The Boxer (10 page)

He never tried to involve Paula in conversations about his new job; nothing ever happened that was important enough to mention to her. Paula took his occupation and his sudden wealth with composure; she showed no apparent interest, she asked no questions. Yet sometimes he had the feeling that he was participating in a small hidden war, as if it were a test of strength between them from which side the first word on the matter would come. Only at the very beginning, when he had explained the sense and purpose of his activity, which he never kept secret, did she hint at disapproval. “If you think this is right for you,” she had said.

After that, nothing more. The issue of making Aron’s days less empty appeared to be dealt with for her, since he looked more satisfied. She had other issues, other worries. For example, she hadn’t as yet succeeded in finding a home for Mark in the neighborhood.

P
lease don’t drink so much,” she said.

Aron was taken aback. Though Paula’s words didn’t sound presumptuous — rather they were expressed casually — they felt like an outrageous attack. Also the fact that she immediately left the room, almost coyly, didn’t mitigate their effect. He was a drunkard, and that was not acceptable to her. She had never made any demands, neither direct nor indirect;
that was exactly what was so outrageous
, suddenly he guzzled too much for her. He took the bottle and got
intentionally
drunk, way beyond norm, as a punishment to Paula. A punishment so severe that he woke up the next morning only long after Paula had left for work. He soon noticed something shocking: Paula hadn’t spent the night in the apartment; the bed was untouched and there were no leftovers from breakfast in the kitchen. She must have already left the apartment in the evening while he was asleep in front of the empty bottles. Aron checked to see if her clothes were missing, cosmetics, her nightgown, yet everything was in place. So he could still hope that this wasn’t a permanent departure, simply an irate reaction to his behavior, their first serious tiff. She’d be back in the evening, he reassured himself. If not, if such a trifle sufficed as a pretext for separation, that proved he was nothing more than a whim for her. But considering everything that had happened between them, that was out of the question.

He took an aspirin, made coffee, and considered with what right Paula asked him not to drink so much. That he drank too much lately, an average of a bottle a day, was beyond dispute. He could not compare himself with other drunkards, he didn’t know any, but a bottle a day, was undoubtedly a lot. And yet liquor had meant nothing to him before the war; he hadn’t been a drunkard back then. For the first time he noticed and confronted the mystery of how, in such a short time, such a large vice could have taken hold of him. A not too illuminating reason may be that it was easy for him to get cognac. That explained nothing; at most it facilitated the quenching of a sudden thirst, the origin of which was still unexplained. One could rather quote loneliness as a reason. The passive waiting for Mark, Paula’s absence until evening, the mindless calculating and occasional meetings with Tennenbaum or a dealer, with whom he didn’t find, or look for, closer contact. All this put together spelled boredom, which was easier to bear under the effects of alcohol. Yet boredom didn’t explain everything either,
a third of the bottle at most;
the remaining two-thirds, according to Aron’s own words, remained unexplained.

S
ince I’m already talking about those times, this also belongs to the story. But I don’t like talking about it.”

Aron drinks in little sips, his fourth or fifth glass today; he’s not drunk, just a little tipsy. He doesn’t drink very often during our conversations, for my purposes, not often enough. When he’s drunk my questions seem to bother him less than usual. He doesn’t react so sensitively and, what is more, he almost anticipates my questions. He takes a break on his own initiative and answers them, even if, as is the case today, they haven’t yet been posed.

“You mustn’t think that a camp like that ends from one day to the next. That would be nice. You’re freed, get out, and everything’s over. Unfortunately it’s not like that; you imagine it’s far too easy — the camp runs after you. The barrack pursues you, the smell pursues you, the hunger pursues you, the beatings pursue you, the fear pursues you. The lack of dignity pursues you, and the insults. Years later you still wake up and need several minutes before you get used to the fact that you woke up not in the barrack but in your own room. But it’s not just like that at night with your damned dreams. Also in the middle of the day you suddenly see someone who isn’t even there, and you hear someone talking to you who has long been buried, and it hurts you in a place where no one has hit you since then. From outside it looks like a normal life; in reality you’re still sitting in the camp, which continues to exist in your head. You fear that this is how insanity starts. And you suddenly notice that liquor helps. Sure, it doesn’t erase anything from existence and it doesn’t change the past, but it blurs, eases, helps you get over the dreck. How could I simply tell Paula, Fine, starting tomorrow I’ll stop drinking?”

