Flotsam (19 page)

They whizzed off. The car went up a steep incline and then pitched downward into a dark tunnel. A monster in chains rose screeching before them and made a grab at Ruth. She screamed and pressed close to Kern. Next moment a grave opened and a number of skeletons rattled out a grisly death march with their bones. Then the car shot out of the tunnel, whirled around a curve and pitched into a new shaft. Another car was rushing toward them with two people in it pressed close together and staring at them in terror; a collision seemed inevitable—then the car careened around a curve, the mirrored
reflection disappeared and they flew into a steaming hell in which clammy hands swept across their faces.

“Cheers you up, doesn’t it?” Kern shouted.

“Not me,” Ruth shouted back and closed her eyes.

They ran over a wailing old man, then emerged again into the light and the car stopped. They got out. Ruth rubbed her eyes. “How fine all this suddenly seems,” she said smiling, “the light, the air, the breeze, the fact that you can move and breathe.”

“Have you ever been to a flea circus?” Kern asked.

“No.”

“Then come along!”

“Good evening, Charlie,” said the woman at the door. “This your day off? Go right in. Alexander II is on now.”

Kern looked complacently at Ruth. “Again, nothing to pay,” he explained. “Come on.”

Alexander II was a strong, reddish flea who was making his first solo appearance before the public. His trainer was a trifle nervous; hitherto Alexander II had only acted as the left lead horse in a tandem and he possessed a wild and incalculable temperament. The audience, which, including Ruth and Kern, consisted of five people, observed him intently.

But Alexander II gave a flawless performance. He trotted, he climbed and swung on a trapeze, and got through the climax of his act, with a balancing pole, without so much as a sidewise glance.

“Bravo, Alfons,” Kern said, shaking the proud trainer’s much-bitten hand.

“Thanks. How did you like it, Madame?”

“It was marvelous!” Ruth shook hands with him too. “I don’t understand at all how you do it.”

“It’s perfectly simple. All training. And patience. Someone
told me once that you could train stones if you had enough patience.” The trainer grinned slyly. “Do you know, Charlie, I played a little trick on Alexander II. I had the beggar dragging a cannon around for a half-hour before the performance. The heavy mortar. That tired him out. And tiredness makes for obedience.”

“Cannon,” Ruth said. “Have fleas got cannon now too?”

“Even heavy field artillery.” The trainer let Alexander II take a good bite on his lower arm as reward. “It’s our most popular number, Madame. And popularity brings in the cash!”

“But they don’t shoot at one another,” Kern said. “They don’t exterminate themselves—that’s where they’re less smart than we.”

They went to the auto scooters. “Greetings, Peperl!” the man at the entrance howled through the metallic uproar. “Take number seven, she bumps good and hard!”

“Don’t you get the feeling that I’m Mayor of Vienna?” Kern asked Ruth.

“Better than that; I think you own the Prater.”

They roared away, collided with other cars and were soon caught in the whirlpool. Kern laughed and took his hands off the wheel; Ruth tried hard to steer, frowning earnestly. Finally she gave it up, turned to Kern as though to apologize and then smiled—that rare smile which lighted up her face and made it tender and childlike. It was the full red mouth one noticed now and not the solemn eyebrows.

They made the rounds of a half-dozen booths and sideshows—from the calculating sea lions to the Indian fortuneteller; nowhere did they have to pay. “See,” Kern said proudly, “they get my name wrong everywhere, but we get in free. That’s the highest form of common courtesy.”

“Will they let us ride on the big ferris wheel free too?” Ruth asked.

“Certainly! As artists in the employ of Director Potzloch. They’ll treat us as honored guests. Come along, we’ll go there now.”

“Hello, Schani,” said the man at the ticket window. “Brought your fiancée, I see.”

Kern nodded and blushed, avoiding Ruth’s eye.

The man took two colored postcards from a pile beside him and handed them to Ruth. They were pictures of the ferris wheel with a panorama of Vienna. “Souvenirs for you, Fräulein.”

“Thank you very much.”

They got into one of the cars and sat down by the window. “I just let that reference to fiancée pass,” Kern said. “It would have taken too long to explain.”

Ruth laughed. “As a result we have this special honor—the postcards. The only trouble is probably neither of us knows anyone to send them to.”

