A Choice of Enemies

by Mordecai Richler

  Everywhere Ernst went he pretended to be waiting for Sally. There was a soda shop near Montreal High School that she had often gone to in her teens. Ernst went there and feeling foolish and conspicuous he nevertheless sat on each stool and at every table, until he was sure to have sat where she had sat before. In one of his many dreams he came home to Sally in N.D.G. and she told him that her parents were coming home for dinner. Mr. MacPherson was very fond of Ernst. They smoked a pipe together and the good old man told him stories of Sally as a child. Ernst rose and said, “You don’t have to work any more. I have been given a big promotion. We are going to buy you a house.”

  Mrs. MacPherson kissed Ernst. “You are like a son to us,” she said.

  On Sunday mornings they went to church together and in the afternoons they went driving. There were three children. A boy and two girls. When Ernst got his next promotion they bought a little cottage in the Laurentians.

  “What a happy couple,” people said.

  Ernst did not eat very much. He lost weight. Nights he spent alone in his room. As the weeks passed, as he began to fall behind with the rent again and the first snows came, he realized that something would have to be done. But Ernst had lost his drive.

  Ernst worked one week as a dishwasher and the next he shovelled snow, he waited at table, drove a taxi, sold magazine subscriptions, shined shoes, delivered coal, and at last went to work in a furniture shop on Saint Lawrence Boulevard. Between jobs he sometimes slept for two days at a time or went from one movie to another. From not eating enough he turned to gorging himself. Four meals a day became his average fare. He grew fat. But one thing he did accomplish. When he read in the Star that a German “new Canadian” had been killed in a traffic accident he went to the funeral and arranged to buy the dead man’s papers from the widow. On these papers he forged the name of a dead comrade. Joseph Rader.

  The furniture shop on Saint Lawrence Boulevard was owned by a man called Steinberg, who had once owned a furniture store on the Theatinerstrasse in Munich. There he had sold hideous modern furniture on the instalment plan to a hard-pressed but Aryan clientele. When the hard-pressed Aryans had smashed his shop and burned his account books in ‘36 Steinberg had fled to London. He had been interned there in a camp as an enemy alien and then he had been sent to Canada, where after a short period in another camp he had been released. Now Steinberg once more sold hideous modern furniture on the instalment plan to hard-pressed Aryans. He even had a few of his old customers back. But this time he kept his account books locked in a fireproof safe.

  Steinberg bullied Ernst. He paid him poorly. He mocked the boy; he didn’t like him.

  Nobody in the neighbourhood, in fact, liked Ernst. He claimed to be an Austrian, but they knew better. Nobody could understand why Ernst wanted to live and work in a Jewish quarter. When Ernst ate every day at Hyman Gordon’s lunch counter in the basement of the Klassy Klothing Building next door nobody sat at his table. Hyman Gordon always served him last.

  Spring came. The snows shrank greyly, grass sprung up on the mountainside, and St. Catherine Street thickened with pretty girls in cotton dresses. Next door to Steinberg’s furniture shop an old factory building was being demolished. Often, during the noon hour break, Ernst stopped to watch the men at work. Hyman Gordon and others also stopped to watch, but they never acknowledged Ernst’s presence.

  The only person Ernst visited in all that time – and he saw her as seldom as possible – was the widow Kramer, the “new Canadian” from whom he had bought his papers. Inge Kramer, who was in her late thirties, worked as a housekeeper for a family in Westmount. She was a tall, bony, severe woman, very thrifty, and frankly dishonest. Frau Kramer longed to marry again, a man with some money, someone who would start up a small business with her. She lived frugally, hoarding her salary with fanatical care. She was vehemently proud of the fact that her late father had served in the S.S. and Ernst was a little frightened of her sometimes.

  After his accident, when he revived in a private room of the Montreal Jewish General Hospital, the first thing Ernst did was to call for the newspaper reports of the incident. He examined all the photographs that had been taken of him under the rubble and was satisfied that nobody could recognize him.

