The Drifters (108 page)

I said, ‘I find it mildly offensive that a generation whose very existence was saved by the men who opposed Hitler before they were born should tonight be applauding when The Beatles make fun of that effort.’

Inger said, ‘Not the effort. The wrong uses to which memories of that effort are being put today. We are truly fed up.’

I saw there was no use in my trying to discuss a theme on which so many had made up their minds so firmly, so I thanked Inger for her hospitality and started out the door, but again Rolf stopped me. ‘Don’t go,’ he said, and
I realized that he wished to talk with someone older, someone with a more combative mind than those he had been listening to that night, so I sat on the bed and he began, ‘You seem to miss the big point about our generation. You get hung up on war or sex or drugs, and we don’t. Inger and I, for example, we have a whole new thing going.’ I asked him what it was.

‘It’s this. We are really cutting out from society. Whole segments of us are simply not going to have anything to do with the values that have motivated you. Take Inger and me. We see no reason to get married. We’re sure it’s an honorable estate for those who need it, but we don’t. We see no reason to get educated in formal schools for formal degrees. If you want to be an engineer or a doctor, I grant that you need such degrees, but we don’t. We educate ourselves … perhaps to a high level … but it’s for us, not for some examining board.’

Inger, who now sat down on the bed beside me, holding between her fingers the fag end of a cigarette which one of the departed guests had rolled, broke in to say, ‘We try to do everything as inoffensively as possible. Even our dress and the way we wear our hair is temperate. On those points, which society takes so seriously, we’ll make concessions. But on the big issues, we won’t. Honestly, we would die rather than submit to the old forms.’

She was so sincere, so attractive, with the yellowish smoke drifting past her head, that I asked, ‘That’s quite satisfactory, I’m sure, when you’re twenty-eight. But how are you going to adjust later on?’

Rolf snapped his fingers and cried, ‘That’s precisely it! This is later on.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘I’m referring to a home … children … reliable income.’

The two Swedes winked at each other and broke into open laughter. She grabbed my arm and said, ‘You dear man! Don’t you realize what we’re saying? This is the future. This is our home … for six months every year.’

‘Who’s supporting you?’

Rolf shook his finger back and forth under my nose. ‘You are missing the whole point, Mr. Fairbanks.’ He opened an orange soda, poured me half a glass, kept the bottle for himself. ‘In two weeks Inger and I fly back to Stockholm. We take no hash or keef with us. In those suitcases over there we have normal clothing, and before
we go we cut our hair a little shorter. When we leave the airport at Stockholm we catch a bus that takes us to a flat just like thousands of others, and if you were to see us the day after we get home, you wouldn’t be able to tell us from millions of others who look just like us. At noon that first day Inger will start to visit kindergartens, and by the time she’s seen three, she’ll have a good job at a good salary. She’s a wonderful teacher and is in great demand.’

Inger interrupted to offer me her cigarette, which I declined, so she took several drags and said, ‘As soon as Rolf lands, he reports to almost any asylum for the insane, and they’re so happy to find someone who can cope—who will report to work faithfully—that he lands a good job even faster than I do.’

‘For six months we work most diligently,’ Rolf explained.

‘Then what?’

‘Then we quit.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Of course. It’s time for Marrakech. Our real life is down here and we’ve saved enough bread to swing it. So Inger quits at the kindergarten and I quit at the asylum, and we’re on our way.’

‘And there’s no problem when you get back?’

‘I’ve been telling you. Within two or three hours after we land we have good jobs again.’ He reached for Inger’s cigarette, took a few puffs and returned it. ‘It’s a new world. Look at Inger. Can’t you see that she’s really very competent? Don’t you suppose that if she wanted to apply herself to the rat-race of a school system, she could become headmistress in short time? There’ll always be a place for Inger. And do you know why? Mainly because she’s found a contentment that others haven’t. She doesn’t fight or elbow. She has no aggressions. She is truly one of the beautiful people. If she went to America, she’d land a well-paid job within one day.’

‘But I would never work more than six months a year,’ Inger said. ‘Then it would have to be back to Marrakech … for the real life.’

‘You find this so gratifying?’

‘Don’t you?’ she asked.