“No,” Kern said. “I don’t know anyone. Those I can think of have no address.”

The car drifted slowly upward and beneath it the panorama of Vienna unfolded gradually like a great fan. First the Prater with its bright strings of lighted avenues like double-stranded pearl necklaces around the dark neck of the forest—then like a giant ornament of emeralds and rubies the garish blaze of the amusement park—and finally the myriad lights of the city itself, more almost than the eye could take in, and beyond them the thin dark haze of the mountain ranges.

They were alone in the car which rose higher and higher in a gentle curve and then glided parallel to the earth so that it seemed to them suddenly as if it were no longer a car—but as though they were sitting in a noiseless airplane while the
earth turned slowly beneath them—as though they were no longer a part of it, as though they were in a phantom airship that had no landing field anywhere and under them a thousand homes glided by, a thousand lighted houses and rooms, lamps, welcoming lights of evening, stretching away to the horizon, dwelling places with sheltering roofs, which called and enticed, and no one of them was theirs. They hung suspended in the darkness of exile and the only light they had was the cheerless candle of yearning.…

The windows of the gipsy wagon were open. It was sultry and very still. Lilo had spread a bright cover over the bed and thrown an old velvet curtain from the shooting gallery over Kern’s mattress. Two Chinese lanterns hung in the windows.

“A Venetian night for modern vagabonds,” Steiner said. “Were you in the little concentration camp?”

“What do you mean?”

“The Ghost Ride.”

“Yes.”

Steiner laughed. “Bunkers, dungeons, chains, blood and tears—the Ghost Ride has suddenly become modern, eh, little Ruth?” He got up. “Let’s have some vodka!”

He picked up the bottle from the table. “Have some, Ruth?”

“Yes, a big one.”

“And you, Kern?”

“A double one.”

“Children, you’re learning.”

“I’m drinking out of pure high spirits,” Kern explained.

“Give me a glass too,” said Lilo, who had come in with a
platter of brown piroshki. Steiner poured. Then he grinned and raised his glass. “Long live Melancholy, the dark mother of life’s joy!”

Lilo put down the platter and brought an earthenware jar of pickles and a plate with black Russian bread. Then she took her glass and slowly emptied it. The light of the lanterns glittered in the clear liquid so that she seemed to be drinking out of a rose-colored diamond.

“Will you give me another glass?” she asked Steiner.

“As much as you want, melancholy little child of the steppes. Ruth, how about you?”

“I’ll have another too.”

“And another for me,” Kern said. “I got a raise today.”

They sat and ate the warm patties filled with meat and cabbage. Afterward Steiner seated himself cross-legged on his bed and smoked. Kern and Ruth sat down on Kern’s mattress on the floor. Lilo moved back and forth cleaning up. Her huge shadow wavered across the walls of the wagon. “Sing something, Lilo,” Steiner said presently.

She nodded and got her guitar which was hanging on the wall in a corner. In speaking her voice was husky but when she sang it was deep and clear. She sat in half-darkness. Her usually impassive face became animated, and her eyes took on a wild and melancholy brilliance. She sang Russian folk songs and the old lullabies of the gipsies. After a while she stopped and looked at Steiner. The light sparkled in her eyes.

“Go on singing, Lilo,” Steiner said.

She nodded and plucked a few chords on the guitar. Then she began to hum, little melodies in a single key out of which now and then words rose like birds out of the darkness of the broad steppes, wanderers’ songs, songs of brief peace beneath
the tents, and in the restless light of the lanterns it seemed that the wagon, too, had become a tent, hastily pitched in the night, and that tomorrow all of them would have to press on.

Ruth was sitting in front of Kern leaning against him; her shoulders touched his knees and he felt the smoothness and warmth of her back. She rested her head against his hands. The warmth streamed through them into his blood and made him a helpless prisoner of unfamiliar desires. There was a dark something stirring within him and pressing upon him from without. It was in Lilo’s deep and passionate voice and in the breath of the night, in the confused tumult of his thoughts and in the flashing tide that suddenly lifted him and bore him away. He laid his hands like a shawl around the slender neck in front of him and it nestled eagerly against them.

