The Oriental Wife (7 page)

“Surely not. Would you tell me what happened to you?”

“It is not so very interesting. Two years ago I moved to München—you would say Munich—because I thought things would be better there. It was not so Nazi a city as Nuremberg. And for a while things were tolerable. I built up a practice. I could not see any Aryan patients, but the authorities did not interfere with me much. Then a little girl was hit by a car outside my house, which was also my office; her mother rang my bell, she was hysterical. I told her I could not treat the child, I was forbidden, but she pleaded with me, she wept and clung to my hands, until I brought the child upstairs to my consulting room. In fact she was not so badly wounded, it is only that head wounds bleed very much, but the mother thanked me over and over; she kissed my hands. I made her promise not to tell anyone what I had done, but she was a foolish woman, or maybe some of the neighbors had witnessed it. At any rate, the next day the Gestapo came and took me away.” He stopped, he crossed his legs; he was wearing the same sort of high, round-toed shoes, laced through
hooks, that Louisa’s father had always worn. Dr. Joseftal’s were cracked but highly polished.

“Yes? And then?” Phillip asked, looking up from his notebook; he had been writing while the doctor talked.

“And then they did what the Gestapo does,” he said harshly. He breathed through his nose for a moment. “In Germany nobody would ask such a question. It is enough to say they came.”

“So they tortured you.”

The doctor made a face. “I would not use that word. To me it suggests something more … systematic. They shouted, they took out their
Gummiknueppeln
—their police sticks; they got to work. They were very thorough.” His attention became fixed on the women in the feathered hats, who had seated themselves at a table close by; they had removed their gloves and were being served coffee, with a plate of brightly iced cakes between them.

“How long did they detain you?”

“Just three days. But I was right to move to München, the police there are still imperfect Nazis. Sophie—my wife—took my war medals to a station and they filed a paper requesting my release.”

“Where did the Gestapo take you? Dachau?” Phillip asked, and he grimaced.

“Such interrogations do not take place in the
Lager
, they occur in the prisons. Look here, there is no interest in this sort of story. You are wasting your time.” He turned to Louisa. “So you are getting married,” he said.

“Yes. When we get to California.”

He nodded once; he did not congratulate Phillip, or wish her luck. “And are you keeping well? How is your health?”

She was fine, she said, just fine.

“I remember you used to have many colds when winter came.”

“Not for years. Not since I got to England.”

“Ah. You are someone for whom the English climate has been a curative. A medical curiosity.”

She laughed for longer than the joke warranted. “Will you be able to practice medicine here?”

“I’m afraid that is not possible. But your friend Rolf Furchgott hopes to obtain some work for me, proofreading for a medical journal that is published in German as well as English. I prefer it to being a butler. There are many of us, you know, many doctors, and lawyers too, who attended a school in München that taught the arts of butlery. For Jews trying to get visas. I had a friend who went to England on such a visa, he was quite comic on the subject.”

She asked after his wife and daughter. He coughed behind his hand. “They are working already. It is easier for women, it seems, to get employment here, in domestic service. My daughter has found a job cleaning in a cafeteria. When her English has improved she will hope to find something better. My Sophie has been hired by an elderly woman who requires someone to cook and clean. It is not so bad, she says, with just one person in the household. She is only very worried about our son, he is in Czechoslovakia, he went there in ’34, but now we think he must leave. Rolf Furchgott is trying to help with the visa, but it is more difficult than we had thought.” For a moment his fingers clawed at the arms of the chair. Then, collecting himself, he stood up. “I must really be going,” he said, and as Phillip began to rise, “Please do not trouble yourself.” He turned
back to Louisa. “Remember me to your parents, yes? In happier times your father and I served on a committee together, to help the veterans. I am sorry I had no chance to say good-bye to him.”

“Not exactly a charmer, is he?” Phillip said when he was gone. “Christ. I hope they’re not all going to be so bloody stiff-necked.”

“You can’t expect him to be like Emil,” she protested, referring to a denizen of the café. “He’s not a bohemian.”

“Thank you. I think I might have deduced that for myself. That doesn’t explain why he treated me like the enemy.”

