A Choice of Enemies (29 page)

“Yes.
The Traffic of the Fire
will be out on November the
nineteenth
. It costs a dollar ninety-eight a copy.”

In reply to Mr. Hale’s next question Miss Morgan said that she counted Dylan Thomas, Mallarmé and Fraser’s
The Golden Bough
as her primary influences.

“And to my right,” Mr. Hale said, “we have Charles Lawson, television playwright and film writer. I understand, Mr. Lawson, that your latest film,
All About Mary
, will have its première at the Shea’s tomorrow night. Is that right?”

“It must be. Otherwise how could I afford this suit?”

In reply to Mr. Hale’s next question Mr. Lawson said that his most significant influences were his analyst, his wife, and money, in that order.

Thomas Hale’s glad face filled the screen again. “Tonight’s controversial question,” he said, “is do you think Canadian artists must leave the country in order to develop?” Hale paused; he smiled. “We ought to be in for some truly partisan discussion tonight as Miss Morgan is sailing for England next week. I believe she hopes to settle
there. While Charles Lawson, an expatriate for years, has recently returned to settle
here.”

“Would you like me to try another channel?” Trudy asked.

“No,” Ernst said. “I want to see this.”

“Charles Lawson is a good man,” Hyman Gordon said.

“I saw one of his plays last week,” Trudy said. “What corn!”

“Charles Lawson,” Hyman Gordon said reverently, “could have been a big man in Hollywood, but he stood up for freedom of speech. That counts for something.”

“Is Lawson a commie?” Trudy asked.

“Quiet,” Ernst said.

“To stand for freedom these days,” Hyman Gordon said, “that counts for something.”

“Quiet,” Trudy said. “Joseph is trying to listen.”

“… that Canada is starved for culture,” Miss Morgan concluded.

“I’m not trying to say that Toronto rivals London as a theatrical or literary city yet,” Mr. Lawson said. “But – and this is a big but, mind you – Canadian artists cease to have value to their own country once they become expatriates. I’ve lived in London. I’ve seen too many highly promising talents end up at the bottom of a bottle of Johnny Walker.”

“Are you suggesting that I’m liable to become a dipsomaniac once I’ve moved to London?”

“Mr. Lawson, I’m sure, was only speaking metaphorically.”

“I’m a Canadian,” Mr. Lawson said, “and proud to be one. Miss Morgan has a point. This is no cultural paradise yet, but,” he said angrily, “if our gifted poets continue to run off to safer – and I use that word advisedly – to
safer
climates, then we will never develop culturally.” He leaned forward. “England is dead, Miss Morgan. Finished.”

“Maybe so,” Miss Morgan said, “but at least there are people who read poetry there.”

Thomas Hale leaned back in his chair. “That’s a very disputatious remark, Miss Morgan. I’m a Canadian. I read poetry.”

“An old maid,” Hyman Gordon said. “Phooey.”

Trudy Greenberg stiffened.

“Gogol,” Hyman Gordon said. “There was a poet for you.”

“Please,” Trudy said, “Joseph is trying to listen.”

“Byron,” Hyman Gordon said, “that’s what I call a poet.”

“… just because of class distinctions?”

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Lawson said, “but we didn’t want to bring up our child in a mesh of prejudice, privilege, and pomposity. We certainly weren’t going to send David to a public school.”

“I fail to see what that has to do with the subject at hand,” Miss Morgan said.

“A point well taken,” Thomas Hale said. “The problem of how you choose to educate your children is not germane –”

“Sure, sure,” Mr. Lawson said, “but I’d like to discuss this problem of expatriates with Miss Morgan again after she’s lived in London for a bit.”

“I repeat,” Miss Morgan said, “Canada is a provincial country. My going to London is not going to change that.”

“A provincial country,” Mr. Lawson said, “but a very exciting one. Sensational things are beginning to happen right here in Toronto. Take the Stratford Festival, for instance –”

“You’re not going to claim Shakespeare as a Canadian writer. Are you?”

“Ho, ho, ho,” Mr. Hale said.

“You interrupted –”

“You called the London theatre decadent. Am I right in saying that you failed to get any of your plays presented in –”

“Look here, when you observe that Canadians don’t read poetry what you really mean to say is that they don’t read
your –”

Poing, poing, poing, went the bell before Thomas Hale. Music crept in. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you have been watching.…”

“Turn it off,” Ernst said.

