Roger Kraus served the N.S.D.A.P. well. As an athlete, and as a soldier.
In 1935 he was sent to Spain. Here he was an intimate of Hoheitsträger Hans Hellermann and frequently appeared on Fichte League platforms. Officially employed by Hellermann & Phillippi as a member of the Harbour Police, he worked as an informer and a hunter of men, taking orders from Carl Cords and occasionally from Zuchristian. In Madrid, during July, 1936, he distributed Mausers or early potatoes to Lafarga and Torres. Later in the year he joined Queipo de Llano’s army. In 1938 he was decorated for exceptional service by Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
Kraus, under sentence of death in Paris, returned to Spain in 1945.
He disliked Spain. The men were effeminate, Semitic, and they made poor soldiers. Even when they killed it was always from a passion, never with a sense of order. But these were bad times and he must be satisfied with anything.
He examined his reflection in the hallway mirror. The clothes are bad, he thought. They hang loosely from my body. She should see me in my uniform. My boots black and polished, my legs masculine, slender, my tunic tight against my chest. Still, I have the figure of a young man. My muscles are hard.
Not like Chaim – soft: plump: Jew. Godless.
And Chaim reminded him of last night. Theresa had quarrelled with him again, and Toni had avoided him at the Mocambo. So he had gone on to Noël’s and there, young Chicu, drunken again, had greeted him with a mocking “Sieg Heil, Colonel.” There had been others in the bar but Kraus knew them and that they were cowards. He had grabbed Chicu and swung him around so that his arm was pinned in back of him. Then, gradually increasing pressure on his arm, Roger had ordered him to lay his other hand flat on the bar. He had drained his beer mug while Chicu crouched, whimpering, his hand quivering on the bar. Then, quickly, swiftly, he had smashed his beer mug down on Chicu’s hand. He had heard the bones crack, and he had felt Chicu go limp and fall to the floor.
Godless, he thought. Impudent, and cowards.
But street brawls.…
Yes, the last months had been bad. He, Roger Kraus, was a soldier. But there were no calls. He was without an army or a commander or a reason. There had to be a reason, a prey, an enemy. Not this nothing, this waiting, this freedom.
She will be surprised to see me, he thought.
And in his room André puffed solemnly at a cigarette. The light was not strong enough for painting but it was sufficient just now to stare down at the street with nothing to do but think or wonder.
So many souls arising and greeting the new dawn dull-mindedly. Chaim, what is old Chaim thinking? (You are wonderfully wrong, old Chaim – We cannot love all men because many of them are evil and not worth the cheapest of our sentiments which is pity.) In Montreal, mother is awakening and father is yawning (eyes half-shut because he doesn’t want to see mother’s wrinkled body), and with the ineffable confidence of the untried he stretches and decides he will wear his trousers with the grey stripe.… Pepe is stirring, perhaps María is ill, poor Derek is probably staring into a mirror.
But me, what do I believe in? Not even in the validity of my own anger. (We, doomingly haunting a back-alley of prehistory, suffer the asking warlords and gods unworthy of men.) But is it necessary to believe in something?
Because I do not know enough or cannot guess enough or feel enough I believe in being good and understanding and brother to other men and painting because it is the only thing I can do half-well and perhaps finally it will explain to me what I am looking for.
As a child, and later as an adolescent, André enjoyed wandering on the mountain which rose like a camel’s hump in the heart of Montreal.
He had been brought up in Westmount where the Canadian rich lived, and every morning at eight his father got up and had breakfast and had Morton bring around the car and drove down to St. James Street where the Canadian rich worked.
André had attended a private school, and in the morning old pinhead Cox forced all the students to take cold showers. He studied Latin and in sixth grade got caught with a copy of Sunbathing in his desk and he made left-wing on the school hockey team. At night his mother read him the poems of Bliss Carman and his father dozed or approved of the editorials in the Gazette or recited a poem by Rudyard Kipling. His mother had many lovers and named him André because his father wanted to call him George after the King. André adored one of his mother’s lovers, Jean-Paul, who did not last too long. Jean-Paul stole things, he called André’s father le roi des yahoos to his face and his mother la belle Lucretia which André did not understand until later on, he was perpetually drunk and borrowing money and he was killed when a training ’plane he was in crashed during the first months of the war.
Yes, one fine day you got up and it was war. (It was not war when Guernica happened and the woman said vale más morir de pies que vivir de rodillas. No, not yet. But now Mr. Chamberlain said I am speaking to you from number 10 Downing Street and Mr. Hitler said up Germans and the Montreal Gazette said Save Your Scrap Iron.) So Mr. Bennett got up in the Mount Stephen Club and said gentlemen, this is war: he came home and he told André how it makes a man out of you: Mrs. Bennett knitted socks for the Red Army: and every week André made a bundle of the Gazettes and drove down to salvage campaign headquarters with Morton.
But what did it mean?
