The Trespassers (23 page)

She pointed to the far corner of the washroom. Vee shook her head and started toward it. Bronya followed her, again carrying the pail and cloths. In the corner, Vee turned toward her, her eyes questioning.

“You would not mind such things?” Bronya asked, and swung open the door to the last toilet in the long row. “You—in there—I stand here?”

“Of course I don’t mind.”

Just inside the door, Vee stood, the door slightly ajar, and Bronya so close they could talk in whispers if need be.

“Bronya, I did not answer your letter,” she began, again offering each word surrounded by a moment of empty time. “I have been so very busy with some things. But do not think I was not very glad you wrote me.”

“I wanted thank you to tell you so much.
Meine Mutter wird—
my mother will receive the letter now—no—she has now received, last week, your letter.
Gott sei Dank—
she will be so—so—” She searched for the word she needed, the word big enough, profound enough. When it came, it was a whisper, and there was awe in it. “Happy.” She said it, and shook her head wonderingly.

“Yes, oh, I hope so.”

Bronya looked at Vee’s face directly, inquiringly. The five words had come out huskily, the voice dipping down for them. For a moment there was silence between them; then Bronya touched Vee’s sleeve.

“You are helping, very much helping. You do not guess.”

“You have a baby? Mrs. Willis told me you have a little baby.”

“Yes, one year now. She is Bronya too.”

“Where do you leave her—is she all right?”

“All right. Woman near, I take her there every morning, feed her and take her there. Then after work—” She smiled and Vee’s hands clenched. Reunion—daily reunion.

“Can’t you—is there no other job for you? You were a teacher—”

The other nodded once abruptly, and then wordlessly kept on nodding.

“Sulphuric acid, young ladies,” she then said slowly, “results when we combine sulphur dioxide with water—”

She broke off, her eyes sought Vee’s, met them, turned aside.

“Yes, I was a teacher of chemistry. But you know—”

“But here, can’t you get into some school—this is so—” Vee’s hand started a gesture, halted midway in it, and fell to her side.

“For teaching, I need citizen papers. I have applied. It takes five years. In the meantime, I must work anything. And I study English every night. Soon, it gets easier.”

“Oh, God, the rules. We make it so hard with our rules. It’s terrible.”

“No, no. Never terrible. Germany terrible, yes, now Austria. Europe all soon, terrible. Never America. It is the best, you do not imagine how the heart dreams for America in Europe now. Everywhere.” Her words were heated, her eyes concentrated on Vee’s, as if they would lead these American eyes to see America.

“You—are you—all alone?”

“Oh, yes. They—my husband had to be killed.”

“Oh. I—Mrs. Willis didn’t tell me.”

“He a chemist too, a great fine research chemist. He worked in a laboratory on warfare chemicals—explosives. He discovered for them many fine things. So he had military secrets. You follow?”

“Yes.”

“He was also Jew, so after 1935 he wished to leave. They need his work so they have made it easy there for a little time. But last year—”

She shook her head, closed her eyelids down hard, so that the lashes lay tight on the bluish crescents over her cheekbones.

“It was too terrible soon to bear. The fear—always the fear. I was going to have baby. We wished to come. Except my mother. She said it is foolish so far to come. She would not. She—Karlsbad, by a friend. Czechoslovakia’s safe forever, she said. Free republic country too, like America, never Nazi.”

The words came faster now, more easily. Vee watched the lips, guessing at some of the distorted pronunciation, no longer aware of the bars imprisoning the emotions. She said, “Yes,” or “I know,” from time to time, to tell Bronya she knew how it must have been.

“So then, finally, they decide. The Nazis. He, my husband, can never leave Germany because military secrets in head. But also he not permitted in laboratory, because Aryan firm. Problem, no?”

Her lips hardened against each other. A muscle began to work under the tight skin over each jawbone. The voice coming to Vee was tight now, too, coarsened.

“To such problems, the Nazi answer is only one. They arrest, they throw in Dachau. Once they beat his face with a club. He counted, so not to scream. Forty-three times smash. A friend told me here later. He died, April.”

Vee suddenly bent her head, covered her face with her right hand.

“Damn them, damn them, God damn them,” she said into her fingers.

Bronya slipped away, attended to some woman’s requests, quickly ran her cloth over two washbasins, and returned.

