Flotsam Read online

  “That makes no difference. It’s the big one I want; I’ll take it.”

  Kern could hardly believe his ears. That meant eighteen crowns profit. “If you take the big one I’ll give you a cake of almond soap free,” he announced happily.

  “Fine. One can always use soap.”

  The woman took the bottle and the soap and went into the next room. Kern meanwhile put away his things. Through the half-open door came the smell of cooked meat. He determined to treat himself to a first-class dinner. The soup at the eating place on Wenceslaus Square wasn’t really filling.

  The woman came back. “Well, thank you very much, and good-by,” she said cordially. “Here’s a sandwich to take with you.”

  “Thanks.” Kern stood there waiting.

  “Was there something else?” the woman asked.

  “Well, yes.” Kern laughed. “You haven’t given me the money yet.”

  “Money? What money?”

  “The forty crowns,” Kern said in amazement.

  “Oh, so that’s it! Anton!” the woman shouted into the next room. “Come here a minute, will you? There’s someone here asking for money.”

  A man in suspenders and a sweat-stained shirt came out of the next room. He was wiping his mustache and chewing. Kern saw that there was a strip of braid down his trousers, and a nasty suspicion suddenly rose in his mind. “Money?” the man asked hoarsely, digging a finger into his ear.

  “Forty crowns,” Kern replied. “But you can just give me the bottle back if that’s too much. And you can keep the soap.”

  “Well, well!” The man came closer. He smelled of stale sweat and fresh, boiled loin of pork. “Come with me, my boy.” He went to the door of the next room and opened it wide. “Do you know what that is?” he asked, pointing to the coat of a uniform hanging on a chair. “Do you want me to put that on and go with you to the police station?”

  Kern recoiled a step. He already saw himself in jail serving a two weeks’ sentence for illegal peddling. “I have a residential permit,” he said as casually as he could. “I can show it to you.”

  “You’d better show me your permit to work,” the man replied, staring at Kern.

  “That’s at the hotel.”

  “Then we can go straight to the hotel. Or would you prefer to call the bottle a present, eh?”

  “Oh, all right.” Kern turned toward the door.

  “Here, don’t forget your sandwich,” the woman said, grinning broadly.

  “Thanks, I don’t want it.” Kern opened the door.

  “Just listen to that. He’s ungrateful too!”

  Kern shut the door behind him and went quickly down the stairs. He didn’t hear the thundering laughter that followed his flight. “Magnificent, Anton!” the woman said proudly. “Did you see the way he skipped? As if he had bees in his pants. Even quicker than the old Jew this afternoon. I’ll bet he took you for a police captain and saw himself already in the coop!”

  Anton grinned. “They’re all afraid of any kind of a uniform! Even if it belongs to a postman. That’s gravy for us. We’re not doing so badly with the emigrees, are we?” He put his arm around his wife’s breasts.

  “That’s a good perfume.” She pressed herself against him. “Better than the hair tonic we got from the old Jew this afternoon.”

  Anton hitched up his trousers. “Slather yourself with it tonight and I’ll have a countess in bed with me. Is there still some pork in the pot?”

  When he was on the street Kern stopped. “Rabbi Israel Loew,” he said miserably, looking in the direction of the cemetery, “that was a fine trick you played on me! Forty crowns. Forty-three really, counting the cake of soap. That’s a net loss of twenty-four.”

  He went back to the hotel. “Has anyone been here to see me?” he asked the doorman.

  The latter shook his head. “Not a soul.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. Not even the President of Czechoslovakia.”

  “He wasn’t the one I was expecting,” Kern said.

  He went upstairs. It was strange he had not heard from his father. Perhaps he really wasn’t there; or he might have been picked up by the police in the meantime. He decided to wait a few days more and then go again to Frau Ekowski’s.

  In his room he found the man named Rabe who screamed at night. He was just starting to undress.

  “Going to bed so early?” Kern asked. “Before nine o’clock?”

