Ship of Fools (52 page)

Mrs. Treadwell was dancing with her young officer, who had got in the habit of inviting her almost every evening. He had long since mentioned his name, even the name of the town where he was born; at first she had confused them, and then could not remember either of them. When not looking directly at him, she could hardly remember his face, and often did not recognize him at once when he appeared before her. Since her late entanglements with Lizzi and Freytag, she wished more than ever not to touch or be touched, neither with hands or words. Speech of their sort could be a pawing and prying not to be tolerated. She liked her young officer's style of holding her by the mere fingertips, his right hand resting—no, not resting, poised weightlessly at the most neutral spot on her entire person, that harmless area just below the right shoulder blade. Her hand in turn hovered lightly just above his bent elbow, keeping the stipulated distance between bodies which, at school dances, it had been the undivided responsibility of the girl to maintain.

“If you are uncertain whether you are at the proper distance,” her dancing teacher told her earnestly, “mentally raise your right arm crooked at the elbow, straight out from your shoulder, and if it barely touches your partner's chest, rest assured you are entirely correct. If your partner seems to be encroaching, simply hold yourself away firmly but gracefully without losing step until he takes the hint. And remember this, if he is a gentleman, he
will
take the hint. If he does not, then you will not dance with him again.…” This voice from the pre-Flood era of her youth so delighted her, its ghostly sound drifting through endless spaces of forgetfulness, she turned upon her partner a dazed, tender smile, and came wide awake when she saw him respond with a faintly puzzled, if not quite disturbed, frown. At the same moment his hold tightened ever so slightly, and ever so gently he drew her towards him. Mrs. Treadwell mentally raised her right arm, crooked at the elbow. The young officer slacked his arm at once, and remarked thoughtfully, seeing Bébé blundering about among the dancers, “I wonder what that dog is doing out by himself?” Mrs. Treadwell couldn't imagine, and they drifted along in easy silence and harmony until the music stopped. “Thank you,” he said. “Delightful,” said Mrs. Treadwell smiling just over the top of his head, “good night,” and she left the deck at once.

Amparo, still teaching Hansen to dance, trundled him about joylessly, her face the mere image of boredom. In spite of her efforts to direct him he managed to lunge them into the swiftly spinning Johann and Concha, who veered and flew away like birds. “Oaf,” said Amparo intensely, the first word she had spoken to him that evening. “How long do you expect me to keep this up?”

Hansen, who had not spoken at all, said nothing but renewed his oppressive clutch and tramped forward as if he were following a plow, almost running them into the band. “Idiot!” she said. Hansen brooded as he stumbled onward. “I pay you, don't I?” he inquired at length, heavily. “Not for stepping on my feet, no,” said Amparo. “Goat!” she said in fury, “watch your big hoofs!”

Freytag and Jenny, who took pains to assure each other that they had met on deck quite by accident, lingered wondering whether they dared to dance together again. David might decide to be awkward at any moment. Jenny had come upon Freytag standing alone, leaning slightly at the waist, one hand in pocket, watching the dancers, or pretending to, his features set in the strange frowning blind stare, the whites of his eyes sometimes showing all round the iris, that look Jenny had seen often by now, at first with perfect belief and indignant sympathy, and of late, always of two minds about it—first that his suffering was real, and second, that he was perhaps being a touch theatrical about it. Yet she could always feel again, as ever, the same light blaze of indignation against the vulgar insult offered him by the Captain. She put the blame squarely on the Captain because he was the only one who could have stopped the nonsense with a word; instead he had given it shape and direction. It was simply cowardly and low to hit someone who had no way of hitting back. Poor Herr Löwenthal was mistreated too, and Freytag never seemed to give this a thought;—that was wrong of him. She believed in hitting back, blow for blow and as many extra as you could manage to get in.—Not to resist and punish an injury, to oneself or to anyone else, was to consent to the wrong, plain moral cowardice in her view, and there was nothing she despised more. Thinking these thoughts, which grew more and more dispersed and vague as she came near Freytag, when he roused himself at sight of her and smiled as if pleased, she forgot them altogether and asked, “Wouldn't you like to dance? I'm tired of catering to David's suspicious mind!” “How flattering,” he said, “of course!”

