13
At a quarter to ten that evening,
Christiansen still hadn’t returned to the hotel. Esther was
desperate enough to suggest phoning the police, but Herr Leivick
wouldn’t hear of it.
“If he’s alive he’ll send us word, and if he
isn’t there is nothing we can do to change that. In either case, we
shall have to leave Vienna—our anonymity here is at an end.”
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled
unhappily. He had liked Inar; anyone could see that. He didn’t
believe he could still be alive after all this time. Esther wanted
to crawl into his arms and cry.
“You should have seen the look on his face,”
Itzhak kept repeating to Herr Leivick. “A hole in his shoulder big
enough to put your hand through, but he didn’t care—he didn’t even
seem to notice. Inar isn’t afraid of anything. The way he went
charging after that goddamned Nazi. I think he was ready to tear
him apart with his teeth.”
It was Inar now. Not Christiansen, or that
goy
bastard, but Inar. And Itzhak was happy because he had
found a new hero, and heroes can’t be killed. It was like an axiom
in geometry. Itzhak was the only one who was happy.
Esther wished he would shut up.
So they waited. Herr Leivick packed his
suitcase and made coffee, and they sat around in a silence
interrupted only occasionally by Itzhak’s assurance that all would
be well, that the man who had tried to kill them in the secondhand
clothing store was dead in a ditch somewhere and that nothing as
insignificant as a bullet could prevail against the House of
Israel’s new god.
But Esther was not so convinced. She had
seen, time and time again, that courage and virtue were helpless
against the superior power of evil, and all she could find it in
her heart to do was to mourn. She wished she had been left to go
mad in Mühlfeld Prison. She wished the shot that had wounded Inar
could have killed her first—anything before this. It just wasn’t in
her to surrender love once more. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t
cared about her, just as long as she could be free to love him in
peace. Now, finally, she had found something—someone—to love more
than her own life. If he really was dead, then she didn’t care what
happened to her.
“Have some coffee, my dear.” Herr Leivick
pressed the cup into her two hands, molding his own around them as
if he didn’t trust her not to spill it. He knelt beside her chair,
his eyes full of kindness. “It’s a hard thing, I know, but you and
I both have experience of hard things. There’s nothing to be done
about it, and it’s still possible he may be alive. Inar is no
sacrificial lamb.”
She touched his face with the tips of her
fingers, trying to smile. He only wanted to comfort her. How could
she possibly explain that there was no comfort for what she felt,
that even the sound of his words stabbed her through like a knife
with a broken point? She couldn’t say any of that, so she said
nothing, and tried to smile.
They waited in silence, the coffee untouched.
Finally Esther set the cup down on the floor.
That was just before the telephone rang.
“I’m in my room,” he said. Yes, it was Inar.
She could hear his voice as Herr Leivick tilted the receiver a
little away from his ear so that she could listen. It was really
he.
“Oh, God,” she whispered.
“I’ve been the guest of the American military
police. They’ve been patching me back together. Come on down, if
you like, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
That was all the invitation they needed. Herr
Leivick fished through his jacket pocket until he found the key,
and then all three of them went down the back staircase to the room
Inar had rented for himself and Itzhak after he and Herr Leivick
had decided she needed a room to herself.
Inar was sitting on his bed. His shirt was
off, and his whole chest was wrapped in heavy bandages. He looked
tired; his skin seemed almost gray. He was drinking a glass of
water.
“I killed him—self defense.” He showed his
teeth in a ferocious, mirthless grin. “Nobody minded. The war
crimes office in Nuremberg had him on their lists. His name was
Pilsner, just like the beer.”
“And he was working for Hagemann? You have no
doubts?”
Herr Leivick sagged into a chair. He seemed
afflicted, almost as if he had received news of a close friend’s
death.
“Would I kid you, Mordecai? He was SS, a real
hard case. Nobody was going to take that one alive.”
“I see.”
