13

After supper Rost found himself strolling in the city centre, down a steep street that led to the canal. It was a fresh, starry evening in the wake of the rain. The sky arched arrogantly and majestically over the roofs. There was a distant smell of hay in the air. The summer night breathed soundlessly, and the city lay stripped bare before him, imbued with movement, washed shining clean for the Sabbath. From time to time a shiver ran along the skin of the canal, disrupted for a moment by the flames of the street lamps reflected in its waters. Hurrying trams, some empty and some crowded, rattled to and fro along the banks, crossed the bridges with a wooden, slightly hollow sound, and disappeared into the labyrinth of the city. Blue necklaces of electrical sparks occasionally flashed from the network of wires above them, with the explosive sound of dry firewood burning. A dark, pleasant coolness rose from the water below, like that which sometimes bursts forth from a sunless courtyard on a blazing summer day.

With his hands in his trouser pockets and a swaggering air, a cold cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Rost approached Stock’s, from whose open windows and door a roar of laughter rolled down the already deserted alley. It was the baritone voice of Yasha the Odessan: Rost recognised it at once. In the main hall the waiters were clearing the tables. Standing between two tables, Reb Chaim Stock perused the Neue Freie Presse with naked, watery eyes, the pince-nez pushed down to the tip of his nose. Not far off, his wife sat idle, small and square, her broad, wrinkled face glistening as usual with the grease of the kitchen. On her little eyes, which resembled burned coffee beans, sat a pair of spectacles, their arms flying through the thickets of the wig spread like a big brown net over her temples. Behind the lenses she stared into space, her hands folded in her lap, a bunch of keys fastened to her apron as inseparably as a limb to her shrivelled body.

It was a holiday. The cooks had taken their allotted leave, the daughter Malvina had gone to the theatre or somewhere else with her poet and his great future, and Reb Chaim Stock and his wife were reluctantly obliged to take a holiday too. Deprived of their contact with the kitchen, which was different for each, they found themselves depleted and superfluous, at a loss. For each, in their own way, the kitchen had provided a point to their existence. Apart from Malvina, the daughter of their old age, their other children were all already married. The sons, short, pious Jews with kosher little beards, engaged in businesses of one kind or another; and one other daughter, also married — Dora Pelz, a woman with a wrinkled, ugly face and a boutique for expensive lingerie, who in her spare time wrote novels that had never been published. Nevertheless, she regarded herself and was regarded by the rest of the family as the most intellectual of them. She was a liberated woman, uninhibited, modern to the tips of her fingers; her big teeth stuck out of her mouth, and her thin lips were unable to stop them. Her novels had two guaranteed readers: herself and Max Karp. Although the latter, to the extent that etiquette permitted, tried to escape, when he failed to do so he would sit with her for hours, read her manuscripts and praise them, argue with her at length about the emancipation of women, and wear her out with his poetry. Afterwards, to Malvina, he would say with a dismissive smile: ‘Schund.’ [A term in common use at the time for trashy romantic literature.] She did not quarrel with his opinion. If Max Karp said ‘Schund’ it was Schund.

In the next room a few of the gang were gathered. Rost was welcomed with cheer, and Alfred the waiter was immediately sent to bring him something to drink.

‘Misha?’ said Marcus Schwartz in reply to Rost’s question. ‘In the general hospital.’

‘Ah! Since when?’

‘Two days ago. Did you read in the papers,’ Schwartz lowered his voice, ‘about a bomb thrown at the Russian ambassador in Schwarzenbergplatz four days ago? An assassination attempt that failed. The press is trying to play the whole thing down, on orders from higher up. In any case, they say Misha had a hand in it. The assassin wasn’t caught, of course. In other words, they arrested some innocent man as a smokescreen.’

‘Not a word, understand?’ warned Yasha. ‘We bury it here! Anyone who talks can sell his bones to the rag-and-bone man on the spot. He won’t need them anymore, and afterwards he won’t get a penny for them.’

‘Swallow it and it will leave no trace,’ said the heroic tenor, coming to his aid in a biblical vein. ‘After all, a friend is a friend.’

‘Pity it didn’t succeed!’ blurted Akidos the painter, Marcus Schwartz’s roommate. He sat there, long and stiff as a plank with his grey, beardless face, full of suppressed anger, as usual, at the world and everything in it.

‘In America,’ said Arnold Kroin, ‘bless their hands, something like that always succeeds. They know what they’re doing over there.’

‘Were you ever actually in America, tenor?’ Yasha teased him. ‘I for one don’t believe it.’

‘Perhaps you don’t believe that I am Arnold Kroin either?’

‘That I believe. Who else would agree to inhabit your skin?’

