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And the frozen defeated men limped away across the war-torn countryside of Europe, their eyes black with pain and with shock. ‘Yes, that’s the end of it, that’s the end of the dream. That’s the end of the conquest of the world. You have paid for this victory in blood, sweat, tears and suffering. Take a good look for that’s the last you’ll ever see of Germany, and the menace of Germany in Europe. We have fought the good fight together and we have won – the free countries of the world.’
Beside Martha Thomas Stern shifted about in his seat and said steadily under his breath, ‘Bastards, bastards, bastards.’ On the other side, Solly Cohen very softly whistled the Internationale between his teeth. Leaning forward, Martha looked for Anton. How did he feel, the German, looking at his ghost-like countrymen, listening to the cheap easy sneer? His regular profile, like one on a coin, showed beside the pretty upturned profile of the red-head. Neither face said anything, they were people at a cinema, and so, presumably, was she, Martha, though she raged with useless protest which expressed itself: ‘I bet that commentator was making his voice say three cheers for Chamberlain at Munich, I bet he was.’
‘Well of course,’ said Solly, and whistled the Internationale, more loudly. Joss leaned forward to ask Martha: ‘Whose idea was it to bring my little brother to the pictures?’ And Solly laughed aloud as Martha said: ‘Mine.’
‘Shhh,’ said someone in front; and someone else let out a sudden loud raspberry – the whole cinema seethed frustration, anger, resentment, discomfort. Suddenly, from somewhere at the back, there was a shrill whistle, and then a shout: ‘Up the RAF!’
‘Trust them,’ said Joss approvingly, as the tension broke.
‘We shall miss you,’ said Solly loudly to the RAF, invisible tonight in their mufti.
A scuffle. The manager appeared, an outraged presence; torches swung agitatedly; the whole cinema turned to watch a couple of men, their faces the broad you-aren’t-fooling-me faces of the North English, being escorted to the door. ‘All right, I can walk, thank you very much!’ Then a last muffled shout: ‘The RAF for ever, I don’t think.’
When everyone again turned to see what was going on, a small dark aircraft sped, turned, soared across skies lit with fire, while tiny dark eggs spilled into a dark city which flung up great showers of spark and flame.
Solly said, loudly copying the practised jeer of the announcer (who was, however, saying in a voice unctuous with victory that the city – which? – was not without water supplies, sewage or railways as a result of this successful bombing raid) – ‘And see how they run, the filthy vermin, away from the cleansing bombs of our gallant boys.’
A man turned around from the front and said: ‘If you haven’t got any patriotic feelings why don’t you go home where you came from?’
‘Thanks,’ said Solly, ‘I will.’ He unwound his long thin person from the discomfort of the seat and made his way out, whistling the Internationale. ‘Jesus,’ said Joss, moving up to fill Solly’s seat near to Martha, ‘I suppose one day he’ll grow up.’ He was embarrassed for his brother. ‘I don’t know,’ said Martha, ‘I felt the same.’
On the other side of Martha, Thomas Stern sat, silent. But his hands gripping the arm-rests vibrated with tension. He muttered, steadily, ‘Bastards, bastards, bastards.’
When Martha turned to look at him, he said: ‘And you shut up. All of you shut up. You can keep out of it.’
Martha said: ‘Who?’
Joss’s restraining hand came on her forearm and he said: ‘Better leave Thomas alone. A friend of his was with the people who entered Belsen, he had a letter today.’
On the screen now appeared shots of jungle – a lush scene, which might have done for a musical. But flames engulfed it. Flames from a flame-thrower seared the flesh of men, the substance of trees and plants. Black ash crumbled where men, trees, and plants had been, and drifted across the screen in greasy smoke which could almost be smelt in the cinema. An island in the Pacific. After all, it was only ‘the war in Europe’ that was due to end any day. ‘The war in the Pacific’ was being fought from island to island still, while Europe crumbled in famine, cold, and ruined cities. Which island was this? But Martha had missed its name, she would never know which island she had watched being scorched by the flamethrowers, just as she would never know which German city she had seen being pulverized to ruins.