No one seemed to be paying attention to her,
so Esther sat down quietly on the bed beside Inar. She just wanted
to be near him. There was a patch of gauze taped onto his rib cage
just below the shoulder; the dried blood showed through from
underneath like a glowing ember. She would have liked to touch it,
but somehow she couldn’t summon the courage.
He glanced down at her and smiled
“It’s where they took the bullet out,” he
said. “It broke the rib, followed it around to the side, and then
ran out of steam. It was lying right under the skin.”
Herr Leivick made a noise in his throat, as
if he wanted to clear it.
“Do the Americans know who you are now?” he
asked.
They know who
I
am. but that’s all.”
Inar shrugged his massive shoulders—his body smelled warm and
clean. “They were very friendly once we’d sorted out who had been
trying to kill whom. They even drove me back to my hotel. I gave
them an address in the International Zone, thanked them very much
and waved goodbye, and then took a cab back here. Don’t worry about
the Americans.”
“Does it hurt a great deal?”
“I’ve felt better. What do you expect,
Mordecai? I’ve got two new bullet wounds, but they’ve got
company—old residents in the neighborhood. I’ll mend. But, you
know, we have to get her out of here.”
He made a curt gesture in Esther’s direction.
It was like being dismissed from existence.
“Itzikel, why don’t you take Esther back
upstairs? I want to have a little talk with Inar.”
Herr Leivick rose from his chair and slipped
his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He seemed to be
thinking about something else as he smiled at her, as if she had
stirred some memory.
On the stairway and in the two-room suite
that Herr Leivick and Esther divided between them, Itzhak was
morosely silent. He hardly even looked at her. He seemed angry, or
at least resentful. For twenty minutes together he stood leaning
back against the dresser, his arms folded across his chest, staring
at nothing.
“You should go to bed,” he said finally. What
could she possibly have done to offend him?
“I don’t feel like it.” She shook her head.
“I’m not tired—I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
It was not an answer that pleased. The
silence continued until Herr Leivick returned.
“I shouldn’t think of going down there just
yet,” he said, looking at Itzhak and shrugging his shoulders
helplessly. “I don’t think you’d find it particularly restful—our
friend seems to be in something of a mood. He’s playing his
cello.”
“He’s what?” Itzhak was frankly incredulous.
He seemed on the verge of laughing out loud until he saw the
expression on Herr Leivick’s face.
“Why not? You’ve seen the case often
enough—did you imagine he carries it around with him merely for the
exercise? He’s quite good. Besides, music is very soothing to the
nerves. He’s had a hard day. I’m only telling you because I think
it would be wise if you slept up here tonight”
Itzhak s mouth compressed into a thin
line.
“I wish you wouldn’t talk to me like I was a
kid, Mordecai.”
“You are a kid.”
“I wasn’t such a kid this afternoon, with
that Nazi.”
“I know—Inar told me about it. He said you
did very good work. But you still have to learn to be a little
tactful, Itzikel. You won’t he grown up until you learn that other
people have souls as well as you—even overgrown, golden-haired
goyim
like Inar Christiansen.”
“Would it be all right if I went?” Esther
asked suddenly. It was an impulse—she hardly knew where she found
the courage. “I could just sit outside his door and listen. I
wouldn’t disturb him.”
Herr Leivick turned to her with a curious,
measuring narrowness of the eyes. He almost seemed to have expected
something of the sort. Finally he held out the room key for her,
waiting until her fingers closed around it.
“Go ahead,” he said, with the deliberateness
of a man who has hit upon an idea and isn’t sure whether he is
pleased with it or not. “Go down and listen, if you want to. Who
can say? It might be just the sort of disturbance he needs. Itzhak,
just walk her down and make certain there aren’t any unfamiliar men
loitering around in the halls, would you?”
Itzhak didn’t seem at all pleased with the
assignment, but he stuck the pistol back into his belt, pulled his
sweater back down to cover it, and opened the door for her.
Already, at the foot of the stairwell, one
could hear the whisper of music that seemed simply to be part of
the atmosphere. like the scent of flowers in an empty room. She sat
down on the last step—Inar’s door was only a few feet away—and
looked up at Itzhak, smiling.