T
he closer the clock hand advanced to half past six, the more restless Aron became. In the early afternoon he had a little drink, just a glass; he didn’t want to let it come to an open battle should Paula — as he firmly believed she would — appear punctually. Actually, he knew perfectly well that the abstinence to which he’d committed himself would be only temporary, yet that wasn’t what it was about. Paula mustn’t find him in the same condition in which she had left him yesterday. He was prepared, but only over a certain period of time, to return gradually to his quota of one bottle a day; perhaps he could even drink less than that. After all, Paula had said, “Don’t drink so much” — he remembered that clearly — and not “Stop drinking.” He was prepared to explain in all candor that he was trying to do what he could, that he was doing his very best.

Paula arrived at the usual time. She didn’t give him a kiss and acted like nothing had happened between them. She went into the kitchen to prepare dinner as usual. Aron remained seated at the table, relieved, until he heard her call, “It’s ready.”

As they sat across from each other, he got the feeling that she was different, unwilling to speak, and more serious. He didn’t exclude the possibility that she was waiting for an apology. Yet it still wasn’t clear to him who owed an apology to whom — he to Paula for nothing other than his usual behavior the previous night, or Paula to him for her absolutely unusual one. He thought, he says, it best if neither one apologized.

“Did you listen to the radio?” she asked.

“Today? No.”

“Did you read the papers?”

“No. What happened?”

Paula went out, took a newspaper out of her bag, laid it on the table, and went on eating. Aron leafed through it quickly; nothing particular caught his attention until Paula said irritably, “Can’t you read? Right on the first page.”

The news was that the Americans had dropped a new type of bomb on a Japanese city. Ghastly devastation, the paper said, an unbelievable number of victims. Aron asked, “Is this what you’re talking about?”

Paula found this question cynical. She had firmly believed in his indignation, and here he was asking whether she meant this or something else. Aron felt no indignation. Not because, he says, he was looking for an argument; on this of all days, with the smoke of yesterday’s fight still burning in his nostrils, he was in the mood for reconciliation. But concerning this bomb affair he thought radically differently from Paula, and he didn’t want to tell her what she wanted to hear. He told himself, and then her too, that far away a damned pack of fascists still hadn’t given up, and with all the goodwill in the world he couldn’t see why he should get upset if someone gave these criminals a colossal slap in the face.

“You call this a slap in the face?” Paula cried out. She was, in a way that he hadn’t observed before, angry. First of all with the bomb droppers and now with him. Her voice cracked so that to Aron, so he says, it sounded almost childish. The war was decided long ago there in Japan, she said, everybody knew that. “Only to spare a couple of their own men, they kill hundreds of thousands” —- what was this if not outright murder, hysterical murder? she cried. They demonstrate their pointless power and turn themselves into criminals. This Truman, she said, wiped out an entire city with just one bomb, “and you dare to call it a slap in the face?”

“Don’t stick to that one expression,” Aron said.

Paula stood up and slammed the door. Aron sat, frightened, and wondered from how many directions fights brewed; he was positively surrounded. When he walked into the living room he didn’t find Paula at the table; she was lying in bed and had taken the radio with her. He could hear the voice of a speaker indistinctly through the door. He had waited the whole day and hadn’t got around to working. He took the books and cognac from the cupboard and sat down. At least this time she had stayed home.

Hours later he also went to the bedroom. Paula was asleep, the radio was still playing music. Aron made an effort to be quiet so as not to wake her up. Though he didn’t feel drunk, he was afraid she would smell a relapse, even after a particularly thorough brushing of his teeth. When he turned off the radio she woke up and lit a cigarette, ready for a new exchange of opinions.

