A Choice of Enemies

by Mordecai Richler

  “We’ve found a little flat for ourselves.”

  “How come,” Karp asked, “that you have the army identity papers of Nicolas Singleton?”

  Ernst turned accusingly to Sally.

  “He came in for tea while you were out yesterday morning. I ran out to get milk and he must have –”

  “You see,” Karp said, “when Norman heard of his death there were no details. We presumed that he had died on manoeuvres. An accident, perhaps.… One minute. I’ll be right with you.”

  In the kitchen Karp opened the oven and ran a finger over the ham and licked the honey off it. He lowered the gas a fraction before he returned to the living room.

  “It was foolish of you not to burn the papers,” Karp said, “if you killed him.”

  “I bought the identification papers from a dealer in Munich. That’s how I happen to have them.”

  “And is that,” Karp asked, “why you are both planning to run away?”

  “We have found a flat.”

  “You know, of course, that Norman isn’t well.” Karp leaned back and sighed. “A very tricky business it is. Although he has not had an attack of amnesia for some time he is still not supposed to be exposed to over-excitement.” Karp rose. “Excuse me.”

  He poured a little more honey over the ham. It had begun to crackle. In the living room again he noticed that Ernst had moved his chair closer to Sally. They had been holding hands.

  “When I first met Norman Price I was a hospital orderly. This house, everything, I owe it all to him. He has never asked for a favour in return.” Karp adjusted himself more comfortably in his chair. “What would you do in my position?”

  “In your position,” Ernst said, “I would have spoken to Norman immediately.”

  “But he’s sick,” Sally began. “You said that over-excitement.…”

  “Supposing,” Karp said, “I didn’t tell him. Then what?”

  “We would speak to him ourselves,” Sally said.

  “Supposing one didn’t believe you?”

  “There’s nothing we could do about that,” Ernst said.

  “Frankly speaking,” Karp said to Sally, “he is not the most trustworthy person in the world, is he?”

  The aroma of baking ham filled the room sweetly.

  “Why haven’t you offered me money?” Karp asked. “A person of my race, I mean. That, one would have thought, would have been your first move.”

  “How much do you want?” Sally asked quickly.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Ernst said. “He’s making fun of us.”

  “Am I?”

  “How much do you want?”

  “Why is it,” Karp asked, “that people will believe anything of me – and my kind – and not,” he said, pointing at Ernst, “of his?”

  “Ernst has done you no harm.”

  “Look at me,” Karp said, “and what do you see?”

  “Stop bugging her.”

  “Potatoes! A short, fat Polish potato-eater. We’re all marked with the same grey puffy face.” Karp laughed a deprecating laugh. “Don’t you think that I, too, would like to be tall and – and have a mistress as pretty as her?”

  Sally shuddered. “Aren’t you a homosexual?” she asked.

  Karp smiled acidly at Ernst.

  “I’m sorry,” Sally whispered.

  “She doesn’t care what you are. Neither do I.”

  Karp spread out his hands and bounced the fingertips of one against the other. “The young,” he said, “how I despise the clumsy young people. I’ll be right back.” Opening the oven he saw that the ham was doing splendidly. He lowered the gas and put the sweet potatoes in to bake. Then, after he had wiped each of his fingers individually, he returned to his guests. Ernst and Sally had risen from their chairs. “Are you going?” he asked. “So soon.”

  “Sally is tired.”

  “I upset her.”

  “She’s tired.”

  “But Norman won’t be here for another –”

  “Are you going to tell him?” Sally asked.

  Karp eased himself into his chair again and sipped his sherry pensively.

  “Mr. Karp, please … It wasn’t Ernst’s fault. Not exactly.…”

  “Where were you,” Karp asked Ernst, “when I was in the camp?”

  “His father was in a camp too.”

  “Certainly.”

  “I was in the Hitler Youth.”

  “Why didn’t you run away before she found out,” Karp asked. “Why didn’t you spare her?”

  “I love her.”

