Ship of Fools (41 page)

The stewardess moved sideways along the wall, somewhat as if she had found herself caged with a dangerous beast. Dr. Schumann did not wait for La Condesa to get back in bed, but seizing her by the upper arm as she passed plunged the needle abruptly into the soft muscle. She shuddered deeply with pleasure, her eyes closed, and reached up to breathe in his ear warmly: “What a bad-tempered man you are, and what shall I do without you?”

He glanced at the stony-faced stewardess on her knees mopping up
Schaumwein
and back to La Condesa, frowning. He dropped her arm and summoned the principles of his whole life to rebuke her immodesty and her utter lack of regard for appearances.

“Oh Madame, good night, and do try to compose yourself!” he said, sternly, hearing how feeble his words were compared to what she deserved. He waited to see her cover her nakedness; lie flat and turn her head on the pillow to smile at him drowsily. “Sleep,” she said, in a drowned voice, “sleep, poor prisoner.”

Turning the corner in the corridor a few steps from her door, he almost collided with two of the Cuban students, one carrying a bottle of wine, the other a chessboard. They bowed and stood to the wall to allow him to pass, but he stopped also, and spoke to them abruptly without any attempt at ceremony: “Gentlemen, I have been many times astonished at your lack of consideration for Madame, and I must now insist that your attentions cease at once. Madame is my patient, and I forbid all visits in the evening, and none in the day without my special permission. I am sorry,” he said, with a good deal of bitter satisfaction.

They bowed again with effusive good manners—a slight parody of good manners, the Doctor thought—and one of them said, “Of course, dear Herr Doctor, we understand perfectly.” The other said, “Oh, perfectly,” and they turned ahead of him, outdistanced him and disappeared almost at once. The Doctor dismissed them from mind with a swift impression of their coarse-grained, thick-looking skins and the muddy whites of their eyes—a slight touch of the tar-brush, no doubt—what matter? His nerves were shaken again, and he permitted himself a brief vengeful meditation on the crockery-smashing sex, the outraged scullerymaid, the exasperated housewife of the lower classes, the jealous mistress—the sex that brought confusion into everything, religion, law, marriage; all its duplicities, its love of secret bypaths, its instinct for darkness and all mischiefs done in darkness. Who was La Condesa smashing, he wondered—himself, or the Captain, or both? Or another man, or other men in the past who had resisted her, restrained her, baffled her, denied her, and finally evaded her? Or was she used to easy conquests, eager dupes? The Doctor halted at this point, said suddenly under his breath, “Mother of God be my refuge!” and crossed himself, and instantly felt his head clear a little, as if the demons had fled. Quietly, as if he were thinking about someone else's misfortune, he faced his own: this malice had tinged his sinful love from the first, for he had loved her from the first before he admitted it was love; as his guilt deepened, his wish to ease her sufferings was changing slowly into a wish to cause her suffering, of another kind, in which she would be made to feel his hand and his will … why did his love wish to degrade her? He knew well she was no enraged servant, no jealous mistress; she had chosen the simplest most direct way in the world, even touching in its simplicity and directness, to express her contempt and her defiance of the Captain, of the Doctor, and of all the powers that held her prisoner. Her face had been composed, her eyes when she turned them towards him had been shining with amusement; she had swung the bottles as if she were christening a ship. As for her immodesty, walking about in her nightgown, showing her bare legs so carelessly—there was something in it very disrespectful to him, as if he were not even present, or was not really a man with whom she should exercise a little prudence … as if he were harmless, impotent. This was a familiar trick of women, every man knew it well, but—and the Doctor's heart gave a leap and started beating too fast—it was intolerable, just the same! He slowed down, unnerved, and reached in his inner pocket for the little phial. “Love,” he said with hatred, as if someone could hear him and answer, “to call this baseness love?” He walked slowly once around the deck, making up his mind to look for one of those priests and go to confession, and to receive Holy Communion in the early morning. For the first time in a great while, he felt not the right contrition, that good habit of the spirit, but a personal shame, a crushing humiliation at the disgraceful nature of what he had to confess. Folly, folly, at his age, a married man, running in his mind after that strange woman as if he were one of those pimple-faced students, yet denying his feelings to himself, blaming her for everything, and hating his own evil in her.…

He drew a good breath and squared his shoulders when he saw striding down upon him, cassock flapping, the older, more austere of the Spanish priests, no doubt taking a constitutional before turning in. He stepped in his path a few paces away, and put out an arm in signal.

