Morning Is a Long Time Coming (24 page)

“Our sign is posted in four languages, fraulein. German, French, Italian,
and
English.”

“Well, I certainly didn’t see—at least, I didn’t notice your sign, honest!”

“Nevertheless.”

“Nevertheless what?”

“Nevertheless I am still required to bill you for the second night.”

I tried to think, but I couldn’t—the ancient mahogany clock’s strident, every-second sounding was interfering with my thoughts.

“Required to do it?”

He nodded smartly. “Required policy of the Hotel Göttingen. Those are my orders.”

Not only were the clock sounds harshly metallic, but its carvings were grotesque. Like so many severed heads captured in wood at the moment of beheading.

“What did you say?”

“I said, fraulein, that I am only following the orders of the management.”

“Following orders? ... That’s what she said you’d say.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“... Told me that at The Skyway one day ... said you people didn’t care about wrong ... didn’t care about right. Only orders ... said you all were very big on following orders. I didn’t understand then, Grandmother, but
I understand now. And you were right! Germans take orders from anybody—a young waiter wearing gold braid on his red jacket!”

“Fraulein, this is no conversa—”

“I want to ask you about that waiter—he wasn’t really a waiter, only an acne-faced busboy wearing a red jacket. If he told you to find Jews, you’d be real quick to run out and do that, now wouldn’t you?”

“Pay your bill and kindly leave this hotel!”

“You are the taker of orders, not me! That’s what you told everybody at Nuremburg. I was only taking orders. You remember saying, I was only taking orders?”

“Fraulein, please. You are causing a disturbance.”

“Please? Are you begging me? Toby, Miera, their husbands and all of their children gone. And all you can say is please ... PLEASE!”

“Stop that! I’m telling you. Keep your voice down. Our guests require quiet.”

“What do I care about your guests! I don’t care about your guests! I care about Judah. I care about who gave the order to find Jews! And just who was it that gave the order to behead Judah?”

“Please, please. People are watching. I will telephone the manager ... maybe an exception.” He backed into the connecting office, slamming the door behind him.

“COME BACK HERE!” I screamed at the door which I heard being bolted from the inside. “COME BACK HERE, DAMN YOU, AND TELL ME WHO MURDERED THEM!”

But when the only answer that came back was the mock
ing
tsk, tsk, tsk
of the severed-head clock, I picked up the heavy desk inkwell, and with all the strength of inflamed self-righteousness, sent it crashing through that plate glass face. I watched with freshly liberated enjoyment as thick globs of black ink streamed downward to totally obliterate numeral VI.

I lay on my back on a long hard bench and thought how strange it is that the Germans have just as lousy jails as the Arkansans. With all that experience the Germans have had incarcerating people (not to mention all those final solutions) wouldn’t you think that they’d have learned how to run a really good jail by now?

But if I wanted to be completely fair about it (and I don’t believe that I did), I’d note that besides this bench, there is also a cot covered with a brick-colored expanse of rubber sheeting. I wondered if the sheeting was there to keep the mattress clean or was it there because it was already filthy. I averted my eyes because I didn’t like the idea of knowing for certain.

Metal struck metal with enough force to startle a reaction from within me. I looked on the other side of the bars to see a cop with enough gold braid on his shoulders to impress the Gestapo.

“Fraulein, we have located among your possessions a return railroad ticket to Paris.”

Someday I’m going to have to learn how to respond to a statement that tells me exactly what it is that I already know. In Jenkinsville, folks are all the time saying, “You shore can say that again,” or for a little variety, “Now, ain’t
that the living gospel,” but somehow both of those phrases seem more appropriate to Jenkinsville than they do to Göttingen.

“There is a late afternoon train to Paris, fraulein. Would you care to be on the 4:10?”

Who knows what I want? Or, in fact, did I want anything? Or did I want nothing? Nothing to hurt, nothing to be taken away. Not ever. Maybe nothing is too big a deal and way too much to ask for, anyway. But will somebody please tell me what’s a person to do when they’re too afraid of life to live and too afraid of death to die?

