“Interesting writers are rare among all peoples.”
“Here is our driver with the passports.”
We crossed the border, and an hour later the bus stopped and we went to have lunch at a Spanish restaurant.
In the entrance, Mrs. Weyerhofer came up to me and said, “You sat with my husband this morning and I know that the whole time he talked about me. I can read lips like a deaf-mute. You should know that he’s a pathological liar. Not one word of truth leaves his lips.”
“It so happens he praised you.”
Celina Weyerhofer tensed. “What did he say?”
“That you are unusually interesting as a woman.”
“Is that what he said? It can’t be. He has been impotent several years, and being next to him has made me frigid. Physically and spiritually he has made me sick.”
“He praised your imagination.”
“Nothing is left me except my imagination. He drained my blood like a vampire. He isn’t sexually normal. He is a latent homosexual—not so latent—although when I tell him this he denies it vehemently. He only wants to be with men, and when we still shared a bedroom he spent whole nights questioning me about my relationships with other men. I had to invent affairs to satisfy him. Later, he threw these imaginary sins up to me and called me filthy names. He forced me to confess that I had relations with a Nazi, even though God knows I would sooner have let them skin me alive. Maybe we can find a table together?”
“I promised to eat with some woman and her son.”
“The one I saw you with yesterday in the dining room? Her son is a beauty, but she is too fat and when she gets older she’ll go to pieces. Did you notice how many diamonds she wears? A jewelry store—tasteless, disgusting. In Lyons and Bordeaux none of us had a bathroom, but she got one. Since she is so rich, why does she ride in a bus? They don’t give her a plain room but a suite. Is she Jewish?”
“Her late husband was a Jew.”
“A widow, eh? She’s probably looking for a match. The diamonds are more than likely imitations. What is she, French?”
“Armenian.”
“Foolish men kill themselves and leave such bitches huge estates. Where does she live?”
“In Turkey.”
“Be careful. One glance was enough to tell me this is a spider. But men are blind.”
I couldn’t believe it, but I began to see that Mark was trying to arrange a match between his mother and myself. Strangely, the mother played as passive a role in the situation as some old-time maiden for whom the parents were trying to find a husband. I told myself that it was all my imagination. What would a rich widow, an Armenian living in Turkey, want with a Yiddish writer? What kind of future could she see in this? True, I was an American citizen, but it wouldn’t have been difficult for Mrs. Metalon to obtain a visa to America without me. I concluded that her fourteen-year-old son had hypnotized his mother—that he dominated her as his father had probably done before him. I also toyed with the notion that her husband’s soul had entered into Mark and that he, the dead Sephardi, wanted his wife to marry a fellow Jew. I tried to avoid eating with the pair, but each time Mark found me and said, “Sir, my mother is waiting for you.”
His words implied a command. When it was my turn to order my vegetarian dishes, Mark took over and told the waiter or waitress exactly what to bring me. He knew Spanish because his father had had a partner with whom he had conversed in Ladino. I wasn’t accustomed to drinking wine with my meals, but Mark ordered it without consulting me. When we came to a city, he always managed that his mother and I were left alone to shop for bargains and souvenirs. On these occasions he warned me sternly not to spend any money on his mother, and if I had already done so he demanded to know how much and told his mother to pay me back. When I objected, he arched his brows. “Sir, we don’t need gifts. A Yiddish writer can’t be rich.” He opened his mother’s pocketbook and counted out whatever the amount had been.
Mrs. Metalon smiled sheepishly at this and added, half in jest, half in earnest, that Mark treated her as if she were his daughter. But she had obviously accepted the relationship.
Is she so weak? I wondered. Or is there some scheme behind this?
The situation struck me as particularly strange because the mother and son were together only during vacations. The rest of the year she remained in Ankara while he studied in London. As far as I could determine, Mark was dependent on his mother; when he needed something he had to ask for money.
At first, the two of them sat in the bus together, but one day after lunch Mark told me that I was to sit with his mother. He himself sat down next to Celina Weyerhofer. He had arranged all this without the driver’s permission, and I doubted if he had discussed it with his mother.
