The Prince of West End Avenue Page 6

  "How many times, Goldstein?" said Hamburger wearily. "How many times?"

  Goldstein sighed.

  We watched Hamburger until he was finished, his knife and fork neatly lined up on an empty plate. He wiped his lips fastidiously with his napkin, looking up at us under angry brows. "Well, what are you waiting for? You expect me to go to the powder room?"

  Goldstein, knowing nothing of recent events at the Emma Lazarus Old Vic, and anxious, no doubt, to achieve a mood of

  bonhomie, turned to Lipschitz. "So tell me, Nahum, how's the play coming along?"

  "We're managing," said Lipschitz curtly.

  "He needs a couple gravediggers," said the Red Dwarf.

  "And a Fortinbras," said Hamburger.

  "Maybe a couple other players," said the Red Dwarf.

  ' 'Why, this it is, when men are rul'd by women,' " I said half to myself.

  Lipschitz heard me. "Speak up, Korner. You got something to say, we should all get the benefit." He darted his head at me, his cheeks an angry red.

  "Gentlemen, gentlemen," said Goldstein pacifically, "forget I said anything. Is it my business? A friendly question, was all."

  "They put you up to it."

  "As God is my witness, Nahum."

  "Sure, sure."

  "I don't even know what we're talking about."

  "We're talking Hamlet" said the Red Dwarf. "We're talking Tosca Dawidowicz, we're talking Mineola."

  "Take it from me, Nahum," said Blum. "I've been there. Such a good lay you should sell your soul she's not."

  "Whatever she is, Blum," said Hamburger, "she's also a lady. For that reason alone you should watch your tongue."

  "Lady shmady, in that department I think I know what I'm talking. Look at you, sniffing after Hermione Perlmutter. What do you smell? You think it's incense? Lift both their skirts, you'll find the same thing."

  Hamburger turned purple. With his fist clenched, he lunged at Blum, who ducked back, knocking his cup to the floor, where it shattered.

  "For God's sake!" said Goldstein, signaling to Joe. "Are we savages?" There was a sudden silence in the restaurant as the

  few diners at the other tables looked at us in alarm. "You want to fight, you go outside."

  "You shut your mouth, Blum, or I shut it for you!"

  "Ignore him," I told Hamburger. "You know what he is. Calm down, you'll do yourself a mischief."

  Blum, considerably cowed, bit his lip and lapsed into silence.

  "Tosca has nothing to do with it," said Lipschitz. "I stand behind every one of the changes."

  "What changes?" said Goldstein.

  Briefly, I told him.

  "That's ridiculous," said Goldstein.

  "Listen who's talking ridiculous," sneered Lipschitz. "You know how to run a restaurant. How to put on a play, thank you very much, /know."

  "I've devoted my life to the stage!" Goldstein gestured to the walls covered with theater posters and photographs, many of them signed, of theatrical personalities. "You think these mean nothing? The Adlers themselves were not so high and mighty they wouldn't listen to my advice." His voice rose, trembling with fury. "I've forgotten more about the theater than any of you clowns will ever know."

  "Get stuffed, Goldstein," said Lipschitz.

  Goldstein sprang to his feet. "Out of my restaurant, all of you!" he screamed. "Get out!"

  "Lipschitz will apologize," I said. "He got carried away. Calm down."

  "Why should we get out?" said Lipschitz. "This is a public restaurant."

  "You want to see how public?" screamed Goldstein, livid, the veins in his temples throbbing. "You want to find out? Stay there. I'm going to phone the police, they'll tell you." He tripped over Joe, who was picking up the shards of Blum's

  coffee cup, and fell to the floor. I offered him a hand, which he struck aside. There were tears in his eyes. "Get out!"

  There was nothing for it. We left the restaurant and scattered.

  LlPSCHITZ MUST HAVE GOTTEN WIND of our little enterprise. Well, that is not in itself surprising, what with the many wagging tongues of the Emma Lazarus. And I do not imagine that Hamburger—let alone the Red Dwarf!—has approached his quota of players with the degree of tact and discretion that so delicate a subject calls for. At any rate, Lipschitz stopped me in the hall this evening, right after Kiddush, the blessing over the wine. "So, friend," he said, "when do the gravediggers return to work?"