It was quiet outside when Kern and Ruth left. The booths were already covered with their gray tarpaulins, the noise had ceased, and after the uproar and the shouting, after the cracking of rifles and the shrill cries of the barkers, the forest had silently taken possession again, burying beneath it the gray and gaudy rash of tents.

“You don’t want to go home just yet, do you?” Kern asked.

“I don’t know. No, I don’t.”

“Let’s stay here. We’ll walk around. I wish tomorrow would never come.”

“I wish so too. Tomorrow always means fear and uncertainty. How lovely it is here!”

They walked through the darkness. Above them the trees were motionless; wrapped in silence as though in an invisible soft wadding. There was not the slightest rustle of a leaf.

“Perhaps we’re the only people still awake—”

“I doubt it. The police are always awake longer.”

“There are no police here. Not one. This is the forest. How pleasant it is to walk here! Even our footsteps are silent.”

“No, you can’t hear a thing.”

“I can: I hear you. Or perhaps it’s me. Somehow I can’t even imagine what it was like without you.”

They walked on. It was so quiet that the silence seemed to be whispering—as though it were breathlessly awaiting a strange monster from far away.

“Give me your hand,” Kern said. “I’m afraid you might suddenly no longer be here.”

Ruth leaned close to him. He felt her hair against his face. “Ruth,” he said, “I know this is nothing more than a brief feeling of belonging together amid all this flight and loneliness—but for us it means more than much that goes by a grander name—”

She nodded her head against his shoulder. They stood thus for a while. “Ludwig,” Ruth said. “Sometimes I don’t want to go on anywhere. I’d simply like to let myself drop into the earth and cease to exist.”

“Are you tired?”

“No, not tired. I’m not tired. I could go on walking like this forever. It’s so soft. Like walking on air.”

A wind rose. The leaves above them began to rustle. Kern felt a warm drop on his hand. Another brushed his face. He looked up. “It’s beginning to rain, Ruth.”

“Yes.”

The drops began to fall steadily and faster. “Take my coat,” Kern said. “I don’t need it. I’m used to this.”

He put his coat around Ruth’s shoulders. She could feel the warmth that lingered in it and suddenly she had a strange sense of being protected.

The breeze ceased. For an instant the forest seemed to hold its breath. Then lightning, wide and noiseless, blazed through the darkness; thunder followed at once and immediately the rain poured down as though the lightning had ripped open the sky.

“Come quick!” Kern shouted. They ran toward the carrousel, which stood dimly before them in the night under its gray canvas like the squat tower of a robber baron. Kern lifted an edge of the cover and they crawled inside and stood panting, as though suddenly protected inside a gigantic dark drum on which the rain beat down.

Kern took Ruth by the hand and drew her with him. Their eyes quickly grew used to the darkness. The shapes of horses reared like ghosts; the stags were turned to stone in eternal shadows; the swans spread wings filled with mysterious shadows; and the peaceful and massive backs of the elephants stood blacker than the darkness itself.

“Come!” Kern drew Ruth to a gondola. He gathered up silk cushions out of the coaches and carriages and lined the bottom of the gondola. Then he pulled off the gold-embroidered cover from an elephant. “Come. There now, you have a coverlet fit for a princess!”

From without came the long-drawn roll of the thunder. The lightning threw faint, colorless light into the warm darkness of the tent—and with each flash, like the soft and distant vision of an enchanted Paradise, the animals emerged with their painted antlers and trappings, peacefully parading together in a never-ending circle. Kern saw Ruth’s pale face with its dark eyes and, as he covered her, he felt her breast under his hand; unknown and strange again and exciting as it had been on that first night in the Hotel Bristol in Prague.

The storm came swiftly nearer. The roll of the thunder
drowned out the drumming on the tight-stretched canvas roof, from which rain gushed in streams; the floor vibrated at the violent thunder claps, and in the reverberating silence that followed a last particularly heavy shock, the carrousel freed itself and began slowly turning. More slowly than by day, almost reluctantly, as though under the influence of a secret spell—the music too was slower than by day and oddly interspersed with pauses. It made only a half turn, as though awakened for an instant from its sleep—then it stopped and the organ too was silent, as though it had wearily broken down in the middle of a note, and there was only the murmuring of the rain, rain, the oldest lullaby in the world.

PART II