I had been sitting next to a woman from Holland, and this changing of seats provoked whispering among the passengers. From that day on, I became Mrs. Metalon’s partner not only in the dining room but in the bus as well. People began to wink, make remarks, leer. Much of the time I looked out of the window. We drove through regions that reminded me of the desert and the land of Israel. Peasants rode on asses. We passed an area where gypsies lived in caves. Girls balanced water jugs on their heads. Grandmothers toted bundles of wood and herbs wrapped in linen sheets over their shoulders. We passed ancient olive trees and trees that resembled umbrellas. Sheep browsed among cracked clods of earth on the half-burned plain. A horse circled a well. The sky, pale blue, radiated a fiery heat. Something Biblical hovered over the landscape. Passages of the Pentateuch flashed across my memory. It seemed to me that I was somewhere in the plains of Mamre, where presently would materialize Abraham’s tent, and the angel would bring Sarah tidings that she would be blessed with a male child at the age of ninety. My head whirled with stories of Sodom, of the sacrifice of Isaac, of Ishmael and Hagar. The stacks of grain in the harvested fields brought Joseph’s dreams to mind. One morning we passed a horse fair. The horses and the men stood still, congealed in silence like phantoms of a fair from a vanished time. It was hard to believe that in this very land, some fifteen years before, a civil war had raged and Stalinists had shot Trotskyites.
Barely a week had passed since our departure, but I felt that I had been wandering for months. From sitting so long in one position I was overcome with a lust that wasn’t love or even sexual passion but something purely animalistic. It seemed that my partner shared the same feelings, for a special heat emanated from her. When she accidentally touched my hand, she burned me.
We sat for hours without a single word, but then we became gabby and said whatever came to our lips. We confided intimate things to one another. We yawned and went on talking half asleep. I asked her how it happened that she had married a man forty years older than herself.
She said, “I was an orphan. The Turks murdered my father, and my mother died soon after. We were rich but they stripped us of everything. I met him as an employee in his office. He had wild eyes. He took one look at me and I knew that he wanted me and was ready to marry me. He had an iron will. He also had the strength of a giant. If he hadn’t smoked cigars from early morning till late at night, he would have lived to be a hundred. He could drink fifteen cups of bitter coffee a day. He exhausted me until I developed an aversion to love. When he died, I had the solace that I would be left in peace for a change. Now everything has begun to waken within me again.”
“Were you a virgin when you married?” I asked in a half dream.
“Yes, a virgin.”
“Did you have lovers after his death?”
“Many men wanted me, but I was raised in such a way I couldn’t live with a man without marriage. In my circle in Turkey a woman can’t afford to be loose. Everyone there knows what everyone else is doing. A woman has to maintain her reputation.”
“What do you need with Turkey?”
“Oh, I have a house there, servants, a business.”
“Here in Spain you can do what you want,” I said, and regretted my words instantly.
>
“But I have a chaperon here,” she said. “Mark watches over me. I’ll tell you something that will seem crazy to you. He guards me even when he is in London and I’m in Ankara. I often feel that he sees everything I do. I sense it isn’t he but his father.”
“You believe this?”
“It’s a fact.”
I glanced backward and saw Mark gazing at me sharply as if he were trying to hypnotize me.
When we stopped for the night at a hotel, we first had to line up for the toilets, then wait a long time for our dinner. In the rooms assigned to us, the ceilings were high, the walls thick, and there were old-fashioned washstands with basins and pitchers of water.
That night, we stopped late, which meant that dinner was not served until after ten. Once again, Mark ordered a bottle of wine. For some reason I let myself be persuaded to drink several glasses. Mark asked me if I had had a chance to bathe during the trip, and I told him that I washed every morning out of the washbasin with cold water just like the other passengers.
He glanced at his mother half questioningly, half imperatively.
After some hesitation, Mrs. Metalon said, “Come to our room. We have a bathroom.”
“When?”
“Tonight. We leave at five in the morning.”
“Sir, do it,” Mark said. “A hot bath is healthy. In America everyone has a bathroom, be he porter or janitor. The Japanese bathe in wooden tubs, the whole family together. Come a half hour after dinner. It’s not good to bathe immediately following the evening meal.”