  Rabe nodded. “It’s the best thing for me to do. Then I shall sleep until midnight. That’s the time I always get my attacks. It was at midnight that they usually came for us when we were in the bunker. After that I shall sit up for a couple of hours at the window. Then I can take a sleeping powder and get through the night all right.”

  He placed a glass of water beside his bed. “Do you know what calms me most when I sit by the window at night? Saying poems to myself. Old poems from my school days.”

  “Poems?” Kern asked in amazement.

  “Yes, very simple ones. For example, the one they sing to children in the evening:—

  “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,

  Look on me, a little child;

  Pity my simplicity,

  Suffer me to come to Thee.”

  He stood in his white underwear like a tired, friendly ghost in the half-darkened room, and slowly repeated the verses of the lullaby in a monotonous voice, staring with lifeless eyes through the window out into the night.

  “It calms me,” he repeated, and smiled. “I don’t know why, but it comforts me.”

  “Really?” Kern said.

  “It sounds crazy, but it does calm me. Afterwards I feel quiet and somehow as if I were at home.”

  Kern was uncomfortable. His skin felt prickly. “I don’t know any poems by heart,” he said. “I have forgotten them all. It seems an eternity since I was in school.”

  “I had forgotten them too. But now suddenly I remember them all again.”

  Kern nodded and stood up. He wanted to get out of the room. Then Rabe could sleep and he wouldn’t have to think about him.

  “If one only knew what to do with the evenings!” Kern said. “Evenings are the worst time of all. I haven’t had anything to read for a long while. And to sit down there and discuss for the hundredth time how fine things used to be in Germany, and when they’re going to be better again, that’s something I just can’t stand.”

  Rabe sat down on his bed. “Go to the movies. That’s the best way to kill an evening. Afterwards you don’t know what you’ve seen; but at least you haven’t been thinking about anything.”

  He took off his socks. Kern watched him thoughtfully. “The movies …” he said. It occurred to him that perhaps he could invite the girl from next door to go with him. “Do you know the people here in the hotel?” he asked.

  Rabe laid his socks on a chair and wiggled his bare toes. “A few. Why?” He stared at his toes as though he had never seen them before.

  “The ones in the next room?”

  Rabe reflected. “Old Schimanowska lives there. She was a famous actress before the war.”

  “I don’t mean her.”

  “He means Ruth Holland, a pretty young girl,” said the man with the eyeglasses who was the third occupant of the room. He had been standing listening in the doorway for some time. His name was Marill, and he had formerly been a delegate to the Reichstag. “That’s right, isn’t it, Kern, you old Don Juan?”

  Kern blushed.

  “It’s strange,” Marill went on. “People blush at the most natural things. But never at mean ones. How was business today, Kern?”

  “A complete catastrophe. I lost money.”

  “Then spend some more. That’s the best way to keep from getting complexes.”

  “I was going to,” Kern said. “I’m planning to go to the movies.”

  “Bravo. With Ruth Holland, I assume, judging from your cautious inquiries.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t met her.”

&nbs
p; “You haven’t met most people. You have to get started sometime. Get going, Kern. Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.”

  “Do you think she’d go with me?”

  “Of course. That’s one of the advantages of this filthy life of ours. What with fear and boredom, everyone’s thankful to be distracted. So no false modesty! Fire away and forget your cold feet!”

  “Go to the Rialto,” Rabe said from the bed. “ ‘Morocco’ is playing there. I’ve found that foreign countries are best for distraction.”

  “ ‘Morocco’ is always good,” Marill remarked, “even for young girls.”

  Rabe sighed and drew the covers around him. “Sometimes I wish I could sleep for ten years.”

  “Then you’d like to be ten years older?” Marill asked.

  Rabe looked at him. “No,” he said, “then my children would be grown up.”

  Kern knocked at the door of the next room. A voice from inside answered indistinctly. He opened the door and stopped short. He had come eye to eye with Schimanowska.