  “He’s been working for me for three months,” Steinberg told one of the reporters. “A boy to be proud of.”

  The crowd collected on the hospital sunporch, waiting to get in to see Ernst, included many reporters, some officials, a few doctors, and three press photographers.

  “Why can’t we get in to take his picture?” one of the photographers asked Trudy Greenberg.

  “He’s shy,” Trudy said. “I told you that.”

  “Give us a break, eh?”

  “What I want,” another photographer said, “is one of you and Joey together.”

  “Be a sport, Miss Greenberg.”

  “I told you,” Trudy said. “I’ll try my best.”

  “Now we hear you talking.”

  “There’s a honey for you.”

  A reporter stood off to one side with Frau Kramer. They spoke in hushed voices. Two other reporters were interviewing Hyman Gordon.

  “It all happened so fast,” Hyman Gordon said. “One minute I was standing there, watching the demolition men at work, and the next people were yelling, ‘Watch out’, ‘Run’, ‘Look out, Hymie’ … I’m telling you when I looked up and saw that wall swaying I just froze on the spot. I couldn’t move to save my life.… And the next thing I knew a push from behind – whew! and I was knocked flat, but clear of the wall. The dust, the dust from that wall.… People came running. Shouts, screams, sirens. A business.” Hyman Gordon wiped back his shaggy grey hair and shook his head reverently. “And there buried underneath the rubble was the boy we wouldn’t talk to or eat with or even stop to say hello. There was Joseph, who had pushed me and saved my life. I’m telling you I still ask myself why he did it. The others could have.… They didn’t and I don’t blame them for a minute. You could be killed. You had to be crazy.…

  “There was Joseph with his mouth full of dust and his forehead split by a brick; there he was buried under all that crap and not a complaint from him. Three hours it took to dig the boy out.… Tell me I’m crazy, tell me anything you like, but when we all stood around him with encouraging words and cigarettes and a little for him to drink I could swear that he smiled and that he was happy. I never saw him look happy before … I,” Hyman Gordon lifted his hands and let them drop to his lap, “I never really talked with him before.…”

  The officials waiting to see Ernst were from the B’nai Brith, Kiwanis, and the Rotary Club. Ernst had won a thousand dollar reward for bravery. A league for Jewish-Gentile friendship was going to give him a citation. Yet another organization had promised to give him fifty dollars a week until he was able to work again.

  “All right,” Trudy said to the photographers, “wait here. And remember,” she added, “I’m not promising anything.”

  Ernst woke from a dream of Sally to find Trudy Greenberg smiling at him lavishly. “They’re coming,” she said.

  Ernst glared at the system of weights and pulleys that tied him to the bed. Then he heard them approaching. There were the public officials, the reporters, the doctors, and three photographers.

  “There he is,” a reporter said.

  “God bless him.”

  “Smile,” a photographer said.

  “Hey. Hey, Joey, Look this way. Atta boy!”

  Then Ernst saw her. Frau Kramer approached him with a thin smile. Ernst pulled despairingly at his leg, but it was no use. As she bent over and kissed him again and again the flashbulbs popped. Frau Kramer, her cheeks stained with tears, turned to face the others. “I’m his fiancée,” she said. “We are going to get married.”

  The following day, Saturday, there was a photograph of Ernst in the Star. It was three columns wide. The image was clear.

  V

  Two weeks later Vivian took Norman to visit her mother. Mrs
. Bell’s council flat in Fulham was damp and reeked of bacon fat. Everywhere you turned there were little tables adorned with crocheted mats and bowls of artificial flowers. The National Health Service had issued Mrs. Bell with a hearing aid and glasses and an upper plate that clacked when she spoke. She was a round, plump woman with grey hair and big blue eyes. Her rosy cheeks gave her an aura of constant blushing girlish surprise. Mrs. Bell, who was probably sixty-five, spoke in a poignant whisper of a voice.

