Flotsam (21 page)

“No,” said one of the guards.

The blond student looked at him pityingly. “Physical culture. Gymnastics. Bodily exercise. Now do you understand? Is that supposed to be our supper?”

“Sure,” said the jailer.

The blond student bent over one of the bowls and screwed up his face in disgust. “Take it out!” he roared suddenly. “How dare you bring in this slop? Dishwater for the son of the President of the Senate? Do you want to be demoted?” He stared at the guards. “I’m going to make a complaint. I wish to speak to the police captain immediately! Take me to the Commissioner of Police at once. Tomorrow my father’s going to make things hot for the Minister of Justice on your account.”

The two guards stared up at him. They did not know whether they dared be rude or had better be careful. The blond student stared back fixedly.

“Sir,” the older of the two said presently in a cautious tone, “this is the regular prison food.”

“Am I in prison?” The student was a picture of injured dignity. “I am in detention. Don’t you know the difference?”

“I do, yes—” The guard was now visibly shaken. “You can, of course, buy your own food, sir. That is your right. If you’re willing to pay for it, the jailer can bring you a goulash—”

“At last someone is talking sense.” The blond student’s manner softened.

“And perhaps a beer too—”

The blond student looked at the guard. “I like you. I’m going to use my influence in your behalf. What’s your name?”

“Rudolf Egger, your grace.”

“Quite so. Carry on.” The student got some money out of his pocket and gave it to the jailer. “Two orders of beef goulash with potatoes. A bottle of plum brandy—”

The guard Rudolf Egger opened his mouth. “Spirits—”

“Are allowed,” the student finished the sentence. “Two pitchers of beer—one for the guard and one for us.”

“Many thanks. Your servant, sir,” said Rudolf Egger.

“If the beer isn’t fresh and cold,” the son of the President of the Senate explained to the jailer, “I’ll saw your foot off. If it’s good, you shall keep the change.”

The jailer smiled happily. “It shall be as you say, Count.” He beamed. “I can recognize genuine, golden Viennese humor.”

The food came and the student invited Kern to join him. At first Kern refused. He saw the Jews eating their slop with earnest faces. “Be a traitor! It’s the style nowadays,” the student
encouraged him. “Besides this is a meal between fellow card-players.”

Kern sat down. The goulash was good and after all he had no passport and moreover was only half Jew.

“Does your father know you’re here?” Kern asked.

“Good God!” The student laughed. “My father! He has a dry-goods business in Linz.”

Kern looked at him in astonishment. “My friend,” the student said calmly, “you seem not to know that we are living in the age of bluff. Democracy has given place to demagogy. A natural sequence.
Prost!
”

He uncorked the plum brandy and offered a glass to the student with spectacles. “Thanks, but I don’t drink,” the latter said in embarrassment.

“Of course not! I might have guessed it.” The fair-haired student tossed off the glass himself. “For that very reason others will persecute you forever. How about us, Kern? Shall we kill the bottle between us?”

“Yes.”

They emptied the bottle. Then they lay down on their plank beds. Kern thought he would be able to sleep. But he kept waking up. Damn it, he thought, what have they done with Ruth? And how long are they going to keep me locked up?

He was given two months in prison. Assault and battery, disorderly conduct, resisting the police, repeated illegal residence—he was surprised he hadn’t been given ten years.

He said good-by to the blond student, who was released at that time. Then he was taken downstairs. He had to turn over his possessions and was given prison clothing. While he stood
under the shower it occurred to him that he had felt depressed once because he was handcuffed. That seemed a tremendously long time ago. Now his only feeling about prison clothes was that they were a help; he wouldn’t be wearing out his own things.

His fellow prisoners were a thief, a petty swindler, and a Russian professor from Kazan who had been picked up as a vagrant. All four were put to work in the prison tailor shop.

The first evening was bad. Kern remembered what Steiner had once told him—that he would get used to it. But nevertheless he sat on his bunk staring at the wall.

“Do you speak French?” the professor asked him suddenly from his bed.

Kern started. “No.”

“Do you want to learn how?”

“Yes. We can start right now.”

The professor got up. “You have to occupy yourself, you know. Otherwise your thoughts will start gnawing at you.”

