Mother Night Part 11

"When I got to West Berlin," she said, "and they gave me the forms to fill out-name, occupation, nearest living relative-I had my choice. I could be Resi Noth, cigarette-machine operator, with no relatives anywhere. Or I could be Helga Noth, actress, wife of a handsome, adorable, brilliant playwright in the U.S.A." She leaned forward. "You tell me-" she said, "which one should I have been?"

G.o.d forgive me, I accepted Resi as my Helga again.

Once she got that second acceptance, though, she began to show in little ways that her identification with Helga wasn't as complete as she'd said. She felt free, bit by bit, to accustom me to a personality that wasn't Helga's but her own.

This gradual revelation, this weaning of me from memories of Helga, began as we left the cafeteria. She asked me a jarringly practical question: "Do you want me to keep on bleaching my hair white," she said, "or can I let it come back the way it really is?"

"What is it really?" I said.

"Honey," she said.

"A lovely color for hair," I said. "Helga's color."

"Mine has more red in it," she said.

"I'd be interested to see it," I said.

We walked up Fifth Avenue, and a little later she said to me, "Will you write a play for me some time?"

"I don't know if I can write any more," I said.

"Didn't Helga inspire you to write?" she said.

"Not to write, but to write the way I wrote," I said.

"You wrote a special way-so she could play the part," she said.

"That's right," I said. "I wrote parts for Helga that let her be the quintessence of Helga onstage."

"I want you to do that for me some time," she said.

"Maybe I'll try," I said.

"The quintessence of Resi," she said. "Resi Noth."

We saw a Veterans' Day parade down Fifth Avenue, and I heard Resi's laugh for the first time. It was nothing like Helga's laugh, which was a rustling thing. Resi's laugh was bright, melodious. What struck her so funny was the drum majorettes, kicking at the moon, twitching their behinds, and twirling chromium d.i.l.d.os.

"I've never seen such a thing before," she said to me. "War must be a very s.e.xy thing to Americans." She went on laughing, and she thrust out her bosom to see if she might not make a good drum majorette, too.

She was growing younger by the second, gayer, more raucously irreverent. Her white hair, which had made me think so recently of premature aging, now updated itself, spoke of peroxide and girls who ran away to Hollywood.

When we turned away from the parade, we looked into a store window that showed a great gilded bed, one very much like the one Helga and I once had.

And not only did the window show that Wagnerian bed, it showed a reflection of Resi and me, too, ghostlike, and with a ghostly parade behind us. The pale wraiths and the substantial bed formed an unsettling composition. It seemed to be an allegory in the Victorian manner, a pretty good barroom painting, actually, with the pa.s.sing banners and the golden bed and the male and female ghosts.

What the allegory was, I cannot say. But I can offer a few more clues. The male ghost looked G.o.d-awful old and starved and moth-eaten. The female ghost looked young enough to be his daughter, sleek, bouncy, and full of h.e.l.l.

25.

THE ANSWER TO.

COMMUNISM ...

RESI AND I dawdled on our way back to my ratty attic, looked at furniture, drank here and there. I dawdled on our way back to my ratty attic, looked at furniture, drank here and there.

Resi went to the ladies' room in one bar, leaving me alone. A barfly started talking to me.

"You know what the answer to communism is?" he asked me.

"Nope," I said.

"Moral Rearmament," he said.

"What the h.e.l.l is that?" I said.

"It's a movement," he said.

"In what direction?" I said.

"That Moral Rearmament movement," he said, "believes in absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love."

"I certainly wish them all the luck in the world," I said.

In another bar, Resi and I met a man who claimed he could satisfy, thoroughly satisfy, seven women in a night, provided they were all different.

"I mean really different," he said.

Oh, G.o.d-the lives people try to lead.

Oh, G.o.d-what a world they try to lead them in!

26.

IN WHICH.

PRIVATE IRVING.

BUCHANON AND.

SOME OTHERS ARE.

MEMORIALIZED ...

RESI AND I didn't get home until after supper, after dark. Our plan was to spend another night at a hotel. We came home because Resi wanted to have a waking dream of how we would refurnish the attic, wanted to play house. I didn't get home until after supper, after dark. Our plan was to spend another night at a hotel. We came home because Resi wanted to have a waking dream of how we would refurnish the attic, wanted to play house.

"At last I have a house," she said.

