Part 10 (1/2)

”Then out of the eleventh commandment,” he suggested.

She raised her wrists suspiciously. ”What's that?”

”Exigency.”

Carefully she shut out contempt. ”There's no such thing. Not for me. I do what I please,” she summed it up.

More than ever he seemed to sight her through his conceptual telescope. But he had turned it around; he reduced her altogether. ”You had better be prepared for another course, Allegra,” he told her. ”One that favors your interests instead of your wishes,”

”My wishes are identical with my interests.”

”Save me from a renegade Marxist!” he vividly came back. They stood, the husband and wife, humorless and embattled, quarreling and speculating over the visitor, the private visitor, who had not yet arrived. Yet obscurely they were allied, and had old pacts and treaties to consider, and bickered behind their common walls on strategy only, on whether longbows were suitable, or simple spears, for subtlety of defense: each feared the other's plan, but both feared the visitor more. ”I don't predict,” Enoch began again, ”I only warn. We'll have to wait and see. The chief thing is to remove the child.” He hesitated. ”What time is he coming, do you know?”

”I sent word with the old mart-he took some bags to the station a while ago. -I wrote down noon.”

”So early? He never used to wake before two,” Enoch offered skeptically.

My mother appeared displeased by this allusion. ”But the train doesn't go until three. That's plenty of time, isn't it?”

”Meanwhile I'll finish loading the car.” He took up his ledger and was, on that note, ready to leave; but he came to me instead and bent somewhat and smoothed my head with a showmanlike hand that seemed, for the moment, to put me on exhibit. His touch was cool and brief, message-bearing-a signal, in fact, to show the enemy's a.r.s.enal. It was the touch of espionage. I did not like it, and sat up straight to confront my stepfather's suddenly ominous intricate eyes, unexpectedly of the most characterless blue under tawny lids. There was something of connivance in the room; the rain mumbled on the windowpanes; my mother breathed plaintively. Somehow I was included, and more and worse than that, involved. They had ringed me round with secret links and implications, those two, Enoch and my mother, and had drawn me in and made of me, despite my pa.s.sive witnessing, a deep partic.i.p.ant. It was as though (but once more with polished fingertips, casual and swift, Enoch stroked my hair: a hangnail momentarily enmeshed him, and I felt the pull of a tiny brutal twinge) they blamed me and held me accountable for their tense mysteries and ign.o.ble conversations. They did not think me free of their condition; and although I ventured not an inch beyond the fringes of the mat-this to prove that if my fate was circ.u.mscribed, I was at least its captain-and conceived of their conjoined lives as a thicket too unintelligible even to wonder at, and could not comprehend their voyages and explorations and doubted their objects, deeds, dealings, precious things (in the same way they could not believe in what I chose for toys), still they supposed me bound to their condition: and severely viewed me as locked in the world with their visitor and foe. ”My G.o.d, Allegra, she's soaked through,” Enoch said, pulling away his dampened hand. He dropped it limply in disgust, but in the very instant of his gesture my mother had her own, and lifted high her arms, guaranteeing everything.

”She won't be here when he is, I promise you,” she vouchsafed him. ”Ill put her to bed next door until her clothes are dry-they're all she's got at the moment. If they ever do dry in this weather.”

”All right, but keep her out of sight,” Enoch warned. ”Don't let him see her.”

My mother reflected. ”I'll say she's gone. Ill tell him we've already sent her off,” she calculated softly, and picked up the yellow cablegram which had fluttered, to the floor.

”I won't go,” I broke in: it was the first time I had spoken: their two startled looks leaped out at me in tandem. ”I won't go, whatever you say.”

”You see?” my mother pounced. ”That's what I've had to listen to all morning!”

”You should be glad to get out of Europe,” my stepfather said sternly.

”It's no use lecturing,” admonished my mother. ”That sort of talk won't work. She's too obstinate. -You'll do as you're told,” she finished.

”I'll die,” I whined. ”If you make me go I'll die of thirst”

”Good heavens, there's plenty to drink on the boat. What's the matter with you?” my mother inquired testily. She groaned and fixed on Enoch. ”If she's getting sick again-”

He expelled an awkward sigh; it might have pa.s.sed for a type of snore.

”You know how her stomach is,” my mother persisted. ”Well? Does your stomach feel all right?”

”They'll shoot me,” I said. ”They'll shoot me in the desert.”

”What?” they jointly cried.

”The sheikhs from the Wailing Wall. They'll take me out into the desert and kill me. It's what they do in Palestine.”

”What has Palestine to do with you?” my mother demanded, stunned and growling with bewilderment.

I thought her more stupid than ever. ”It's on account of my father. Because he's a Jew.”

”Enoch's not your father. You know that surely,” she burst out. ”I tell you, the child hasn't got a mind, really!”

”No,” I plunged on in a pa.s.sion of opposition. ”Not Enoch. My father. Anneke told me. And if she doesn't come back they'll put me in a camp. I won't go to Palestine no matter what. I won't,” I sobbed, ”you can't send me. It's not my fault-not if I'm not a refugee, is it?”

”No,” Enoch said, ”you're not a refugee.”

”Nor a Jew,” my mother put in quickly. ”Tell her she's not a Jew either.”