In the meantime Rost questioned Marcus Schwartz in a whisper about the consequences of the assassination attempt, and discovered that only the horses were killed, while the coachman by some miracle escaped with his life. He made up his mind to visit Misha in the hospital. There was no doubt that he had been implicated in the attempt.

He took a sip of his beer and glanced absent-mindedly at the tenor’s broad, fat face, which always seemed grubby and in which three gold teeth glittered as if surrounded by mud. A mass of flesh hung from it limply, as if not properly attached to the bones, unseemly and shapeless, with two little eyes buried in its folds. Doughy flesh, mousy hair, gold teeth — these made up the tenor’s face and produced his hoarse, smoky voice. He was greedy, his appetite insatiable. Somewhere in a hamlet in Galicia he had abandoned a wife and three children, while he sang like a broken gramophone at Jewish weddings, folk tunes such as ‘Shulamith and the Well’, ‘Hat a Yid a weibeleh’ [Yiddish: ‘A Jew has a little wife’.], and so on, filling his belly to bursting and receiving a few coins into the bargain. He lived in a little room too small for him, suffered from asthma, quarrelled morning and night with his landlady, Frau Feuertzing, over the rent he owed her. From time to time he kept her quiet with two or three florins, and at other times he spent the money he owed her on a prostitute he picked up in the street. Sometimes, when he had too much to drink, he became sentimental and full of self-pity. Then he would curse America for destroying him, that blood-sucking leech which drained a man’s blood to the last drop, may the earth swallow it up! He would announce to anyone willing to listen that tomorrow — finished! enough! — he would show the world what he was made of. Caruso, you say? A zero! A chicken! No voice to speak of! But he, Arnold Kroin, his name would be in every mouth; Arnold Kroin was not yet lost! And the next minute he would give way again to the depths of dejection, and promise his audience that the next day he would no longer be among the living. He would give that old witch Frau Feuertzing something to remember him by — he would hang himself in her room! He already had a rope ready. No, no! Don’t try to stop him; his mind was made up! The next day he would show up as if nothing had happened, propelling his heavy body, dirty, unshaven, smiling with his gold teeth, and making jokes as usual.

He wore a brightly striped shirt with a celluloid collar to save on laundry costs; a strange suit in the American style, the jacket with wide padded shoulders and the trousers wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, too short for him; and pale-orange shoes, shabby and scuffed with the heels worn down, but American all the same. For the weddings he would dress in black, the jacket shiny as silk with aged, worn-out striped trousers, and a black bowler hat instead of the reddish one for every day. His outfit was completed by a bamboo cane, a remnant of better days. In general, he looked like a caricature of America.

Arnold Kroin smiled without replying to Yasha’s insults. After a moment he turned to Rost and asked if he would treat him to a glass of beer.

Rost said he would.

Reb Chaim Stock stood in the doorway and surveyed the company benevolently, his hat pushed back to expose the high, lined forehead of a Talmudic scholar, the newspaper dangling from his hand. Yasha invited him to join them in a glass, but he declined.

‘I’m too old for fun and games,’ he said, not without a hint of condescension. A few years ago, oho! Back then he could do anything — none of them could have rivalled him in drinking! But now he was not fit company for them. His voice sounded drained, toneless, choking, as if something were constricting his throat. Then he coughed, a few abrupt little coughs.

‘But with the maidservants,’ Yasha said with a laugh when the old man left, ‘he pretends to be young, the old goat!’

‘Wally the little brunette told me,’ said Arnold Kroin, ‘that he offered her five florins. She laughed in his beard. She gave him an address …’

‘And you, tenor, what kind of business do you have with Wally?’

The tenor drained his beer and puffed silently on his cigar. He came to a decision. He looked at Rost, as if taking his measure.

Marcus Schwartz started telling a boring story in a dull, monotonous voice, about some lawyer in Berlin who seduced young girls with the help of his wife. A good-looking young couple from the upper classes, and suddenly the scandal came to light. He had read all about it in the newspaper. Marcus Schwartz had a peculiar talent for blunting the edge of any stimulating story. Everything that came out of his mouth became banal, dull, and spiritless.

Rost called the waiter and paid. His friends urged him to stay, but to no avail. There was a general feeling of boredom in the air. Everyone stood up to leave. The tenor took the opportunity to ask Rost in a whisper for a loan of two florins. As soon as he got what he asked for, he took off, his stiff, heavy body seeming to croak like his voice as he walked. Yasha accompanied Rost to the end of the road, where he paused to take his leave.

‘And Fritzi?’ asked Rost.

‘I’m sick of her.’ And after a moment: ‘You want her? She likes you; she’ll be glad to have you.’

‘No.’

‘She’s a great girl! You’ll enjoy her.’

‘You’re behaving like a Jewish father with an unmarried daughter.’ Rost laughed and shook his hand.