  “So,” he said wearily, “he loves you.”

  “We love each other.”

  “Is that funny?” Sally asked. “Do you find that so funny?”

  “I won’t tell Norman,” Karp said severely. “Not tonight anyway. But don’t you dare run away from here. If you run away I’ll find you.”

  They went back to their room and unpacked. Sally wept.

  XIV

  Joey came to see Norman later in the afternoon. “If you let me in,” she said, “I promise not to throw another tantrum.” She wore a tight green woollen dress. Her brown face was itchy with panic.

  “Anything wrong?” Norman asked, taking her coat.

  “It’s Charlie. You must help me, Norman. I’m going crazy.”

  “He sent me a post-dated cheque for two hundred pounds this morning,” Norman said, “and a note saying that he didn’t want his name to appear anywhere in the film credits. That’s stupid, Joey. It’s his money; he earned it. Will you take it back to him?”

  “It’s no use. He won’t have it.”

  “Are you broke?”

  “Worse. But we’ve been broke before – Tell me the truth, Norman, do you think I’ve stood in his way all these years?”

  “Is that what he says?”

  “He’s always supported my family, you know. It adds up to a hell of a lot.”

  “You’ve been terrific for Charlie at any price. I mean that.”

  Joey hastened to the window. “He thinks I’m having an affair with you.” She looked up and down the street anxiously. “I’m afraid he may have followed me here.”

  “Easy.” Norman circled her waist and stroked her head gently. “Charlie wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  “Did you know that he meets with Karp now and then?” Joey asked.

  “Karp?”

  “Charlie didn’t have to leave the States. He was still in the clear.”

  “Let’s take one thing at a time,” he said, leading her to a chair. “Why is he seeing Karp?”

  “They talk about you a lot. That’s all I know.”

  “Karp’s condition is psychotic, Joey. He teases people the way a boy pokes at snakes with sticks. He’s a kind of provocateur. I’m telling you this because it would appeal to Karp’s malign sense of humour to abuse me to Charlie.”

  Joey’s laugh came out a catch, a stab, an ache at a time. “I learn new things about you every day,” she said. “I used to believe you were the one person who didn’t give a damn what people said about you. Now, in your devious way, you’re trying to tell me not to believe the horrible things Karp must be telling Charlie about you.”

  “All right,” Norman said, annoyed, “look at it this way. If Karp walked in right now he’d be quite capable of making all three of us feel that he had interrupted a seduction scene.”

  Joey rushed to the window again. “Please draw the curtains,” she said.

  “Joey, sweetie, he’s not following you.” Norman pulled on his jacket. “Let’s go to the pub.”

  In the pub they were forced to stand very close together, her dress was very tight, and he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on what she was saying.

  “There was a time,” she said, “when I believed in every one of Charlie’s schemes. He was leaner then. And at twenty-one, I guess, you think that every hopeful is going to make it. There seems to be so much time.”

  Norman looked down into his glass, but fr
om there his gaze went, inevitably, to her wide capable hips, so he quickly looked up at her face again and smiled inanely.

  “But I’m glad he never did,” Joey said. “Because if Charlie had made it, Norman, he would have left me. Not that he isn’t going to leave me anyway. Probably sooner than you think.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m the girl Charlie promised everything to. Don’t you think he’s got a heart? Last night he saw it all. He was never going to do any of the things he had always counted on. Do you think he wants me around for the rest of his life to remind him he’s a failure?”

  “Last night was an aberration. He’ll be O.K. yet.”

  Norman ordered two more whiskies and a bottle to take home with him.

  “He’s dying to have a child, poor man, and I’ll never be able to give him one.”

  “You could adopt one.”

  “Damn it, Norman, why is it the bastards who always have the talent? Tell me that.”

  “I remember,” Norman said, “that when they were all drawing cheques from WPA, Charlie was the envied one. He could tell a story better than most of them.”

  “Where will he go from London? There’s no place left for him to go.”

  “There are other things,” Norman said self-consciously.

