wound on the snout.

'And you don't feel any pity for her?' she said. 'You are cruel, you just don't love her.'

And with that she handed the beast over to me.

'You should love her.'

'Why should I?'

'Of course you should.'

That was my affair with the mulatto girl called Florence, and even now, I think of Florence whenever I hear high-heeled shoes; unfortunately the cat always comes to mind as well.

***

Julika has postponed her trip to Paris, so that we shan't lose our afternoon out on bail and because it would be a sin, she says, not to take advantage of such a golden October day.

Not another word about her former marriage.

Somehow it worries me.

***

Smyrnov was a Soviet agent passing through Switzerland. Personal description unknown. On the other hand, the Swiss Federal Police seem to know that this Smyrnov, known as the Boss, had the job of organizing the murder of a popular ex-Communist then living in Switzerland. Helpers and helpers' helpers were, as usual, known by code names: one was called 'the Hungarian', another 'the Swiss', and the latter is supposed to have negotiated with Smyrnov in Zurich on 18.1.1946 and may possibly also have done intelligence work. Shortly after the date in question, the Zurich municipal police reported Stiller's mysterious disappearance. Stiller seems to be something like the last hope of the Federal Police. Didn't he once fight against Franco? And since Anti-Fascism, although it was once a Swiss virtue, is now enough to put a person under suspicion of being a fellow traveller[[[mdash.gif]]]

What do I care!

***

P.S, My counsel has absolutely no sense of humour regarding the fact that Switzerland is not only a small country, but is being made even smaller by world events. This frequently makes our discussions difficult. He is (understandably) opposed to the future. Any change frightens him. He pins his hopes upon the past; but at the same time he knows that it is not the past but the future which is coming, and that makes him more hostile than ever towards the future. How far my counsel is representative of the national outlook in this respect, I don't know. He always feels assailed, even when I have no intention of attacking him, and this leads to severe bouts of self-satisfaction.