Hyman Gordon switched off the set.

“Are you all right?” Trudy asked.

Ernst’s forehead was sweaty.

“Come on, hero. Give us a smile.”

“I would like to sleep for a while,” Ernst said.

“Certainly.” Trudy turned expectantly to Hyman Gordon.

“After you, Miss Greenberg.”

Trudy joined Hyman Gordon at the door.

“A moment,” Ernst said. “How soon are they expected?”

“In about a half hour,” Trudy said. “I’ll come to wake you first.”

Outside the studio in Toronto, Joey waited in the Buick. Charlie kissed her warmly. And then Joey showed him the clippings that had come with Karp’s letter from Israel.

“Why, the poor girl.” Charlie stared at a rather bad newspaper photograph of Sally. “The poor, silly girl.” They drove in silence for a while before he asked, “How’s David?”

“Sleeping like a lamb.”

“The poor girl.” Charlie lit two cigarettes and passed one to Joey. “What does Karp write?”

“He’s not liked over there. He’s having trouble. People suspect him because he survived.”

“Poor Karp.”

And suddenly all Charlie could think of were the friends he had lost and the friends who had died and the friends who had turned into enemies and how everyone, himself included, tried and tried and tried and only ended up hurting each other worse. He could think only that here he was at last with a wife and child and something like
celebrity and yet inside him, deep inside, was sourness and a sense of having been cheated. There was fear of discovery not of an act, but of an attitude. He thought of Norman and wondered whether he had it any better. I doubt it, he thought. “Any mail?” he asked.

“An invitation to Eckberg’s for dinner Saturday night. You’ve been invited to speak at Carleton College on the twenty-fifth.”

“The twenty-fifth, eh?”

“And the
Y.M.H.A
. would like you to act as judge in a playwriting contest.”

“The poor, silly girl.”

“Seymour wants us to come round for drinks tomorrow night. I – what did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you
O.K.
?”

“Maybe,” Charlie said, “David will grow up to be somebody big. An artist, maybe.”

Ernst’s journey from Munich, Paris, London, to the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal had been a long and circuitous one. Stowing away at Liverpool had been easy, and once in Montreal Ernst ate where Sally had used to eat and walked where she had walked before. He went to the bars she had described as fun and, in the telephone directory, he looked up the names of people she had mentioned and went to stand in front of their houses until they appeared. At least once a day he walked by her house in
N.D.G
. The second time, Ernst recognized her father from a photograph she had shown him. A thin, greying man with calm blue eyes, Mr. MacPherson, his pipe turned upside down against the rain, seemed the epitome of the Scots schoolmaster. Ernst watched him pass with longing and much regret and then followed him like a supplicant for a few blocks.

Everywhere Ernst went he pretended to be waiting for Sally. There was a soda shop near Montreal High School that she had often
gone to in her teens. Ernst went there and feeling foolish and conspicuous he nevertheless sat on each stool and at every table, until he was sure to have sat where she had sat before. In one of his many dreams he came home to Sally in
N.D.G
. and she told him that her parents were coming home for dinner. Mr. MacPherson was very fond of Ernst. They smoked a pipe together and the good old man told him stories of Sally as a child. Ernst rose and said, “You don’t have to work any more. I have been given a big promotion. We are going to buy you a house.”

Mrs. MacPherson kissed Ernst. “You are like a son to us,” she said.

On Sunday mornings they went to church together and in the afternoons they went driving. There were three children. A boy and two girls. When Ernst got his next promotion they bought a little cottage in the Laurentians.

“What a happy couple,” people said.

Ernst did not eat very much. He lost weight. Nights he spent alone in his room. As the weeks passed, as he began to fall behind with the rent again and the first snows came, he realized that something would have to be done. But Ernst had lost his drive.

Ernst worked one week as a dishwasher and the next he shovelled snow, he waited at table, drove a taxi, sold magazine subscriptions, shined shoes, delivered coal, and at last went to work in a furniture shop on Saint Lawrence Boulevard. Between jobs he sometimes slept for two days at a time or went from one movie to another. From not eating enough he turned to gorging himself. Four meals a day became his average fare. He grew fat. But one thing he did accomplish. When he read in the
Star
that a German “new Canadian” had been killed in a traffic accident he went to the funeral and arranged to buy the dead man’s papers from the widow. On these papers he forged the name of a dead comrade. Joseph Rader.