“Yes.” Kern nodded. “Besides it will be useful. I’ll probably have to go to France when I get out of here.”

They sat down beside each other on a corner of the lower bunk. Above them the swindler was making a noise. He had a stump of a lead pencil and was covering the walls with obscene drawings. The professor was very thin. His prison clothes were much too big for him. He had a wild red beard and a childlike face with blue eyes. “Let’s begin with the most beautiful and futile word in the world,” he said with a charming smile that had no irony in it, “with the word ‘freedom’—
la liberté
.”

Kern learned a great deal during this time. At the end of three days he could talk without moving his lips to the prisoners
in front of him and behind him during the exercise period in the courtyard. In the tailor shop he memorized French verbs in the same way with the professor. In the evening when he was tired of French, the thief taught him how to pick a lock with a wire and how to quiet watchdogs. He also taught him the times when all the various fruits ripened in the fields, and the technique of crawling unobserved into a haymow. The swindler had smuggled in with him a few copies of the
World of Fashion
. It was the only thing, aside from the Bible, that they had to read, and they learned from it how to dress at diplomatic receptions and on what occasions a red or white carnation was proper with a dinner coat. Unfortunately the thief was incorrigible on one point; he maintained that a black cravat was the right thing with tails—he had often enough seen waiters in restaurants dressed that way.

As they were being taken out of their cell on the morning of the fifth day, the jailer gave Kern a violent shove so that he lurched against the wall. “Look out, you ass!” he roared.

Kern pretended he couldn’t stand up. He hoped in this way to get a chance to kick the jailer in the shins without being punished. It would have looked like an accident. But before he was able to do it the jailer plucked him by the sleeve and whispered: “Ask to leave the room in an hour. Say you have stomach cramps.” Then he shouted, “Get going! Do you think we’re all going to wait for you?”

During the walk Kern speculated as to whether the jailer was trying to get him in trouble. They hated each other. Later in the tailor shop he discussed the subject in a noiseless whisper with the thief, who was an expert on prisons.

“You can always leave the room,” the latter explained. “That’s a human necessity. No one can get you for that. Some
people have to go often, and some not so often. That’s nature. But after that look out!”

“All right. I’ll just see what he wants. Anyhow it’s a change.”

Kern pretended to have stomach cramps and the jailer led him out of the room. He took him to the washroom and looked around. “Cigarette?” he asked.

They were forbidden to smoke. Kern laughed. “So that’s it! No, my friend, you’ll not get me that way.”

“Oh, shut up! You think I’m trying to get you in trouble, do you? Do you know Steiner?”

Kern stared at the jailer. “No,” he said presently. He guessed that this was a trick to catch Steiner.

“You don’t know Steiner?”

“No.”

“All right then, listen. Steiner has sent word to you that Ruth is safe. You need have no anxiety. When you get out you’re to have yourself deported to Czecho and then come back. Now do you know him?”

Kern suddenly realized he was shaking. “Cigarette now?” the jailer asked. Kern nodded. The jailer took a package of Memphis and matches out of his pocket. “Here, take them! From Steiner. If you’re caught, I don’t know anything about it. And now sit down in there and smoke one of them. Blow the smoke down the can. I’ll watch outside.”

Kern sat down on the toilet. He took out a cigarette, broke it in two and lit one of the halves. He smoked slowly with deep inhalations. Ruth was safe. Steiner was on the lookout. He stared at the dirty wall with its obscene drawings and thought this was the finest room in the world.

“Look,” said the jailer as he came out. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Steiner?”

“Have a cigarette,” Kern said.

The jailer shook his head. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

“Where did you know him?” Kern asked.

“He got me out of a mess once. A damned bad mess. Now come along.”

They went back to the tailor shop. The professor and the thief looked at Kern. He nodded and sat down. “Everything all right?” the professor asked noiselessly.

Kern nodded again.

“Well, let’s get on,” the professor whispered into his red beard. “
Aller
. Irregular verb.
Je vais, tu vas, il
 …?”

“No,” Kern said. “Today we’ll take up something else. What’s the word ‘to love’?”

“ ‘To love’?
Aimer
. But that’s a regular verb—”

“That’s the very reason,” Kern said.

