The Troubled Air (23 page)

“That isn’t the way it is at all,” Archer said quietly.

“No,” Pokorny said. “Of course not. I know it isn’t. All I was saying is that I wouldn’t blame you …”

“I came up here, Manfred,” said Archer, forcing himself to look at the wild-haired little man, bent over the plate, inaccurately spooning up soup, “to help you if I could.”

“Why?” Pokorny sat up, spoon caught in midair, and looked challengingly at Archer.

“Because I admire you as an artist. Because you wrote music for me conscientiously and well for three years,” Archer said, feeling that this was only a small part of the truth, if it was true at all. “Because I know you. Maybe that’s it.”

“Would you still want to help me,” Pokorny asked, bending down again, “if I told you that Mr. Hutt was right? If you knew that I
did
perjure myself to enter the country?”

Everybody is guilty of everything, Archer thought sinkingly. Nobody is innocent of any charge. Describe a crime and I will find a friend to fit it. “That would depend,” Archer said, feeling that he was being evasive, “on all the facts.”

“All the facts.” Pokorny pushed the plate away from him. He took out his handkerchief again and wiped his mouth, not quite catching all the leakage. “If I give you all the facts, will you keep them secret?”

“I can’t promise anything. Don’t tell me anything you feel it would be harmful for me to know.”

“Then you would feel I was hiding something from you,” Pokorny said, peering near-sightedly at Archer. “You would begin to believe everything you heard about me, because you could not check. I would be a question mark in your brain. ‘Pokorny,’ you would say, ‘he is a doubtful character. He must have plenty to hide.’ All right!” Pokorny stood up abruptly, the orange robe swinging open to reveal a pudgy, pale, hairless breast. “I will tell you everything. What’s the difference? I can’t lie, anyway. I don’t have the temperament to hide anything. My face is my own lie-detector. The portable model. Ask me a question, I get nervous, in a minute I give the answer, even if I know I should keep quiet. It’s the way I am. I am like the radio networks—I am on the air twenty-four hours a day.” He laughed weakly at his own joke, then padded over to a library table on which there was a plate of grapes. He offered the grapes to Archer. “Would you like some? In the middle of the winter. The American way of life. Refrigeration. From the Argentine.” He stuffed five or six of the grapes into his mouth, tearing them off the main stem with his teeth and chewing them, seeds and all. “Tasteless,” he said thickly, carrying the plate with him and coming back to the table and sitting down. “I eat all the time. It is a disease. I feel that there is a hollow in me. The doctor says I am overweight. The arteries are undecided. They do not know whether they should continue working for me or give their notice.” He chuckled again, morbidly, as he put some more grapes into his mouth. “The doctor says I must lose twenty-five pounds or he cannot be responsible. I tell him I don’t like to be responsible for my arteries, either, but the doctor doesn’t laugh, he doesn’t enjoy the European type of humor in the medical field. The calories, he says, are disastrous, he predicts a stroke. I tell him about the hollow inside me, but he says it is all psychological. He is young, very modern, he is always saying ‘psychosomatic.’ When I die, he will try to perform an autopsy, I’m sure. He looks at me and I can see it in his eye. He is bothered already he will have to cut through so much fat. He will investigate and write a paper on the psychosomatic hollows in Viennese composers with blood pressure. See—I finally have found I can have a conversation with you. Trouble—it loosens the tongue, gives you subject for discussion. The facts.” Pokorny ran his tongue around his teeth, sucking at grapeskin. “I promised the facts. And you promised nothing. It is my kind of bargain. That’s what my wife would tell me. She is a woman who does not have any illusions about me. You will meet her later, but please do not take everything she says too seriously. She is disappointed in the world—for my sake. She thinks I am neglected and she hits back. Ah—I see you are moving your feet. You are impatient. You are saying, he is a disorderly fat man. Why doesn’t he come to the point?”

“Take your time,” Archer said carefully, recognizing that Pokorny was nervously postponing the moment when he would have to expose himself. “I have nothing else to do tonight.”