  The hall, which runs from the lounge to the dining room, is wide and well lighted. On its walls are displayed various pictures on Jewish themes, the work of residents past and present: a haunting photograph of the Vilna ghetto, a weak water-color of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, a mosaic made up of tiny pieces cut from matzo boxes depicting a Middle European seder. Certainly it is impossible to hold a conversation there and expect not to be seen. This Lipschitz must have known.

  "As for me, I have not yet made up my mind," I said, pulling away from his slimy grasp, anxious to be gone. "You will kindly remember, I agreed to play in Shakespeare's Hamlet, not in Tosca Dawidowicz's. Not even in yours. There are questions of literary integrity here that I, for one, take very seriously. As for the Red Dwarf, he must speak for himself."

  As it happened, the Red Dwarf was hurrying past at that moment. Friday is boiled chicken night, and he dearly loves a drumstick. He eyed us with grave suspicion.

  Lipschitz waved his hand airily, dismissing him. "Poliakov is no loss."

  The Red Dwarf grinned nastily. "Cossack!" he hissed at me, and hurried on, food for thought being no substitute for the real thing.

  Lipschitz drew me aside. "Listen, a little goodwill on your side, a little on mine, we can iron out our differences. What's so important it should come before the production? Cooperation is what I'm talking about; personalities, we don't need. If this one plows the field and that one makes the dinner, another keeps the accounts and still another stands with his rifle in the watchtower, each is working for the good of all. No big, no small. Any other way, the Arabs will be raping our women and cutting off our balls."

  "On this particular kibbutz," I told him, "equality is achieved in other ways."

  "All right," he said, "let's talk candidly." Lipschitz's lizard head darted this way and that. His tongue flicked his lips. "What I was thinking was this: a man like you, Korner, is valuable to the production. Such a man should be second only to me myself in authority. Here's what I'm offering: return to rehearsals, and you're my understudy. If anything, God forbid, happens to me, you're Hamlet! This I shall announce to the entire company."

  He was trying to bribe me! My cheeks burned with shame.

  "Wait," he went on. "That's not all. Come back to us and I'll make you my codirector. This, too, I shall announce. Think about it, don't answer right away. God forbid anything happens to me, you sit in the director's chair, no questions asked." He paused; his tongue flicked his lips. "That's my best ofTer."

  One does not have to do with such a man. I turned on my heel and walked away. Still, I can only admire his cunning: we had been seen in private conversation by many of the residents on their way to dinner. The possible political implications of this meeting would set beaks atwitter all around the Emma Lazarus, the factions shifting and realigning: "Just a parley

  before the first salvo." "Obviously the putsch has collapsed." "It's Chamberlain at Munich all over again." "Rapprochement." "War by other means." "Zionist encirclement and annexation." In this war of nerves, Lipschitz had made an impressive first move.

  Later Hamburger and the Red Dwarf came to my room. The Red Dwarf rudely pushed past me and climbed into the easy chair, almost disappearing in its embrace. For Hamburger he left the straight-back chair at my desk. They looked at me silently for a moment. I closed the door.

  The Red Dwarf's gold tooth glinted. "So, comrade, you have chosen a life for the czar?"

  Naturally I said nothing. To such sarcasm there is nothing to say. But since, standing there, I felt a little like the accused before his ju
dges, I went and sat on the bed.

  "What did Lipschitz want?" asked Hamburger.

  "Perhaps you should ask," said the Red Dwarf, "what did Korner want?"

  "For God's sake, Poliakov," said Hamburger. "Korner is no traitor. What nonsense is this? Apologize to him, or I quit this whole business."

  "No offense, comrade," said the Red Dwarf smoothly.

  I told them what Lipschitz had said.

  "So Lipschitz knows," said Hamburger woefully.

  "This is what we get for pussyfooting around," the Red Dwarf snarled. "If you'd listened to me, Lipschitz and his lackeys would be already groveling at our feet, whining for mercy. 'Let's sound the others out,' says Kerensky over here. 'Let's hear from Pinsky and Minsky and Stinksky.' Let me tell you something: if you want the people to march on the Winter Palace, you have to shtup them in their backs with a rifle butt and fire a few bullets into the air." He crossed his legs under him on the easy chair and began to sway back and forth, his eyes closed, as if in silent prayer or ill with stomachache.