  She had a face like a barn owl. The heavy rolls of fat were covered with thick white powder and gave the appearance of a snow-covered mountain landscape. Her black eyes were like deep-set holes and she stared at Kern as though she might fly at him any moment with her claws. In her hands she held a brilliant red shawl with some knitting needles sticking in it. Suddenly her face was contorted and Kern thought that she was going to leap upon him. But then a kind of smile came over her features. “What do you want, my young friend?” she asked in a resonant, moving, dramatic voice.

  “I’d like to speak to Fräulein Holland.”

  The smile disappeared as though it had been wiped off.

  “Oh really?”

  Schimanowska looked at Kern contemptuously and then set up a great clatter with her knitting needles.

  Ruth Holland was crouched on her bed. She had been reading. Kern saw it was the same bed by which he had stood the night before. He felt his color mounting. “There’s something I want to ask you,” he said.

  The girl got up and went out into the hall with him. Schimanowska’s snort, like that of a wounded horse, followed them.

  “I wanted to ask if you’d go to the movies with me,” Kern said when they were outside. “I have two tickets,” he added untruthfully.

  Ruth Holland looked at him.

  “Or perhaps you have some other engagement?”

  She shook her head. “No, I have no engagement.”

  “Then come along. Why should you sit all evening in that room?”

  “Oh, I’m used to it.”

  “So much the worse. After two minutes I was glad to get out again. I thought I was going to be eaten alive.”

  The girl laughed. Suddenly she seemed very childlike.

  “Schimanowska just looks that way. She has a kind heart.”

  “Maybe so. But you can’t see it by looking at her. The picture starts in fifteen minutes. Shall we go?”

  “All right,” Ruth Holland said, and it was as if she were making a resolve.

  At the ticket window Kern hurried ahead. “Just a minute, I’m going to pick up the tickets. They’re being held for me.”

  He bought two tickets and hoped she hadn’t noticed. But in a moment that didn’t matter; the important thing was that she was sitting beside him.

  The room grew dark. On the screen appeared the native quarter of Marrakesh. The wastes of the desert blazed, sun-drenched and exotic, and through the hot African night came the monotonous and exciting beat of the tambourines and flutes.…

  Ruth Holland leaned back in her seat. The music swept over her like a warm rain—a warm, monotonous rain from which memory arose tormentingly.…

  She was standing beside the moat in Nuremberg. It was April. In front of her in the darkness stood the student Herbert Binding with a crumpled newspaper clenched in his hand.

  “You understand what I mean, Ruth?”

  “Yes, I understand, Herbert! It’s easy to understand.”

  Binding nervously twisted the copy of the Stürmer. “My name in the paper for keeping company with a Jewess! For being a profaner of the race! That means ruin, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Herbert. My name is in the newspaper too.”

  “That’s something entirely different! How can it affect you? You can’t go to the University even as it is.”

  “You’re right, Herbert.”

  “So this is the end, isn’t it? We’ve separated, and we’ll have nothing more to do with each other.”

  “Nothing more. And now good-by.”

  She turned around and walked away.

  “Wait—Ruth—listen a minute!”

  She stopped and he came up to her. His face was so close to hers in the darkness that she could feel his breath. “Listen,” he said, “where are you going now?”

  “Home.”

  “You don’t have to right away—” His breathing became heavier. “We understand each other, don’t we? And that’s not going to change! But after all you could—we could—it just happens that tonight there is no one at my house, you understand, and we wouldn’t be seen.” He reached for her arm. “We don’t have to part like this, so formally I mean; we could just once more—”

  “Go!” she said. “At once!”

  “But be reasonable, Ruth.” He put his arm around her shoulders.

  She looked again at the handsome face, at the blue eyes, at the waves of blond hair—the face she had loved and had implicitly trusted. Then she struck it. “Go!” she screamed, tears streaming from her eyes. “Go!”

  Binding recoiled. “What, strike me? Why, you dirty Jewish slut! Would you strike me?”

