‘You are like my arthritis,’ he said.
Todd’s head came up. ‘Huh?’
‘Neither of you have had much to say tonight. What’s got your tongue, boy? Cat or cormorant?’
‘Nothing,’ Todd muttered. They turned down Dussander’s street.
‘Perhaps I could guess,’ Dussander said, not without a touch of malice. ‘When you came to get me, you were afraid I might make a slip… "let the cat out of the bag," you say here. Yet you were determined to. go through with the dinner because you had run out of excuses to put your parents off. Now you are disconcerted that all went well. Is that not the truth?’
‘Who cares?’ Todd said, and shrugged sullenly.
‘Why shouldn’t it go well?’ Dussander demanded. ‘I was dissembling before you were born. You keep a secret well enough, I give you that. I give it to you most graciously. But did you see me tonight? I charmed them. Charmed them!’
Todd suddenly burst out: ‘You didn’t have to do that!’
Dussander came to a complete stop, staring at Todd.
‘Not do it? Not? I thought that was what you wanted, boy! Certainly they will offer no objections if you continue to come over and "read" to me.’
‘You’re sure taking a lot for granted!’ Todd said hotly. ‘Maybe I’ve got all I want from you. Do you think there’s anybody forcing me to come over to your scuzzy house and watch you slop up booze like those old wino pushbags that hang around the old trainyards? Is that what you think?’ His voice had risen and taken on a thin, wavering, hysterical note. ‘Because there’s nobody forcing me. If I want to come, I’ll come, and if I don’t, I won’t.’
‘Lower your voice. People will hear.’
‘Who cares?’ Todd said, but he began to walk again. This time he deliberately walked outside the umbrella’s span.
‘No, nobody forces you to come,’ Dussander said. And then he took a calculated shot in the dark: ‘In fact, you are welcome to stay away. Believe me, boy, I have no scruples about drinking alone. None at all.’
Todd looked at him scornfully. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
Dussander only smiled noncommitally.
‘Well, don’t count on it.’ They had reached the concrete walk leading up to Dussander’s stoop. Dussander fumbled in his pocket for his latchkey. The arthritis flared a dim red in the joints of his fingers and then subsided, waiting. Now Dussander thought he understood what it was waiting for: for him to be alone again. Then it could come out.
I’ll tell you something,’ Todd said. He sounded oddly breathless. ‘If they knew what you were, if I ever told them, they’d spit on you and then kick you out on your skinny old ass. My mom might even take a butcher’s knife to you. Her mother was part Jewish, she told me once.’
Dussander looked at Todd closely in the drizzling dark. The boy’s face was turned defiantly up to his, but the skin was pallid, the sockets under the eyes dark and slightly hollowed — the skin-tones of someone who has brooded long while others are asleep.
‘I am sure they would have nothing but revulsion for me,’ Dussander said, although he privately thought that the elder Bowden might stay his revulsion to ask many of the questions his son had asked already. ‘Nothing but revulsion. But what would they feel for you, boy, when I told them you had known about me for eight months… and said nothing?’
Todd stared at him wordlessly in the dark. ‘Come and see me if you please,’ Dussander said indifferently, ‘and stay home if you don’t Goodnight, boy.’
He went up the walk to his front door, leaving Todd standing in the drizzle and looking after him with his mouth slightly ajar.
The next morning at breakfast, Monica said: ‘Your dad liked Mr Denker a lot, Todd. He said he reminded him of your grandfather.’
Todd muttered something unintelligible around his toast. Monica looked at her son and wondered if he had been sleeping well. He looked pale. And his grades had taken that inexplicable dip. Todd never got Cs.
‘You feeling okay these days, Todd?’
He looked at her blankly for a moment, and then that radiant smile spread over his face, charming her… comforting her. There was a dab of strawberry preserve on his chin. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Four-oh.’
‘Todd-baby,’ she said.
‘Monica-baby,’ he responded, and they both started to laugh.
9
‘Kitty-kitty,’ Dussander said. ‘Heeere, kitty-kitty. Puss-puss? Puss-puss?’
He was sitting on his back stoop, a pink plastic bowl by his right foot. The bowl was full of milk. It was 1:30 in the afternoon; the day was hazy and hot. Brush-fires far to the west tinged the air with an autumnal smell that jagged oddly against the calendar. If the boy was coming, he would be here in another hour. But the boy didn’t always come now. Instead of seven days a week he came sometimes only four times, or five. An intuition had grown in him, little by little, and his intuition told him that the boy was having troubles of his own.
‘Kitty-kitty,’ Dussander coaxed. The stray cat was at the far end of the yard, sitting in the ragged verge of weeds by Dussander’s fence. It was a torn, and every bit as ragged as the weeds it sat in. Every time he spoke, the cat’s ears cocked forward. Its eyes never left the pink bowl filled with milk.
Perhaps, Dussander thought, the boy was having troubles with his studies. Or bad dreams. Or both.
The last made him smile.
‘Kitty-kitty,’ he called softly. The cat’s ears cocked forward again. It didn’t move, not yet, but it continued to study the milk.
Dussander had certainly been afflicted with problems of his own. For three weeks or so he had worn the SS uniform to bed like grotesque pyjamas, and the uniform had warded off the insomnia and the bad dreams. His sleep had been — at first — as sound as a lumberjack’s. Then the dreams had returned, not little by little, but all at once, and worse than ever before. Dreams of running as well as the dreams of the eyes. Running through a wet, unseen jungle where heavy leaves and damp fronds struck his face, leaving trickles that felt like sap… or blood. Running and running, the luminous eyes always around him, peering soullessly at him, until he broke into a clearing. In the darkness he sensed rather than saw the steep rise that began on the clearing’s far side. At the top of that rise was Patin, its low cement buildings and yards surrounded by barbed wire and electrified wire, its sentry towers standing like Martian dreadnoughts straight out of War of the Worlds. And in the middle, huge stacks billowed smoke against the sky, and below these brick columns were the furnaces, stoked and ready to go, glowing in the night like th» eyes of fierce demons. They had told the inhabitants of the area that the Patin inmates made clothes and candles, and of course the locals had believed that no more than the locals around Auschwitz had believed that the camp was a sausage factory. It didn’t matter.
Looking back over his shoulder in the dream, he would at last see them coming out of hiding, the restless dead, the Juden, shambling towards him with blue numbers glaring from the livid flesh of their outstretched arms, their hands hooked into talons, their faces no longer expressionless but animated with hate, lively with vengeance, vivacious with murder. Toddlers ran beside their mothers and grandfathers were borne up by their middle-aged children. And the dominant expression on all their faces was desperation.
Desperation? Yes. Because in the dreams he knew (and so did they) that if he could climb the hill, he would be safe. Down here in these wet and swampy lowlands, in this jungle where the night-flowering plants extruded blood instead of sap, he was a hunted animal… prey. But up there, he was in command. If this was a jungle, then the camp at the top of the hill was a zoo, all the wild animals safely in cages, he the head keeper whose job it was to decide which would be fed, which would live, which would be handed over to the vivisectionists, which would be taken to the knacker’s in the remover’s van.