  “Not for him, there aren’t.”

  “What about you?”

  “I don’t matter.”

  “Come on, Joey.”

  But she was serious.

  “I love him. In my own bitchy way I always have. I could forgive him for not ever making it, but that’s just what he doesn’t want.”

  Norman paid for the bottle of whisky and they returned to his room.

  “What will I do when he leaves me?”

  “You’re being morbid. He’s never going to leave you.”

  Joey sat down beside him on the bed. “None of us have amounted to much,” she said, “have we?”

  Norman was hurt. “I guess not,” he said.

  Joey gave him the full benefit of her body in profile.

  Norman coughed. “We seem to belong to a world of broken promises and angers valued like valentines. A world that’s done. But Ernst – you know – is struggling to be born. We came from an ordered world, Joey, and out of that order we made chaos, and out of that chaos came Ernst. So in a sense we’re responsible to him. Or that’s the way it seems to me anyway.”

  “Are you in love with Sally?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I am.” But he was startled. He had not expected to say that.

  Joey began to tremble. “Norman. Oh, Norman.” He held her cold, shivering body close, and stroked her hair. A knifelike sob cut through her. “Oh, Norman.” He led her to the bed, her body boneless, submissive, feverish, and pulled back the blankets and covered her. As she lay there sobbing brokenly he poured two stiff drinks and then, as an afterthought, he drew the blinds. Joey whimpered. He kissed her cheeks. He took off her shoes and rubbed her ice-cold feet.

  “What will I do if he leaves me, Norman?”

  “He’ll never leave you,” he said, handing her a drink.

  “You say that because you think he’s second-rate. You’ve never taken Charlie seriously, have you?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “A word of praise from you would mean so much to him, but you never mention his writing at all.… Ernst seems to mean more to you than Charlie.”

  Norman didn’t reply.

  “He works so hard at it,” Joey said. “He’s always leaving himself open to rejections and ridicule. He’s not a coward like you. All these years working away on an academic biography the size of an insect. Polishing and polishing and polishing. Too frightened to expose it to the light of day.”

  “I happen to enjoy working on it.”

  “You’re not dirty like Charlie. Your hands are clean,” she said, shivering.

  “Would you like a hot drink?”

  She shook her head.

  “More blankets?”

  “All his life Charlie has had to do with second-best. Like me.”

  “Come off it, Joey,” he said, covering her with another blanket.

  “Did I ever tell you how we met?”

  “No.”

  “I was working for –” she named an important left-wing magazine of the ’thirties “– when Johnny Rubick came back from Madrid.”

  Rubick, who had talked to the committee since, was one of Hollywood’s most gifted directors.

  “He was working on his novel then – it was before you knew him – and all the girls in the office were after him. He was so glamorous, Norman, and – Charlie was writing for us too then and he was always asking me out, but I never had time for him. Not in those days. I – You see, I became Johnny’s mistress. One of his innumerable mistresses I should say.…”

  She told him how after he had impregnated her, Johnny had told her not to worry, he had a friend who would fix her, and the two of them had gone to a cheap hotel with Johnny’s friend, a deregistered doctor, and the job had been done there. But Joey shouldn’t have gone to work the next day, that was her error.

  “I bled badly.…” Johnny, she discovered, had driven off to Mexico with an actress. He was gone. “When Charlie looked up from his typewriter he saw that I’d fainted.…”

  Joey would always remember the young doctor with the bad teeth, who sucked the shell-frames of his glasses, as he told her that she would never be able to have children.

  “And when I woke, Norman, there was Charlie. He had been sitting with me for two days.… When I woke in the public ward, wishing myself dead, Charlie was there holding my hand and smiling. He had come with flowers and a proof of his latest short story. He came, Norman, when nobody else would have me.”

  “I’m sold,” Norman said. “He’s a great guy.”

  “When the war came Charlie didn’t become a P.R.O. like the rest of them. He could have had a soft job with the army shows, like Bob, or been attached to a film unit like so many others. But not Charlie. Old and flat-footed as he was it was still the infantry for him. Four years of it, Norman, with all those people offering him soft jobs.”