This was the main film now. A thick slow tune began to pulse through the cinema. It was music easy and sexual which would, in a moment, have welded the thousand people in the cinema into a whole. A heavy velvet curtain swirled across the screen and back again, and there appeared the apparently naked back of a blonde woman. She stood in a doorway over which was a sign in electric lights: Stage Door, and when she turned to smile at a group of soldiers (American) and at the audience (in central Africa) it became evident that she was not as naked as it had at first appeared: her dress was held up in the front by a ribbon which tied it around her neck. Sequins flashed and glittered as the flames had flickered a moment before, and her great friendly mascaraed eyes were as close as the hollowed staring eyes of the frozen German soldiers. Her homely breasts bulged almost into the teeth of the audience, and the music intensified as half a dozen GIs filed grinning shyly past the naked shoulders and sequined breasts of a famous film star (acting as hostess for the sake of the war effort) into the club.
‘I thought we were seeing The Seventh Cross?’ said Thomas. ‘For crying out loud. I’ve got work to do.’
It was Martha’s fault – she had brought them to the wrong film. Thomas had already stood up and was on his way out. Joss followed. Anton got up, with the red-headed girl. In a moment they were all on their way out, and people shushed and said: ‘What did you come for then?’
They assured the manager they had only come for the news, so upset was he that six patrons were leaving all at once, and found Solly still on the pavement. Apparently he had known all the time that the main film was bound to send them out of the cinema, and he had been waiting for them.
The seven stood on the pavement. The Cohen boys, Solly and Joss, both finished with uniform, both about to start life in peacetime. Athen the Greek: far from being finished with war, his life was consciously planned for years of war, civil war, revolution. Thomas Stern, frowning on one side of the group, obviously wanting to leave it and be alone with his anger. He saw Martha looking at him. He said in a low violent voice: ‘All right, Martha. But I tell you, I’d torture every one of them myself, with my own hands.’
She said: ‘Some of them looked about fifteen.’
‘Well? They should simply be stamped out – they should be wiped out, like vermin.’ But as he stood, sombre, apart from them, he made himself smile and said: ‘All right then. I’ll shut up. I’ll shut up for now, anyway.’
Anton, the German, who waited day by day for the moment he could go home to Germany, was talking to the red-haired girl. She was looking up at him with self-conscious glances of admiration.
And suddenly Martha understood that this girl was Anton’s girl. For Anton was self-conscious about her, was flattered that this girl, or woman (she was vivacious rather than pretty, with green eyes too quick and wary for youth), had publicly claimed him. She was now taking his arm. Just so, Martha thought, a young man publicly announced, without saying it in words, ‘this is my girl’. He stood smiling, while the others looked on, not looking at Martha. And Anton did not look at Martha. The girl did, however. Not more, though, than she did at the others: she included Martha in her rapid self-conscious glances, while she kept laughing up towards Anton’s pale and handsome face.
Martha felt, as she knew she was bound to feel, a pang. But she suppressed it: I don’t want him, I don’t enjoy him, but if someone else takes him then I start crying! She was thinking: Well, and so the conversation we had last week was meant to be taken seriously, was it? He really does mean to get himself a woman? Well, good for him.
The group was drifting across the street to a tea-room. Martha was introduced, at last, to Millicent; Millicent, Martha. Hello, how are you?
Martha thought: Thomas and Solly and Joss are going to feel sorry for me because Anton has a girl! This caused Martha genuine pain, genuine resentment. She was furious with herself.