“You’ll be safe enough here,” he said,
looking nervously away. The sound of the cello seemed to upset him,
as if it hinted at the existence of things he would just as soon
not know about. “Do you want me to come down for you later?”
She shook her head. No, she didn’t want
that.
When he was gone, and she was alone there in
the hallway with that strangely human voice, she was almost a
little ashamed of her own sense of relief. Itzhak was a nice boy
and. as he had pointed out to her more than once, one of her own
kind, but he seemed to be waiting for something—something he almost
seemed to demand as a birthright—that she couldn’t possibly have
brought herself to give him. She didn’t love him, could never love
him, could never want to love him, even if “love” amounted to no
more than giving him freely what she had given to so many men
already, and all because they too had demanded it as a birthright.
Itzhak wasn’t anything like them, but somehow that didn’t make any
difference. It didn’t matter that he was her own kind, because she
didn’t have a kind anymore. She wasn’t a nice Jewish girl whose
father could speak for her while she hid in the next room. Her
father was dead, and there wasn’t anything nice about her. Itzhak
would have to look elsewhere.
But with Inar it was different. It wasn’t
simply that he too had been through the fire, although that was
part of it—that he knew the worst of her and could imagine all the
rest was a relief to her conscience. It wasn’t that he had saved
her from dying piece by piece in that Russian prison. She wanted
him. It was a new experience for her—she wanted to feel the weight
of his body over her. She wanted that helplessness. It would be the
first time any man had had her because for that moment and that
moment alone she needed it. It didn’t make any difference that he
didn’t care anything about her. Why should anyone care anything
about her? She wasn’t anybody. He could throw her out tomorrow
morning, but she would still have had something she could keep for
the rest of her life. It was what she imagined virgins must feel
like.
And he played the cello too. The sound of it
made her so happy she felt like crying.
General von Goltz had played the violin,
keeping time by tapping his foot on the floor. B, D, B, C-sharp,
A—just notes. He liked a piece with plenty of double-stops and
trills. He would play them over and over, each time exactly the
same. He liked an audience. The music that this man was playing in
the solitude of his hotel room was nothing like that. It almost
wasn’t music at all. It was almost like the sound of someone
speaking, except that the words were lost. It was like something
from childhood . It was like Isaiah prophesying in the
wilderness.
And it was beautiful. Unearthly—just a long
melodic line that never repeated itself, going on and on, tragic
and beautiful. A lament for Israel—for Esther Rosensaft. Except, of
course, that Inar Christiansen was not a Jew and hardly knew Esther
Rosensaft was alive. Still, it didn’t seem to make any difference.
There was room in that sadness, even for her.
And then, suddenly, it stopped. A second
later the door opened, and Inar was looking out at her with a
puzzled expression on his face. It was only then that she realized
she really had been crying.
“Have you come down to complain about the
noise?” he asked. It was hard to tell whether he was joking or
not.
“What was that you were playing?” she
asked.
“Nothing. Just doodles. It keeps the shoulder
muscles from stiffening up.” He glanced up and down the corridor
and then back at her, and then smiled. It seemed so strange to see
him smiling.
“Come in.”
He stood a little aside for her and then
closed the door again. She stood in the center of the room, not
quite sure what to do with her hands, until he made a curt gesture
toward a small wooden chair standing against the wall. His cello
rested against the bed
“Play something else,” she said as she sat
down. “Something that isn’t so sad.”
At once she felt like an idiot, but he merely
smiled again. He seemed to have taken the attitude that she was a
child who must be entertained, so he sat down once more on the bed,
hoisted the neck of his instrument up to his shoulder, and began to
play.
“What was that?”
“‘Little Brown Jug.’ It’s an American
song.”
“Please don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not—that’s what it’s called. I’m
sorry.”
He looked as if he were about to say
something else, but then he stopped, lowered his head, and began to
play again. This time he was concentrating, and the tone was
caressing and rich. The heavy, strong fingers of his left hand
danced back and forth across the strings. He hardly seemed to
realize anyone was there.