For a long time I could not answer, for I was trying to judge this mysterious life on its own terms—the Djemaá, the fellowship, the surcease the young found in marijuana,
the benevolent indifference of the local society, the narcotic suspension of real life, the Arabian Nights milieu, the endless conversations, the music, the irresponsibility—and I had to confess its lure; but against it I had to weigh the tough gratifications of the other world, from which I also derived so much pleasure in hard work, competitive triumphs, art museums, tall buildings well designed, Beethoven symphonies, and homes with growing children. Finally I said, ‘It could be gratifying … as a vacation.’

‘Enough!’ Rolf cried. ‘That’s all I want you to admit. As a vacation it has merit. You see, the difference between us is only the length of the vacation. Inger and I insist that it last at least six months, the work no more than six.’

‘In Stockholm we work intensively,’ Inger assured me, and I could believe her. ‘Rolf usually takes over the most difficult ward of the asylum and ends the problems. He’d make a superb director. So we pay our way in society. But from society we demand a much better life than our parents had.’

‘We thought of splitting the year, five months’ work, seven months’ vacation,’ Rolf said, ‘but you’ll appreciate the reason we didn’t. Inger found that in five months she couldn’t train her children. I found I couldn’t really clean up a ward in less than six. And we do like to do a good job.’

‘Children?’ I asked.

‘We have a little girl,’ Inger said, passing the cigarette to Rolf. ‘When we get back, she’s overjoyed to be with us. When we’re down here, she’s quite content to be with her grandmother.’

Rolf said, ‘She’s growing up rather better than those we see around her,’ and Inger said, ‘Don’t look so surprised, Mr. Fairbanks. In Israel thousands of children are brought up in the kibbutz. And they seem to turn out better than those who are brought up in the traditional ways. In the next generation it’ll be standard across the world. The family is vastly overrated.’

‘Will you ever get married?’ I asked.

Rolf shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’ve suggested it once or twice … not very strongly. Inger says she has all the children she wants. Also, when you work in an asylum, marriage looks somewhat less enchanting than it does when you’re twenty and hopeful.’

‘I doubt we’ll need marriage,’ Inger said, blowing the
black bangs out of her eyes. ‘Of course, we don’t know how we’ll feel when we’re forty.’

‘How about your daughter?’

‘You mean … does our not being married affect her adversely? The only case in which our not being married might have harmful consequences would be if she wanted to marry the son of some traditional middle-class family, but we’d do anything within our power to prevent that anyway, and not being married ourselves seems an effective tactic.’

Then a new idea struck me. ‘What you’re doing is gambling that the economic system which men like me organize and keep going will be elastic enough—secure enough, if you wish—to enable you to enter it on your own terms, grab off a little cash, and return to your six-month vacation? In other words, you exist because we pay the bill?’

‘Exactly,’ Rolf agreed. ‘With this correction. The system exists primarily for your benefit. You don’t run the system for us. You run it for yourself. But in order to keep it functioning, you need our work and our consuming. You need us as much as we need you. And the price you’re going to have to pay us in the future is one year’s wages for six months’ work.’

‘And the promise of a secure job each time you come back?’

‘Definitely. But not for our sake. For your sake. When I clean up the mess in the asylum—and I work very hard for the money you pay me—I’m not doing it for myself primarily. I’m doing it for you—to keep your system going.’

‘Isn’t it everybody’s system? How many couples like you can it support … on half production?’

‘Obviously it can support us,’ Rolf said, ‘and we’re not concerned about the others.’

‘Why not make your contributions over the whole year?’ I asked in some irritation.

‘Because that’s too long a spell to work at other people’s tasks.’

‘Why not make them your tasks?’

‘What you really mean is, ‘Aren’t you interested in promotion and higher salary?” Inger would find no satisfaction in being headmistress. I’d get none from being an asylum director. That kind of career gratification we’ve eliminated
from our thinking, and so have millions of others. As for the money, we frankly don’t want any more.’

‘Has it been marijuana that’s killed your drive?’ I asked.

‘In Stockholm we never touch it. Our police make it too risky … for the present. So abstinence is the price we have to pay for being eligible to work in your system. It’s not particularly onerous.’

