The Cowards (31 page)

‘Follow me,’ I said to my Jewish women and led them around to the left between the fence and the white factory wall. Around the corner there was a little yard bright with sunshine and full of refugees sprawled out on the grass. We passed a long row of big windows until, almost at the end of that side, we came to an open door in which two women in white coats were standing. I handed the paper to one of the women.

‘Fifteen lunches,’ she said to two other guys wearing armbands.

‘Come on in,’ one of them said.

I told the Jewish women they could go in and one after another and each one looking as solemn and as close to dying right then and there as the other, they filed in past me.

‘Jesus,’ the guy said to me as he counted them, ‘they must have just got out of a concentration camp.’

‘From Schörkenau,’ I said.

‘Aha.’

And just then, drifting in with the rattle and clink of spoons and the foul smell of cafeteria food, there was the sudden wail of a strange kind of music, a twanging, keening sound, something like mandolins, only much better I thought.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Russians,’ the guy at the door said. I listened. I couldn’t see all the way inside, but I listened. It was one of those peculiar Russian melodies, sad but not maudlin, a melody that sounded detached and uplifted, above it all.

‘Can I take a look?’

‘Sure, go on in.’

I slipped into the cafeteria and looked around. It was a big place with benches and tables, full of smoke and bad smells
and food. Tattered POWs were sitting around the tables, stuffing themselves. Aproned women were clearing. A long queue stretched back along the wall from the serving window. I walked between tables towards the music. The room was L-shaped and around the corner another big hall opened up and there I saw a Russian orchestra seated on a platform, playing this song. Actually they weren’t Russians. They were Mongolians or Georgians, men with wide flat faces and walrus moustaches. About eight of them sat there, smiling broadly and incessantly, twanging away on all kinds of odd mandolins and balalaikas. In front of the platform, where a couple of kids stood gaping at the orchestra, benches and tables had been cleared away and a handful of French soldiers were dancing with girls from Lewith’s kitchen. The girls’ cheeks were bright red and they looked like they were dancing in heaven. I squeezed my way up close to the orchestra and stood there. The Mongolians sat straight as statues, but every single one of them was grinning from ear to ear and their small hands flickered skilfully over the strings. You could hear the smooth, drawling, full-blown, mournful melody with a bass underneath and the little, high-pitched, tinkling tones of some sort of mandolin. The Mongolians played without stopping and without notes, grinning the whole time, blissful and mute and motionless in the midst of all that stink and clatter and talk. I watched them and listened to their song and wondered where on earth they’d come from and how they’d ever managed to wind up here and what a tremendous thing music was – how it was better than everything else put together and how, just because of their music, I felt some sort of fraternal feeling with these dirty mujiks, and as I listened to them, I watched their hands, the way they played, wonderfully, their fingers moving over the strings with a marvellous calm and precision. For a few minutes some of them would stop, take a breather, then join in again, right on the beat, whether they were all playing in unison or harmony. Every once in a while a couple of them would play a lower-pitched plunking melody and the others would come up with something like trumpet riffs in jazz. I listened and forgot about everything. Then the
orchestra stopped and a young kid played a solo on a huge bass balalaika or whatever it was. He played a low-pitched tune and the deep plunks of the balalaika sounded so weirdly and fantastically beautiful that it was almost like a miracle, almost as miraculous as when Armstrong sings ‘St James Infirmary’ and Kid Ory answers him on a muted trombone, and then suddenly that whole grinning and speechless bunch started singing and they sang a wild, wailing song in those Oriental voices of theirs and my hair stood on end and I felt they were lifting me straight up to heaven. The Frenchmen whirled the girls around the floor till their skirts flew up and you could see their silly pink panties and when the song was over one of the dancing Frenchmen yelled at me,
‘Vive la France! Vive les Soviets! Vive la paix!’
and he smiled. I smiled back at him and wanted to yell something, too, but suddenly I was embarrassed. I would have liked to holler something back but I couldn’t. The best I could come up with was a grin and I waved my hand and was furious that I didn’t know how to shout like that and it ruined the music for me. I couldn’t shout, ‘Long live Czechoslovakia!’ or anything like that. I just couldn’t. Maybe because Czechoslovakia is such an awfully long word. Still I might have yelled something shorter like ‘Long live Peace!’ But I couldn’t do that either. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wasn’t spontaneous enough. Sure, naturally it was good that the Germans were gone. But it didn’t even start to make me feel ecstatic enough to holler. I’d never been able to holler or shout when parades went by or yell ‘Welcome!’ and stuff like that. It was all very fine but, damn it, why couldn’t they leave me out of all that? Why couldn’t they just leave me alone? I wasn’t dying to yell whatever it was I felt. I felt mad at that Frenchman. The damn fool. Why should I holler just because he had? I was glad the Protectorate was over but I didn’t feel any urge to go crazy just on account of it. And I couldn’t stand the feeling that somebody was standing there just waiting for me to go crazy.

