Flotsam (6 page)

“Miriam!” the mother called.

“The child is right,” said the old man with the scar on his forehead sitting beside the violinist. “Go ahead and play. It will entertain us all and I don’t think there is any rule against it.”

The violinist still hesitated. Then he took the bow out of the case, tightened it, and raised the violin to his shoulder. Through the room floated the first clear notes.

It seemed to Kern as though he felt a caress, as though a hand were smoothing away something inside him. He tried to
resist but could not. A shiver ran through him, then suddenly he was filled with a comforting sense of warmth.

The door of the office opened and the head of the secretary appeared. He came in, leaving the door open behind him. There was a light in the office and the short crooked figure of the secretary was sharply silhouetted in the doorway. He looked as if he were about to say something—but then he tipped his head to one side and listened. Slowly and silently, as if pushed by an invisible hand, the door behind him swung shut.

Only the violin was there. It filled the heavy, dead air of the room and seemed to transform everything, to melt together the voiceless loneliness of the many little beings cowering in the shadow of the walls and to unite them in one great, yearning lamentation.

Kern put his arms around his knees. He let his head sink and allowed the flood to stream over him. He felt as if it were sweeping him away somewhere—to himself and to something very alien. The little black-haired girl crouched on the floor beside the violinist. She sat silent and motionless and looked at him.

The violin was silent.

Kern, who could play the piano a little, knew enough about music to tell that the playing had been magnificent.

“Schumann?” asked the old man beside the violinist.

The latter nodded.

“Go on playing,” said the girl. “Play something that will make us want to laugh.”

“Miriam,” called her mother.

“All right,” said the violinist.

He raised his bow again.

Kern looked around and saw bowed heads and the shimmer of raised white faces, he saw sorrow and despair and the soft transfiguration wrought for a few instants by the melody of the violin. He saw this; and he thought of the many similar rooms he had seen, filled with exiles whose one crime was to have been born and to be alive. This existed and at the same time this music existed too. It was incomprehensible. It was at once an undying comfort and a hideous irony. Kern saw that the violinist’s head rested against his instrument as though on the shoulder of a loved one. I won’t give up, he thought, as the twilight deepened through the big room; I will not give up, life is wild and sweet and I do not know it yet; it is a melody, a shout, a cry from distant forests, from undiscovered horizons, in unknown nights—I will not give up.… It was some time before he noticed the music had stopped.

“What’s that called?” the girl asked.

“German Dances, by Franz Schubert,” the violinist said huskily.

The old man beside him laughed. “German Dances!” He rubbed the scar on his forehead. “German Dances!” he repeated.

The secretary turned the light-switch by the door. “Next,” he said.

Kern was given an order entitling him to a sleeping place in the Hotel Bristol, and ten tickets for meals at the dining hall on Wenceslaus Square. When he had the tickets in his hand he suddenly realized that he was tremendously hungry, and rushed through the streets for fear he would get there too late.

He was not too late to get in, but all the seats were taken and he had to wait. Among those who were eating, he saw one of his former professors at the University. He wanted to go up and shake hands with him; but when he had reflected a moment, he decided not to. He knew that many emigrees did not care to be reminded of their former lives.

Presently he saw the violinist come in and stand looking about in bewilderment. He motioned to him; the violinist appeared surprised but came over slowly.

Kern was embarrassed. On first seeing the man again, he had believed he was an old acquaintance; now he suddenly realized that they had not yet spoken to each other.

“I beg your pardon,” he said flushing, “but I heard you playing a while ago and it occurred to me you might not know your way around here.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t. Do you?”

“Yes, I have been here twice before. Have you been out of the country for long?”

“Two weeks. I arrived here today.”

Kern noticed that the professor and someone beside him were getting up. “There are two free places,” he said quickly. “Come on.”

They pushed their way between the tables. The professor came toward them through the narrow space. He looked at Kern uncertainly and stopped. “Don’t I know you?”

“I was one of your students,” Kern said.