“I’ll disturb both of you. You’re obviously tired.”
“No, sir. I never go to sleep until between one and two o’clock. I’m planning to take a walk through the city. I have to stretch my legs. From sitting all day in the bus they’ve become cramped and stiff. My mother goes to bed late, too.”
“You’re not afraid to walk alone at night in a strange city?” I asked.
“I’m not afraid of anybody. I took a course in wrestling and karate. I also take shooting lessons. It’s not allowed boys my age, but I have a private teacher.”
“Oh, he takes more courses than I have hairs on my head,” Mrs. Metalon said. “He wants to know everything.”
“In America, I’ll study Yiddish,” Mark announced. “I read somewhere that a million and a half people speak this language in America. I want to read you in the original. It’s also good for business. America is a true democracy. There you must speak to the customer in his own language. I want my mother to come to America with me. In Turkey, no person of Armenian descent is sure of his life.”
“My friends are all Turks,” Mrs. Metalon protested.
“Once the pogroms start they’ll stop being your friends. My mother tries to hide it from me but I know very well what they did to the Armenians in Turkey and to the Jews in Russia. I want to visit Israel. The Jews there don’t bow their heads like those in Russia and Poland. They offer resistance. I want to learn Hebrew and to study at Jerusalem University.”
We said goodbye and Mark wrote the number of their room on a small sheet he tore from a notebook. I went to my room for a nap. My legs wobbled as I climbed the stairs. I lay down on the bed in my clothes with the notion of resting a half hour. I closed my eyes and sank into a deep slumber. Someone woke me—it was Mark. To this day I don’t know how he got into my room. Maybe I had forgotten to lock it or he had tipped the maid to let him in.
He said, “Sir, excuse me but you’ve slept a whole hour. You’ve apparently forgotten that you are coming to our room for your bath.”
I assured Mark that I’d be at his door in ten minutes, and after some hesitation he left. Getting undressed and unpacking a bathrobe and slippers from my valise wasn’t easy for me. I cursed the day I had decided to take this tour, but I hadn’t the courage to tell Mark I wouldn’t come. For all his delicacy and politeness Mark projected a kind of childish brutality.
I threw my spring coat over my bathrobe and on unsteady legs began climbing the two floors to their room. I was still half asleep, and for a moment I had the illusion that I was on board ship. When I got to the Metalons’ floor, I could not find the slip of paper with the room number. I was sure that it was number 43, but the tiny lamp on the high ceiling was concealed behind a dull shade and emitted barely any light. In the dimness I couldn’t see this number. It took a long time of groping before I found it and knocked on the door.
The door opened, and to my amazement I saw Celina Weyerhofer in a nightgown, her face thickly smeared with cream. Her hair looked wet and freshly dyed. I grew so confused that I could not speak. Finally I asked, “Is this 43?”
“Yes, this is 43. To whom were you going? Oh, I understand. It seems to me that your lady with the diamonds is somewhere on this floor. I saw her son. You’ve made a mistake.”
“Madam, I don’t wish to detain you. I just want to tell you they invited me to take a bath there, that’s all.”
“A bath, eh? So let it be a bath. I haven’t had a bath for over a week myself. What kind of tour is this that some passengers get privileges and others are discriminated against? The advertisement didn’t mention anything about two classes of passengers. My dear Mr.—what is your name?—I warned you that that person would trap you, and I see this has happened sooner than I figured. Wait a minute—your bath won’t run out. Since when do they call it a bath? We call it by a different name. Don’t run. Because you’ve forgotten the number, you’ll have to knock on strangers’ doors and wake people. Everyone is dead tired. On this tour, before you can even lie down you have to get up again. My husband is a good sleeper. He lies down, opens some book, and two minutes later he’s snoring like a lord. He carries his own alarm clock. I’ve stopped sleeping altogether. Literally. That’s my sickness. I haven’t slept for years. I told a doctor in Bern about this—he’s actually a professor of medicine—and he called me a liar. The Swiss can be very coarse when they choose to be. He had studied something in a medical book or he had a theory, and because the facts didn’t jibe with his theory this made me a liar. I’ve been watching you sitting with that woman. It looks as if you’re telling her jokes from the way she keeps on laughing. My husband sat next to her one time before she monopolized you, and she told him things no decent woman would tell a stranger. I suspect she is a madam of a whorehouse in Turkey. Or something like that. No respectable woman wears so much jewelry. You can smell her perfume a mile away. I’m not even sure that this boy is her son. There seems to be some kind of unnatural relationship between them.”