She wanted to tell him how Dr. Joseftal had sat on her bed, patting her hand; she remembered his telling her mother, when she warned Louisa not to waste the doctor’s time, that he had all the time in the world. “I should have given him something to take to his daughter.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something. I bought that ribbon this morning, remember? I could have given that to her.”

“Yes, well, you could have, but you didn’t. I don’t suppose ribbons are what the poor cow needs, anyway. Let’s go upstairs, I want to make some calls. I think this piece could turn into something quite useful, despite the good doctor’s recalcitrance.”

But he could not get hold of anyone. “Let’s go to the park,” she suggested, but he waved this aside; she sensed that he was feeling aggrieved again. For a minute he went and stood by the window, staring at the crowds on the street; then he fetched a glass from the bathroom and dug the bottle of Scotch out of his suitcase.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said timidly.

“Why? Are you afraid I’ll climb onto my horse and start a pogrom?”

“That isn’t funny.”

“She is not amused,” he muttered, splashing some Scotch into the glass. He took a gulp. “You seem to care a lot more for all these people than you do for me.”

“Of course I don’t. It was only that he seemed so terribly sad. Sad and gallant. You don’t know what he was like before.”

“Right. And Otto is like a brother to you, and you seemed awfully fond of Rolf too.”

“I wasn’t,” she said weakly. “He was just odd, like you said.” She could not explain the painful tenderness she had felt for them, her sense of knowing them as she would never know anyone else. She could not tell him how alien he seemed in comparison.

He came over, still holding the glass, and started nuzzling her neck. “I’m the one you’re supposed to love. So show me, damn it. Show me you love me.” His tongue moved across her skin, leaving a sticky trail. She shut her eyes, willing herself to feel the heat in her stomach, so that everything could come right between them again. But rage was mounting in her; she had to fight back the impulse to put her hands on his chest and shove him away.

Now he was unbuttoning her dress, a soft green silk thing she had bought for the trip. She kept waiting for him to notice that she was not responding, but though she kept her arms rigid by her sides, his hands went on moving greedily, onto her breasts. A faint odor of mildew wafted up from the carpet.
She remembered, with a rush of shame, that Dr. Joseftal had not even wished her well for her marriage; he had not said he was pleased for her. He would go back and say to his wife, Louisa Straus is here with a man who is not her husband, and they would exchange troubled glances, both of them thinking of their own daughter.

Phillip had unhooked her bra now, he was brushing his hands in circular movements over her nipples.

“Stop,” she said, clutching at his hands. “Please stop.”

He drew away from her, blinking, his face puffy. Then he sat abruptly on one of the plaid beds. “Christ,” he said; he reached for the bottle on the night table but pushed it away.

Stealthily, she ran her tongue around her mouth; she snaked her hands around her back and hooked her bra back into place. “Don’t be angry at me. Please. I’m sorry.”

“Are you? I doubt it. I don’t think you’re at all sorry.” Rising from the bed, he went and rummaged through the jumble of objects she had left on the dresser, picking up first one thing and then another. He fingered the keys to his house in London and put them in his pocket. “I’m going out for a bit. I’ll see you later.” She heard him open the closet and shut it again, and then the sound of the room door closing, not a slam but an oiled click.

Five minutes later, panic had set in: she was crouching in front of the dresser, rifling through the drawers for his passport. If it wasn’t there, if he had taken it with him, it would mean he was never coming back. She heard the elevator stop on their floor and stood without breathing, squeezing her eyes shut, but the footsteps went in the
other direction. Then she remembered him putting their passports in the tiny safe next to the bed, and knelt beside it, twirling the knob frantically. But there was no way she could open it.

Since they had been in New York, she had forgotten that everything depended on his loving her, she had no right to refuse him. If he walked in now, she would run to him, holding out her arms. “I don’t know what came over me,” she’d say. “How could I have been so ridiculous?” But already it seemed too late for that.

