A Choice of Enemies (12 page)

For years he had dreamt that one day he would be introduced into an intelligent society of artists and professional people. In this fantasy he saw himself as a man with a faithful wife and children, giving small dinner parties and being invited to others. There were no uniforms. All crimes, all hungers, and penniless days were done. People like Norman enjoyed his company. They did not think of him as a German. He was well-liked. Honourable. Another happy conformist.

And here, at last, he was going to be introduced into just such a society. Ernst calmed himself with two drinks before they left for the party.

“Don’t worry,” Sally said, “they’ll adore you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ernst said stiffly. “I’m not interested in their opinions.”

But seated in the taxi with Norman and a smiling Karp, too anxious to take part in the small talk, Ernst, unaware that he was interrupting a conversation, suddenly blurted out, “I’m a very good carpenter, Norman. If you like I’ll build you a bookcase. I will do that for you as a gift.”

Norman fidgeted with his glasses; he shifted uneasily in his seat.

Sally pressed Ernst’s hand to caution him, but he couldn’t stop talking. He turned to Karp. “I’m a good electrician, too. From now on I will do all your electrical work free of charge.”

It was at times like these that Sally felt small and uninjured beside him. She tried not to weep.

“Here we are,” Norman said.

Ernst insisted on paying the taxi fare. He would have it no other way.

The party was in honour of Colin Horton. Horton, a progressive journalist, was the most recent arrival in London. He was a heavy man, in his early forties, with a tight bony head, shiny black hair and flat black tack-head eyes. Norman suspected that his humility, like a panellist’s groping after the right word, was a professional’s mannerism. But the fact was that Horton was a highly skilled journalist and, had his politics been other than what they were, he could have been entrenched in an executive position with one of the big news magazines today.

“I had the most interesting experience in a taxi this morning,” he said. “The driver, who recognized me from my newspaper pictures, refused to allow me to pay my fare. He said anybody who wasn’t wanted in America could ride free in his taxi any day. After all the abuse that my wife and I” – he acknowledged his wife with a stab of his pipe – “have suffered in America I was genuinely touched. I’m telling you this because I thought it would please you to know that
among the working-class our stand against creeping fascism has not gone unnoticed.…”

Norman turned away; he headed for the bar.

“I’m anxious to visit the People’s Democracies as soon as possible,” Horton said. “It would certainly be pleasant to be in a country where peace isn’t a dirty word.”

“Ah,” Karp said, “I must introduce you to Ernst later. He’s from East Germany. One would think you two would have a lot to talk about.”

Sonny took Norman aside. “
O.K.
,” he said, “now tell me why you brought that little goon into my house.”

Bella joined them with her gentle smile. “Spain seems to have agreed with you, Norman. You look wonderful!”

“Hey,” Sonny said, “did you know that he was bringing that goon here?”

“I forced him on Bella,” Norman said. “I wanted you to meet him. I thought maybe you could help him get some work.”

Winkleman’s face flamed. “Who do you think I am? Jesus Christ.”

“Look, Sonny, you don’t even know the boy. He –”

“Who wants to know him? Are you seriously asking me, a Jew, to be tolerant of a little Nazi punk?”

“He’s not a Nazi.”

“You
are
asking rather a lot,” Bella said.

“Look here,” Sonny said, “Bella loves you. You want money, you want a lay, you want I should get you the best head-shrinker in London, just ask me. But if you want me to play a son-of-a-bitch Christian, book a run for your own place, kid. This here house is one hundred per cent un-American Jew-land.”

“Take it easy,” Norman said.

“Ask me a favour,” Sonny insisted. “Test me.”

“He’s teasing,” Bella said.

“Come.” Sonny took Norman into his office and gave him a cheque for two hundred pounds.

“Why did you bring me in here?” Norman asked. “I could have waited for the money.”

“Joey was listening. You told me you didn’t want Charlie to know that you were working on the script.”

“Do you think she heard anything?”

“No.”

“Joey is very penetrating.”

“The only thing penetrating about that girl is the looks she gives her husband. Listen, what’s the score on Charlie?”

“What do you mean?”

“Drazin tells me he isn’t even listed in
Red Channels.”

“Charlie’s
O.K.
I’ve known him for years.”

