A Choice of Enemies

by Mordecai Richler

  BOOKS BY MORDECAI RICHLER

  FICTION

  The Acrobats (1954)

  Son of a Smaller Hero (1955)

  A Choice of Enemies (1957)

  The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)

  The Incomparable Atuk (1963)

  Cocksure (1968)

  The Street (1969)

  St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971)

  Joshua Then and Now (1980)

  Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989)

  Barney’s Version (1997)

  FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975)

  Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (1987)

  Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case (1995)

  HISTORY

  Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!:

  Requiem for a Divided Country (1992)

  This Year in Jerusalem (1994)

  TRAVEL

  Images of Spain (1977)

  ESSAYS

  Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports (1968)

  Shovelling Trouble (1972)

  Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974)

  The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays (1978)

  Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album (1984)

  Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions (1990)

  Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions (1998)

  On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It (2001)

  Dispatches from the Sporting Life (2002)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Best of Modern Humour (1983)

  Writers on World War II (1991)

  Copyright © 1957 by Mordecai Richler

  Copyright © 2002 by Mordecai Richler Productions, Inc.

  First published by Andre Deutsch, 1957

  First Emblem Editions publication 2002

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Richler, Mordecai, 1931-2001

  A choice of enemies

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-558-8

  I. Title.

  PS8535.138C48 2002 c813’.54 C2001-904144-6

  PR9199.3.R5C48 2002

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  The characters and events in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance they have to people and events in life is purely coincidental.

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  For Joyce Weiner

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  About the Author

  1

  I

  ERNST WAS STILL IN THE EASTERN ZONE, ABOUT NINETY kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself. Ernst waved. The truck stopped. He jumped in beside the driver.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Berlin,” Ernst said, slamming the door.

  “Have you a travel permit?”

  Ernst pointed to the FDJ badge on his jacket lapel.

  Heinz indicated his own badge, “Friends of the Soviet Union,” and said, “If you don’t mind, I would like to see your permit anyway.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” Ernst wiped his dripping head with his sleeve. “All members of the Central Cultural Group of the FDJ must be at the Lustgarten by four this afternoon. I’m late as it is, so please hurry.”

  The truck swished ahead into the rain again.

  “As you can see,” Heinz said, “I don’t pick up people without checking. After that mess provoked by fascist agents in Berlin I decided to follow all regulations to the letter. Heinz, I said to myself, Heinz Baumann, you cannot be too careful.”

  “Admirable of you.”

  “Heinz, I said to myself, these woods are crawling with bastards trying to sneak into the West. You cannot be too careful, Heinz.”

  “Thank God for the road blocks,” Ernst said.

  Heinz had a red pockmarked face. He seemed to Ernst to be the simple sum of all the thick, docile women, beer and sausages he had consumed. Ernst glanced surreptitiously over his shoulder. The truck was carrying paint. But there was a box covered by a tarpaulin hidden behind Heinz’s seat.

  “We want to be one nation bound by brotherhood,” Heinz said.

  “Exactly.”

  “If the West rearms all the old boys will come back again.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s good to see our youngsters in such a hurry to get to political meetings. In the West boys your age are bikini-ists.”

  Ernst didn’t reply.

  “Germany should sit at one table.”

  No answer again. Ernst had fallen asleep.

  Heinz tugged at his cap and cursed the windshield wipers and, more impersonally, his luck. He began to hum an old Afrika Korps marching song. The rain gradually softened into a drizzle and the truck began to pick up speed. Looking the pale skinny boy over again Heinz decided that in the old days he had cut a finer figure. Not that he had anything against the present regime. A man could earn a living anyway. Better the SED than the old crowd.

  “Where are we?” Ernst asked.

  “Did you have a good sleep?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Where are we?”

  “Take it easy.” Heinz glanced at Ernst’s boots. “We don’t reach the check point for another ten minutes.”

  “I’ll get off here, if you don’t mind, and catch a train into the city.”

  “How did you get the mud on your boots?”

  Ernst froze. He felt inside his jacket cautiously. He wore a knife strapped inside.

  “Let’s see your papers.”

  “Don’t be a fool. If you turn me in at the check point I’ll say you were helping me.”

  “Who said I was going to turn you in?”

  “I’m telling you just once more. I’m in a hurry.”

  “Everybody’s in a hurry these days.”

  “All right,” Ernst said. “I insist you take me to the check point. But don’t think I didn’t notice the eggs and butter in the back. Profiteering will interest the vopos, I’m sure.”

  The truck coughed to a stop and Ernst opened the door and leaped out.

  “I wasn’t going to turn you in,” Heinz shouted. “I was only teasing.”

  Ernst ran, he stumbled, he broke for the woods again.

  “You should have trusted me,” Heinz shouted after him. “I could have … helped.…”

  But Ernst was gone.