  Norman and Vivian ate supper with her in the parlour off blue plates which – once you had cleared them of roast beef and mashed brussels sprouts – revealed greasy and crackled likenesses of King George V and Queen Mary. Mrs. Bell spoke endlessly of Diana.

  Vivian’s older sister Diana had been killed in the blitz, a week before she was to have played her first featured role in a film and two weeks before a famous artist was to have completed his portrait of her. After supper Mrs. Bell led them into Diana’s room. “Diana would have been thirty-five a week Wednesday,” she said. “Isn’t that so, Vivian?”

  Vivian nodded.

  “Vivian’s the practical one,” Mrs. Bell said. “Oh, had my Diana lived she would have had the world at her feet today. When I think of all the hearts she broke.… We were ever so close, you know. She used to tell her mummy everything. Why when she broke with Lord Dinsdale the poor boy took to drink, and do you remember Tommy Boswell, Vivian? There was a proper gentleman.” Mrs. Bell giggled softly. “He took Diana to a ball at Oxford, where they ate swan steak.… Isn’t that so, Vivian?”

  The unfinished portrait of Diana hung on a wall in the room. The room, in fact, was full of mementoes – yellowed theatre programmes and pressed orchids, a warped scrapbook and frocks slightly moth-eaten – the room, in fact, was exactly as Diana had left it fifteen years ago, the night of her death, when she had gone off to the hunt ball with flying-officer Denis Graves. As Mrs. Bell led them out of the room again she said, “Vivian’s a bit ashamed of her mum, you know. I’m not one for reading and that’s the truth of it. But Diana and I were ever so close. Like sisters.…”

  Vivian leaned close to Norman. “The family bought her off,” she said. “That’s why she broke with the Dinsdale boy.”

  After Norman had walked Vivian back to the basement flat on Oakley Street she invited him inside for a nightcap. Kate was out. So this, he thought, is as good a time as any to tell her that I’m leaving the country.

  “I think we’d better stop seeing each other,” Vivian said suddenly.

  “Why?”

  “You feel obligated to me because I took care of you while you were ill.”

  Imitating a posture of Kate’s she stood beside the fireplace with one elbow balanced on the mantelpiece. Her loose, fluffy sweater was calculated to underplay her small bosom, and her tight skirt succeeded in forcing attention to her attractively broad hips. But the clothes, just like the boyishly smart haircut, were sadly out of character. Kate never should have tried to make her over, Norman thought.

  “So,” she continued in an edgy voice, “I think it would be best if we didn’t see each other again.”

  Norman fiddled anxiously with his glasses. “Would you like to marry me?” he asked.

  Turning away from him, Vivian knelt and busied herself with the fire. When she turned to him again her eyes were moist. “Please go,” she said.

  Norman started towards her.

  “No,” she said. “I want you to go.”

  But she followed him out into the hall. “Why do you want to marry me?” she asked.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “All right, then. I’ll marry you.”

  Norman kissed her on the mouth. She did not respond very warmly.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night,” she said.

  He was wakened by the phone shortly after eight the next morning.

  “You don’t have to go through with it,” Vivian said.

  “With what?” Norman asked thickly.

  “You asked me to marry you last night.”

  “I thought that was settled,” he said. “I thought you said yes.”

  “I did. But I haven’t told anyone yet. There’s still time for you to change your mind.”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Let’s get married.”

  A thoughtful pause. “I don’t even know your religion,” she said at last.

  “I’m a Seventh Day Adventist.”

  “Good Lord,” she said. “Are you?”

  They were married in the Chelsea Registry Office on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Mrs. Bell, Kate, and Roger and Polly Nash, came to the ceremony. Bob and Zelda Landis sent a telegram. The Winklemans sent a bouquet of roses and a cheque for fifty pounds. Norman had no idea of how they found out about the wedding. But it was nice of them anyway, he thought.