“All I want to know is why a guy who could earn a living in a civilized country would ever come here.”

“He was blacklisted, that’s why. He just isn’t important enough to have been listed in
Red Channels.”

Back in the living room Sonny introduced Norman to Joyce Drazin. Joyce was having lunch with her agent tomorrow.

“Tomorrow,” Bob Landis said, “I’m going to get myself a new analyst. This one never laughs at my jokes.”

“I’m having lunch with an important backer tomorrow,” Budd Graves said. “If things work out you and I may have something to talk about.”

“You’d better take it easy on those lunches,” Charlie said.

Budd Graves looked like a melon ready to burst.

“Charlie’s right,” Landis said. “A few more lunches and all of Winkleman’s men will not be able to put Budd Graves together again.”

“If things work out tomorrow,” Budd Graves began again, “I –”

“Charlie,” Landis interrupted, pointing at Sally and Ernst, “what gives? I thought she was saving that creamy white body for Norman.”

“So did Norman.”

“There’s something not kosher about Norman,” Budd Graves said.

“He sells plenty of scripts,” Charlie said, “doesn’t he?”

“Ah, we’re all hacks,” Landis said. “Anybody can knock out the kind of crap we write and sell it. But Norman seems to be a kind of Jonah.”

Sure, sure, Charlie thought. Anyone can sell hack work. Thank you very much. But the reason why I can’t sell so easily is because I’m not a hack and maybe another factor is my name never used to be Lipschitz.

“Tell me something about Sally’s boy friend,” Landis asked.

“He’s a German,” Charlie said. “From East Berlin. ‘He chose freedom’.”

“Who brought him here?” Graves asked angrily, “Norman?”

Ernst was everywhere. You took out a cigarette casually and a match held by Ernst flared under your nose. You had hardly finished your drink and Ernst was there again to seize your glass and get you another. You were interrupted once in the middle of an argument or flirtation when Ernst bobbed up yet again, cutting you off with a plate of unwanted hors d’oeuvres.

The more hostile his reception, the harder Ernst tried to please, and the more obnoxious he appeared to others. Sally tried as gracefully as she could to get him to stop running the party like a race, but there was no stopping him. She overheard somebody say, “Isn’t his behaviour typically German,” and sat down forlorn in a chair, anticipating the collision to come.

There were other curiosities at Winkleman’s tonight besides Horton. There was a captive Englishman and his wife. Sir James Digby was a film director of sorts, his wife was a starlet. The effect of their arrival at the party was much as if two sharecroppers had crashed a gathering of Southern planters.

Norman overheard Winkleman tell Plotnick. “Take a look at the boobs on her,” and then he whispered something in Plotnick’s ear.

“She doesn’t,” Plotnick said with appetite. “I don’t believe it.”

Valerie Digby, her tight warm breasts half unpeeled, half trapped in the black lace of her gown, tossed her smile like a hat into the potbellied ring around her and fetched Bob Landis, tall, tweedy, a regular writing chap, to her. Bob drove her like a moth into the corner of the room, cutting off the others with his back. Norman watched enviously from afar.

Norman had first met Bob in New York in 1939. The evening Norman had visited his flat, Bob and his girl, a bony blackhaired set designer, had quarrelled fiercely. Bob had been offered a summer job as a gag writer in the Catskills. His girl threatened to leave if he took it. But Bob was badly in debt, he had a mother to support, and as he had explained over and over again two months off the novel would do the book a world of good. As the quarrel flamed brighter more and more people had slipped into the cold-water flat until, at its burning best, a full-blown party was in progress and the quarrel, dampened by the wisecracks of outsiders, had been put out.

Of the young people there that evening three had since become famous. The rest of them, like Bob, had been moderately successful. But that spring evening in 1939, what with two survivors of the defence of Madrid in their company, what with everyone young, talented, handsome or pretty, and with fame two or at the very most three years ahead, they had all been suffused with a warm glow. The girls, the girls, Norman remembered, had been so splendid, and the men so tall with promise. Somebody, at last somebody, had gone to the window and cried, “Look. Oh my God, look.” Dawn had come even to the East Side.

