Through Streets Broad and Narrow (44 page)

Greenbloom took the knife from her. Before anyone could anticipate his intention he advanced on Luthmann and pressed the point of it against the white silk shirt covering the German's stomach, pinning him against the mirror. He held it firmly in his long outstretched arm, the point making a hollow in the shirt. He was smiling into Luthmann's face.

“Forgive me, this is only in fun. We got a lot of actors here. We must act up and show them what we older ones can do. Now, boys, you can leave him to me,” he said to John and Groarke. “We've got him where we want him. He's popular. Why, he's the most popular man in the party. Don't you move, boy! You stay right there until you promise the little girl you'll figure out that sword dance on her carpet.” Suddenly, with scarcely a pause, he abandoned his American pose and said very slowly, “My friends, I am the Prince of Denmark.”

There was complete silence. Luthmann was white with anger. He was unable to move. A tiny point of blood was staining the hollow apex of the concavity in his shirt. Greenbloom was leaning
quite heavily on his false leg, leaning half his weight into the arm holding the knife.

A girl screamed, someone else clapped; John shouted, “Speech!” and with his free hand, Greenbloom waved again for silence and declaimed, “How now! A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead.”

Luthmann swore in German. He swelled out his belly muscles and a little more blood ran down his shirt front. But Greenbloom, pale as someone lately dead, quite immovable, his eyes on Luthmann's, went on: “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! I took thee for thy better. Take thy fortune. Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger.”

Her words attaching themselves incongruously to those of Hamlet, Caroline called out, “You've hurt him!”

Greenbloom withdrew the knife and Luthmann stepped forward from the mirror; his shoulders were very stiffly held; one hand lay against the bloodstain, giving him the look of a man who has his arm in a sling.

He bowed to Caroline, glanced at John and Groarke and then confronted Greenbloom.

“This was not a good joke.”

“No?”

“You are an American citizen?”

“I am a Jew,” Greenbloom said.

Luthmann did not move, but his hand began to stroke the place where he had been pricked, the hand moving so stealthily that it seemed not to be a part of him. His lips said something and Greenbloom announced to the room at large, “He is surprised. His instinct did not warn him that I was a Jew. He did not sense it.” He asked the reflections in the mirror, “What can be the explanation? Why did not this pure Aryan realize at once that there was a Jew in the room with him? Perhaps it was because I have not bled. Though I have sampled his blood, and he no doubt has had the opportunity of analyzing that of so many of my race, he has not thus far shed a drop of my own. Or perhaps it is because he also is an imposter, an offender against the creed of his masters in Europe. Yet they say that a Jew always
knows another Jew. Can it be that this person is neither a German nor a Jew?”

He let the question hang on the air and turned away. With the hand still holding the knife he indicated the door at the far end of the room and everyone turned to look out of it, at the dim shape of the white stallion standing withers deep in the night mist.

“We will let this mongrel go,” Greenbloom said. “Always remembering that one day, when the pack with which he runs has exterminated my German Jewish brethren and has itself been dismembered by its own philosophies, he must in death become a man.”

Someone clapped again. They all clapped. The girl who had earlier mounted the stallion left her lover from by the wall and ran to Luthmann, hanging on to him as he walked down the room; like a bundle, sobbing, with her white arms and tumbling hands round his neck and in his hair. She kissed him with passion, her face pressed against his tight-shut mouth. He half-tripped and tried to push her away and through her kisses she called out, “I love you, don't send me away. Oh don't be so cruel,
cruel!
”

Luthmann swore and tripped again. He fell full length on top of the girl who screamed and let her arm drop from his neck; but when he got up she sought his ankles, clutching at his trouser turn-ups so that he had to step like a man in thick undergrowth. She called after him. “What have they done to you? What have you done to him?”

The young man she had been kissing came forward and pulled her up from the floor.

“Darling, you must come home. Fiona, it's Charles. You've had too much to drink— Darling, you must let me take you home.”