Outside the tea-room, the group hesitated, not knowing whether it would remain a unit for another hour, or allow itself to separate into its parts. Martha arranged a smile and looked towards her husband and Millicent. But their arms were no longer linked. Anton stood on one side, apparently embarrassed. Solly bent over the girl, or woman, who stared straight up at the tall young man, her face almost flat under the white lights of the tea-room entrance, as if she had had a tuck taken in the back of her neck, or as if her head had been cut off and carelessly laid on her shoulders. At any rate, what with her red beads, and her agonized smile (from which Martha gathered that she had not known until now that Anton was married, or at least had not known that Martha, so very much present, was his wife) and a white pleated dress which carried out the same innocent sacrificial theme, she looked like a victim. Anton stood quietly apart, smiling, smiling. But socially – just as if nothing had happened, as if he had not been on show with a young woman not his wife. Solly’s face was ecstatic with jeering triumph: it shouted to everyone: ‘Look, this old stick Anton’s got a girl.’ And, of course: ‘Martha’s free!’ for his eyes were alive with dramatic intention, playing over Millicent’s face, darting sideways at Martha, to see how she took it, swivelling to the others, to make sure they understood. ‘You can’t go yet,’ he said to Millicent. ‘What is all this? The night’s yet young.’ She protested and said that she must. Her eyes were almost closed in the energy of her outstretched painful smile which pride forced her to maintain. Anton stood silently by, waiting for Solly to put an end to it. Athen, Joss, Thomas Stern, stood watching. Athen as usual looked from a distance: it was not for him to criticize, his attitude said. Thomas Stern, disapproving, juggled objects in the pockets of his khaki shorts – uniform shorts still, they would be for months yet. Joss stared at his brother as Martha felt he must have been doing all his life, with an affectionate but bitter smile of criticism. During the few moments of this cruel scene under the white harsh lights of the Old Vienna Tea Room, Martha repudiated Solly for ever: his ‘childishness’, his open jeering triumph, and above all, his humiliation of the unfortunate girl, lost him any possibility (if there had been one! Martha defended herself, hastily) of ever, at any time, having an affair with Martha. Then Joss put out his hand, laid it on Martha’s shoulder, and said with a smile clumsily tactful: ‘Well Matty, and what are we all going to do with you, taking us to the wrong film?’
He took Martha into the tea-room with him, and by the time they sat side by side, the group had come in after them. Millicent was not with them. Anton sat opposite Martha, giving her a smile both triumphant and apologetic. Athen sat near Anton, and began talking to him: which was his way of saying he did not propose to pass any judgment on what had been happening. Thomas Stern sat on the other side of Martha and he said again: ‘Well Matty, I always thought you were attractive, but not for me, man. I’m a peasant myself, and so are you. But now you’re sick, you’ve got everything – as far as I am concerned, I’m telling you, you can have me any time!’
They all laughed, even Athen. But there sat Thomas, leaning forward to look into Martha’s face, absolutely serious. Martha thought that he spoke as if they had been alone. Her nerves were telling her he meant what he said.
She said, joking to lessen the tension: ‘So I’m a peasant?’
‘Yes,’ he said, still with the same straight pressure of his strong blue eyes. ‘Yes. But don’t you get well too quickly, I like you all strange and delicate.’
‘It’s the first time I’ve heard that Matty is ill,’ Anton said, on a ‘humorous’ grumbling note that restored normality.
‘Where’s Solly?’ asked Martha quickly, to stop them examining her.
‘I told him to get lost,’ said Joss.
‘Who was eating all those kebabs with him last week?’
‘Look,’ said Joss, suddenly very serious – with an intensity not far off that which Thomas had shown a few minutes before. ‘Listen. He’s my brother – for my sins. I see him for meals. Etcetera. For my sins. After all, when he’s at home we even live in the same house. But I tell you, keep clear of him! He’s one of the people to keep clear of.’
Martha said, after a moment: ‘Well, well!’ meaning to remind him of what he had said about ‘contradictions’.
Again he looked at her, straight and intent, determined to make her accept what he was saying. ‘He’s the kind of person things go wrong for. Always. If you tell him to bring a tray in from the kitchen, he drops it. If he drives a car to the garage, he’ll take the wrong turning. I tell you, better watch out, I’m warning you.’
They all began to laugh, because of his intensity, because they thought: families! Joss maintained his calm while they laughed, and when they had finished: ‘All right. But remember I said so when I’ve gone.’
Of course, Joss was going: Martha had forgotten. The fact that she was disappointed was announced by her flesh, which had been relaxing in the most pleasant of understandings with Joss. Good Lord! she said to herself. Quite obviously I’m determined to have an affair with somebody. And I’ve only this very moment realized it. Well – if Joss is going, then it’s a pity, because this is the first time since we’ve known each other that he’s actually been attracted to me I can feel he is.
