The Acrobats (7 page)

Walking down the concrete steps hand in hand they were both immediately aware of the stink of stale human excrement and damp urine. They held their breath until they had walked out on the river bed.

Toni knelt down, peering into a tiny stream of stagnant water that weaved its way snakily in and out of a sandbank. The pool swarmed with mosquitos and squeaking frogs. It exhilarated her somehow, this tiny stream. She looked up. He seemed distant.

“Tell me something about America,” she said.

It was no longer dark. The sky was grey. Pulpy clouds lifted themselves up by a faint violet glow that clung to their bottoms. He stood rigidly upright, pretending he was of the big sky, no longer of the earth.

I have a right to forget, he thought. I love her. We are young. The world owes the young certain rights.

“The sky isn’t like this in America,” he said. “It is like a prison roof painted blue. Here, it’s different. Unfinished, like a Goya. There’s always something more important than anything in it. But it’s missing.”

“Do you think your mother would like me?”

“She never likes anyone I like. Especially a woman.”

Slowly the violet hue was swallowing up the clouds. The big eastern sky was full of burning orange and pink lights. Climbing, slowly climbing higher. The pallid disc of a white moon was fading away, dissolving into a copper mist dimly.

She had captured a frog. Clutching it in her tiny fists she pushed it under his nose. Suddenly the frog, its quick legs outspread, leaped out of her hand and bounded across the air into the stream, making a plop as it hit the water.

She turned to him. “Oh, I’m so happy, darling. How beautiful to be in the country!” Quickly she slapped him on the tail of his jacket and ran off. “Catch me, André. Come on!”

Sadly he watched her run off, over the muddy bed and across the splotches of dry grass. Suddenly he was afraid.

He noticed that a tall man was standing on the bridge and watching them. It was the same man who had been following him for the last week or so. When André looked up the man turned away.

He hurried off after her. “Toni! Toni!”

A hundred yards off she had fallen down giggling, rolling over on a patch of grass. He tumbled down beside her and grasped her firmly in his arms. “Toni, I love you.”

He had never said it before. Not even to Ida. Now he felt ashamed and silly. It was such a cliché! Toni, I love you.

She kissed him passionately, crushing herself against him.

And she felt fear because she loved him with a hopeless beautiful love, knowing, always knowing, that he could not love, that something ugly and bitter within him would always stifle any love he felt for her.

“What is it?” he asked.

“You are going to die.”

“What? What, my darling?”

She kissed him again.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, but …”

She embraced him tightly, urgently, pulling his head down to her lips. “Nothing, my darling. Nothing.”

Men frequently think that the evils in the world are more numerous than the good things; many sayings and songs of nations dwell on this idea. They say that a good thing is found only exceptionally, whilst evil things are numerous and lasting. Not only common people make this mistake, but many who believe they are wise. Al-Razi wrote a well-known book
On Metaphysics
(or Theology). Among other mad and foolish things, it contains also the idea, discovered by him, that there exists more evil than good. For if the happiness of man and his pleasure in the times of prosperity be compared with the mishaps that befall him – such as grief, acute pain, defects, paralysis of the limbs, fears, anxieties, and troubles – it would seem as if the existence of man is a punishment and a great evil for him.

MOSES MAIMONIDES                       

M
ADAME! CONSIDER
for a moment the world at large. Coming up sun filling in the empty sky. A just so-so morning (really). Greenwich reports the stars of last night succumbed in an ordinary way. Ditto the moon. It will be, by all reports, an ordinary day. As per usual people sleep. (Some snoring, some not.) In Pittsburgh, U.S.A., Mr. Peter Kalowski, who in twenty-seven years of service with Ajax Dairies, Inc., has never been late for work, creeps out of bed for his breakfast at three a.m. In the kitchen he notices that Mrs. Kalowski has forgotten to prepare his sandwiches. He takes the carving knife down from the wall. He re-enters the bedroom and stabs fat Mrs. Kalowski to death. (Tomorrow in court he will plead temporary sanity and get off with 199 years to life.) In Dwing, Herts, the outraged (Minister) George Barrin, writes (to be mailed to
The Daily Express
at nine a.m.):