But she looked at him blankly and went running out after Luthmann calling, “Come back. Please wait for me. I love you!”

They saw her give up the chase and lean against the stallion's hindquarters weeping with abandon, to be led away by her lover with her coat draped carelessly over her shoulders.

Palgrave flopped down on the piano stool and played the introductory
bars of “Oh, mistress mine, where are you roaming?” and then sang it, his voice castrate with pleasure.

Greenbloom listened to him for a few moments, avoided by everyone, the knife still in his hand. Saying goodnight to no one, without a flourish, he left the room. They saw him pass the stallion, and after he had gone they saw the handle of he knife jutting from its side, the hidden blade penetrating deeply the hollow heartless interior of the plaster.

There was silence. Then Jan Benjamin said, “God! What an exit.”

A girl asked, “Who
was
that man?”

Someone, one of the male love-makers who had come down from a bedroom, was explaining to himself or to his partner, “It was sheer propaganda of course. Earlier I heard the man Luthmann announce that he was going to talk about the treatment of Jews in the concentration camps and I thought, God! The other man must have come in and overheard it all and it turned out that he was Jewish himself. He must have
overheard
it all, you see? He was Jewish and he heard this Nazi—”

“But the knife!”

“Yes, where did he get the knife?”

“He wasn't joking, he drew blood.”

“That was what Luthmann said: ‘This was not a good joke,' like that, ‘Not a
goot
choke.' ”

“But he was bleeding. I thought he was going to be murdered.”

“I honestly thought—”

“Impaled, you mean.”

“But who brought him?”

“Oh, that man, Blaydon.”

“Caroline darling, how dreadful for you, such a horrible thing to happen!”

People left as they had come, imperceptibly. Palgrave tried to organize a trip out to the Greyhound but when he found there was little enthusiasm decided to run Jan Benjamin back to his rooms. Gracefully, over a final Melachrino cigarette, he told Caroline and John, “He was really a fantastic person; but I do hate it when people start getting dramatic off-stage. I think it
was probably a mistake to have asked that Jew man; although he was quite civilized I do feel that ultimately they
never
know how to behave; always go too far.” With one of his little fillips of spite he went on, “But then of course John
does
this sort of thing; he seems to know such incredible people.”

Caroline said, “You're absurd, Palgrave, ridiculous.” She asked John, “Don't you agree that he's just silly at times? I mean really
silly?
”

Ignoring the question John asked her, “When did Groarke go? Did you see him leave?”

Palgrave, lingering in his most irritating fashion, said to Benjamin, “Another of John's déclassé mistakes. He will go and mix the most impossible people and the result is that something embarrassing happens. Invariably. Last year he gave some Dublin nurse dinner at the Ranelagh Club. A
nurse!
”

“Your friend Groarke was looking grim,” Caroline told John. “I was watching him the whole time. He was the one I was worried about. I thought he was going to go berserk and start breaking everything up.
Has
he been ill?”

Jan Benjamin said to Palgrave, “Don't you think we ought to tidy things up a bit before we depart? We seem to be the last to leave.”

“Caroline, do you mind dreadfully if we don't?” Palgrave begged. “If you're really stuck I'll get some catering people to come round in the morning.”

“Oh, do go, Palgrave! You said you were going ages ago. John will help me. We're not going to do much. Parties always end like this.”

“Angel!” Palgrave kissed her. He said to John, “Goodnight. I suppose I shan't be seeing you again this term; you've got an exam, haven't you?”

“Yes, in three days' time.”

“You won't be coming into the club?”

“Probably when the exam's over.”

“I rather wanted to ask you about something. Leave a message for me with the porter, will you?”

“All right.”

When they had gone Caroline said, “Let's open all the windows
and the door to let the smoke and fumes out. We needn't tidy up very much because Mrs. Mahoney's very efficient. She'll be here at eight in the morning and by the time I get up she'll have it all straight again.”

John swept the floor and replaced the carpets while Caroline carried trays of glasses and plates into the kitchen. He heard the taps running as he cleared the fruit and food from the buffet table. He shook and folded the long linen tablecloth and moved the table into the middle of the room; then he collected the empty bottles and replaced them in their cases.