In a burst of energy, she hurried into the bathroom, determined to go find him. She would start in the bar they had been to last night. But by the time she had powdered her face and smeared rouge into her cheeks, her resolve had faded. Instead she returned to the room and took off her shoes, setting them beside the bed, breathing in the carpet smell as she did so. She seemed to know the shape of the next few hours as though she had lived through them a thousand times.

She arranged the pillows against the headboard and lay back gingerly, so as not to muss her dress. It was how she had arranged herself as a child, when her mother had locked her into her room and she’d had vengeful fantasies of dying. She used to fold her arms across her chest, imagining her mother’s sobs on discovering her lifeless body. Then she would picture her father, weeping into his mustache, until her own tears started.

What would happen to her father if Phillip did not marry her? Sooner or later, they would come for him, as they had come for Dr. Joseftal. “They took out their
Gummiknueppeln
 … they were very thorough.” The ringing of the phone next to her ear was like a reprieve; flooded with gratitude, she snatched the receiver from its cradle before he could change his mind and sobbed out hello. But it wasn’t Phillip on the other end; it was Rolf.

H
e knew from her voice that something was wrong. He was not as obtuse about these things as people imagined, it was just that he always froze at such moments; he could feel the blood vessels in his brain constricting, so that the right words, of comfort and sympathy, never got through. It happened all the time when he was talking to the refugees.

Instead he asked her how she was enjoying her stay in New York.

She adored it, she said, in a bright English intonation, everything was so fast, wasn’t it, such excitement, wherever you looked there was always something going on.

He cleared his throat. “I wondered if I might speak to Phillip.”

“Oh, what a pity. He’s just gone out. Could I have him phone you back?”

Yes, of course, he said, and then she told him maybe it would be better if she took a message. Phillip had gone to meet someone, she wasn’t quite sure when he’d be back.

“One of the refugees?”

No, she said, it was a journalist colleague. “But we saw Dr. Joseftal this afternoon.”

“And how did you find him?”

“Not well at all.”

“No. But he’s one of the lucky ones. They let him go.”

“They only kept him for three days, he said. But he was completely different. What did they do to him? How could that happen in just three days?” Now her voice had changed; she sounded like the Louisa he used to know. Quite often, turning passionate about something as trivial as how they would line up their tin soldiers, she had sounded on the verge of tears.

“It wouldn’t be just the three days that altered him,” he said cautiously, reluctant to say too much. Obviously she had no real idea of what was happening in Germany. Perhaps her parents were shielding her as much as possible, telling her things weren’t really so bad. Maybe that was the best approach when dealing with susceptible young ladies. He had said too much already, over lunch.

He cleared his throat. “Well, I won’t keep you.”

“But didn’t you have a message for Phillip?”

He had almost forgotten: he had phoned to give Phillip another name, of someone who would talk to him as much as he wanted, who could not stop talking about what had been done to him, so that the other refugees, including Rolf, tried to avoid him whenever possible. His hysteria was exhausting, and he didn’t bathe often enough, either. But if it was stories Phillip wanted, Gruenbaum would be happy to provide them. It might even help him to find a really interested listener for a change. He gave Louisa Gruenbaum’s number, which she took down. Then she asked him if he knew Dr. Joseftal’s address.

Not offhand, he said. But he could get it for her.

“I want to send his wife and daughter something. But I didn’t think of it until after he left.”

What did she have in mind, he asked her.

“I bought some really lovely ribbon this morning, I thought I could send them that.” And then, when he was silent, “Not just ordinary ribbon. It’s very thick, it’s got blue-and-green peacocks embroidered on it. And I bought a green bead necklace at Best’s, sort of like jade, though of course it isn’t.”

He had thought she was going to say a warm cardigan, or a woolen hat; having seen Dr. Joseftal, with his broken teeth, she couldn’t seriously believe that the situation called for embroidered ribbon. Then she said, “I thought I could write her a little note, you know, just telling her how kind the doctor had been to me when I was a child, and wishing them luck.” And suddenly he saw that Mrs. Joseftal might, after all, be glad to receive such a note. For all he knew, a ribbon with peacocks on it would likewise make her glad, and the green beads would be just the thing to cheer her daughter.