Inger said, ‘You mustn’t think of us as getting off the plane at Marrakech every six months and panting into the Djemaá, “Give me some keef, quick!” ’

‘What we do,’ Rolf said, ‘is what any sensitive person would do. We take one look at that kaleidoscope … then we hear Jemail shouting from the entrance to the souks … and we see Big Loomis paddling along … and tears come into our eyes … and we come through the alleys to this hotel … and Léon says, “Your room is waiting,” and when everything is unpacked and the kids have dropped by to welcome us back and we’ve read our mail, we send Jemail out for some real fine grass and we roll a joint, and as we hand it back and forth we say, “We’ve come home.” This is the reality. Stockholm is where we go into exile to help you run your asylums.’

It was nearly morning. As the last cigarette passed between the two, I asked, ‘But doesn’t it dull your energies?’

‘Life does that,’ she said.

‘Then you admit they are dulled?’

‘Yes. I can no longer take war or promotion or big income or a large house seriously. I reject empire and Vietnam and placing a man on the moon. I deny time payments and looking like the girl next door and church weddings and a great deal more. If you want to blame such rejection on grass, you can do so. I charge it to awakening.’

After Monica rejected Cato, she stayed alone for a while, but she was so sick that someone had to care for her, so, at Cato’s and my urging, Big Loomis agreed to take her up to his quarters for a crash effort at persuading her to kick the heroin habit, and at first he made some progress, although whenever she could sneak a shot from Jemail she would feel exalted and would stand on the balcony and fill the central well with obscene accusations
against the fat man, usually ending with the charge that he and Cato were sleeping together.

In spite of this accusation, the two Negroes drew closer together. At first Cato had been wary of the huge Texan, whose ideas showed none of the racial animosity that animated the Negroes of Philadelphia, even suspecting him of being an Uncle Tom. But as he came to know him better, he recognized that Loomis, through a conspicuous success in football, had acquired something denied to many blacks: a gratifying sense of personal achievement. Loomis knew he was as good as any white man in Texas, and he had the offer of a contract from the Los Angeles Rams to prove it. He felt quite secure in the belief that if he returned to the States and got a degree in medicine he’d be as good a psychiatrist as any white man in New York, and maybe better, because he’d have a broader human experience.

So Cato had gradually developed a wary respect for Loomis and would have liked to be more friendly, but did nothing about it, fearful lest the Texan make fun of the phobias he had acquired in Philadelphia. But now that Monica had turned away from him, he felt desperately alone and unable to accept solace from any of the whites he knew. He moved more and more, therefore, into the orbit of the big man and often climbed to the top floor to talk with Loomis. He was surprised at the man’s stability and breadth of vision.

‘Staying alive in the United States is a game,’ Loomis argued, ‘and any smart boy should be able to lick it.

‘But you got to play white man’s rules.’

‘Man, white men face plenty of problems.’ Loomis laughed. ‘You think they’re exempt from the pressures just because they’re white? You see any Negroes killing themselves with heroin on this floor?’

And sooner or later, Cato always brought the discussion around to Monica. ‘What can we do for her?’ he asked one day after she had been even more hysterical than usual.

‘You love her, don’t you?’ Loomis asked.

‘Not that way, not any more. She took care of that … but good. But she is worth saving, Loomis.’

‘You’re beginning to show intelligence, son,’ the huge football player said. ‘The secret of life really is to love … and not only when someone else loves you back, and even when there’s no obvious reason. That’s when you
grow up. We’ll think of something to save this wounded chick.’

As Cato was descending the stairs he ran into Holt, who said, ‘I’m looking for Gretchen.’ Cato just nodded and kept going down.

Holt went on up to Gretchen’s room, but she was out. Joe, lying in bed dressed only in skin-tight Levis, turned sleepily as Holt entered, and asked, ‘What’s up?’

‘Britta and I are flying on to Ratmalana,’ Holt said, ‘and before we go I’d sort of like … well … I’d hate to be so close to Casablanca without seeing it.’

‘It’s a real drag,’ Joe said. ‘Sort of like Pittsburgh.’

Holt coughed, looked at his shoes and said, ‘Well, being so close to where Humphrey Bogart saved Ingrid Bergman …’