Another metallic rap for attention. He’s got to stop that! Can’t he tell that I’ve just had all my skin surgically removed? I think that must be why I hurt so much. Not having skin. But maybe it didn’t happen surgically. No, I think maybe I was born that way. Think I’ll write myself up in
The Journal of the American Medical Association,
and then Kopelman and all the others will understand, once and for all, about this birth defect of mine which permits exposed tissue to remain at the mercy of merciless elements.

“The train for Paris leaves in twenty-five minutes, fraulein.” The cop dropped a hefty ring of keys from one hand to the other. “I will personally take you to the railroad station if you promise to behave decently.”

I heard myself laughing, but it wasn’t anything like the inspired laughter that I once shared with Ruth and Anton and later with Roger. My laugh sounded unnatural, as though it had been recorded many years earlier, and was now being replayed on an ancient gramophone.

I raised myself from the bench to walk with inordinate
slowness to where the bars separated us. “You have no right to speak to me of decency,” I told him in a voice that resembled a hoarse whisper. “No right at all, for I am a Jew and you ... you’re only a German.”

30

A
S THE TRAIN
took a wide-angled, around-the-bend turn, I caught my first returning glimpse of Paris. On the other side of the darkness, it shone like an unclaimed treasure. Paris glitters and Göttingen doesn’t. Even so, that isn’t the essential difference between the two cities.

Because for all of Paris’s glamor it’s still a city that doesn’t spend a lot of time fooling around with pretend. So that’s it! The quality that I’ve admired both in this city and
in Roger. The city and the man both have the strength to take life on an “as is” basis.

Much more “as is” strength here than in Jenkinsville, where people pull the gospel so tight around themselves that they squeeze out life along with the devil.

While you, Göttingen, with your feudal architecture, are no better. Medieval towers and ancient forts encouraged and nurtured my belief in all those things, which I see now, could never be. At first, I believed that I had at last found a place where a damsel’s distress would be invariably short-lived and princesses and paupers would not only be expected to prevail, but live happily ever after.

At Gare St. Lazare, my seat mate Raoul, a lawyer on his way back home to Madrid, carried both my suitcases out of the station and onto the sidewalk. Actually, it was Raoul’s second very needed favor to me. And I’m pretty certain that he didn’t realize it because if you wear good clothes, nobody would ever guess you could be going hungry.

Shortly after leaving Göttingen my ulcer gnawed a sharp reminder to put food into my stomach and as much as I wanted to soothe the angry little beast, I knew that I had enough money for cab fare and I maybe had enough money for a dining car dinner, but not for both. Definitely not for both!

As I with growing concern considered my dwindling choices, a tall man of at least forty, with solid gold cufflinks and a perfectly enormous Adam’s apple, appeared before me to ask (in French yet!) if the seat next to me were taken. I must have smiled very welcomingly because his words came through to me as clearly as if he were saying, “Dinner will soon be served.”

And I might have continued smiling too for many more moments than necessary because that’s when it struck me that in spite of Göttingen and my inability (or unwillingness) to even think about what happened there, my dedication to my own personal survival seemed pretty much intact.

While the taxi waited (and I worried that the meter might be running), Raoul with maddening leisure placed his vellum calling card in my hand and offered me the back of another to write my own address. With considerable reluctance, I wrote: Patty Bergen, Jenkinsville, Arkansas, U.S.A. Then we shook hands and said our goodbyes.

As the cab wound adroitly through the traffic, I wondered at the size of the scandal if this oversized, overaged Spaniard should ever decide to present himself in my hometown.

At number 39 Place St. Sulpice, I told the driver to pull over in front of the still lively Café Jacques because just three flights up is (has got to be) home. The fare was 220 francs. I slipped the last of my money—three 100 franc notes—out of my wallet. Told the driver to kindly carry my luggage up to the top of the stairs and in my last act of solvency told him to keep the change.

As I climbed the stairs, one fatigued foot following another, the cabby passed me on his fast trot back down with a smile, a wave, and a “Bonsoir, mademoiselle.”

When I reached the paint-chipped door to our—to Roger’s —place, I stood, trying to breathe in the air that would inflate my rapidly deflating supply of courage. And maybe even in shorter supply than courage was conviction. I didn’t know what to show Roger, my love or my anger.