“Please don’t start where we left off,” Aron said.

She didn’t react curtly; she pushed an amicable hand under his head —
thafs how she was
. “Ah, Arno, you don’t understand anything,” she said.

“What don’t I understand?”

“Because you’re full of hate,” she said.

“I’m full of hate?”

“Maybe it’s understandable, maybe it’s quite normal, but it’s not right. In any case, it’s not right like this. I’m sure I’m making it simpler than it really is, but still, you have to stop seeing only enemies everywhere. One has to try to overcome the desire for revenge. If the old laws are still valid, then the same things will keep happening over and over again.”

“When did I speak of revenge?”

“Then you just think of revenge.”

“You seem to have good sources.”

“Do you seriously want to assert that when an evil government makes war, it’s all right to drop a bomb and kill a whole city in one blast?”

So she had reverted to her earlier argument; Paula was stubborn. “First of all,” Aron said, “there is no government that can make war by themselves and, second, of course it would be good if one could abolish the old laws. Peace, happiness, quiet, do you think I have something against that? But everyone must abolish them, everyone without exception. Just one exception is the crack through which new evil can crawl. Only an idiot would stand up and call out, From today you can do to me what you will, I’m keeping the peace. If you try that today, tomorrow you’ll be in the gas chamber.”

“Yes, you would react like that.” Paula sighed and pulled her hand back.

Aron was still far from asleep, perhaps not drunk enough; he wanted to change the mood. After an
appro-priate pause
he asked, “Is there any news about Mark?”

His trick worked; Paula straightened up. Yes, she said, there was news. She lit a second cigarette. That is, there was basically nothing new, the novelty lay in the fact that she now saw the pointlessness, having considered her resources, of making further efforts to settle Mark in a different home. She had been able to trace only two homes altogether in Berlin and the surrounding area; she had gone to one of them, Brüningslinden, herself; it was cheap and pretty but overcrowded, with no respite in sight. She had to convince herself with her own eyes. And in the second home, after a phone call with the director, things didn’t look all that different.

“So what do we do now?”

“There’s only one thing I can think of,” she said. “You must ask the Russians. There might be a place.”

“The Russians?”

Though not at all absurd, since he lived in the part of the city that was called the Soviet sector, this possibility had never occurred to Aron. Until then, everything had been run by Paula.

O
ne moment. You just spoke of her indignation about the bombs in Japan. So, in other words, indignation against America. And it was American aid that was available to her. Did she perhaps feel that it wasn’t right to accept help from this source any longer? Is this why she thought that Mark would be better off with the Russians?”

A rare event: Aron praises me, in that he says I asked a good question. He had thought about that himself, yet he had come to no conclusion. “It may have been a coincidence. It was peculiar, however, that of all days she chose this one to make her suggestion. I never asked her, as you can imagine, but I don’t think your suspicion is nonsensical, hypersensitive as she was.”

M
ark‘s accommodation through the Russians went so smoothly that Aron was annoyed that he hadn’t considered the possibility earlier. He went to the Soviet headquarters at the address Paula had found, which was the last service Rescue provided him (aside from the monthly food packages, which he saw no reason to cancel). After a brief search he sat in front of the officer in charge, who welcomed him politely, but on hearing Aron’s request, in his mother tongue too, soon behaved as if his very own brother was sitting in front of him. Waves of warmth, Aron says, bounded toward him; even a bottle of vodka appeared in a heartbeat, taken from the desk in a wink of an eye. The officer promised his full support. He said he wasn’t a specialist in such operations, yet there was no doubt that in three days at most Aron could pick up the necessary authorization. “We already saved your son from the fascists, it would be really unfortunate if we couldn’t tear him away from the Americans, too.” They sat there for an hour and emptied the bottle, the first glass to success, the others, for several reasons, to Odessa, because they spoke the same language, or simply because they liked each other.