  He seemed about to spring at her.

  “Go!” she screamed shrilly.

  He looked around. “Shut your mouth!” he hissed. “Do you want to bring down the whole neighborhood on my neck? Maybe that would suit your plans! I’m going, yes, indeed, I’m going! Thank God I’m rid of you!”

  “Quand l’amour meurt …” sang the woman on the screen, her dark voice drifting through the noise and smoke of the Moroccan Café. Ruth ran her hand across her forehead.

  Compared to that, all the rest had been unimportant—the anxiety of the relatives with whom she was living; her uncle’s urgent advice to take a trip so that he would not become involved; the anonymous letter informing her that if she did not disappear within three days her hair would be cut off and she would be pulled through the streets in a cart, with placards on her breast and back labeling her as a defiler of the race; the visit to her mother’s grave; the wet morning when she had stood in front of the War Memorial from which the name of her father, who had fallen in Flanders in 1916, had been scratched out because he was a Jew; and then the hasty, lonesome trip across the border to Prague, taking with her her mother’s few pieces of jewelry …

  Once more the music of flutes and tambourines came from the screen. Above it rolled the march of the Foreign Legion—a quick, stirring clarion-call above the company of those proceeding into the wilderness, fighters without home or country.

  Kern bent toward Ruth Holland. “Do you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  He reached in his pocket and handed her a small bottle. “Eau de Cologne,” he whispered. “It’s hot in here. Perhaps you will find this refreshing.”

  “Thanks.” She sprinkled a few drops on her hand. Kern did not see that suddenly there were tears in her eyes.

  “Thanks,” she said again.

  * * *

  Steiner was sitting in the Hellebarde Café for the second time. He handed the waiter a five-schilling note and ordered coffee.

  “Want me to telephone?” the waiter asked.

  Steiner nodded. He had played cards a few times and with varying luck in other bars and now possessed about five hundred schillings.

  The waiter brought him a stack of newspapers and went away. Steiner picked up one of the papers and began to read, but he soon laid it aside; he wasn’t much inter
ested in what was happening in the world. For someone swimming under water only one thing matters: to get to the surface again; the color of the fishes isn’t important.

  The waiter put a cup of coffee and a glass of water in front of him. “The gentlemen will be here in an hour.”

  He remained standing beside the table. “Fine weather today, isn’t it?” he asked after a while.

  Steiner nodded and stared at the wall on which hung an exhortation to prolong your life by drinking malt beer.

  The waiter shuffled back behind the counter. But presently he returned, bringing a second glass on a tray.

  “I don’t want that,” Steiner said. “Bring me a Kirsch.”

  “Yes, sir, at once.”

  “Have one yourself.”

  The waiter bowed. “Thank you, sir. You have some feeling for people like us. That’s rare nowadays.”

  “Nonsense,” Steiner said. “I’m bored, that’s all.”

  “I’ve known people to hit on worse ideas when they were bored,” the waiter said.

  He tossed off his drink and began to scratch his throat. “I know why you’re here, sir,” he confided. “And if you’ll let me give you some advice, I’d like to recommend the dead Austrian. There are dead Rumanians, too, and they’re cheaper—but who knows how to speak Rumanian?”

  Steiner looked at him narrowly.

  The waiter stopped scratching his throat and began massaging the back of his neck. Simultaneously he scratched the ground with one foot like a dog. “Of course the best of all would be an American or an Englishman,” he said thoughtfully. “But when do you find an American dying in Austria? And if that should happen, in an automobile accident for instance, how are you going to get hold of his passport?”

  “I think a German passport is better than an Austrian,” Steiner said. “Harder to check on.”

  “That’s true. But all you can get with it is a permit for residence, not for work. But if you take the dead Austrian you can work anywhere in the country.”

  “Till you’re caught.”

  “Yes, of course, but who’s ever caught in Austria? Only the wrong people—”

  Steiner had to laugh. “You know, I might be the wrong person. Just the same it’s dangerous.”