Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  Sheila raised her voice. The sweetness broke off and fell away. “Have you been teaching him Hebrew? Joshua’s religious education is none of your goddamned business. Quentin and I are atheists. We don’t want any of your stupid mumbo jumbo.”

  “I’m an atheist too,” Rehv said.

  She ignored him. “You people have been here for a year now. When are you going to learn to stop dragging everyone into your petty little problems?”

  Rehv found himself staring into her angry brown eyes. He saw the anger change to something else. She was scared. “Don’t you touch me,” she said, withdrawing from him. Joshua began to cry again.

  “Don’t be silly,” Rehv said. “I was only trying to teach him a few Arabic words, that’s all. I didn’t mean to upset him.” He turned to the boy. “I’m sorry, Joshua,” he said. “I hope we can still be friends.”

  The boy sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Joshua,” Sheila said. “How many times have I told you not to do that? It’s disgusting.” Rehv noticed that mother and son pronounced the word with identical cadence.

  Katz said: “If you want to teach so badly why don’t you send in that goddamned CV?”

  “I’m going to,” Rehv said, realizing that he meant it.

  “I don’t care what you do,” Sheila said. “From now on you’ll have to make it on your own. You have until the end of the week to find somewhere to live.”

  “Wait a minute, dear,” Katz said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be so drastic.”

  Sheila glared at him. “Very well, Quentin. You and I will go into the kitchen and discuss it. Joshua, it’s bedtime. Go change and I’ll come in five minutes to tuck you in.” To Rehv she said: “Stay here.”

  She and Katz moved around the tall benjamina that hid the open doorway to the kitchen. “I don’t want to go to bed,” the boy said.

  His parents turned. “But it’s bedtime, angel,” Sheila said.

  “I’m not tired. I want to watch TV.”

  “Just for fifteen minutes.”

  Joshua returned to the television. Rehv stayed where he was by the window. Sheila and Quentin went into the kitchen. Rehv could hear them talking in low voices. They talked for a long time. The television screen showed gunfights, car crashes, and roll-on deodorant. Joshua seemed unaware of him standing there a few feet away. Clouds rolled across the night sky. Betelgeuse was gone.

  Far below Rehv saw two men carrying a large chest across the street. They both seemed to be bearded, perhaps because of the way the streetlamp shone down on their faces. On the far side of the street they had difficulty with the wall of dirty snow the plow had made: The chest balanced on top, the men struggled on either side. After a few moments one man let go of the chest and walked away. The other man stood straight, and watched him go. Then he too let go of the chest, and ran after him. The chest remained perched on the snowbank. The second man reached the first and put an arm around his shoulders. The first man shrugged it off. The second man put his arm around the first man’s shoulders again. This time it was not shrugged off. They walked back to the chest like that. They turned to each other, kissed, lifted the chest, and carried it off.

  Rehv heard footsteps approaching behind him. He turned around. Sheila and Quentin stood side by side like jurors who have reached a verdict.

  Katz said: “We’ve decided to allow the present situation to continue on one condition.” He paused, and looked at his wife.

  “That you see a psychiatrist,” she said.

  “A psychiatrist?”

  “Yes,” Katz said quickly. “There’s no stigma attached to it here, not at all. I don’t know what it was like in Israel, but here everyone does it. It’s nothing.”

  “Do you do it?”

  “No. But I would.”

  He and Sheila were watching him carefully. To his surprise he realized he felt no strong opposition to the idea. He thought of the pink imprint on Joshua’s arm.

  “We think you have some problems, Isaac,” Katz said quite gently. “It’s very understandable after all you’ve been through.”

  “I can’t afford a psychiatrist.”

  Katz smiled. “There is a free psychiatric service for the refugees. We’ll make all the arrangements.”

  “All right.”

  Isaac Rehv walked through the snow to his borrowed home. He thought of the boy: not strong enough, not smart enough. And far too literal minded. He was glad he had said nothing to the sarcastic man at the farmhouse in Vermont. “Where are you going to find the boy who can do all that?” he would have said immediately.