  Norman had not counted on the party afterwards. Roger and Polly Nash aside, he did not care for the people who came to the basement flat on Oakley Street. Vivian, of course, had few friends, and so most of the guests were friends of Kate. The party, a sort of surprise, had been arranged to take place in Norman’s flat. Downstairs Norman noticed that in the excitement of the last three days he had forgotten about his mail. He emptied the box of a few letters and bills and a rolled copy of the Saturday edition of the Montreal Star. Norman drank too much at the party.

  All the gay, sophisticated men gathered in his flat could be divided into two groups. Those who wore extravagant waistcoats and those who went in for extravagant moustaches. The first group, it seemed, was made up of journalists, advertising writers, assistant film and television directors, and non-figurative painters. Most of them had been to minor public schools. They were, on the whole, amusing, clever, and with a tendency to get drunk as a matter of pride. The extravagant moustaches talked about their sports cars, past and present, with a mixture of energy, nostalgia, and passion that one usually associates with talk about one’s mistresses. They wouldn’t speak of their jobs. “You’ve got to earn a crust of bread somehow,” was about as concrete as one of them got with Norman. But, it appeared, they were mostly businessmen of one sort or another and they were far more political. They thought the country was going to pot. There was a dream of a Northern Rhodesian farm, an Australian sheep ranch, or an oil job in Saudi Arabia in their futures. They were shorter, redder, and more inclined to corpulence than the others. Through their contact with the extravagant waistcoats they had acquired a taste for French salads, but nothing would make them give up tomato sauce. Most of the girls – actresses, models, dancers – were extremely attractive and, contrary to legend, far more decorative than their American or continental counterparts.

  Roger Nash came down with a thud on the arm of Norman’s chair. “You’re being anti-social,” he said. “I thought Americans liked to be liked.”

  “Do you really want to write film scripts?”

  “I don’t really want to do anything very much.”

  Vivian came to collect Norman. “There are some people I want you to meet,” she said.

  They were, as he expected, extravagant waistcoats. But there were also three authentic friends of Vivian. Her friends were marked by beards and corduroy trousers. “I say,” one of them said, “are you and Vivian going to settle here or in Canada?”

  “Here,” Norman said.

  Kate passed with a tray of drinks and Norman poured two into one glass and took it. He kissed Kate on the cheek.

  “Norman is going to write films here,” Vivian said to a bearded man. The bearded man managed a smile. “Cyril is a film editor for the coal board,” Vivian said coolly.

  Norman was concerned because he realized for the first time that there was a streak of malice in Vivian. She had invited all these people here with cruel intent. She appeared to have told all of them that Norman was a King’s College man, a former RCAF pilot, and a successful film an
d thriller writer. Norman was dismayed because he did not care for these people and he was not interested in helping Vivian to get her own back. She didn’t seem to know that he wanted to settle down and return to teaching.

  As Norman helped himself to another drink somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

  The small, spare man with the black fuzzy hair wore horn-rimmed glasses and a cheesed-off smile and had no chin to speak of. Haig was a social scientist. He tapped Norman once, twice, three times on the shoulder. Norman whirled around drunkenly.

  “I suppose you were in Spain?”

  Haig had a high, scraping voice.

  “What?” Norman asked.

  “Vivian told me you were in Spain.”

  “Yeah,” Norman said, “I was,” anticipating, not without pleasure, a little praise.

  “Was that where you were wounded?”

  “No. I was a pilot.”

  “A pilot?”

  “In the RCAF. I was shot down over the channel.”

  Pretty girls predominated in the group around them so Norman was anxious to come off well.

  “I don’t mean to be offensive,” Haig said, “but physical courage is a form of ignorance, actually.”

  “Jesus,” Norman said. “I wasn’t a hero.”

  Haig snapped his hand open like a knife and pointed a white blade-like finger at Vivian. “He was decorated,” he said, “wasn’t he?”

  “It was only a formality,” Norman said. “After you’ve taken part in so many missions you automatically –”