I turned and elbowed my way out of there. The Mongolian melody pursued me, growing louder and stronger. They’d started singing again, a bouncy, yelping, beautiful steppe song,
and a wave of sadness broke over me, a completely mindless and helpless kind of sadness, and I made my way blindly between the long tables. A sadness like when, out of the night air during the Protectorate, I picked up the Golden Gate Quartet or heard Wings Over Jordan singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ or Leadbelly singing ‘Cedar House Blues’ or the Mills Brothers or Bob Crosby’s full four-part Dixieland with the tenor sax and knew it couldn’t last much more than a minute and that maybe I’d never hear it again and that there wasn’t much chance I’d ever have a record of it though I knew that any fool over in America could get one cheap and easy and there I was, stuck in the Protectorate and aching because that music was so beautiful and in a little while it would fade out and I’d never – damn it! – hear it again. And now here I was feeling that same longing and heartache I’d felt so often in the past and it made me sick to think how helpless people really were and how stupidly the world was organized after all, a world filled with marvellous things most of which you never get around to seeing or hearing or knowing and, even if you do, it gets lost in no time leaving you with a hole of despair in your heart so you feel like dying. I pushed my way out of the cafeteria, crossed the lawn between the sleeping people, and went through the gate and out into the street. New clumps of haunted, hungry people were headed towards me, escorted by boys wearing armbands and looking very eager and self-important. The sun was scorching and everything looked dusty. I started up the street towards the station and then to the Manes house.

But suddenly I didn’t feel like going there any more. I just wanted to be alone and to wander around in that sea of people, to walk around Kostelec in the afternoon heat and look at them, at those unshaven old men in rags, at those Greeks or Bulgarians or God knows what, at those dark-eyed and elegantly ragged Italians, at seedy-looking Frenchmen and reserved Dutchmen, at the girls of every shade in kerchiefs and rags, wretched, smiling, and dirty, at the endless waves of little Mongolians with their mute grins and the white SU on their backs – that’s what I really wanted to do. I wanted to stare at it all and be a part of it. But I also knew that I’d twice promised
Benno that I’d be over and I couldn’t just not turn up. Christ, everything in my life always gets fouled up. Always. Every goddamn time. I always have to go somewhere else when I feel like staying where I am and I’ve always got to stay when it would be wonderful to go somewhere else. Something always turned up to make things come out wrong. But that was me. Me all over. Maybe I just wasn’t made for love or for happiness, for anything. I was just made to get through life somehow or other, to live it through and observe it and be a part of it, and to … But I didn’t know why else I’d been made except I knew there must be some other reason, that I had to be made for something more than just that, like for playing the saxophone, maybe. That was the best thing I could come up with but maybe there was something else, too, something even better. There had to be.