“Always am I afraid for my mother,” Bronya went on. “She is stubborn. She keeps talking. I see so clear, Czechoslovakia goes next. America I love so.”

Vee’s heart seemed to dilate.

“Even here? Even from this job, Bronya?”

“Oh, yes, yes, it must be so for a beginning time. This is anyway free from fear each night. Someday—”

“Listen. Come to my house soon. I could try, maybe, I could at least try to find you some better job.”

“You could try?”

“Yes, oh, of course. I think your mother will be all right, she will come soon. But you—I’ll try to help you find some other work.”

“That I would wish so much.”

“Housework, would you do that, Bronya, for a while? Maybe you could keep your baby with you.”

“Ah—”

Vee took out a small pencil, searched her purse for something to write on, and was irritated that she had not even a matchbook to tear in half. Bronya watched her, then she smiled and reached inside to the wall beside Vee. She tore off two sheets of toilet paper, folded them in half, and handed them over.

“For plots against Nazi work, this,” she said and grinned, her face alive, warm, like a girl’s for a moment.

“Oh, Bronya, you’re swell.”

“
Bitte
?”

“Look, here is my telephone number. Please call me, your day off maybe. We will find something.”

“Thank, Mrs. Stamford. Thank. Yes, I phone.”

Vee offered her hand on it. Bronya quickly rubbed her own hand down her right hip, then took Vee’s. She shook it downward once, and dropped it. The crisp, brief handshake of Germany.

Jasper sat in the waiting room of Dr. Gontlen’s office. He put down his afternoon paper, looked about him, then reached for
The New Yorker.
He read the caption under each picture, and then tossed the magazine back on the table. In a moment he reached for another cigarette.

Near him an ash tray held half a dozen of his long butts, all neatly aligned, as though something depended on the exactitude of their side-by-sideness. While he smoked, one hand went out to them, his thumb and third finger making a pair of calipers that precisely spanned them from their tops to their bottoms. Then he carefully ground out the cigarette he had just lit, taking care not to squash the burning end as he did so, but rather to press it motionlessly into the ash tray until the life had gone out of it. He laid the long butt down on the tray, shoved it slowly alongside the others in their neat array, and then once again the checking thumb and third finger made their inspection.

He leaned back to examine the other men waiting with him. There were three, they had come in during the forty minutes since his arrival. From their faces he tried to guess something of why they were there, but there were no clues. None of them looked ill, none looked frightened. Yet Dr. Gontlen was a doctor for all sorts of male ailments and diseases; surely they must be feeling some kind of trepidation at this damnable waiting? Their faces were blank, taunting him to discover what he could of the emotions and the fears behind the thin, sufficient screen of their immobility.

He lit another cigarette. Just then a door opened, a patient came out, smiling, saying heartily over his shoulder, “Well, thanks, Doctor, I sure will,” and grinning like a prize fighter who’s just won on a decision. Jasper felt a quick envy for this booming-voiced good humor. He started to his feet, for it was now his turn. But the door only closed again, and he sank back in chagrin.

When he was called, he hoped that his voice and manner would not betray him. Inside the office, he faced a short, chunky man in business clothes.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Crown,” Dr. Gontlen said matter-of-factly. “Sorry you had to wait.”

“Doesn’t one always have to in doctors’ offices?” He meant it as a pleasantry, but he heard that there was an edge to the words, and added quickly, “I’m not annoyed, I know it sounded that way.”

Dr. Gontlen finished writing a line, picked up a curving desk blotter, used it precisely, and then waved the sheet of paper about for a moment, as though he were double-checking an important experiment. He examined the ink, found it dry, slid the paper into a folder, and placed the folder upon a slim stack of similar folders. He then picked up his engagement pad, glanced at it quickly. Jasper could see some strange notations there; they appeared to be in code.

Only then did he look at Jasper’s face. He smiled.

‘You sound nervous,” he said gently. “Sterility patients always are nervous. You said that it’s ten years since you—”

“Yes. I couldn’t explain over the telephone that the diagnosis was perfectly sure at that time, even checked over by one of Dr. McLann’s colleagues. I’m sure this visit is pretty useless, but I thought—”

“Perhaps. Perhaps so. Still, useless is a very positive word. Medicine isn’t half so positive.”