The professor was released at the end of four weeks; the thief at the end of six; the swindler a few days later. Toward the end he tried to convert Kern to homosexuality; Kern was strong enough to keep him away. Finally he knocked him out with the short punch the blond student had taught him; after that he had peace.

He was alone for a few days; then he got two new cell mates. He spotted them immediately as refugees. One was middle-aged and very quiet; the younger was about thirty. They wore shabby clothes and you could see the care they had taken to keep them clean. The older one immediately lay down on his bunk.

“Where have you come from?” Kern asked the younger man.

“From Italy.”

“How is it there?”

“It was good. I was there two years. Now it has changed. They are checking up on everything.”

“Two years!” Kern said. “That really is something!”

“Yes, but it only took them a week to catch me here. Is it always that way?”

“It’s been getting worse in the last six months.”

The newcomer propped his head in his hands. “It’s getting worse everywhere. What’s going to happen now? How is it in Czechoslovakia?”

“Worse there too. Too many there. Have you been in Switzerland?”

“Switzerland is too small. They spot you right away.” The man stared straight ahead. “What I should have done was to go to France.”

“Do you know French?”

“Yes, sure.” The man ran his hands through his hair.

Kern looked at him. “Shall we speak French? I’ve just been learning it and I don’t want to forget.”

The man rolled up his eyes in astonishment. “Speak French?” He gave a dry laugh. “No, I couldn’t do that! Get thrown into jail and then carry on a French conversation—that’s too ridiculous. You certainly have funny ideas.”

“Not at all. It’s just that I lead a funny life.”

Kern waited a while to see whether the man would change his mind. Then he climbed up on his bunk and repeated irregular verbs until he fell asleep.

He awoke to find someone shaking him. It was the man who had refused to talk French. “Help!” he gasped. “Quick! He’s hanged himself.”

Kern sat up, still half asleep. In the pale gray of early morning
a black body hung in front of the window, its head drooping. He leaped from his bunk. “A knife! Quick!”

“I haven’t a knife. Have you?”

“Damn it, no. They took it away. I’ll lift him. You try to work the belt over his head.”

Kern got onto the bunk and tried to lift the hanging body. It was as heavy as the world, much heavier than it looked. The clothes were cold and dead as he. Kern exerted all his strength. He could scarcely lift him. “Hurry,” he panted. “Loosen the belt. I can’t hold him here forever.”

“Yes.” The other man climbed and went to work on the hanged man’s neck. Suddenly he stopped, reeled and vomited.

“You damn fool!” Kern roared. “Can’t you go on? Get him loose! Quick!”

“I can’t look at him,” groaned the other. “His tongue, his eyes—”

“Then get down here. You lift him and I’ll get him loose.”

He put the heavy body in the other man’s arms and sprang up on the bunk. The sight was hideous. The pale and swollen face, the eyes protruding as though about to burst, the thick black tongue—Kern felt for the thin leather strap which had cut deep into the folds of the bloated neck. “Higher,” he shouted, “lift him higher!”

He heard a gurgle below. The man was vomiting again. At the same instant he let the hanged man fall and the jerk drove his eyes and tongue out as though he were sneering hideously at the helplessness of the living. “Damnation!” In desperation Kern sought for something that would bring the man below him to his senses. Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, the scene between the blond student and the jailer went through his mind. “Why, you damned washerwoman!” he roared. “If you don’t take hold immediately, I’ll kick your guts out! Get
going, you yellow-bellied coward.” As he spoke he kicked and felt his foot strike home. He kicked again with all his strength. “I’ll break your skull!” he screamed. “Go on and lift!”

The man kept quiet and lifted. “Higher!” Kern raged. “Higher, you filthy washrag.” The man lifted higher and Kern succeeded in loosening the noose and slipping it over the hanged man’s head. “All right. Now lower him.”

Between them they laid the limp body on the bunk. Kern tore open his vest and trouser band. “Get the slit in the door open,” he directed. “Call the guard. I’ll begin artificial respiration.”

He kneeled behind the grizzled head, took the cold dead hands in his warm, living ones and began to move the man’s arms. He heard a wheezing rattle as the thorax rose and fell and sometimes he paused to listen; but there was no breathing. The man who wouldn’t speak French was rattling at the slit in the door and shouting: “Guard! Guard!” It made a dull echo in the cell.