“Father …” he said, and Father Garza stopped before him.

Late next morning Freytag, still sulky and uneasy after a nearly sleepless night listening to Hansen's loud quarreling with his nightmare in the upper berth, drank coffee alone in the bar. He was ravenously hungry after his spoiled dinner the evening before, but his resentment had hardened, and he was resolved to ask for a change of table before he ate again. When he saw the drift of familiar figures beginning the morning round of the deck, he went to look for the head steward.

The head steward's love of authority was second only to the Captain's. Freytag expressed his wish to be seated alone for the rest of the voyage in the easy tone of a man reserving a table in a restaurant with the headwaiter. The head steward consulted his seating chart as if there might be some doubt in the matter. Then he tapped his palm with the head of his pencil and said, most politely, “
Mein Herr
, there will be no difficulty. In fact, it has already been arranged for you, I am happy to say.”

“Arranged?” repeated Freytag, and stopped himself just in time from asking “Who arranged it?”

“Your request made to the purser was conveyed to me, sir,” said the head steward, in a voice full of respect, his face full of guarded insolence. Freytag said at once, “Thank you,” and turned away. He felt quite light and hollow with rage, and hardly knew how he reached the upper deck again; when that doleful little Baumgartner family, with its sickroom air, walking in a huddle, murmured among themselves at him “
Guten Morgen
…
Grüss Gott
…
Haben Sie gut geschlafen
?” he rudely passed them by, and hurt their feelings badly, and never knew it, and would not have cared if he had known; such abject bores did not really exist, they had no right to feelings. Or at least, no right to intrude them on him. He thought he could trace the snail's trail of events quite clearly; there was nothing subtle about either that pig Rieber or that half-witted rattle Lizzi; they would go to the purser, or even straight to the Captain himself; the Captain would do the rest, at the proper godlike distance—oh it was all plain enough! Except for certain details, it was not even anything new, not the first time since he married Mary that he had been refused a table in places where before he had been welcome. But this never had happened except when Mary was with him. Smart and beautiful and golden and trim and smiling a little, eyes averted, Mary would stand beside him in silence while the headwaiter explained that he was sorry, but there was no record of a reservation: “Our mistake, no doubt, we regret it deeply, but as you see—” and it was true, every unoccupied table in the place would have a large card saying: “Reserved.” He would rage and storm along the street and in taxicabs and back at home, but Mary never lost her strange patience. “I am used to it,” she told him, “and you are not. But didn't I tell you my love how it would be? I know where
We
may go and where not, please will you not listen to me?”

“I will listen, Mary,” he promised her now. “If you can't come with me, I will go with you!”

At lunch Freytag advanced into the dining room without hesitation, as if he knew where he was going. A steward ran towards him as if he were heading him off, and in a wheedling murmur directed him towards a small table set near the service entrance against a blank wall, where, Freytag had noticed a good while ago, the Jew Herr Löwenthal sat by himself. He was sitting by himself at that moment. The steward bowed Herr Freytag to his chair, drew it out, seated him, unfolded his napkin and handed it to him, and offered him the lunch card before Herr Löwenthal finished choosing his own lunch and glanced up. “Good afternoon,” he said, in the tone of a man in the door of his own house greeting a stranger, perhaps a dubious one.

“Good afternoon,” said Freytag, with neutral blandness, considering that he had fought this battle out with himself, and was going to control the situation by sheer calm and will power. “I hope I am not intruding.”

“And could we help it if you were?” asked Löwenthal, raising his shoulders and eyebrows. “Did anybody ask us?” He did not seem offended, but merely was mentioning an obvious fact.