  II

  The visitor from Toronto, a short, squat, bearded man with an unused boyish face – his name was Thomas Hale – smothered the door knob in a hairy wad of fist and, his smile muddy with assurance, said to his host once more:

  “You ought to come home –”

  It was four a.m. and his host, Norman Price, was awfully tir
ed.

  “– Europe’s had it, Norman. England’s not a battlefield any more, but a playground for sentimental, visiting Canadians like myself. Nothing more is going to happen here, except that Churchill will die. But in Canada –”

  Norman glanced at his watch. “I wish we could talk some more,” he said, “but your taxi is waiting downstairs.”

  “It’s a pity. A waste. You ought to come home and teach.”

  Hale, Norman thought, is what the obituary writers mean when they call somebody “a fighting cock,” but Norman was fond of him all the same. Hale was a magazine editor. A fierce champion of periphery causes, he had, for instance, taken an outspoken stand against capital punishment. Yet, even if Hale hastily rejected anything that might impose on his slippered ease, he was also unfailingly decent. You couldn’t dislike him simply because he was cautious.

  “Your taxi is –”

  “Well,” Thomas Hale said warmly, “see you next year, I hope.”

  Norman raised his glass. “To next year in Toronto,” he said.

  Hale gone at last, Norman returned to his smoke-filled living room and slumped back in his chair. Norman was thin, a little taller than average, with a long narrow face. His black curly hair, already grey around the temples, was beginning to recede. His steel-rimmed glasses made him look rather solemn. Norman, in fact, was extremely self-conscious about what people told him was his remote expression, his severe face, and so, hoping to please, he smiled often. His smile was shy, hesitant, and gentle. But a smile on his face, like a sun in the London sky, was so incongruous that it startled rather than pleased. “A spectre is haunting Swiss Cottage,” Winkleman had once said. “It is the spectre of Norm’s Goyishe conscience.” Norman was thirty-eight; he was thickening around the waist.

  Whenever Norman thought of his country he did not, as Americans were supposed to do, recall with a whack of joy the wildest rivers and fastest trains, fields of corn, skyscrapers, and the rest of it. There were all these things in his country. There were magical names in abundance. A town called Trois-Rivières; a mountain pass named Kicking Horse; Saskatchewan – a province. But there was no equivalent of the American dream to boost or knock. The Canadian dream, if there was such a puff, was how do I get out?

  I got out early, Norman thought.

  Norman had been eighteen when he had come to study at Cambridge. He had been back to Canada many times since, for periods of from one month to a year, but after he had resigned his job at an American university four years ago he had come back to London again.

  Norman thought he was doing very well. That’s why he was so annoyed with Hale. For looking over his hard-come-by Kensington Church Street flat with Hale’s Canadian eye he was aware for the first time of the chipped bureau, the frayed sofa, and the absence of a Frigidaire, television set, and deep-freeze. What only this morning had seemed very cosy indeed now struck Norman as seedy. He cursed Hale. This morning he had been proud to think that here he was an academician, a disgraced professor, doing reasonably well as a writer of thrillers and the occasional film script. But Hale wasn’t impressed. I’m decadent, he thinks. Me, Norman thought, decadent. Jesus.

  Feeling better, he went out for a walk.

  Norman, unlike the other émigrés, had taken London to his heart. It didn’t yield itself to strangers with nearly so much ease as Paris, but in the end the city’s beneficence, its quality of being used, feasible, sane, took you prisoner. New York was more spectacular, but London, perhaps because you were not the saint or irresistible lover you longed to be, was the more reassuringly human. Greatness and power and youth had passed: the city, like you, was relieved.

  Norman remembered a more febrile London. The London of blackouts and dancing the raids through at the Dorchester and the boys you flew with going down one after another. Whenever he recalled his crash he remembered that he had tried to shield his face from the flames even before his groin, as though he would rather have suffered impotency than a disfigurement he couldn’t conceal from society. There was something else. He had not prayed.

  When he had suffered his first failure of memory, about two months after his crash, he had put himself in the hands of the psychiatrists. A month later he had been discharged. But there had been other lapses. One had lasted nine days. They said his amnesia was not organic; it was functional, of the fugue type, and inexplicable. So some time ago Norman had resolved to keep his life free of disturbances.

  Walking home again in the widening light Norman wished once more that he could be a better, more intelligent man. It would be fun, he thought, to have been born one of those brilliant sensitive Englishmen who, at the age of fifteen, is seduced by an exotic lady novelist in his uncle’s villa at Florence or Dubrovnik. Brilliant, sensitive Americans, he knew, were heartier types. Their first woman came at fourteen, either in a field of corn under a symbolically bloody sun or, if the weather didn’t permit, in the barn where he and she took refuge, with the symbolic storm raging outside.