Pokorny pushed the plate of grapes away from him. “Don’t tell her that I had grapes. She is scientific, too, she knows all about sugar content and fat deposits in the blood vessels. All Americans are scientific, there are amazing articles every Sunday in the New York
Times.
She is opposed to my having a stroke. She calls the doctor on the phone and informs on me. She says, ‘He had two rolls and a quarter of pound of butter for breakfast.’ She tells me if I have a stroke and I am paralyzed I will have to find another wife. She is trying to frighten me into being young and healthy. She is very fond of me. She sits and listens to me play my compositions on the piano and she closes her eyes and cries. She has no more ear than a camel, but she cries just the same, out of loyalty. The doctor said sex was dangerous, too. He is very modern, he calls it relations. The strain on the heart muscles. Everything is dangerous these days, grapes, your wife, writing music for the radio. It’s the times we live in. When I was younger, it never occurred to us—food, love and music might be fatal.” Pokorny sat hunched over the table, restlessly playing with the stained towel around his throat, opening it, pulling it closer, talking more and more swiftly, as though his thoughts were rushing to his tongue, as though the necessity of talking on one subject to a man he had barely spoken to before this had freed a flood of other information that had to come out, in an eruption of confession. Archer tried to keep his face impassive. He listened carefully, attempting to catch and remember the word here and there that was useful in the spate of revelations. Conscientiously, he tried to keep himself from being disgusted or critical or pitying.

“My wife is at the root of my troubles,” Pokorny said. “It sounds ungallant, not the sort of thing an artist from romantic Vienna ought to say. But I love her, so I can be ungallant about her. She is at a meeting tonight, but she will be home soon. She’ll look at the soup and tell me I had too much and she’ll threaten me that she won’t bring white bread into the house any more. She’s always at meetings. She’s a Communist. She’s very important; it’s surprising how they listen to her. That’s why they’re getting after me, the Immigration, they see my wife’s name on everything. I will get deported because I married an American lady who was born in Davenport, Iowa. Love is upside-down, too. When there was the strike on the waterfront, she brought a boy here with his head split wide open. Another quarter of an inch and you could have seen his brain. The police were looking for him and we hid him. He slept in our bed and we put a mattress on the floor in here for ourselves. She would walk through blood for her ideas. She would be very dangerous if she got the chance. She should never be put in charge of anything. If I get deported, she will lead a parade to the dock, with signs about the warmongers. I would never recover from it.”

“Look, Manfred,” Archer said, dazed by the complexity of the life he was uncovering and feeling that he had to interrupt and warn the man, “you don’t have to tell me anything about your wife. That has nothing to do with the program or with you.”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Archer,” Pokorny said formally, “that is where you’re wrong. It has everything to do with it. She is well known. She is extreme. She draws attention to me. I cannot bear attention. I had one hope—to be quiet, to be anonymous. My wife has a file in the FBI this thick …” Pokorny’s pudgy hands indicated ten inches in the air. “What does it say in the file? Mrs. Manfred Pokorny, married to a refugee, who entered this country on an alien’s permit in 1940. Never took out citizenship papers. Now working on the radio. Next step, Mr. Hutt. Next step—good-bye. I tell you all these things about my wife because it doesn’t make any difference. It’s all known. And even if it isn’t, all they have to do is ask me. I’m excitable, I’m weak, I’m afraid of prison. The only time I’m calm is when I am composing music. Even when I eat—you noticed—it is like a whirlpool.”

“Still,” Archer said, almost successfully hiding his dislike of Pokorny’s voluble terror, “you haven’t told me anything that would warrant deporting you.”

“No,” Pokorny said, automatically reaching for the grapes again, “not yet. So—in 1940—I made out my application for entering the United States. I was in Mexico. I was living on seven dollars a week. I had a violin, a good violin, a Guarnerius, and I sold it. It was the last thing I had to sell. The Mexicans were getting ready to put me out of their country. My wife—my first wife, I married her in Vienna in 1921—kept telling me she was going to kill herself if we were pushed out again. We had been in France, in Morocco, in Santo Domingo. Some musicians in America—people who had played some of my music—I had a little vogue before the war—in the style of Schoenberg—they vouched for me. On the application they asked me—was I ever a member of a communist party, anywhere …”

He hesitated. Archer watched him intently. Pokorny was sweating, little rivulets sliding down the loose rolls of fat on his neck.