As a boy living in it the war had meant The Walls Have Ears, hurrah for Churchill, Send us More Japs, V for Victory, up the Yids, Open up a Second Front, send your laundry to the chink, Buy Bonds, bravo the red heroes, Hitler has only got one ball and Goering has none at all, United Nations with Flags Unfurled, hip-hip the frog maquis, and so on. But later, just one year ago, he had visited a beach in Normandy. There were craters in the gravel; and he had found a black boot with a bullet hole in it. Pillboxes, at least four feet thick and crazycoloured, lay smashed on the surf like the toys of giant children. The town itself, Ste. Famille, was abandoned and a ruin. So all through the night he sat up on the beach and tried hard and with no success to see the men charging out of the sea and falling with bullets in their bellies, and feel the Germans warm in their pillboxes firing away and muttering ach, swine – but en didn’t do that kind of stuff or he was crazy or freezing and udy came out at dawn and found him with the boot in his hand and trembling and he slept like a baby in the car all the way back to Paris and he was drunk for two days and the gang said he was being dramatic.…
So he came to Spain, Valencia, where the killing had started in a way and maybe they could explain it.
Yes, there were truths.
The Communists had one and so did the Christians. Even the bourgeois had one and for a long time they did pretty good with it. But you could not paint, not really, so long as men were killing each other so often. There was the truth, a shining beauty of a truth, and if he was strong enough he would find it. But until then, until that never day, his centre would be confusion. He would accept what came and act or choose according to what he knew, for not to act would mean nonliving, which was the lot of the coward.
Toni’s room was small and simply furnished. There was a discoloured yellow square on the wall where in 1937 a portrait of La Pasionaria had hung. In 1943 a student had committed suicide in the room by slashing his wrists. The blood had been washed away but where the pool had dried the floor varnish was still rubbed out. Then, for some time, the building had been run as a brothel. When Señor Jorge purchased the establishment only a year ago and had converted it back into a rooming house all the mattresses had had to be aired. The cracked springs were never mended.
I know better than he does what he wants, she thought. For one thing this is not his home and the sadness of Europe is wrong for him. So is politics, Guillermo, and Pepe. His anger against his family and his country comes of love and later on we will go to his land. A man should have a home and a family for without it he is a tramp. We will have a fine home in the mountains. He shall have a room full of books, and I shall sew for our children in the parlour. We shall be
happy and have many quarrels. When we die our children shall carry on.
But the new will be strange. Perhaps the people won’t like me?
André had left early. Last night he had been particularly restless in his sleep and twice Toni had had to get up to cover him. He had left a note.
Darling,
You looked so lovely asleep I didn’t dare wake you.
A.
Send Guillermo around to my room as soon as he shows up.
She was in her dressing-gown, moving drowsily about the room, when she heard the knock on the door.
“Pase.”
Kraus entered the room and Toni shivered. Oh, my God, she thought. What if he saw him? What if they met in the hall?
Kraus smiled secretively, trying to affect superiority.
“You mustn’t come here,” Toni said.
The room is full of sleeping smells, she thought. Our smells. She walked over to the window and opened it.
“Why?”
Toni wrapped her gown more closely around her body. Underneath she was naked and she felt he knew. She felt nauseous.
“Why mustn’t I come here.”
“You mustn’t,” Toni said. “I forbid it.”
Kraus sat down on the bed. It was still warm and unmade. She was not alone last night, he thought.
“Why?”
“Please, go. Please.”
Kraus felt uneasy. With men – real men – his exploits were sufficient proofs of his power. But although women were reduced to a groaning and passionate avowal of his manhood in bed they resented and even mocked him in the morning. He was afraid of women. It was a question of needs.
“I used to collect stamps,” he said. “I had a beautiful collection. Theresa burned it. She burned it on the day the Bolsheviks entered Germany.”
Toni smiled helplessly. His eyes were hard and grey and vacant. She recognised the mood, and she was afraid.
“Is it true about you and the artist?”
“Who told you?”
“My sister.”
I wonder if she reads my diary, he thought.
His eyes never left her. And in spite of herself she was excited and tingling.
“I love him,” she said quickly.
“He is only a boy.”
Toni wanted to conceal their bed from him. She was suddenly ashamed of her body. She would have liked, that moment, to cover herself to her fingertips. He must not see anything.
“He is no good. He drinks.”
Last night, for the first time, André had made love to her with the lights on. He had studied her body lovingly and all night long he had held her in his arms. “I love you,” he had said. “You are beautiful.” I remember the taste of his sweat.
“You don’t understand, Roger.”
I hate her, he thought. He held the sheets tightly in his fists. He couldn’t think of anything to say so he said: “He is a friend of the Jew.”
“So am I.”
Roger laughed. His laugh was short, and without humour. “Should I kill the Jews?” he asked.
Toni flushed. “He is not afraid of you.”
“You are wrong. They are always afraid. Even now, when they are in power, they are afraid.”
“Please go. I don’t feel well,” Toni said.