Quite unexpectedly, Jasper knew he liked the chunk of a man before him. That surprised him. He smiled and sat back against the chair.

“Let’s get some history, first,” said Dr. Gontlen. An extraordinary process began at once, for Gontlen asked questions that seemed completely ungermane to the subject. In addition to the usual listing of childhood and adult illnesses and operations, and of family longevity and family diseases, Dr. Gontlen sprang questions Jasper had never been asked in any other medical examination.

“How old were you when your voice changed, do you know?” “How old were you when your body hair appeared?” “When did you begin to shave regularly?” “Have you ever had a basal metabolism test?” “Feel washed up in the late afternoon?” “Were you ever seriously injured in football or any other game?”

Jasper answered as accurately as he could. McLann had done nothing like this. He found himself almost impersonally interested, far less nervous than he had been. For the moment even the purpose of his visit was forgotten. He merely listened, tried to remember and answer accurately. Maybe this made sense after all.

There was silence, while Dr. Gontlen’s pen wrote line after line of neat notation. When he came to the end, he picked up the hard arc of blotter, dried the sheet, waved it, examined it, put it in a new folder, and then leaned back. He stared thoughtfully at the ceiling and stroked his shaven chin as though there were a goatee for his fingers.

“The average normal specimen of semen should contain a hundred to a hundred and twenty million active spermatozoa per cubic centimeter,” he said. “They should, under the microscope, present a certain motility which is hard to describe in lay terms, but which is unmistakable to the specialist or trained technician. If there are
no
active spermatozoa, there may be a real sterility.”

“But if there are?”

“There may be none in the specimen, and
still
not prove a true sterility,” the doctor’s even voice ignored the question and went on. “Even then, one would have no human right to decide, until every possibility of mechanical block in the sperm ducts was investigated. Such investigation takes time.”

“I don’t care. Now that I’ve started this again, I—”

“But if the microscope should show spermatozoa, but too few, or of too low a motility, that is, too little energy and speed of motion, you understand…”

“Yes, I do. Does it take long to find out? I—”

“No. The first examination can be undertaken today, if you wish. Or tomorrow if—”

“I thought you had to wait several days for tests—”

“Not for this preliminary examination. But if you would rather come back when you are less disturbed—”

“No, I’d rather know as soon as possible.” He stood up, as the doctor rose. “Doctor, will you—I know you will be absolutely direct with me? I don’t want you to—”

Gontlen shook his head and smiled, almost tenderly.

“You are all the same,” he said. “An implication that is an insult to any honest scientist, yet not one of you can help yourselves. No—no—don’t apologize, don’t explain. I know how anxious you are. And I promise to tell you at once, and directly, and without lies. Now are you ashamed to ask a doctor for such a promise?”

He patted Jasper on the shoulder, reaching up a little as he did so. Suddenly Jasper felt himself nearer to crying than he had for all the twenty tight, fighting years since he was a boy in prep school. He wheeled around, grasped the little man’s hand.

“I guess you
do
know,” he said. “What—where—?”

“My young assistant, Dr. Ladenheim, is in that office. He will explain everything. Then you will wait, perhaps another half-hour.”

He dismissed Jasper with a nod.

A half-hour later, Jasper was again lining up the stubs in the ash tray. Now the waiting room was empty, except for himself. The silence, the waiting, the fear, and the hope stung and bit at each separate nerve of his body. When he could stand it no longer, he rose and paced the floor. When he became aware of his pacing, he flung himself down in the chair again, stared at each of the three closed doors leading into the inner offices, and despised their blank and sullen shutness.

He should never have come; in spite of Gontlen’s unexpected decency and understanding, he found this whole thing a humiliation, a hate in his very soul. The young doctor’s voice so Goddamned matter-of-fact, so unaware of the thing he was saying. Jasper could be impersonal and scientific enough in the abstract, but now he felt only a horror of embarrassment. “This whole wretched experience—Jesus, it’s foul, it’s repulsive.” Anger filled him, a hatred of everything that had so far happened. Anger at the outrage committed against his own dignity, against his own manhood, a maddened futility of anger like the fury that filled you when you pounded wildly against a barred gate, when you pulled a gun’s trigger and found it jammed.