”She couldn't be trusted,” Enoch said, grown fervid with a kind of rage-chastened pity I had never before seen in him. He was plainly sorry for me, and did not hear his wife. ”Where did you find that girl?”

”Her qualifications were very good,” my mother said. ”The University of Leyden and all. She used to be a medical student”

”She couldn't be trusted,” he said again.

”She's a refugee, that Dutchwoman,” my mother said. ”They're all no good. I mean they've been corrupted. The victims of oppression are always corrupt” she added with a grave philosophical frown that stood like a mockery in her ravaged face.

I went on solemnly weeping. ”I'm not a refugee,” I gave out, stifled.

But Enoch had drawn up the heavy ledger with its black cardboard covers vaguely glimmering, bordered with the black tape of an obituary-rectangle. It tipped slightly, and to save it from sliding out of his grasp he supported it against his chest, flattening it close to him as though it contained life. It shone on his breast like plates of armor and he clung to it in the fancy that it had powers still untried, and might, if he lowered his head in just such a way and showed himself preoccupied and possessed and willing to dare, then and there call out the Shechina in a blazing presence too terrible to remember afterward, as the excruciations of giving birth yield their own forgettings; and he wore on his body that book of woe as he might have worn Urim and Thummim, to deliver up manifestations and to court the unmanifestable and dazzle it into disclosing its faceless face, the way a woman dumb with grief will cradle in her bosom her dead baby, pretending it is alive and cuddling it in the ordinary way, hoping to Woo it back to life by the subterfuge of the familiar-but the familiar has changed irrevocably into the extraordinary, and her arms hold carrion.

My stepfather said deliberately, ”You're an idiot to talk that way, Allegra, you have no right,” while she trailed after him with a stare so literal and wondering it almost moved him.

”I only meant there must be something wrong with a person in the first place,” she began, shoveling after excuses, ”to make him end up a refugee. There's logic in-that, isn't there? And morality too,” she dug deeper yet, ”because there's no such thing as gratuitous harm. I mean who would chase or murder someone for no reason at all?” She was all worry and concern, and congratulated herself on that account. ”You believe in progress, don't you? The human race has advanced since Cain and Abel, I should hope.”

She missed him entirely; was blind to his furious erupted breastplates (saw instead only his thick foolish ledger, one of many, all the same, each spiffed uselessly with the incinerated, each heavy as a brick or cinderblock, product of that impractical drudgery-not art or work-of-mind: unless brick-kilns are inspirational ateliers-which shut him away from the favor and influence of his superiors: saw that dismal ledger, in fact, in the shape of a blotched black wall-it had the size and harsh squareness and bulk of a wall-cruelly built, brick by brick, between herself and the ornate celestially-radiant emba.s.sy-house in the shrine-city of some historic, preferably anciently monarchic, land, a house whirling with footmen-attended b.a.l.l.s at which innumerable high personages beg to waltz with Allegra Vand-whom'd you say? ah! lucky fellow!-the Amba.s.sador's Lady); and, for all she felt him out in the minute that he stood, zealously a.s.sessing her and me, for all she descried his ardor in that long and violent minute, she might have been emptying bureau drawers in another room on another continent. She stuck to her position, antic.i.p.ated discourse (which did not come), and was oblivious-while she looked for signs and symbols-of the palpable. And there it was, the palpable, right-angled and hard, as articulate and unanswerable as a coffin-box, pressed against (what could satisfy the literal-nosed more?) his actual and living heart-the black covers of the ledger held on that priestly spot like a tablet of the Law: not G.o.d's but Europe's.

He was engrossed; did penance; kissed the arch-cup of the splendid feet of his baal, the Lady Moloch, nude as ice but for her diadem of human teeth and her ankle-ring of human hair; until it was at last enough.

My mother did not brush against this piety, and saw nothing and knew nothing.

So it was enough. ”We're all refugees from something or other,” he surrendered. This was weak and irrelevant. My mother shared his sadness without exactly sensing why (her nostrils partook of the smell of fire and of horses, and were clogged with the spittle of fleet hot horses, sweating and slowly salivating, on whose sleek brown backs in ebony saddles, with razor-spurs, stinging with thumb-thick whips, murderers rode) and turned to me and quite competently explained how my governess had gulled me: they did not send American children to the Jewish desert, or to any camp, or anywhere. So I understood it was a made-up story invented by the Dutchwoman to induce me to keep her horrid secrets. Had she often directed me not to tell this or that? (my mother asked, all naivete, all unaffected casualness); did she sometimes converse with men and stroll away? Did anyone come to see us on the beach in the middle of the day? And did we ever take walks into the bad quarter, where all the houses sprouted in out-of-breath bunches, with colored tiled roofs, the sounds of water leaking, grey flash of rat and gruesome cognizance of public fart? She named other malodors, and suggested to my memory types of insects-flies, too-and of men.

”But that's where we used to eat every day,” I supplied.

”But the bills!” she uttered in astonishment. ”At the end of every week the bills that woman presented me with-from the Restaurant Palatin, on the boulevard.” (I had never heard of the place; we had dined on the boulevard only once, in a cafe.) ”She kept the monly for herself, and fed the child on nothing,” my mother gruffly established. ”What a cheat!-How did she ever get hold of so many bills?”