  Norman turned up Church Street. There he saw a pretty girl with a furled umbrella waiting at the bus stop. She had nice legs. The sun was stronger in the sky now, it was spring, and all at once he yearned for toast and coffee. What I need is a wife, he thought. Maybe I’ll meet a nice girl at Sonny Winkleman’s on Saturday night.

  He picked up his mail downstairs and took the steps to his flat two at a time. There was a copy of the Intelligence Digest – a magazine he needed for an article he was preparing for Hale – and a telegram from Charlie Lawson.

  “ARRIVING SOUTHAMPTON TWELVE TUESDAY. MEET US WATERLOO.”

  Tuesday, Norman thought. This is Tuesday.

  “CAN YOU SUBLET APARTMENT AS HINTED. SALUD. LOVE AND KISSES. CHARLIE AND JOEY.”

  No, Norman thought, I certainly can’t. He did not intend to leave London that summer. But pouring himself another cup of coffee he read Charlie’s telegram again. They’re two, he thought, and I’m one. They don’t know London. No, he thought, I’m not letting them have the flat. That’s final.

  He turned to the rest of his mail. His agent in New York had sent him a copy of the letter from Bill Jacobson of Star Books. They liked his latest thriller, but they wanted it expanded to a minimum of sixty thousand words. There was also a copy of the Montreal Star, a friend at home always sent him the Saturday edition, and a few bills. Norman returned to Charlie’s telegram. They’re two, he thought, and I’m one. Then, remembering all the good times they had shared, he decided that the least he could do was to let them have the flat until they found something more permanent at a reasonable rent. He phoned Karp.

  “Karp? Norman speaking. Listen, I’d like to ask you a favour. Have you any empty rooms in your place?”

  Karp’s house was in Hampstead. He said that he had two empty rooms.

  “I’m going to sub-let my flat for a while. Can you rent me one?”

  “Remember,” Karp said, “last week I arrived early for dinner? I had to wait an hour for you in your flat. There was nothing to amuse me, so I went through your drawers. I found some letters from a girl called Joey.” Karp paused. “Do many women crawl to you like that, Norman?”

  No, Norman thought. Unfortunately no.

  “Can you rent me a room or not, Karp? It won’t be for long.”

  “I am to be your landlord. Imagine that.”

  Norman had first met Karp in the hospital. Karp had been an orderly.

  “You’ll be able to read my mail more often that way.”

  “You mustn’t take offence,” Karp said. “After all, who read your letters to you in the hospital? Not to mention bathing and hair-cutting and –”

  “Then I can count on a room?”

  Karp said he could count on a room.

  Norman poured himself more coffee. He had been saving his letter from Nicky for the last. Now he opened it eagerly. After their mother had died Norman’s younger brother Nicky had gone to Boston to join her family; he had even adopted their name – Singleton, and that’s how he came to be i
n the American Army.

  “DEAR UN-COMRADE TROTSKY:

  Here in Munich, up to my neck in krauts and beer and brass I often think of you among the more civilized Britishers.

  The only thing I don’t miss are those crazy Church Street church bells breaking my head on Sunday mornings.

  How are you, are you married yet, and please send me more Evelyn Waugh penguins.

  re Evelyn: A buddy here, one Malcolm Greenbaum, spotted A Handful of Dust on my pillow and said, quote, I hear she writes very good. But Malcolm is real people. Honestly, Norman, when I think of my buddies here – Malcolm and Frank in particular – I am really grateful for the army. I would never have met any of these cats at Harvard or in Uncle Tom’s law cabin after (not that I’m going into the law firm any more).”

  Norman remembered Nicky as he had last seen him in London. Tall, boyishly awkward in his uniform, with their father’s brooding blue eyes and tender smile, and with a lot of Dr. Max Price’s brilliance too. Nicky inherited the gift, he thought, not me.

  “Please don’t send me any more New Statesman’s, books like that one by Ring Lardner, Jr, or back issues of Pravda. This is the American army not Abe Lincoln’s Brigade. Do you want me to end up in the stockade? Besides, I don’t dig that red or pink or plain off-colour preaching. I don’t care if the next president is Ike or Harpo Marx, as long as you haven’t forgotten that you promised to take me on a trip once I’m discharged.”

  Norman had promised to take Nicky to Spain for a few months. They were going to rent a villa together. Norman could hardly wait.

  “Oh, yes. I’m going to make 21 in four days, man. No time for more now.

  AufwiederShane,

  ALGER HISS

  P.S. Don’t forget the Waugh, old thing.”

  He had sent Nicky a hundred dollars for his birthday. That was a lot of money, it made him feel guilty, but recalling Nicky’s stay with him again he was glad that he had done it. They had sat up into the early hours every night talking about their more eccentric relatives and only on the last day of his leave had they realized with a sudden panic that Nicky had yet to see a play or the sights.