Freytag's raw nerves prickled. “I asked the head steward for a table by myself,” he said, in a carefully easy tone. “There has been some mistake.” He could not help seeing at much too close a range Herr Löwenthal's smooth oily face, his large heavy lids over chocolate-colored lightless eyes, the unpleasantly thick mobile lips that squirmed as he chewed or talked. Freytag knew the type too well—overfamiliar if you made the mistake of being pleasant to him; loud and insolent if he suspected timidity in you; sly and cringing if you knew how to put him in his place. No, this one won't very well do as the hero of a Cause, Freytag decided. He's not the one all the row is about. Even other kinds of Jews don't like him. He's the kind that comes to the side door peddling trash; Mary's mother would set the dog on him! He recalled all the queer comic names the Jews made up for each other, names of contempt and ridicule, and the worst of them were meant for fellows like this.

Löwenthal was looking about him with skeptical eyes, a sour twist on his mouth. “You didn't look around before you asked? Where did you see a free table?”

Freytag, to his intense irritation, found himself answering earnestly, “There is one on the far side, near a porthole.”

“That is for that big raw German boy with the sick uncle,” said Löwenthal. “Only he's like a prisoner yet; and there's that Condesa, only not for days now; and that American shicksa, the widow—she never misses! What I mean is, you got to sit with somebody—so why not somebody else? Why me? Why not one of the ladies, or that boy you won't have to see much?”

“The purser used his own judgment, I expect,” said Freytag, “such as it is.”

A sarcastic grin positively discomposed Herr Löwenthal's features. “At the Captain's table?” he asked unbelievingly. “And you want to be moved? Only Allrightniks eat with the Captain—so you don't appreciate all that high society? Well, excuse me, no kikes wanted, hein? So we are in the same boat, hein? No, no, don't tell me, let me guess!”

Here it comes again, from the other side, thought Freytag, in a second of pure panic. I can't sit here, either. His stomach squeezed into a tight knot, his right hand clenched until he forced it to open to pick up the lunch card. “Vegetable broth, salmon with cucumber,” he told the waiter, and then added in nearly the same tone to Löwenthal, “I am almost sorry to have to say it, sorry for my own personal reasons, but you are mistaken, if I understand what you seem to be saying. I am not a Jew.”

Varying contradictory expressions rippled over Löwenthal's face like pond water on a windy day. “Something new every moment,” he said, at last, “that I should live to hear this from a
Krist
!” The waiter set before him a plate of hard-boiled eggs and raw cabbage salad. He took half an egg in his mouth, added a heap of cabbage, and chewing a while, went on: “You don't have to say it to me. What you want to do about that is positively your business, I got nothing to add. There's been times when I was tempted, God forbid, to say it myself. But I couldn't get away with it—not with this map. Why, babies barely able to talk yell ‘Sheeny' at a hundred feet. I will say this, you don't look it—I got a sharp eye, and I never took you for one of the Chosen People, and that's a fact. But in Germany there's all this mixed marriage, good Jewish boys chasing out after these towheaded shicksas, they should be ashamed, so a lot of us look more like the blockheads than we should. In Germany you see Jews with no back head already, and that's not natural. Plenty of the lowest-down anti-Semites I know don't have to look further back than their grandfather to find the good old blood … but they don't look if they can help it—”

Freytag, trying to eat, nodded pleasantly as if in agreement. Löwenthal was doing all the talking, and that made the right appearance. Freytag was seated with his back to most of the room; if he had turned his head halfway round he could have looked directly at the Captain's table, though a good distance away. He felt that he was the object of stares, whispers, scandals, mean bits of gossip; let them see then that he was listening to Herr Löwenthal's talk with amiable interest, nothing in the least disagreeable or even conspicuous was to happen; he intended to preserve the very best of appearances to the end. Sitting there feeling as if the blood were about to burst through his pores, suffering the tortures of a prisoner being crushed in the boot, he listened to Löwenthal.

“Sometimes it gets tough, I don't have to tell you,” he went on, “but I don't know—I don't know,” he said with a sudden deep sigh, “if I could turn on my own people … I'd feel strange, being taken for anything else. Why, what else could I be?” He seemed bewildered, as if he had never thought of this before. “But as I say, if you've got your reasons, and you can get away with it, why, I don't blame you. Me, I'm a Jew, and if sometimes I think that's hard luck, why I just try to imagine being a Goy. Yarrrr,” he ended, with a look of nausea.