As they swayed together a measure or two then moved into step, he said, “Did I tell you how I first saw my wife? We were in a huge expensive Berlin night club, a kind of high low-life place, where anybody could go.” He paused as if he had bitten off the end of that phrase. “That is, if you were dressed right and smelt of money. I was dancing with one of the girls, one of those bare-backed ladies who showed off their figures and agility by playing innocent little games such as handball among themselves between dances … and this beautiful little creature who came in with a small party of excessively rich-looking young men and women—I wish you could have seen her then—looks over her partner's shoulder with a face full of mischief and the boldness of a spoiled, well-protected girl and calls out to me as if answering something I had said to her before, ‘Why of course you may have the next!' You can imagine that I went looking for her, and I asked her if she meant it.”

Brassy little wench, thought Jenny, but it works, it works quite often.

He began again on some equally fatuous souvenir, Jenny listened with patience while he went on tormenting himself, wondering if he realized that at last he was talking about his wife in the past tense. “She was really a quite conventional girl, she didn't do that sort of thing, usually. Later, much later, when I asked her why she had done it, she said she had fallen in love with me on sight, and had made up her mind to marry me before she was near enough even to know the color of my eyes! Quite mad, wasn't it?”

“Utterly,” said Jenny, “really suicidal.” He seemed somewhat disturbed by this word, but decided to let it pass.

“She was so clever,” he said fondly, “she'll be cleverer than her mother when she comes to that age … she used to tell me exactly how things would be, she couldn't be fooled, she could just take a breath of air in a place and say, ‘Come along, this isn't for us!' Sometimes I didn't believe her or didn't wish to believe, I'd lose patience with her being so self-conscious about her Jewishness and I'd tell her that she was just another persecuted Jew, determined to be hated and persecuted no matter what. She would say in my very face—‘All Goyim hate the Jews and those who pretend to like us are the worst, because they are hypocrites.' And I'd tell her that this notion just made her feel important—one of the Chosen—the most unpardonably conceited and utterly beastly selfish idea that ever got into the brain of man! ‘I'd think you'd all be ashamed of yourselves,' I'd say.… Not that we quarreled, no, not at all. But these things did come up now and again, and she'd get furious and cry out, ‘The same old Goy talk … didn't I tell you?' and then we'd fly into each other's arms in a fright, and say, ‘Let's not turn on each other!' and it would all blow over, because we were really in love.”

His talk went on as if he were hypnotized by the swing of the waltz and the sound of his own voice running along under the music. Jenny wondered if he remembered other things he had said about his wife, all those words of pure admiration, the romantic tenderness, the rosy honeymoon illusions, the protective, defensive, constant praise—why not? It was all true so far as it went; but after one went so far it was always necessary to go back and touch base and start again on a new set of truths. There is a dream and it is one kind of reality; a waking up and that is another kind; or it is all the same reality under its endless aspects. Now she knew that all along he had been talking about his wife as people talk about their dead, and in this constant reminiscence of her, he was visiting her grave with flowers and reading there the inscription he had composed for her himself.

“… and oh God,” he said almost in a whisper, his mouth close to her ear as they drifted easily in a circle near the music, “I wish I could just take her, without her mother, who never lets us forget for a minute that she has lost nearly all her friends on our account, and find a country—there must be one somewhere—to live like human beings—like
other
people, and never to hear the words Jew or Gentile again.”

“You might go to Africa,” said Jenny, “you might look for one of those fascinating surviving tribes of cannibals and head-hunters where you would both be hated on exactly equal terms, because you're another color. And you could despise them comfortably because they stink horribly and scratch themselves all the time, and bow down to sticks and stones and wear gaudy blankets; and they love and admire themselves with the same passion that all the rest of us adore ourselves, and our color reminds them of ghosts and death and they say our smell turns their stomachs. Would you like that any better?”