  Norman bent over Joey and kissed her forehead.

  “Help him,” she said. “Tell him he’s good. Coming from me it doesn’t mean much to him. But from –”

  “I’ll try,” he said, smoothing down her hair. “I’ll try to help.”

  The phone rang.

  “Don’t answer it,” Joey said.

  “Joey,” he said, “please.” He picked up the receiver, his smile reassuring.

  “I know she’s there,” Charlie said. “Don’t pretend.”

  Norman was too stunned to reply.

  “Tell her that if she isn’t home in fifteen minutes she needn’t come home at all.”

  Norman hung up. “It was Charlie,” he said. “He must have followed you here after all.”

  Joey leaped out of bed, hurried into her coat and shoes, and left without a word.

  XX

  A little later Norman climbed the stairs to Karp’s flat for dinner. Karp wasn’t there. There was a huge ham, untouched, in the garbage pail. The kitchen reeked of burnt potatoes. In the living room Norman noticed the empty bottle. The door to the upstairs bedroom was shut. Norman put his ear to the door and, although the sound was muffled, he could tell that a man was crying out in pain. This had happened before. The last time Karp had not emerged from his bedroom again for three days.

  Norman stopped off and knocked at Ernst’s and Sally’s door.

  “Ernst?”

  He thought he heard someone move quickly inside.

  “Sally?”

  No answer.

  Outside, he hailed a taxi. He wondered idly whether there was a party at Winkleman’s tonight. He thought of going to visit Jeremy, but he was afraid. Wherever he went tonight he wanted to be sure of a kind reception. Landis? Bella had certainly phoned Zelda by now and he was probably not welcome there too any more. Grave
s? Certainly not.

  At that moment Norman realized something that should have been obvious to him before: he realized that all his friends in London were aliens like himself.

  Proud they were. They had come to conquer. Instead they were being picked off one by one by the cold, drink, and indifference. They abjured taking part in the communal life. They mocked the local customs from the school tie to queuing, and were for the most part free of them by dint of their square, classless accents. Unlike their forbears, they were punk imperialists. They didn’t marry and settle down among the natives. They had brought their own women and electric shavers with them. They had through the years evolved from communists to fellow-travellers to tourists. Tourists. For even those who had lived in London for years only knew the true life of the city as a rumour. Around and around them the natives, it seemed, were stirred by Diana Dors, a rise in bus fares, test matches, automation, and Princess Margaret. The aliens knew only other aliens. It was reported occasionally that the men in bowler hats had children and points of view, that, just like in the movies, there were settlers in Surrey, miners in Yorkshire, and workers who – aside from being something you were for like central heating or more gin cheaper – were bored with their wives, suspicious of advertisements, and, just like you, inclined to wonder at three-thirty in the afternoon what it would be like to come home to Sophia Loren.

  Norman felt stupid.

  Around and around him men clocked in every morning at 7.30 a.m., girls sat down after an eight hour shift at Forte’s to write letters to Mary Grant. Clocks, cars, pyjamas, and railway ties were produced. Around him the real £.s.d. world existed. The only sons of white fathers went out to Malaya to murder the only sons of yellow fathers in the interests of national prestige. At eleven every morning pimpled boys went from office to office with luke-warm tea in tall chipped white cups for girls who took letters from their bosses beginning, “In reply to yours of the 23rd inst.” Middle-aged couples failed to see the latest Martin and Lewis at the local Gaumont because they couldn’t afford it. High-strung boys from Wapping failed their eleven-pluses. Old age pensioners were admitted free to the public baths. Around and around him people had already realized that they would never be able to sleep in until after eight on a Monday morning or go for a walk in the park on a Wednesday afternoon or see Paris. Around him moved a real city where Sally’s choice of a lover, Charlie’s script, Winkleman’s chance of a production, and his own loneliness were of no bloody account.