  Nowhere. He thought of the pink mark darkening into a bruise. As he turned into his street he realized that he had forgotten his shoes and socks.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Rehv,” the psychiatrist said. “What a nice name. It means dream in French, doesn’t it?”

  He looked at her for a moment, wondering if she would base her whole treatment on this fact. He saw no answer in her narrow eyes, which changed from blue to green as the gap grew between her question and his reply. She was short and dark, with a soft round body, heavy in the hips and thighs; a body that reminded him of Naomi’s when she was careless about her diet. This slight resemblance of body, not at all of face, sent a brief pulse of uneasiness through his chest.

  “And I think your name means spear in German, Dr. Lanze.”

  “Does it?” The eyes stayed green. “I’m afraid I don’t know any German. One of my great-grandfathers came from Austria, I believe.” While she spoke she watched him very carefully, whether looking for obvious signs of madness or to see if he believed her about the great-grandfather, he didn’t know. “In any case last names don’t matter here. There are enough barriers already when it comes to human communication. In this room it’s first names only. Call me Madeleine.”

  She raised her eyebrows, shaped by tweezers into two Roman arches, to show she wanted some sign of agreement. He nodded.

  “And I’ll call you Isaac.”

  He nodded again, without being prodded, and waited for her to say what a nice name Isaac was, or to make some reference to the biblical Isaac.

  “Take off your shoes,” she said instead, “and sit down.”

  Rehv guessed that shoes were another barrier to human communication. He looked for a place to sit. There were no chairs on the thick brown broadloom, only a few large pillows of Indian design. He sat on one and pulled off his shoes, thinking of Joshua Katz-Finkle. He smelled no unpleasant smells, but saw that his socks were embroidered with hundreds of tiny golf balls. He could not remember wearing them before. He had a lot of socks: The refugees had been given large amounts of used clothing.

  Dr. Lanze drew up a pillow and sat down facing him, closer than he would have liked. Her suede jeans bunched in tight wrinkles that looked very constricting. She pulled one of her high-heeled leather boots onto her opposite knee and tugged at it. She grunted. The boot didn’t budge. She tried again, straining against the handicaps of tight clothing, short arms, round stomach. He heard a louder grunt. She looked up at him and said, a little out of breath, “God, I hate winter.” She straightened her leg, holding the boot over his lap. “Would you mind?”

  Rehv pulled it off. Underneath, her foot was bare; it was short and broad and strong, the toenails painted bright red. He took in slightly more air than usual through his nostrils, and smelled leather mixed with something medicinal. He pulled off the other boot.

  “Thank you, Isaac,” she said, setting the boots beside her on the floor. “I hope you like this room. Most people find it very relaxing.”

  Rehv looked around. Three of the walls were painted white and had no windows. The fourth was brown to match the broadloom and had two large rectangular windows. The ceiling was brown too, like a low and dirty cloud. On a mushroom-shaped stand in one corner sat a small aquarium, full of algae. A single goldfish looked out at them, its transparent fins waving gently in the water. Two paintings hung on the walls: a Renaissance print of Adam and Eve on thei
r way out of the garden, seething at each other—Eve quite hefty, like Dr. Lanze; and a modern oil that made him think of a Helmholtz contraction. He didn’t find the room relaxing.

  “What do you think of when you look at that painting?” Dr. Lanze asked.

  “Is it part of the examination?”

  “No.” She laughed, but not very hard. “And don’t call this an examination. We’re having a little talk.”

  Then why do I have to sit on a pillow without my shoes, Rehv thought. He said: “It reminds me of a Helmholtz contraction.”

  The round arches of Dr. Lanze’s eyebrows narrowed to points. “Excuse me for a minute,” she said, rising heavily to her feet. “I’ve got to use the bathroom.” She crossed the room and went out the door, closing it behind her.