Freytag drew back his face a few inches and his offended, self-pitying eyes rebuked her severely. “You are being frivolous,” he said, “you are ridiculing a dreadful human tragedy.” Their dancing slowed down almost to a standstill.

“I sometimes sound more frivolous than I am,” she said. “It's just my unfortunate manner. It has caused nearly all my troubles …” Over his shoulder she saw David appear in the doorway a moment, take in the scene at a glance, and disappear without a sign of recognition. “There goes David,” she said, without surprise.

“Where?” asked Freytag, turning too late for a glimpse. His face cleared and a curious thin smile tightened at the corners of his mouth. He drew Jenny closer to him with a conspiratorial quick gesture of familiarity and put his cheek against hers. “Is he still there? Is he still jealous? Ah, why didn't we give him something to be jealous about?” “He doesn't need anything,” said Jenny, brightly, repelled by his impertinence, and stiffening against his arm, “he's doing beautifully on his own, thank you.”

Freytag laughed outright, and Jenny observed that it was becoming to him. He wasn't meant to be a hero of drama, much less tragedy. “Do you mean, you cruel creature, you are going to leave him shadow-boxing for all the rest of your life together? It's wicked of you not to give him just cause when he needs it so badly—”

“Oh no,” said Jenny, “you're quite wrong. He doesn't want me to be unfaithful to him. He only wants to feel there is always the possibility, that I am desirable to other men, and he wants the right to accuse me of things—things that if he really believed, he wouldn't be on this ship with me now! But do you mind? Let's not talk about David. That is one of the things he hates, and I don't blame him!”

“I have talked to you about my wife,” Freytag reminded her.

“In not quite this way,” said Jenny, feeling she was splitting hairs. They were both of them being quite stupid and vulgar, and for her, that would not matter for one moment if only somehow somewhere on that wretched crowded ship they could find a place to spend a few nights together. She wished nothing else of him, but she wished for that with the quiet fury of high fever, and the abandonment of a dream. She wondered at him—was he so insensible he could not feel her through his pores?

“That's true,” he agreed, “not at all the same, but she isn't here, and that makes all the difference.… What are you going to do, my dear?” he asked tenderly.

“I don't know,” said Jenny, “I only know it must end.”

Freytag folded her into his arms with sudden warmth and waltzed her rapidly over to the band. “Play ‘
Adieu, mein kleiner Garde-Offizier
,' please,” he called to the man drooping over the rattly little piano, who nodded, soothed at even the smallest acknowledgment that he was alive. When David paused for a second time in another doorway, farther down, he saw them doing a romping improvised dance with long, swooping, drunken steps, both laughing like maniacs. He went back to the bar.

“Oh, take care,” said Freytag. “There's Bébé, what's he doing here?” and there he was indeed nearly underfoot. He dodged too, they avoided each other and he wandered on.

Ric and Rac, outside the traffic of dancers, were doing a dance of their own. Facing each other, as always teeth to teeth, their toes almost touching, they clasped hands, and leaning backwards from each other at the farthest possible stretch, they whirled round and round like planets fiercely, the tips of their shoes clattering delicately as castanets. The game was to see which one would be exhausted first, relax his hold and get a good rolling fall. Even better, one would let go of the other, at the same instant throwing himself forward, keeping balance while the other got his head bumped. In fact, however, such triumphs were largely theoretical, since they were evenly balanced in body and soul. When one loosened and hurled himself forward, the other took a firmer grasp and hurled himself forward also; the most that could happen was a head-on standing collision, with, on luckier days, maybe bloodied noses for both.

This was an indifferent day. They did not enjoy their game and they were too stubborn to stop until they succeeded in hurting each other in some way, it hardly mattered how. So they turned on their axis, shoulders far out, chins tucked in, eyes staring into eyes as balefully as two infant Gorgons intent on turning each other to stone. Neither gave way, but whirled more furiously, digging their claws in each other's wrists, stamping carefully on each other's toes, working up to that moment when by perfect unspoken consent they would break and fly apart and see which one got the fall, or the worst one.