Regardless of the revolution and the absence of American recognition Mr. Ching-Tsu lies on the floor of his straw hut in Ping-Ling rattling with death in a scientifically approved manner. Mrs. Ching-Tsu, a rice-bowl Christian, kneels on the straw, praying to an unlistening crucifix of a slant-eyed Christ hanging from the wall. (Nearby, Reilly, the missionary, sleeps. A chink, he thinks, is something to convert, like the red injuns was.) In New York, Local 231 of the Toy Makers Union is working overtime to meet the big demand for atomic hats ($3.95 per doz/whsl) for the over-privileged kiddies of American damnocracy. (You, Bershenko of Kiev, that sore in the back of your throat wasn’t concocted on Wall St. It’s cancer, comrade.)

It is now 11:30 a.m., Sunday, April 18, 1951.

Valencia, Spain.

On the corner of the Calle San Fernando a man is playing a guitar and singing. His fingers are spilling, splashing, over the strings.

But Roger Kraus – favouring his left leg which was broken in two places in the wrestling matches in Berlin and carrying two ounces of lead slug that hit him with an unforgettable impact at Cuatro Caminos in November, 1937 – hears (staring ahead of him and into nothing), and does not hear, hears and remembers other songs. Remembers:

remembers,

and remembers Alfred’s song,

For he, Roger Kraus, had been present with 5,599 others in the Zirkus Krone, Munich, on that historic and grey and rainfilled night of February 8, 1921, when after the ineffectual Drexler had spoken, the angry man in the brown trenchcoat gesticulating wildly, his voice hysterical, his grammar bad, had told 5,600 souls the truth about the “International Jewish Stock Exchange Parties” and about “Future or Ruin.” So Roger Kraus – failure as a student, dreamer of yearning dreams and wanting badly to wanton, born October 8, 1899, into a family of minor officials, veteran, inarticulate, in love with his sister who despised him for his stupidity and was having an affair with a communist, discharged from three jobs, the last (in a Jew bank) because he had startled Fräulein Freida, poor, hungry, ridiculed all through gymnasium by rimless-glasses Jew intellectuals, Aryan, confused, sometimes following girls
home at night – found (February 3, 1921, Munich) that he too had a place and a time and a card to show that he was a member.

Roger Kraus served the N.S.D.A.P. well. As an athlete, and as a soldier.

In 1935 he was sent to Spain. Here he was an intimate of
Hoheitsträger
Hans Hellermann and frequently appeared on Fichte League platforms. Officially employed by Hellermann & Phillippi as a member of the Harbour Police, he worked as an informer and a hunter of men, taking orders from Carl Cords and occasionally from Zuchristian. In Madrid, during July, 1936, he distributed Mausers or early potatoes to Lafarga and Torres. Later in the year he joined Queipo de Llano’s army. In 1938 he was decorated for exceptional service by Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

Kraus, under sentence of death in Paris, returned to Spain in 1945.

He disliked Spain. The men were effeminate, Semitic, and they made poor soldiers. Even when they killed it was always from a passion, never with a sense of order. But these were bad times and he must be satisfied with anything.

He examined his reflection in the hallway mirror. The clothes are bad, he thought. They hang loosely from my body. She should see me in my uniform. My boots black and polished, my legs masculine, slender, my tunic tight against my chest. Still, I have the figure of a young man. My muscles are hard.

Not like Chaim – soft: plump: Jew. Godless.

And Chaim reminded him of last night. Theresa had quarrelled with him again, and Toni had avoided him at the Mocambo. So he had gone on to Noël’s and there, young Chicu, drunken again, had greeted him with a mocking
“Sieg Heil
, Colonel.” There had been others in the bar but Kraus knew them and that they were cowards. He had grabbed Chicu and swung him around so that his arm was pinned in back of him. Then, gradually increasing pressure on his arm,
Roger had ordered him to lay his other hand flat on the bar. He had drained his beer mug while Chicu crouched, whimpering, his hand quivering on the bar. Then, quickly, swiftly, he had smashed his beer mug down on Chicu’s hand. He had heard the bones crack, and he had felt Chicu go limp and fall to the floor.