"It takes a heap of living," I said, "to make a house a home." I saw that my mailbox was stuffed again. I left the mail where it was.

"Who did that?" said Resi.

"Who did what?" I said.

"That," she said, pointing to my namecard on the mailbox. Somebody had drawn a swastika after my name in blue ink.

"It's something quite new," I said uneasily. "Maybe we'd better not go upstairs. Maybe whoever did it is up there."

"I don't understand," she said.

"You picked a miserable time to come to me, Resi," I said. "I had a cozy little burrow, where you and I might have been quite content-"

"Burrow?" she said.

"A hole in the ground, made secret and snug," I said. "But, G.o.d!-" I said in anguish, "just when you were coming to me, something laid my den wide open!" I told her how my notoriety had been renewed. "Now the carnivores," I said, "scenting a freshly opened den, are closing in."

"Go to another country," she said.

"What other country?" I said.

"Any country you like," she said. "You have the money to go anywhere you want."

"Anywhere I want-" I said.

And then a bald, bristly fat man carrying a shopping bag came in. He shouldered Resi and me away from the mailboxes with a hoa.r.s.e, unapologetic bully's apology.

"'Scuse me," he said. He read the names on the mailboxes like a first-grader, putting a finger under each name, studying each name for a long, long time.

"Campbell!" he said at last, with ma.s.sive satisfaction. "Howard W. Campbell." He turned to me accusingly. "You know him?" he said.

"No," I said.

"No," he said, becoming radiant with malevolence. "You look just like him." He took a copy of the Daily News Daily News from the shopping bag, opened it to an inside page, handed it to Resi. "Now, don't that look a lot like the gentleman you're with?" he said to her. from the shopping bag, opened it to an inside page, handed it to Resi. "Now, don't that look a lot like the gentleman you're with?" he said to her.

"Let me see," I said. I took the paper from Resi's slack fingers, saw the picture of myself and Lieutenant O'Hare, standing before the gallows at Ohrdruf so long ago.

The story underneath the picture said that the government of Israel had located me after a fifteen-year search. That government was now requesting that the United States release me to Israel for trial. What did they want to try me for? Complicity in the murder of six million Jews.

The man hit me right through the newspaper before I could comment.

Down I went, banging my head on an ash can.

The man stood over me. "Before the Jews put you in a cage in a zoo or whatever they're gonna do to you," he said, "I'd just like to play a little with you myself."

I shook my head, trying to clear it.

"Felt that one, did you?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

"That one was for Private Irving Buchanon," he said.

"Is that who you are?" I said.

"Buchanon is dead," he said. "He was the best friend I ever had. Five miles in from Omaha Beach, the Germans cut his nuts off and hung him from a telephone pole."

He kicked me in the ribs, holding Resi off with one hand. "That's for Ansel Brewer," he said, "run over by a Tiger tank at Aachen."

He kicked me again. "That's for Eddie McCarty, cut in two by a burp gun in the Ardennes," he said. "Eddie was gonna be a doctor."

He drew back his big foot to kick me in the head. "And this one-" he said, and that's the last I heard. The kick was for somebody else who'd been killed in war. It knocked me cold.

Resi told me later what the last things the man said were, and what the present for me was in the shopping bag.

"I'm one guy who hasn't forgot that war," he said to me, though I could not hear him. "Everybody else has forgot it, as near as I can tell-but not me.

"I brought you this," he said, "so you could save everybody a lot of trouble."

And he left.

Resi put the noose in the ash can, where it was found the next morning by a garbage-man named Lazlo s...o...b..thy. s...o...b..thy actually hanged himself with it-but that is another story.

As for my own story: I regained consciousness on a ruptured studio couch in a damp, overheated room that was hung with mildewed n.a.z.i banners. There was a cardboard fireplace, a dime-store's idea of how to have a merry Christmas. In it were cardboard birch logs, a red electric light and cellophane tongues of eternal fire.

Over this fireplace was a chromo of Adolf Hitler. It was swathed in black silk.

I myself was stripped to my olive-drab underwear, covered with a bedspread of simulated leopard skin. I groaned and sat up, skyrockets going off in my skull. I looked down at the leopard skin and mumbled something.

"What did you say, darling?" said Resi. She was sitting right beside the cot, though I hadn't seen her until she spoke.

"Don't tell me-" I said, drawing the leopard skin closer about me, "I've joined the Hottentots."

27.