  "Perhaps if we'd gone right away to Scheisskopf," said Hamburger. He pulled at a long earlobe and slowly shook his head. His thin white face, gloomy at the best of times, was heavy with despair. "You don't happen to have a cookie, Korner? Perhaps a little schnapps?"

  "Wodka," said the Red Dwarf.

  I took some bottles and glasses from the cabinet and put oui the gingersnaps.

  "With such an attitude at Valley Forge," I said, "today we would be saluting the Union Jack and singing 'God Save the Queen.' "

  "Someoi us would," said the Red Dwarf.

  "I have always admired," said Hamburger, "the British sense of fair play." He bit into a gingersnap musingly.

  "Pip-pip," said the Red Dwarf. He put a hand behind his head before throwing it smartly back. Down his gullet went a half-tumbler of vodka.

  We were in obvious disarray.

  We pooled the results of our researches. Blum is with us in exchange for the role of Horatio. Salo Wittkower, our Claudius, is with us if we agree to play Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" for all his exits and his entrances—"a kind of leitmotiv," he says. (A small price to pay, even though the composition, I believe, was written for Edward VII.) Also Emma Rothschild, our costume designer (and third-floor chess champion), is with us, admirably, out of simple loyalty to Sinsheimer, whom Lipschitz, in her view, mocks by his directorship. Reynaldo and Polonius are undecided. The rest of the cast will accept whatever is decided for them.

  Neither hopeful nor hopeless: there is no consensus.

  "What is to be done?" asked Hamburger.

  "Chernyshevsky," said the Red Dwarf dreamily, round-shouldered, rocking back and forth.

  "Work more vigorously with the dramatis personae," I

  suggested. "Exploit their dissatisfactions. Reason with them. Try to bring together a majority."

  "It may yet not be too late," said the Red Dwarf, snapping upright. "But let me give you a warning in the form of a quotation: 'The great questions of the day are decided not by the votes and resolutions of majorities, but by blood and iron'—Comrade Lenin, 1916."

  "Bismarck," I said.

  "Lenin!"

  "Hamburger?"

  "Bismarck," said Hamburger wearily.

  "What difference?" said the Red Dwarf, and then, as if to cover his heresy, he took a quick drink of vodka, hand behind his head as before. "The revolutionary takes from the Black Hundred whatever is useful for the liberation of the masses."

  What would he say, this disciple of Lenin, if I told him that I met his hero in Zurich in 1916? Not even the Red Dwarf would have been impressed by him then. The champion of the people was far too busy trying to make his centimes last through the week.

  "It's late," I said.

  "What have we decided?" asked the Red Dwarf, now on his third half-tumbler of vodka and as a consequence growing teary-eyed.

  I glanced at Hamburger. He nodded. "Let's go, Poliakov. We don't have to decide anything tonight."

  The Red Dwarf sprang to the floor. "I've got it!" he announced, and stumbled through a little jig.

  "Tomorrow you'll tell us," said Hamburger.

  "It's simple, that's the beauty of it! You, Korner, you accept Lipschitz's offer. He makes the announcement: if anything happens to him, you become the director."

  "You don't know what you're saying," said Hamburger.

  "No, wait, listen. Once he makes the announcement, we take care of him!"

  "For God's sake, Poliakov!"

  "Don't you see?" said the Red Dwarf. Tears ran down his cheeks. "It's simple!"

  Hamburger took him firmly by the arm. "Tomorrow. Meanwhile, we'll think about it." He led the Red Dwarf, weeping, to the door. "Good night, Korner."

  "G'night," sobbed the Red Dwarf.

  of our dining room one warm summer night and landed at my mother's feet. The note said simply: "Cowards should be shot." Father and I rushed to the window, but there was nothing to see.

  "You are a danger to us all, not just to yourself!" my father began to shout, his eyes bulging, the veins at his temples throbbing. "You must leave Germany right away, immediately!"

  "But Ludwig—" began my mother.

  "Frieda, leave this to me. He must get out of here." He began to pace up and down. "Intolerable!" he said. "Intolerable!" But whether the word was directed at me or at the note that he still held in his hand, it was impossible to say.