Godless, he thought. Impudent, and cowards.

But street brawls.…

Yes, the last months had been bad. He, Roger Kraus, was a soldier. But there were no calls. He was without an army or a commander or a reason. There had to be a reason, a prey, an enemy. Not this nothing, this waiting, this freedom.

She will be surprised to see me, he thought.

And in his room André puffed solemnly at a cigarette. The light was not strong enough for painting but it was sufficient just now to stare down at the street with nothing to do but think or wonder.

So many souls arising and greeting the new dawn dull-mindedly. Chaim, what is old Chaim thinking? (You are wonderfully wrong, old Chaim –
We cannot love all men because many of them are evil and not worth the cheapest of our sentiments which is pity.)
In Montreal, mother is awakening and father is yawning (eyes half-shut because he doesn’t want to see mother’s wrinkled body), and with the ineffable confidence of the untried he stretches and decides he will wear his trousers with the grey stripe.… Pepe is stirring, perhaps María is ill, poor Derek is probably staring into a mirror.

But me, what do I believe in? Not even in the validity of my own anger. (We, doomingly haunting a back-alley of prehistory, suffer the asking warlords and gods unworthy of men.)
But is it necessary to believe in something?

Because I do not know enough or cannot guess enough or feel enough I believe in being good and understanding and brother to other men and painting because it is the only thing
I can do half-well and perhaps finally it will explain to me what I am looking for.

As a child, and later as an adolescent, André enjoyed wandering on the mountain which rose like a camel’s hump in the heart of Montreal.

He had been brought up in Westmount where the Canadian rich lived, and every morning at eight his father got up and had breakfast and had Morton bring around the car and drove down to St. James Street where the Canadian rich worked.

André had attended a private school, and in the morning old pinhead Cox forced all the students to take cold showers. He studied Latin and in sixth grade got caught with a copy of
Sunbathing
in his desk and he made left-wing on the school hockey team. At night his mother read him the poems of Bliss Carman and his father dozed or approved of the editorials in the
Gazette
or recited a poem by Rudyard Kipling. His mother had many lovers and named him André because his father wanted to call him George after the King. André adored one of his mother’s lovers, Jean-Paul, who did not last too long. Jean-Paul stole things, he called André’s father
le roi des yahoos
to his face and his mother
la belle Lucretia
which André did not understand until later on, he was perpetually drunk and borrowing money and he was killed when a training ’plane he was in crashed during the first months of the war.

Yes, one fine day you got up and it was war. (It was not war when Guernica happened and the woman said
vale más morir de pies que vivir de rodillas
. No, not yet. But now Mr. Chamberlain said I am speaking to you from number 10 Downing Street and Mr. Hitler said up Germans and the
Montreal Gazette
said Save Your Scrap Iron.) So Mr. Bennett got up in the Mount Stephen Club and said gentlemen, this is war: he came home and he told André how it makes a man out of you: Mrs. Bennett knitted socks for the Red
Army: and every week André made a bundle of the
Gazettes
and drove down to salvage campaign headquarters with Morton.

But what did it mean?

As a boy living in it the war had meant The Walls Have Ears, hurrah for Churchill, Send us More Japs, V for Victory, up the Yids, Open up a Second Front, send your laundry to the chink, Buy Bonds, bravo the red heroes, Hitler has only got one ball and Goering has none at all, United Nations with Flags Unfurled, hip-hip the frog maquis, and so on. But later, just one year ago, he had visited a beach in Normandy. There were craters in the gravel; and he had found a black boot with a bullet hole in it. Pillboxes, at least four feet thick and crazycoloured, lay smashed on the surf like the toys of giant children. The town itself, Ste. Famille, was abandoned and a ruin. So all through the night he sat up on the beach and tried hard and with no success to see the men charging out of the sea and falling with bullets in their bellies, and feel the Germans warm in their pillboxes firing away and muttering ach, swine – but en didn’t do that kind of stuff or he was crazy or freezing and udy came out at dawn and found him with the boot in his hand and trembling and he slept like a baby in the car all the way back to Paris and he was drunk for two days and the gang said he was being dramatic.…