“Ah, yes, to be sure.” The professor nodded. “Tell me, do you happen to know anyone who could use a vacuum cleaner? With ten per cent discount and easy payments? Or a record player and radio combined?”

For an instant Kern was amazed. The professor had been an
authority on cancer research. “No, unfortunately I don’t,” he said sympathetically. He knew what it meant to sell vacuum cleaners and phonographs.

“I rather thought you wouldn’t.” The professor looked at him absent-mindedly. “I beg your pardon,” he said, as if he were speaking to someone entirely different, and went on.

There was barley soup with boiled beef. Kern emptied his plate ravenously. When he looked up, the violinist was sitting beside him with his hands on the table, his plate untouched.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Kern asked in amazement.

“I can’t.”

“Are you ill?” The pear-shaped head of the violinist looked a sick yellow under the chalky light of the unshaded bulbs on the ceiling.

“No.”

“You ought to eat,” Kern said.

The violinist made no reply. He lighted a cigarette and smoked rapidly. Then he pushed his plate to one side. “It’s impossible to live this way!” he exclaimed finally.

Kern looked at him. “Haven’t you a passport?” he asked.

“Yes, but—” The violinist nervously crushed out his cigarette. “Even so it’s impossible to live this way! Deprived of everything! With no ground under one’s feet!”

“My God!” Kern said. “You have a passport and you have your violin—”

The violinist glanced up. “But that hasn’t anything to do with it,” he exclaimed irritably. “Can’t you understand that?”

“No, I can’t.”

Kern was tremendously disillusioned. He had thought that anyone who could play like that must be a superior person. Someone from whom you could learn… And now he saw, sitting there, an embittered man who, though he was fifteen
years Kern’s senior, seemed to him like a spoiled child. The first phase of emigration, he thought. He will soon quiet down.

“Aren’t you really going to eat your soup?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then give it to me. I’m still hungry.”

The violinist pushed the plate toward him. Kern ate the soup slowly. Every spoonful contained strength to withstand misery and he didn’t want to lose any of it. Then he stood up. “Thank you for the soup. I’d have liked it better if you had eaten it yourself.”

The violinist looked at him. Furrows disfigured his face. “That’s something you’re not old enough to understand,” he said apologetically.

“It’s easier to understand than you think,” Kern replied. “You’re unhappy, that’s all.”

“What do you mean, that’s all?”

“It’s not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you’ll find out, when you’ve been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.”

He went outside. To his surprise he saw the professor strolling up and down on the opposite side of the street. His attitude—hands clasped behind his back, body bent slightly forward—was the same one he had assumed when he walked up and down on the lecture platform elucidating some new and complicated discovery in the domain of cancer research. Only now he was probably thinking about vacuum cleaners and phonographs.

Kern hesitated a moment. He had never accosted a professor.
But now, after his experience with the violinist, he walked over to him.

“I beg your pardon, Professor,” he said, “for speaking to you. I would never have believed that I would be in a position to give you advice. But now I should like to try.”

The professor paused. “Please do,” he replied distractedly. “Please do. I shall be grateful for any advice. What was your name?”

“Kern. Ludwig Kern.”

“I shall be grateful for any advice, Herr Kern. Quite unusually grateful. Really!”

“It is hardly advice. Only the lesson of experience. You are trying to sell vacuum cleaners and phonographs. Give it up. It is a waste of time. Hundreds of emigrees here are trying that. It is as hopeless as trying to sell life insurance.”

“That was the next thing I was going to try,” the professor interrupted excitedly. “Someone told me it was easy to do and you could earn good money at it.”

“He offered you a commission for every policy you sold, didn’t he?”

“Yes, of course. A good commission.”

“But nothing else? No expenses and no salary?”

“No, nothing of that sort.”

“I could make you that offer. It doesn’t mean a thing. Professor, have you sold a single vacuum cleaner? Or a phonograph?”

The professor looked at him helplessly. “No,” he said, strangely embarrassed, “but I hope very soon—”

“Give it up,” Kern replied; “that’s my advice. Buy a handful of shoelaces or a few boxes of shoe polish or some packages of safety pins. Little things that anyone can use. Peddle them.
You won’t earn much, but now and then you’ll sell something. Of course, hundreds of emigrants are trading in them too. But people buy safety pins sooner than vacuum cleaners.”

