The Acrobats (16 page)

“Will you have another gin?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“I’m inviting you to another gin, D.J.”

“Yes. I am sorry. Very good.… Thank you.”

“Don’t fret, D.J. I’m the only one who knows about it.”

Drearily the waiter set two more gins down on the table. A fly had settled on his cheek. He did nothing about it.

Juanito smiled suavely. “I am a fatalist,” he said.

And trying to deny the adoration he felt for Juanito’s dark body, Derek felt his fingers tingle with an anxiety to touch the other man’s lips. Vividly he recalled the scene and the agony which he transported forever with him like a cross – the gorgeous boy from Memphis languishing on the army cot next to him, himself gone weeks without sleep and bursting from denial, leaning over, tenderly, gently, kissing those young lips. Then the betrayal, the beating rendered by the boy that was the very stuff of their love, the shame and humiliation. “Well,
D.J., tell me something about yourself,” Derek said. “Is fatalism your philosophy?”

Juanito laughed. “When I die, all I want to leave behind me are my debts.”

Derek giggled. He’s going to be coy, he thought. All the time he is going to pretend he doesn’t understand what was going on.

“I have seen many movies about your country.”

“Movies! If any of those Hollywood beautifuls ever saw a Moor close up he would run so fast you couldn’t catch him in this world. All of them are paederasts. Why do you think they have to adopt babies after they get married? Why do you think their women divorce them after two months.”

“Still,” Juanito said uneasily, “I would like to visit America one day.”

“So would every other petty-bourgeois. The democracy of the philistines is reaching its logical conclusion. A kind of sugar-coated fascism doled out by mediocrity. But the tyranny of the proletariat will exceed the boorishness of the petty-bourgeois. The hunger is older, there are more accounts to be settled. I’ll tell you what, D.J. Enjoy yourself madly, because pretty soon the hillbillies are going to storm the Winter Palace. Afterwards, darkness.”

“Were you in the war?”

“Yes. I was in the war from the beginning.”

The old woman, who on other days used to hawk rosaries and crucifixes in the Puerta del Sol, suddenly sold hammer-and-sickle badges and red-and-black anarchist caps. Madrid shall be the Tomb of Fascism, the banners had said. One afternoon, an afternoon when the air-raids were still a joke, he had held hands with Eric in the cinema, watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in
Gay Divorcee
. That night they had returned to the front by street car. At six a.m. Eric’s leg had been shot off, and Derek had watched as he scrambled after it and threw it away.

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.

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.

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.