“Madam Weyerhofer, what are you saying?”
“I’m not just pulling things out of the air. God has cursed me with eyes that see. I say ‘cursed’ because this is for me a curse rather than a blessing. If you absolutely must take a bath, as you call it, do it and satisfy yourself, but be careful—such a person can easily infect you with God knows what.”
Just at that moment the door across the hall opened and I saw Mrs. Metalon in a splendid nightgown and gold-colored slippers. Her hair was loose; it fell to her shoulders. She was made up, too. The women glared at each other furiously; then Mrs. Metalon said, “Where did you go? I’m in 48, not 43.”
“Oh, I made a mistake. Truly, I’m completely mixed up. I’m terribly sorry—”
“Go take your bath!” Mrs. Weyerhofer said and gave me a light push. She muttered words in French I didn’t understand but knew to be insulting. She slammed her own door shut.
I turned to Mrs. Metalon, who asked, “Why did you go to her, of all people? I waited and waited for you. There is no more hot water anyhow. And where has Mark vanished to? He went for a walk and hasn’t come back. This night is a total loss to me. That woman—what’s her name? Weyerhofer—is a troublemaker, and crazy besides. Her own husband admitted that she’s emotionally disturbed.”
“Madam, I’ve made a terrible mistake. Mark wrote down your room number for me, but while changing my clothes I lost the slip. It’s all because I’m so tired—”
“
Oh, will that red-haired bitch malign me before everyone on the bus now! She is a snake whose every word is venom.”
“I truly don’t know how to excuse myself. But—”
“Well, it’s not your fault. It was Mark who cooked up this stew. The driver told me to keep it secret that we’re getting a bathroom. He doesn’t want to create jealousy among the passengers. Now he’ll be mad at me and he’ll be right. I can’t continue this trip any longer. I’ll get off with Mark in Madrid and take a train or plane back to the border or maybe even to Paris. Come in for a moment. I’m already compromised.”
I went inside, and she took me to the bathroom to show me that the hot water was no longer running. The bathtub was made of tin. It was unusually high and long. On its outside hung a kind of pole with which to hold in and let out the water. The taps were copper. I excused myself again and Mrs. Metalon said, “You’re an innocent victim. Mark is a genius, but like all geniuses he has his moods. He was a prodigy. At five he could do logarithms. He read the Bible in French and remembered all the names. He loves me and he is determined to have me meet someone. The truth is, he’s seeking a father. Each time I join him during vacations he starts looking for a husband for me. He creates embarrassing complications. I don’t want to marry—certainly not anyone Mark would pick out for me. But he is compulsive. He gets hysterical. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I have a good reason to say it—when I do something that displeases him, he abuses me. Later he regrets it and beats his head against the wall. What can I do? I love him more than life itself. I worry about him day and night. I don’t know exactly why you made such an impression on him. Maybe it’s because you’re a Jew, a writer, and from America. But I was born in Ankara and that’s where my home is. What would I do in America? I’ve read a number of articles about America, and that’s not the country for me. With us, servants are cheap and I have friends who advise me on financial matters. If I left Turkey, I would have to sell everything for a song. I tell you this only to point out there can never be anything between us. You would not want to live in Turkey any more than I want to live in New York. But I don’t want to upset Mark and I therefore hope that for the duration of the trip you can act friendly toward me—sit with us at the table and all the rest. When the tour ends and you return home, let this be nothing more for you than an episode. He’s due back soon. Tell him that you took the bath. You’ll be able to have one in Madrid. We’ll be spending almost two days there, and I’m told the hotel is modern. I’m sure you have someone in New York you love. Sit down awhile.”
The Collected Stories Page 74