Roger spoke in spurts. He parted with his words grudgingly, as if they were prickly objects stuck in his throat.
“You do not understand … how … how rotten they are,” he said. “Our landlord, a Polish Jew, evicted my parents from their home because … because they couldn’t pay the rent. My father died under the knife of a Jew. It was a simple operation. He was murdered. They plan to rule the world …”
Theresa had told him about the landlord, but he was certain about the doctor. His name was Bergman.
“Oh, what do I care about the Jews!” Toni said.
“Do you live with him?”
Toni did not reply.
“He is not even a communist. I could respect him if he at least had the courage for that. But, no. He is nothing. A coward.”
Toni laughed shrilly. “It is you who are afraid,” she said.
“Afraid? Afraid of what?”
“Oh, I don’t know!”
“Well, I’ll tell you. It’s their talk. Talk, talk, talk. They make a man dizzy with their talk!”
Toni turned away from him. She found a cigarette on the dresser and lit it. Now he is in his room, she thought. He is painting or looking out of the window and thinking with his forehead all creased up. I am with him, I’m not here at all.
“Does he give you money?”
“Why does everyone think they can be filthy with me?”
Kraus moved towards her almost sadly. He took her in his arms and she turned her face away. She felt his hand on her breast. It was a hard hand, not understanding and kind like the hand of André.
“You will never be any better than a whore with him,” he said.
She struggled out of his arms. But when she saw the expression on his face she was sorry.
“I love another man.”
“I love you,” he said with difficulty.
Unwillingly, Toni thought: his love is realer than André’s. She felt panicky. André, more than anything else, feels sorry for all of us without understanding. But Kraus looks up to me, he needs me.
“I am so tired. Tired of politics, tired of killing. You don’t understand what she does to me. Oh, I hate her,” he said passionately, “I could kill her.”
“Roger, I’m sorry. I …”
Roger was pale and his face was rigid. She wished she could love him. It would be better than André.
“They all hate me for what I have done. Chaim, the men in the bars. It’s her fault, she always told me what to do. I would like to be their comrade. I … Do you like skiing?”
His eyes were bright and unseeing. She was no longer frightened and suddenly she pulled his head to her breast. “I have never been skiing,” she said.
“I am good with my hands. We could go to Germany and she would never find us. I could be a carpenter.” He stopped short. “They would put me in jail, they say I killed …”
“Roger, you are a man. Why don’t you leave her?”
Kraus laughed pathetically. “She is so strong. I hate her, but I can’t leave her. Who else would talk to me? Who … You don’t know what it is to be lonely. What if the things I did were wrong, what if the dead really weren’t bad?” He. held her urgently and his grip was as strong as steel. “We could go to South America, to Argentina. I have friends there.”
“Roger, you don’t understand. I love André. You can only be my friend.”
He pushed her away and laughed hoarsely. “I do not want to be your friend!”
“There are other women. You are not a bad man, you will find …”
“I’m going away. I’m going, I’m going!”
“Roger!”
His face was white with anger.
“You women are strong! But I will show you and Theresa and your boy of a lover. I will show you all!”
“Roger, don’t be a child.”
He tried to grab her again. This time viciously, for he was a man injured. But she moved away.
“He is no good. He will be unfaithful to you.”
“If he is unfaithful to me I will see what to do then. But that is my problem.”
“I am a champion athlete. I have won many medals. Don’t you understand, I love you!”
“Oh, Roger, please, I must get dressed now.”
Kraus smiled, lasciviously, and like a boy. “I will sit here while you get dressed. I will sit here and watch.”
She began to sob. “Please …”
“Just now you were more friendly.”
“Yes, but you abuse my friendship.”
Roger stood up. “You are too cheap for me anyway.”
He slammed the door after him.
II
“Why has he got rat traps on the floor?”
“He was ill for a month when he came here. He hadn’t been eating properly or something like that. He imagines things. Guillermo told me all about him one night. He comes from a very wealthy family.”
“You would think he could afford a better room than this?”
Manuel was sprawled out on the bed and sipping cognac. García had pushed the canvas tablecloth to one side and cleared a seat for himself on the trunk. He was also drinking.
“They enjoy pretending that they are poor,” Manuel said. “It broadens their education. It is romantic.”
“You shouldn’t talk that way. He is a good friend of Guillermo’s. He has done him many favours. Perhaps he is really poor?”
“Favours? I have had enough of their charity. It stinks!”
“Still, he is a friend …”
“Guillermo is a romantic. Having a foreign artist for a friend appeals to the bourgeois in him.”
“But …”
“You are a boy. You understand nothing. I know the type. They do you favours. They sympathise. The workers suffer so much. My, my. But as soon as there is a crisis, poof! – they disappear.”
André opened the door and stared blankly at the two strangers. He didn’t know what to think. He smiled weakly.
García jumped up. “We are friends of Guillermo’s,” he said shyly.
The Acrobats Page 6