The next time he had come across Bob Landis it had been in the shape of a cheque for five thousand dollars signed by him and payable to the American Labor Party. From the Catskills Bob had gone to
Hollywood. The Rinky-Dinks, as Charlie called them, had been dispersed. For the third member of the group to make it – that night a dadaist and today a sophisticated Broadway playwright – had made the biggest splash of all by naming everyone who had, and a few who hadn’t, passed through the flat that night at a television session of the committee fifteen years later.

“He’s a former Hitler Youth leader,” Zelda Landis said.

“If you ask me,” Charna Graves said, “sometimes Norman Price goes just a little bit too far.”

“The trouble with Norman,” Joey said, “is that he expects people to accept one another on trust. That’s why …” That’s why I love him, she thought.

“He shouldn’t have brought that boy here,” Zelda said.

“Germans,” Molly Plotnick said, “give me the shivers.”

“They’re talking about us,” Ernst said.

“Take it easy, darling. You can hardly expect them to like you at first.”

But she wished they hadn’t come. Norman must have been crazy to bring Ernst here.

“Parlour-Bolshies,” Ernst said. “That one with the pipe. I know the type so well.”

Norman loomed up drunkenly before them. “Enjoying yourselves?” he asked guiltily.

“Loads,” Sally said.

Karp hovered a little way off like a storm impending, waiting for Norman to go.

“I’m sorry,” Norman said, “I should have realized.…”

“Yes,” Sally said, “you should have.”

“I wish they would speak to me,” Ernst said thickly. “I wish they would give me a chance.”

“You’re both drunk,” Sally said. “It’s disgraceful.”

Ernst rose, swaying a little. His cheeks reddened. “I would like to …”

Sally was astonished. She had never seen Ernst genuinely humble before. She felt as though he were exhibiting all his separate selves to her one by one like scraps of evidence.

“… would like to be your friend,” he said.

“Sure.” Norman smiled as gracefully as he could. “Of course.”

Then, as he went off to replenish his drink, Karp confronted Ernst and Sally with a swing of his cane. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said to Ernst. “Come.”

Childish. Norman realized that it was childish. But once in the toilet he squeezed out the toothpaste tube and wrote it on the mirror.

Horton banged his pipe on the mantelpiece, blew into it fiercely, and then reached for his drink. “Whatever happens,” he said, “we mustn’t lose our faith in the American working-class.”

Karp broke through the circle around him. “Ah, Mr. Horton,” he said, “here is the boy I told you about.”

Sally found Norman talking to Sid Drazin in the hall. “Quick,” she said, “I think Karp is going to get Ernst into trouble.”

“One would think,” Karp said, “that you and Ernst would have much to talk about. Ernst used to be an official in the
FDJ.”

“Are you here on a visit?” Horton asked.

“No,” Sally said, “he fled. He found conditions there intolerable.”

Norman squeezed Sally’s arm.

“Tell me,” Horton said, “were you a student?”

“No.”

“Because if you were a student, and a worker’s son, you would be able to get a scholarship in the East, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah. But I would have to study what they wanted me to study.”

“Something useful, is that what you mean?”

A rash of smiles broke out all around.

“He used to be in the Hitler Youth,” Zelda Landis said. “What would you expect?”

“Zelda,” Bob Landis said.

“Everyone was in the Hitler Youth,” Ernst said.

“You mean everyone who wasn’t gassed,” Horton said.

“Norman,” Sally said. “Please Norman.”

“Those who joined the Nazis to get privileges are now members of the
SED
for the same reason,” Ernst said. “You took off your Hitler Youth badge and put on an
FDJ
one.”

“That sounds like the anti-communist line to me.”

“I am not a Nazi.”

“But you were a member of the Hitler Youth. Come, come, boy.”

“But –”

“You agree that if you were a worker’s son you could get a scholarship in the East. But you’re against
useful
studies. I take it, then, that you believe in the utmost freedom for the individual.”

“Well, I.…”

“Hitler held the freedom of the individual to be sacred.”

More smiles.

“People like him ought to be shot,” Charna Graves said.

“Come on now, Ernst, don’t play games with me. You’d like to see East Germany ‘liberated,’ wouldn’t you?”

“I’d like to see them free, but –”

“Never mind. You’ve explained yourself.”

“There are still big parades,” Ernst yelled. “Still uniforms. We marched for Hitler once and now we march for –”