‘And now,’ remarked Athen, ‘we shall all eat cream cakes and drink real coffee.’ He meant to remind them of the newsreel they had just seen. They looked towards Anton, towards the fair and handsome German. The waitress, a pretty woman in a frilled lace pinafore and a frilled mob cap designed to remind customers of the films they had all seen of Old Vienna, stood smiling by their table, and Anton said: ‘Coffee, with cream, and cakes.’ Having made his point, he looked at his friends, and made it again: ‘I’m not going to starve myself for them. They deserve a good hiding, and that’s what they are getting.’
‘It’s natural you should feel like that, comrade,’ said Athen, in gentle, sorrowful rebuke.
Thomas Stern said: ‘If we all ate fifty cream cakes each, what difference would it make to them?’ His them were the victims of the concentration camps, and as the plate of cakes descended between them from the manicured hand of the waitress, he took an éclair, making a public statement, and instantly bit a large piece out of it. Anton took a cake, so did Joss, so did Martha. But Athen shook his head and sat frowning, suffering.
‘Have a heart,’ said Thomas. ‘You’re making us feel terrible.’
Athen hesitated, then he said: ‘Yes, I know, and I’m sorry for it. But recently I understood: these days, after being with you, I find myself thinking, this wine is bad, or this wine is good, I can’t eat this meat, this is a bad meal. I find myself going into a good restaurant.’
‘Cheer up,’ said Joss. ‘There aren’t any good restaurants. You couldn’t corrupt yourself if you tried.’
They all laughed, wanting to laugh. They were irritated by Athen, and ashamed that they were. And, now that he was forcing such thoughts on them, they sat and looked at him, elegant in his new cream-coloured suit.
Anton said, smiling, reaching for another cake: ‘I see you have found yourself a tailor, comrade Athen.’
This could have been taken as small talk. But they all knew each other far too well. They knew, almost before Anton had finished speaking, that Athen would go pale, would suffer, could be expected to lie awake that night, that tomorrow he would come to one or another of them and say: ‘But I couldn’t send the money home to my family. And it was not an expensive suit.’
And Martha, at least, knew that Anton was teasing Athen (as Anton would describe it), attacking Athen (as Athen would feel it), because he felt guilty over Millicent.
Suddenly Thomas got up saying: ‘I’ve got work. Matty, I want to see you. I’ll ring you at your office. I’ve got something to talk over with you. Solly’s up to something and Clive de Wet says he needs our help.’ Normally Thomas would have made a joke for Anton’s benefit: If your husband will give me permission – or something like that. But he nodded briefly at Anton, laid his hand on Athen’s shoulder as if to say: Take it easy, for heaven’s sake! smiled at Martha, then at Joss, and went out.
‘I suppose it’s one of his girls,’ said Anton.
‘No,’ said Joss. ‘He’s upset. A friend of his was with the troops that went into Belsen. He got a long letter. I read it.’
‘Oh well then, that’s different,’ said Anton, almost in the tone he would have used as a chairman, accepting someone’s excuse for leaving early.
Meanwhile Martha sat, registering the fact that Thomas’s going off had upset a pleasant tension: she had been sitting, equally weighted, so to speak, between Joss and Thomas.
Athen got up, saying: ‘I’m sorry, comrades, but I must leave you. I am sorry that tonight I am such bad company.’ He went off by himself.
Anton took the bill to pay at the cash desk. Joss and Martha, alone, turned towards each other.
‘You’re having an affair with Solly?’ said Joss, direct.
‘No.’
‘It looked as if you were.’
‘No.’
Now Joss examined her with the intimate frankness licensed by their long friendship, and then glanced at Anton’s tall, correct back.
‘You two not getting on too well, is that it?’
‘Not very.’
He said, in exactly the same tone of raillery as Solly: ‘Well, we did warn you, didn’t we? You just wouldn’t listen to us, that’s your trouble.’
Martha smiled, decided against telling him that the despised Solly had used almost the same words earlier, and said: ‘Yes, you did.’
‘Well,’ said Joss, practically. ‘It’s a pity I’ve got to love you and leave you. But when the authorities get around to letting me have the right bits of paper, I’m off up North.’