The furniture shop on Saint Lawrence Boulevard was owned by a man called Steinberg, who had once owned a furniture store on the
Theatinerstrasse in Munich. There he had sold hideous modern furniture on the instalment plan to a hard-pressed but Aryan clientele. When the hard-pressed Aryans had smashed his shop and burned his account books in ‘36 Steinberg had fled to London. He had been interned there in a camp as an enemy alien and then he had been sent to Canada, where after a short period in another camp he had been released. Now Steinberg once more sold hideous modern furniture on the instalment plan to hard-pressed Aryans. He even had a few of his old customers back. But this time he kept his account books locked in a fireproof safe.

Steinberg bullied Ernst. He paid him poorly. He mocked the boy; he didn’t like him.

Nobody in the neighbourhood, in fact, liked Ernst. He claimed to be an Austrian, but they knew better. Nobody could understand why Ernst wanted to live and work in a Jewish quarter. When Ernst ate every day at Hyman Gordon’s lunch counter in the basement of the Klassy Klothing Building next door nobody sat at his table. Hyman Gordon always served him last.

Spring came. The snows shrank greyly, grass sprung up on the mountainside, and St. Catherine Street thickened with pretty girls in cotton dresses. Next door to Steinberg’s furniture shop an old factory building was being demolished. Often, during the noon hour break, Ernst stopped to watch the men at work. Hyman Gordon and others also stopped to watch, but they never acknowledged Ernst’s presence.

The only person Ernst visited in all that time – and he saw her as seldom as possible – was the widow Kramer, the “new Canadian” from whom he had bought his papers. Inge Kramer, who was in her late thirties, worked as a housekeeper for a family in Westmount. She was a tall, bony, severe woman, very thrifty, and frankly dishonest. Frau Kramer longed to marry again, a man with some money, someone who would start up a small business with her. She lived
frugally, hoarding her salary with fanatical care. She was vehemently proud of the fact that her late father had served in the
S.S
. and Ernst was a little frightened of her sometimes.

After his accident, when he revived in a private room of the Montreal Jewish General Hospital, the first thing Ernst did was to call for the newspaper reports of the incident. He examined all the photographs that had been taken of him under the rubble and was satisfied that nobody could recognize him.

“He’s been working for me for three months,” Steinberg told one of the reporters. “A boy to be proud of.”

The crowd collected on the hospital sunporch, waiting to get in to see Ernst, included many reporters, some officials, a few doctors, and three press photographers.

“Why can’t we get in to take his picture?” one of the photographers asked Trudy Greenberg.

“He’s shy,” Trudy said. “I told you that.”

“Give us a break, eh?”

“What I want,” another photographer said, “is one
of you
and Joey
together.”

“Be a sport, Miss Greenberg.”

“I told you,” Trudy said. “I’ll try my best.”

“Now we hear you talking.”

“There’s a honey for you.”

A reporter stood off to one side with Frau Kramer. They spoke in hushed voices. Two other reporters were interviewing Hyman Gordon.

“It all happened so fast,” Hyman Gordon said. “One minute I was standing there, watching the demolition men at work, and the next people were yelling, ‘Watch out’, ‘Run’, ‘Look out, Hymie’ … I’m telling you when I looked up and saw that wall swaying I just froze on the spot. I couldn’t move to save my life.… And the next thing I
knew a push from behind – whew! and I was knocked flat, but clear of the wall. The dust, the dust from that wall.… People came running. Shouts, screams, sirens. A business.” Hyman Gordon wiped back his shaggy grey hair and shook his head reverently. “And there buried underneath the rubble was the boy we wouldn’t talk to or eat with or even stop to say hello. There was Joseph, who had pushed me and saved my life. I’m telling you I still ask myself why he did it. The others could have.… They didn’t and I don’t blame them for a minute. You could be killed. You had to be crazy.…

“There was Joseph with his mouth full of dust and his forehead split by a brick; there he was buried under all that crap and not a complaint from him. Three hours it took to dig the boy out.… Tell me I’m crazy, tell me anything you like, but when we all stood around him with encouraging words and cigarettes and a little for him to drink I could swear that he smiled and that he was happy. I never saw him look happy before … I,” Hyman Gordon lifted his hands and let them drop to his lap, “I never really talked with him before.…”