I crossed the railroad tracks and went past Dagmar Dreslerova’s house and saw her looking out the window, but I pretended I hadn’t seen her and walked right on past that block of apartment houses with all those hopeless little mica stars in the stucco and turned off towards the Manes house. I rang the bell at the garden gate. ‘Who’s there?’ said the mouthpiece. ‘Smiricky,’ I said, and the door buzzed and I went in and up the path and up the columned stairs to the front door. The path and the ground floor lay in the shadows of the apartment house next door, but the second and third floors basked in sunshine. It was a great place. Benno’s grandfather had built it, the millionaire Manes, about twenty years ago and it had lost none of the charm of the style of that time and it never left me with that feeling of showy luxury I got from the Heisers’s place. Maybe that was because I was so used to it. We’d often played there, either downstairs in the drawing room or up in Benno’s room which was plastered with pictures of Negro musicians and was next to Evka’s room with its big portrait of her painted by Rosta Pitterman. It was a great place. I went up the curving steps and opened the glass door. It was nice and cool in the drawing room. A potted palm stood at the bottom of the steps like at Heiser’s yet this one looked different and there were two wooden bears holding an umbrella rack. I was about
to go upstairs to Benno’s room when the doors into the salon slid open and there stood Mrs Dvorackova, the old housekeeper.

‘Benno’s in the garden,’ she said.

‘Aha. Thank you,’ I said, and went into the salon. There was a piano in the little bay by the window. I went through the French doors on the right, through the dining room and out on to the sunporch which was drenched with light but not stuffy or hot. There sat Mrs Manesova and two of my Englishmen were sitting there in wicker chairs. The Englishmen – their jackets off, their green khaki shirts unbuttoned at the neck – looked very trim and clean as they sat there chatting in English with Mrs Manesova. Two siphons stood on the table and two bottles of pre-war whisky. I said hello and crossed the porch to the garden. There was Evka in a white silk bathing suit, playing ping-pong with one Englishman while another refereed. The ping-pong table was in the shade under a tree and Evka’s white bathing suit flashed brightly against the shadows. Three deck chairs had been set up out in the sun and there lay Benno, Helena, and another Englishman. Benno was in his bathing suit, too, and with his bulging belly and female-looking breasts he looked like a Buddha. A couple of beer bottles stood sweating on a little table. Helena, wearing a two-piece blue linen sunsuit, was sitting in the second deck chair and you could tell she must be pretty chubby, too. There was a little sausage roll of fat between where her halter ended and her shorts began, so I looked around again at Evka’s suntanned back and firm little fanny glistening in that silk bathing suit. The seam ran right down the middle so when Evka moved, each half glistened differently. The Englishman was sitting in his deck chair, smoking a pipe. He, too, had taken off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. I walked over to the deck chairs.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ said Benno.

‘Hello, Danny,’ said Helena.

The Englishman got up. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.

‘Well, how are you? Enjoying yourself here?’

‘Very much.’

‘Good. I just came over to see how you were getting along. I’ve got to be going though.’

‘How come? Where to?’ said Benno.

‘Oh … I’ve got some things to do and … and I’ve got to pick up those snapshots Berty took on Sunday,’ I said with sudden inspiration.

‘Hell, he could’ve taken our pictures, too,’ said Benno. ‘Sit down.’

I stretched out on another deck chair opposite them. A long volley of clicks came from the ping-pong table. I stared at Evka. She turned around to pick up a ball and saw me.

‘Hello, Danny,’ she said gaily.

‘Hello. How do you like your Englishmen?’ I asked.

‘They’re wonderful,’ she grinned and, as she bent for the ball, I gazed down the top of her suit. Then she straightened up and turned and I went on staring at that two-piece fanny of hers.

‘Hey, you dummy!’ I heard Benno say. I realized he was talking to me. I looked over at him.

‘What?’

‘Can’t you take your eyes off her for a minute and listen to what I’m telling you?’

I laughed.

‘You’ve got a great sister, Benno. I envy you.’

Benno said nothing.

‘I mean it. Evka’s terrific.’

‘Yeah, but she’s awful dumb.’

‘Benny!’ said Helena.

‘She’s dumb and you know it.’

‘Well, but there’s no need to talk about it like that.’

‘Anyway, she’s terrific,’ I said. ‘She really is, Benno. I’m serious. Isn’t she beautiful?’ I said, turning to the Englishman. I must have broken some chain of thought because he sat up with a jerk and, quickly and without thinking, said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ I repeated, nodding at Evka. The Englishman beamed.

‘I’ll say she is!’ he said in ardent agreement, then started watching Evka, too.

‘See, you fool?’ I said to Benno. ‘Even foreigners appreciate her.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Benno. ‘I guess you’ve heard that the SS are supposed to get here tomorrow?’