The professor looked at him thoughtfully. “I hadn’t thought of that at all.”

Kern smiled in embarrassment. “I can believe it. But think it over. It’s better, as I know from experience. Earlier I, too, tried to sell vacuum cleaners.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” The professor extended his hand. “Thank you. You are very kind.” His voice was suddenly strangely soft and submissive as if he were a student who had come to class badly prepared.

Kern bit his lip. “I was at all of your lectures—” he said.

“Yes, yes—” The professor made a distracted gesture. “Thank you, Herr——Herr——”

“Kern. But it’s of no importance.”

“On the contrary, it is important, Herr Kern. I beg your pardon—my memory has not been very good recently. Thank you many times. I believe I shall try it, Herr Kern.”

The Hotel Bristol was a dilapidated little frame building that had been rented by the Refugees’ Aid. Kern was assigned a bed in a room in which two other refugees were staying. He felt very sleepy after the meal he had eaten and went to bed at once. The two others were not there and he did not hear them come in.

In the middle of the night he was wakened by screams. He sprang out of bed immediately and, without pausing for thought, seized his bag and his clothes, dashed through the door and down the hall. Outside everything was quiet. At the
head of the stairs he stopped, put down his valise and listened—then he rubbed his eyes with his fist. Where was he? What was up? Where were the police?

Slowly memory came back to him. He looked down at himself and smiled with relief. He was in Prague, in the Hotel Bristol, and had a permit that was good for fourteen days. Silly to get in such a fright. Probably he had had a nightmare. He turned around. This mustn’t happen again, he thought, if I get jumpy that will be the last straw. Then everything’s up. He opened the door and groped in the dark for his bed. It was to the right, beside the wall. He quietly put down his valise and hung his clothes over the foot of the bed. Then he felt for the blanket. Suddenly, just as he was about to lie down, his hand encountered something soft and warm and breathing. He shot bolt upright.

“Who’s that?” a girl’s voice inquired sleepily.

Kern held his breath. He had got into the wrong room.

“Is someone there?” the voice asked again.

Kern stood rigid. He felt sweat break out all over him. After a while he heard a sigh and the sound of the girl turning over. He waited a few minutes. But everything remained silent and there was only the sound of a deeper breathing in the darkness. He reached quietly for his things and slipped cautiously out of the room.

A man in a shirt was standing in the corridor now in front of Kern’s room and was staring at him through his eyeglasses. He watched Kern come out of the neighboring room carrying his things. Kern was too confused to give any explanation. He went silently through the open door, past the man, who did not move out of the way for him, put his things away and got into bed. Before doing so he carefully ran his hand over the cover. There was no one lying under it.

The man stood for a while in the doorway, with the faint light from the hall glittering on his eyeglasses. Then he came in and closed the door with a sharp snap.

At that instant the screaming began again. Kern understood it now. “Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me! For Christ’s sake don’t hit me! Please, please! Oh …”

The screaming changed to a hair-raising gurgle and died away. Kern sat up. “What’s the matter anyway?” he inquired in the darkness.

A switch clicked and the light came on. The man with the eyeglasses got up and went to the third bed, where lay a gasping, sweat-drenched man with wild eyes. The other man brought a glass of water and held it to his mouth. “Drink this. You’ve just been dreaming. You’re safe.”

The man drank thirstily, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his thin throat. Then he fell back exhausted, shut his eyes and gave a deep sigh.

“What’s it all about?” Kern asked again.

The man with the eyeglasses came over to his bed. “What’s it all about? Someone who has dreams. Who dreams aloud. Released from a concentration camp a couple of weeks ago. Nerves, see?”

“Yes,” Kern said.

“Are you staying here?” asked the man with the eyeglasses.

Kern nodded. “I seem to have a touch of nerves myself. When he began to scream a while ago I dashed out. I thought the police were raiding the place. After that I got into the wrong room.”