Here Anton came back. Joss said, rising: ‘Matty, can you have the office open for me tomorrow? I’ll ring you.’
He went off, as she nodded.
Now Anton and Martha walked together out of the Old Vienna Tea Rooms. She was thinking, as she sent glances at his pallor, the tension of his mouth: Is he upset because of Millicent or because of Germany? Last week he had sat silent on the edge of his bed, holding a small scrap of newsprint. Later she had found it in a drawer. It described how in a panic flight from Eastern Germany, away from the advancing Russian armies, women had left the train at the stops, carrying wrapped in newspaper the corpses of babies that had died of hunger. The women buried them in the snow by the side of the railway tracks. Famished dogs came afterwards, and dug up the half-buried babies. The mass bombings of German cities, the atrocities, the concentration camps, the frightful destruction of his country, the fact that his countrymen fled like guilty ghosts before the armies of half the world, the fact that they struggled and died and starved like animals – all of this, which surely must have reached the very essence of the man, was received by him with no more than the comment: They deserve a good hiding. But over this, the small scrap of newspaper about the babies wrapped in newspaper, he had sat and wept secretly, the tears running down his cheeks, then he had dried his cheeks carefully, with a large white handkerchief – then sat again, silent, crying.
Martha put her arm into her husband’s arm, and let it drop again as he said: ‘What does Thomas want to see you for?’
‘I don’t know.’
They found the car, an old Ford, parked among the lorries and wagons of the farmers who had been in the cinema, and began the half-mile drive back to the flat. They drove under banks of deep trees that were silvered by intermittent starlight, darkening and lifting into light as big clouds drove overhead. The tarmac shone white, like salt or like snow, then was very dark under the trees.
‘Well?’ said Anton at last: ‘What have you decided?’
Martha knew quite well that the right answer to this was that she should touch him, or kiss him. But she said stupidly: ‘What about?’
He let the car slide gently into a ditch filled with dry leaves, and neatly pulled on the brake before turning his pale eyes on her: ‘I want to know whether I should give you another chance or not.’
Martha raged with resentment at the phrase; she could not dispel it, even though she knew that phrases like ‘give you another chance’ or ‘give them a good hiding’ should be calls on her compassion rather than triggers for anger.
She walked quickly up the path away from him, listening to his crunch crunch behind her on the gravel. In the tiny room that was their bedroom, she switched on the lights and at once winged insects began circling around it, their wings rustling and clicking.
She was thinking: There’s something in this conflict with Anton that reminds me of the horrible cold arguments I have with my mother. She’s always in the right – and so am I. And Anton and I are both in the right. There’s something about being in the right … she felt positively sick with exasperation already – because of the banality of what they were going to say. Both Anton and she would be thinking quite sensible, even intelligent, thoughts – but what they said would be idiotic, and their bad temper, their unpleasantness, would be because both knew they could not express their sense in their words, let alone actions. Martha even felt as if this conversation or discussion (if the coming exchange could be dignified by such words) had taken place already and there was no point in going through with it again.
However, she stood drawing striped cotton over the windows, thereby shutting out a sky where the storm clouds still swept and piled in great, dramatic silver masses, and folded back the thin white covers of the two beds in which both were going to sleep so badly. Meanwhile, Anton untied his tie before a glass and watched his young wife in it, his face hard.
‘Well, Matty, I’m waiting.’
‘What for?’
‘There was a discussion, if you’ll be good enough to search your memory.’
‘It looked to me this evening as if you’ve already made up your mind,’ Martha said casually. She was pulling off her dress. The solid brown curves of her legs, her arms, thus revealed, suddenly spoke to her, and with a total authority. Thomas Stern said she was a peasant, did he? She looked at her fine strong body, smelled the delightful warm odours of her armpits, her hair, and thought: So he thinks I am a peasant, does he?
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You know quite well what I mean. What’s the red-head’s other name?’
‘I’m not going to deny that I find Millicent attractive, Matty!’
‘Well, I should hope not.’
Anton, a tall, over-thin man, his flesh glistening fair, his blond head gleaming, the fine hair on his thighs and belly shining gold, stood naked before stooping to pull up his pyjama trousers.
