“Is it?”
She stopped smiling and looked at me. “How long have you been in Germany?”
“One day,” I said, and changed the subject: “How does an American act?”
“As if the world weren’t such a bad place after all,” she retorted. “As if a single man could cope with any difficulty, and fists were effective weapons. If an Englishman were pushed and had his pipe broken, he’d appeal to the nearest bobbie.”
“I shouldn’t have pushed him,” I said as I felt my ears turn red. “It was a childish thing to do.”
“I’m glad you pushed him,” she said, and her eyes danced like ripples in sunlight. “I felt like kicking him. He was very officious, a very kickable type.”
The music had stopped and her laughter tinkled in the silence like a bell. We were standing clear of the crowd against a building, but several people turned and frowned at us. I wondered if laughter was verboten in the Third Reich.
“We mustn’t talk,” she whispered.
Noise flooded from the loudspeakers as if somewhere a dam of sound had burst, and broke in waves over the street.
“Wagner,” the girl beside me whispered. “That means he’s coming.”
The waves of music swept the street bare of everything but sound and power, flattening the individual will like ocean combers rolling on the pavement. When the sound receded, it left a throbbing vacuum for Der Führer to fill with his presence.
A little man in a brown raincoat came down the center of the street with his peaked nose thrust out like a brown rat walking in a dry riverbed. At his right a fat stoat, bloated with the blood of stolen chickens, waddled in step with the leader, and at his left a rabbit with a twisted foot limped along. Hitler and Göring and Goebbels, triumvirate of the new order that was to be in Europe.
The crowd was humming like viols and low drums, like bees around the queen. I felt vaguely embarrassed as if I was witnessing a sexual act, and looked at the girl beside me to see how she was taking it.
She was standing on tiptoe with her chin raised to see, her breasts high and pointed under her taut black coat. Her upper lip was twitching as if there was a nerve of hate there that she couldn’t restrain, and I saw her take her lips between her teeth. Her face was pale and drawn tight over the delicate bones of her cheeks and jaw. There had been a gay and youthful beauty in her face, but now it was pinched by a bitter interior wind. Then and there I wanted to take her with me out of Germany.
After the strange triumvirate marched a little group of generals whom I did not recognize, and then a troop of SS guards like a mechanical black snake made of men. A brown caterpillar of storm troopers crawled behind them with breeches and leather leggings on its hundred legs. Then came a company of goose-stepping soldiers in army uniform, kicking out stiffly in unison as if they were all angry at the same thing and to the same degree. I had a grotesque vision of radio-controlled robots in field grey, marching across a battlefield towards smoking guns on pointed toes like ballet dancers and bleeding black oil when they fell down dead.
The girl beside me touched my arm and said in a low voice, “Let’s get out of here.”
I turned to her and she seemed smaller. Her mouth looked soft and defenseless, and was pale where she had bitten it. Her face was as white as a pearl and her black lashes shadowed her eyes. She looked very tired.
The circus was over and the crowd began to break up. We moved away with it, she leaning lightly on my arm.
“What’s your name?” I asked. “Mine is Robert Branch.”
“Ruth Esch.”
“Will you have tea with me? You look as if you could do with some tea.”
“I’ve never learned to like tea,” she said, “even when I was in England.”
“Have you been in England? I just came from there.”
“Did you? I have been there often with my mother. She had friends in England.”
“You speak English almost like an Englishwoman.”
“Thank you,” she said and smiled, more to herself than to me.
“If you won’t have tea, will you have coffee with me?”
She hesitated. “Well, I really have an engagement with Thomas, you know. He’ll be expecting me. On the other hand, he’s not likely to go away.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had an engagement. Don’t stand anybody up for me.” I wondered who Thomas was and felt jealous of him already.
“Stand anybody up?” she said gravely like a child repeating a lesson, but there was laughter in her eyes.
“Break a date, call off an engagement,” I said. “Americanese.”
“Oh, Thomas wouldn’t really care so much. Even when you stand him up, his arms still reach to the floor.”
“What?”
She laughed at my surprise. “He lives in a cage at the Zoological Gardens. He’s a chimpanzee and I go to see him nearly every day.”
“Are you interested in animals?”
“I like Thomas,” she said. “He’s so very human. The Nazis haven’t thought it worthwhile to indoctrinate him.”
“Are you an anti-Nazi?” I asked. “You look like one.”
“Dankeschön. We won’t speak of it, if you please. By the way, are you a scholar?”
“A sort of one. Why?”
“Are you quite poor? Most scholars are.”
“Not particularly,” I said. “I’ve got a pretty good scholarship. In fact, I seem to be quite rich in German money.”
“Then you may give me coffee over here.” She pointed to the plate-glass front of a restaurant across the street.
I said, “Thank you very much,” and meant it. She spoke and moved with the independence and dignity of a woman who could not be easily picked up. I felt that my one-guinea pipe had been broken in a good cause.
We crossed the street and entered the restaurant. The air inside had a hothouse warmth and was laden with the scent of expensive perfumes and expensive cigars. The men and women at the tables looked well fed and well dressed. Most of the women wore Paris dresses and had the slightly unreal, glazed look of the too perfectly groomed, the look of orchids and rich men’s wives and daughters and top-flight politicians’ mistresses. The rich men were there in clothes cut in Savile Row and Bond Street, and the officers in black SS uniforms and brown shirts were the top-flight politicians. At the far end of the room, a string orchestra in Hungarian peasant costume whined and throbbed and lamented. A faint sweet odor of dead and rotting Babylons came up through the cracks in the wainscoting, but the expensive cigar-smoke covered it over.
A waiter led us to a table and we had thick Turkish coffee in tiny cups.
“Oriental splendor,” I said. “Are you by any chance a beautiful Armenian slave-girl?” Without her coat, Ruth Esch was more beautiful than before. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved tunic of black wool above which her skin shone starkly. Her shoulders were wide for a woman but slender and delicately curved. Her bright hair burned steadily around her head like downward flames.
She said with a little laugh, “I’m not Armenian exactly. I’m a Troyan.”
“Troyan? Do you mean Trojan?”
“Shakespeare says Troyan. I’m playing Cressida this week.”
“Shakespeare’s Cressida? Really? Are you an actress?”
“A sort of one.” She was mimicking me. “The leading lady at the Repertory Theatre is under the weather this week, and they’ve given me her part. I was to play Cassandra.”
“I can’t see you as Cressida,” I said, and recognized the blunder as soon as I said it.
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