Who gave him the right to hurl those terrible accusations at me? I’d like to give him one good sudden swift kick and
then I would no longer be angry with him. I would have made him suffer at least a little of what he had made me suffer. We would call it a draw. Then who knows, we might be able to love to the finish.

I wanted to be at peace with Roger again and, even more urgently than that, I had to rest. And it was for that reason that I knocked.

That’s when I heard a sound (a feminine-gender sound of lovemaking interrupted?) on the other side of the door. I wondered if my spent body could make it unseen down the steps without having to come face-to-face with either of them. Damn her! Damn him! And damn the French! That’s all they ever do. That’s all they ever think of!

Suddenly I conceived a very clear picture of just what it is that French Catholics whisper to their priests once inside those mysterious closet-like cubicles. “Tell me, Father, is the church positive, I mean really positive about the existence of sex in the afterlife?”

The door opened a wedge and Roger, not surprisingly, seemed surprised. Even so, he invited me in. What a really stupid thing to do.

“Thanks, anyway! But I don’t want to meet her. It was only that I happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I’d say hello. But I’m already late for an appointment, so hello and goodbye,” I heard myself say, while wondering where it is that I could possibly find to go.

He wore a mocking half-smile on his lips. “Meet her?” He swung the door back, allowing a fully unobstructed view of the nobody-there interior.

“You are hearing with jealous ears, my friend.”

“Maybe,” I said, not allowing myself to become completely
convinced until I saw a single glass of well-sipped burgundy on the table. “But it is you,
mon ami,
who speaks with a cruel and jealous tongue.”

“Yes, well, perhaps, but I deserved better treatment than you dispensed, dear lady. Every day I came to the hospital, yes? I count the days until we can be together again. Yes, it’s true. I’m like a crazy man counting the days. And you! What is it you do? At the last moment and under the most direct questioning, you finally admit that you’re not coming home. That you never had any intention—”

“Roger, it wasn’t nearly as premeditated as you’re trying to make it sound. Olivia Marcou made me realize that I simply could not leave this continent without doing what it was that I came here to do. I had to go. My obsession demanded it!”

“Well, I was taught that common courtesy demands that even a hotel reservation be cancelled, but did you?”

“No, but I wish that I had. I’m tired. I’m sorry, but I’m so very tired.”

Roger ceased the enumeration of my transgressions to look at me with unguarded vision.
“Mon Dieu, tu es fatiguée!”

“I’m more than tired. I want to retreat undisturbed, at least for a while, into a novocained existence.”

As he helped me off with my coat, he asked where my other things were. My suitcases?

I pointed toward the stairs and with barely a nod, he went after them. When he reappeared at the doorway with a suitcase in each hand, he asked, “Shall I hang up your clothes?”

“Don’t bother,” I told him. “They need your concern a lot less than I do.”

As he moved, his eyes seemed to fix upon me as though
I were a navigational chart and he was afraid of losing his way. I patted the space next to me on the sofabed. “Come, Roger, sit here. I’ll tell you some things that you’ll like to hear.”

Obedient as a schoolboy, he did as he was told. Then he placed his hands in his lap and stared at them as if attempting to understand a strange and unfathomable entity.

I brought him to me, stroking his face with my fingertips. Gradually, I felt his tension ease. He was submitting to me because only I had the power to make all the bad go away. Shoo! Oh, God, Roger, I wish, I really wish I could do that for you. I’ll try to do that for you.

“What I did that was wrong,” I told him, “I’m very sorry about. But you must never think that it was because I didn’t care for you. Because as much as I know how to love, Roger, I love you.”

31

T
HE
P
ARIS MORNING
that woke me was periwinkle blue. A diffused light caught the high points of his face, especially the forehead and cheeks, with a cool lucent quality. And that’s when it came to me that if I were the photographer, I’d know exactly what I wanted to photograph and why.

My hand made a crescent sweep across Roger’s warm bare back and I got to wondering if something can still have value even if it lasts for only a little while. He pressed to
ward me as a small boat might wash gently against its moorings. I answered my own question: Longevity can’t be the only test of love.