That’s my husband, thought Martha. What nonsense! She watched the fair fine flesh of her husband vanishing behind dark green cotton and her flesh said: He’s got nothing to do with me, that man.
Aloud she said: ‘We agreed that if I – ‘ she had been going to say, took a lover, but that was too literary, even though he had used the phrase first. Very European you are, she had said to herself, derisively: take a lover! Good Lord, who do you think I am? Madame Bovary? Well, I wish we had her problems. And it was not possible with Anton, for some reason, to say: get myself a man, find myself a man – that would be a sort of insult to him. ‘We decided that if I decided to be unfaithful to you then I should be honest with you, and you would take a mist … get yourself a girl – at any rate, we’d both get other people?’
‘Quite correct,’ said Anton, standing upright, startlingly handsome in his admirable dark green pyjamas. He was tying the cord of his pyjama trousers.
This was the moment when Martha should go to him, naked as she nearly was, and put her arms around him. That was what he was waiting for, and why he tied his pyjama cord so slowly. If she did this, if she played her role properly, as a good wife should, then by midnight, or at the very latest, tomorrow morning, Millicent the red-head would have become one of the little married jokes that act as such a delightful lubricant. Too bad for Millicent, too bad for whatever expectations she might, at this moment, be cherishing of Anton. If things went one way, she might reasonably hope to be Anton’s mistress, girl-friend, at any rate, have an affair with him. If Martha now played her part properly, all warm and feminine and coaxing (Martha could see herself, and shuddered with disgust) then very soon Millicent would be ‘the red-head, Anton!’ – and greeted with an understanding smile by Martha, a rather proud, self-conscious little grin by Anton. She would be a married joke, a little joke to smooth the wheels of matrimony. Lord, how repulsive! How unpleasant the little jokes, the hundred dishonest little lies, the thousand sacrifices like Millicent (or like Solly if it had come to that) which marriage demands.
If Martha played her role one way, then tomorrow or the next day Millicent, throwing away her pride to ring Anton, or to run into him in the street, would be encountered with: ‘Hello Millicent, how are things, all right?’ ‘Fine, Anton, how are you?’ ‘See you sometime, Millicent.’ If Martha went on behaving as she was now, obedient to her peremptory and at least entirely honest body, Millicent could confidently expect a probably very romantic and satisfactorily painful affair.
Anton stood upright, his head bent as he examined his fingernails. Martha discovered she was feeling uncomfortable – it was because she was standing naked in front of him. She did not belong to him! She pulled off her brassière, her back to him, delighting in a quick glimpse of her shoulder, at the fine curves with the perfect crease and dimple between them. Hastily she tugged on a nightdress. She went quickly into the bathroom to clean her teeth. She was crawling with shame because of the stupid scene they had just enacted. At the same time her flesh was exulting because next day she would see Joss – damn it, he was going to leave soon. But how lucky Joss was, she thought, sensing all of herself, her whole delightful sweet-smelling person.
She could not go back to the bedroom yet. Anton would still be waiting for her to come back. Perhaps he was sitting on the edge of the bed reading that bit of newsprint about the women burying their dead babies in newspaper in the snow? Oh God, if he was, then there’d be no help for it, she would have to put her arms around him, comfort him … she simply would not go back to the bedroom yet.
After a great deal of splashing and drying and brushing of her hair – for the second time that day it got the old-fashioned fifty strokes on each side – she went back to find Anton in bed, his bed-light off, his back to her.
She turned off her light. The room, in the dark, was not dark. It seemed that through the thin curtains, even through the walls, fell the cool brilliance of starlight, which shifted, lightened, darkened, as the clouds drove overhead. For a few minutes the insects maintained their circles around the dark focus of the light, then there was an interval of small uncoordinated hangings, slidings, fallings-away. The moth and insect noises stopped altogether. Martha knelt up in bed to look past the edges of the curtain at the dark pillars of the veranda. A black sky. Black trees, in pools of black shade. Ghostly white lilies in dark shade. Fragments of white gravel. Leaves turning and tossing under starlight in a rippling silver movement.