  "But where will he go?" asked my mother.

  "Switzerland," said Aunt Manya.

  They were talking now as if I were not there to hear them. My sister, Lola, sat on the sofa, silent, frightened, staring wide-eyed at her adored brother, who seemed to have done something truly shameful, unmentionable.

  "Don't you think, Father—" I began.

  "Silence!" he screamed. "You have nothing of any interest to say. You will go to Switzerland. But not to moon about with the other loafers, the good-for-nothings sitting out the war. No more poetry rubbish, thank you! You will study something that might be of use to you in a future career, useful eventually to the firm, useful perhaps in time even to the Fatherland."

  "But Ludwig, Otto is a good boy, never a day's trouble from him. Why are you so angry with him? He can't help it that he can't fight. What has he done?"

  My mother's tearful rebuke brought my father up short. In a softer tone he said, "Some good may come of this. In Switzerland he can also act as the firm's agent with America and the other nonbelligerents. That should count for something, cut through some of the red tape." He ran from the room and locked himself in his study.

  I do not condemn my poor father for his outburst. He was distraught, fearful for his womenfolk—the stone through the window had terrified my mother—fearful for his standing in the community, fearful even for me. Perhaps, too, he had had some glimmering of the truth: the weakness of the foundation upon which he had built his trust in the Enlightenment and the Emancipation, the bacillus of anti-Semitism bred in the very marrow of the Volk y the essential capriciousness of German toleration. Like all the impotent, he vented his frustration on the innocent.

  Later he knocked very softly on the door to my room. "Its not your fault, Otto," he said, reaching up to pat me on the head. "Never mind, my boy. Soon the war will be over, and you will return to us." He meant to be kind, of course; this was as close as he had ever come to an apology. In the order of things, parents do not apologize to their children. But his words stung just the same. Far better, it seemed to me then, to be unjustly accused of cowardice than to be treated as a child.

  As A SMALL BOY I once watched a beetle trying to climb out of a glass bowl: up the slippery walls he went, up, up, and then— hoppla!—down he fell on his shiny back, his little legs waving frantically in the air. Turn him over and he would start again, up, up, and then hoppla! How he wanted to get out!

  The Contessa would not have liked Zurich. This was no place for a claustrophobe. In Zurich, surrounded by the oppressive mountains, the Contessa would
have felt like that beetle. But during the Great War this claustrophobic atmosphere was much increased. There was a tension almost palpable in the air. One lived in the eye of the storm, the peaceful dead center, while all around the battle raged, the guns thundered, the mines blew young limbs to bloody shreds, and a world, a way of life, was dying.

  I arrived in Zurich (as I have elsewhere noted) in mid-September 1915, a month before the university term was to begin, time enough to get settled, to find my bearings. The city was bursting with refugees and exiles, with speculators and spies, with artists, political misfits, and literati, all beached, as it were, on the shores of the lake, all in the service of a Greater Purpose, in a city best praised for its cleanliness and parsimony. Nevertheless, in spite of myself—in spite, that is, of my stupidly "heroic" self-disgust—here in Zurich, independent, after a fashion, for the first time in my life (thanks to a generous letter of credit from my father), here, in this tiny spot in the mountains, to borrow from the cryptic remark of Senora Krauskopf y Guzman, here I felt free.

  My father had determined that I would study political economy under the world-famous Professor Dr. Max Winkel-Ecke, a scholar who might, if any could, transform an idle dreamer into a useful, functioning member of bourgeois society. In the unlikely event that the war should outlast the completion of my course of studies, said my father, perhaps I should move on to commercial law. We would see. He would in any case, purely as a matter of precaution, make suitable inquiries about the law faculty at the university.

  My protests were halfhearted and anyway hopeless: I was, after all, a dutiful son. Besides, I did not seem able to write anymore; the flame of inspiration had been quenched. Oh, yes, I had the occasional "poetic moment," a phrase, an image, a thought that pleased me. But I could bring nothing together. The world's events marched gloriously by, and I stood on the curbside, not even waving a flag. I became a diligent student. The wonder is that despite the unutterable boredom of my studies and the abandonment of my youthful expectations of literary achievement, already chained, as it seemed to me, to the dull grind of a duller future, I still retained a heady sense of freedom.