Caroline said, “Oh, you have done well.” She was standing in the kitchen doorway looking very bright; flushed, but a little delicate about the eyes.

“I didn't know where things went,” he told her.

“Apart from the table which I borrowed, nearly all your guesses were right. Would you like coffee? I
am
making some for myself. I always do after a party.”

He hesitated then he asked, “Have you any idea of the time? My watch has stopped.”

“Twenty minutes to two.” She brought in a tray, put it on the floor and sat down on a chair. “Wasn't Fiona Chambers extraordinary?”

“Does she know Luthmann? I mean, has she met him before somewhere?”

“Never. That's why I was so amazed.”

He said, “I suppose she'd been making love to that Charles person or something, first.”

Caroline laughed very gaily, with complete spontaneity. “Oh, you are funny! You really are the most extraordinary person I ever met.”

He said, “It gets people into a state.”

“Does it?”

“Yes.”

“And your friend Mr. Whatsit,” she went on. “Now I simply can't agree with Palgrave. I think he was a magnificent man. His acting, wasn't it frightening?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you suppose he did it? It can't have been just the
fact that he was Jewish. He wasn't drunk. He's a very civilized man. You told me he was before you asked us if we minded him coming. And you were right. Besides, they're awfully thick-skinned, aren't they? They have to be. So what I want to know is why he went so far. I've been thinking about it all in the kitchen. I'm not even the half of a fool, you know, John. When I thought back I realized that you and your friend Groarke wished this party on me and Palgrave; the entire thing was your idea from the beginning and you only did it in order to bring those two together, didn't you? Luthmann and your Mr. Hamlet or whatever his real name is?”

John said, “If I tell you a secret, a nearly unbearable one, will you promise to keep it to yourself for a long time?”

“How long a time?”

“Six months, I should think.”

“All right; for six months, I promise.”

“Eli, the Jew in the concentration camp, the one Luthmann was talking about, is Horab's brother. Horab is the Jew who paid the money to save him; his brother is the Jew who is going to be put to death in the camp hospital, I think because the money he paid for his release was insufficient.”

She said, “Oh.”

He watched her face with an intense hope, to see some answer for himself in the expression of her eyes or her mouth. Then she said, “But that's horrible. I can't bear it—I simply can't.”

He said, “It's true.”

And she looked back at him, showing now the real horror that she experienced in the stare she gave him.

She said, “You don't understand. I didn't really listen. I didn't properly hear all they said. I'm only beginning to remember it now and I'm not even sure if I've got the facts right. When they were talking about some man in some concentration camp preferring to die rather than to—I was
bored
. That is what is so horrible.”

John got up from the sofa.

“But you know now; don't you? Those people are real. The camps are real, the Jews dying are real, the evil is real.”

She sat there looking at him, very distracted. He saw her as a very young girl indeed; then he saw her as an old woman, her
physical youth dissolving before his eyes so that he knew exactly how she would look in her later years. A crisp small lady with a small cared-for face, quick but faded eyes and straw-grey hair. She was young in face of some pain which she could not understand, old in the acceptance of it.

She said, “Where are you going?”

“Back to my rooms, I've got to be up early. This damned Midwifery exam starts on Tuesday. If I don't pass it this time—”

“But you can't possibly go after telling me that.”

“I can't possibly stay either.” He stood over her, took one of her very small hands. “Caroline, it's no good my saying I'm sorry I told you. With a thing like this you're always hoping that, if only you can tell the right person, the evil will go out of it for you!”

“Please don't go till the morning. Spend the night down here on the sofa. I honestly couldn't bear to be alone with the thought of that man's brother lying in that hospital in Germany. It seems so incredibly real,
he
does, I mean; as real as your friend. It's so real that I can't believe it's true and yet I know it must be. It fits in with all the things one's been reading for years and. not quite accepting—You will stay, won't you?”