“What should I say?” Pokorny asked. “I have seventy dollars in my wallet. I am a Jew. My mother and father are already dead in the crematoriums … it sounds calm when you say it like that. It almost sounds natural. Neat. But when you remember what your mother looked like, standing over the stove, cooking dinner. Dressed up for Sunday in a black lace dress. When you remember going to hear your father in the symphony orchestra … He played the flute. He never was very good, really, speaking as a musician, now, not as a son …”

Pokorny’s mouth, stuffed with grapes, was trembling, and Archer realized that the composer was on the verge of tears. “Look,” Archer said gently, “you don’t have to tell me anything more just now. You’re feeling badly tonight, your wife told me you had a fever. You probably ought to be in bed. Maybe this is too painful for you. I don’t have to hear it now. I’ll come back some other time, Manfred, when you’re feeling better.”

“What do you put on the application?” Pokorny said, ignoring Archer. “America is just over the border. Twenty miles away. Everybody is being kind. Everybody is being sympathetic. Everybody wants to help. If you say yes …” He shrugged. “You vanish. You sink. You are obliterated. If you say no—two little scratches of the pen—you’re alive, you’re a musician, you exist … Yes or no. On a form, the questions sometimes are too simple. Whatever you say is the wrong answer. A man’s life can’t be described sometimes in yes or no. In Vienna, in 1922, I joined the Austrian Communist Party. There. Now you know. But does yes or no tell anybody what it was like in Vienna in 1922? Inflation, strikes, starving, speeches, promises—can you put that in yes or no? And I quit two months later. Even my wife will have to admit that, and I know she’s told the Immigration about me, because she said she would, when I divorced her and married Diana …”

Diana. Archer felt himself being hypnotized by the name. Diana and Manfred Pokorny. Names for the low-comedy servants in a musical comedy. It was almost impossible to assign them to tragic parts. Diana Pokorny, with a cornbelt accent, commissar for the waterfront regions. Parents, Archer thought, must have more respect on the day of christening, for the mortal possibilities lying in the future for their children.

“She’s crazy,” Pokorny said. “My first wife. She is always coming up here making scenes. She brought a pistol once, but it didn’t have a hammer on it, but we didn’t find that out until later. I give her sixty dollars a week in alimony, but she’s always sick and she always keeps trying the most expensive medicines. Now it’s cortisone. She knows a doctor who wants to experiment on her, but it costs three hundred dollars for a treatment. And she went to an analyst for six years.”

Archer felt a grin pulling at his mouth and turned his head so that Pokorny wouldn’t see it. It was heartless to smile, he knew, but the complexities Pokorny had brought about in his life by his choice of women were, considered at all objectively, melodramatically ludicrous. And somehow, and Archer was displeased with himself at the realization, Pokorny with all his agony did not touch him. Perhaps, Archer thought, if he combed his hair and stopped stuffing his mouth with Argentine grapes … If he has to go before the Immigration board, Archer resolved, I will make him go to a barber first, and make certain he puts on fresh linen.

“I quit because they were idiots,” Pokorny was saying. His voice had become tired and he was resting his head in his hands, his elbows on the table. His skin was flushed now and he looked as though his fever were mounting. “The Communists. They began to tell me what kind of music to write, what kind of music I should listen to, what I should applaud, what I should not applaud. Politicians who didn’t know the difference between a sonata and a bugle call. I was writing an opera then and I found out the librettist had ten thousand collaborators. They didn’t listen to an opera with their ears—they listened with a copy of Lenin’s collected pamphlets. I figured if they were that wrong in my field that I knew about, they were probably almost as wrong in other fields that I didn’t know about. So I drifted out. I wasn’t important, I was twenty-three years old—so they didn’t bother me and I didn’t bother them … I tell Diana, but it will take an explosion to change her mind. She says I’m an unreliable intellectual.” Pokorny essayed a wan smile. “She’s half-right, anyway. Still—sitting in that hot little room in Mexico, living off the last of the violin, what do you do when you see the question, ‘Were you ever a member of any communist party in any country?’ Yes or no. How truthful do you have to be? Who do you hurt? What does a man do to survive? How much are you expected to suffer for two months of your life seventeen years before when you were twenty-three years old, in another country? Now …” Pokorny shrugged helplessly. “They will produce the paper. They will say is this your signature. They will say is everything written on this paper true. My first wife will be sitting there, looking at
me,
hating me, knowing all about me. My advice to you, Mr. Archer, is keep away from me, don’t try to help me. Deny you ever knew me. Say that the music was delivered by an agent and that he told you it was being written by a man called Smith. Say that you didn’t know I was a Jew.”