  Rehv waited. He watched the goldfish. In the aquarium were plants to nibble at, a stream of bubbles to swim through, and a small conch shell to hide in, but the goldfish did not want to do any of these things. It watched Rehv.

  Dr. Lanze returned and sat on her pillow. “Sorry,” she said. Her eyebrows had resumed their roundness. He realized he had not heard any sound of plumbing. “Now,” she went on, “where were we?”

  “Helmholtz contraction.”

  “Ah yes: It’s interesting you should say that,” she said, and he knew she had gone to look it up. “The artist called it Star-burst.”

  As long as they were having a little talk he thought of saying, “That would fetch a higher price than Helmholtz Contraction,” but then he remembered the four wooden booths and decided it might not be true.

  “I think you’re the first person who has guessed right,” Dr. Lanze said. “Not that it has to be about any specific subject, of course,” she added quickly. “Do you know what most people think it’s about?”

  “Death,” Rehv said, because he thought any abstract painting made most people think of death.

  The eyebrows rose again to points. “You’re right,” she said slowly. The green eyes regarded his face, then slipped down his body and back up again.

  “Now then,” Dr. Lanze said more briskly. “We’ve had a chance to get to know each other a little.” She twisted around on the pillow to get more comfortable; the suede wrinkles loosened their bonds. “I should start by saying that Sheila has told me something about you. And I think I’ve found out quite a bit more during our chat. You’re intelligent, well-educated, you know something about the stars, you know languages, you’ve been a university professor.” She looked at him to see if he was with her so far. He said nothing. “The question I think we should ask is this: Can a man like that be happy working as a waiter and a night watchman?”

  Rehv gazed at her feet and his feet pointing at each other across the rug: two square naked feet with ten red faces and two long narrow ones in golf ball socks. There was something unhappy about both pairs.

  “Are you happy?” Dr. Lanze asked.

  “Happy?”

  “Do you know how it feels to be happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been happy before?”

  “Yes.” Something rose from his chest and filled his throat; he had trouble getting the word out.

  “That’s good. Many of the people I see have never been happy, not since they were babies.” That made sense to him. Happy was a silly word: It had a nonsense sound like syllables babbled by a baby; like baby talk it was soon outgrown. He knew enduring words for it in other languages.

  “What were you thinking, just then?” Dr. Lanze asked quickly.

  “Nothing.”

  “Something.”

  “I was thinking you should clean the aquarium. The fish will die with all that algae in there.”

  “You’re avoiding me, Isaac.” She wriggled forward on the pillow. “It’s hard to talk about, but you have to talk. I know you lost your wife and child.”

  “I didn’t lose them.” He looked at her angrily. The green eyes looked back with an expression he didn’t understand: patient, knowing, professional, and something else. Fear? He wasn’t sure. His anger died away.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s nothing to tell. It happened to lots of people. You must have read it in the papers.”

  “I’d like to hear you talk about it.”

  “I don’t think you would.” He was growing more uncomfortable sitting on the pillow. His back hurt.

  “How do you expect to adjust to it if you won’t talk?”

  “I will never adjust to it.” He heard the fierceness in his own voice, and saw again the odd look in her eyes. It was not fear, but some other kind of excitement, partly suppressed.

  “I can understand why you say that,” Dr. Lanze said. “But there are many other refugees—”

  “I’m not a refugee. I am an Israeli.” Again he saw the look.

  “There are many other Israelis who are beginning to adjust,” she continued in a quiet, almost husky voice. “Why not Isaac?”

  Rehv thought of the prime minister, Harry, and the young woman with the tear gas. “Is shooting Arabs in the streets adjusting?”

  “Everyone knows that the terrorists are a tiny minority, and they’re being rounded up very quickly,” she said patiently. “The majority is learning to accept the world as it is. Why not Isaac?”

  “I don’t know.” He really didn’t know. He decided he would tell her about the screaming.

  “I’ll be frank with you, Isaac,” Dr. Lanze said before he had a chance. “I’ve been working with a number of other Israelis in the past few months, and most of them were much worse off than you are. You’re young, you’re highly trained, you’re smart, you’re even good-looking. And you were happy before. All your problems come from one traumatic incident. So there is no need for us to ferret about in your childhood or early sexual escapades.” Dr. Lanze smiled. She had sharp, even white teeth. “All we have to do is find ways to deal with that trauma. But first you must accept the world as it is.”

  He thought he would like very much to deal with the trauma, but never under that condition. “Maybe there is another way.”

  “No,” Dr. Lanze said. “There isn’t.” Her lips were still slightly parted, lips the color of her toenails, the tips of the white teeth showing behind. “Let me tell you about a study that was made after the war, the Second World War. It’s about this same subject, coping with trauma, adjusting. It was done on German housewives, women who had lost their husbands, children, everything. The study found that many of them almost immediately began having sex with the occupying troops.” Dr. Lanze wriggled farther forward until her plump buttocks rested on the edge of the pillow. Her voice became huskier. “But more interesting, of these women a very large percentage, quite spontaneously and voluntarily, had a strong desire to perform analingus on the men of the occupying army. The study found that the women who gave in to this desire were generally the quickest to adjust and start building new lives. It was a symbolic acceptance of things as they were.”

  The green eyes moved very close to his, narrowed like slits in a pillbox. Now Rehv understood those eyes. He knew that one word from him, a look, and the suede trousers would be off, and he would be on his back on the floor, her heavy buttocks spread across his face: on his back, building a new life.

  Rehv stood up. He saw Dr. Lanze’s hand go to her waistband. He thought the screaming would start, but it did not. Instead he felt very tall, very controlled, very strong, stronger than he had felt in a long time. He looked down at her and quietly said: “I will never adjust.” She shrank back on the pillow.

  Rehv slipped on his shoes and walked out of the room, down the stairs, and outside into Greenwich Village. An old African trader shuffled slowly by in floppy yellow sandals, carrying an ivory camel that seemed very white in his blue black hands.

  Rehv crossed the street. He did not need the prime minister, the deputy prime minister, the government-in-exile, or men like Harry. He could do i
t all by himself. It might take a long time, even a lifetime, but it would be the life that was Isaac Rehv. He walked quickly down the street, thinking about the boy who could do what had to be done.

  In a parked car sat a sandy-haired man with dark eyebrows. He was reading the comic page of the newspaper.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Armbrister packed the perforated silver ball with tea. “Keemun,” he said. Carefully he lowered the ball by its thin silver chain into a white china mug, and filled the mug with boiling water from the kettle. Steam rose. Armbrister inhaled some of it and closed his bloodshot fish eyes with pleasure. Krebs waited while he removed the silver ball, said, “I really shouldn’t,” and stirred in two spoonfuls of clover honey. While Krebs waited he drank instant coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

  Armbrister sat back in his padded chair and sipped the tea. Krebs saw that he was putting on weight: The roll that strained the lower buttons of his Tattersall shirt had grown in diameter from a French stick to a double rye. He rested the mug on it, and glanced over his untidy desk; probably in search of a tidbit, Krebs thought. Their eyes met.

  “Let’s hear it,” Armbrister said, in the weary tone he used to indicate that being badgered was his lot in life.

  Krebs opened the yellow file on his knees. “I want to go after a man named Rehv,” he said. “Isaac Rehv. First you’ll need some background.” He opened his mouth to begin, but Armbrister interrupted.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said. He put the mug on the desk and reached across for the file. He didn’t like being told what he didn’t know; he preferred to see it on paper, like a teacher grading essays.

  Krebs watched him read. Armbrister read slowly, moistening the pad of his index finger on the tip of his tongue before turning each page. Nothing he read changed the expression on his face, which was that of an old city editor who knew there was no such thing as a new story. Armbrister closed the file. He set it on the desk and gave it a little push, like a child bored with his dinner.

  “Why?” he asked, reaching for his tea.

  “Why what?”