Having done her duty and made the rounds before she had discovered Marc, Erica had no intention of moving again if she could help it, at least until the general exodus got under way. No one else in the still crowded room showed any sign of being about to leave, and she turned to Marc, who was still leaning with one shoulder against the wall looking down at her, having watched her all the way across the room and back again with an expression which told her nothing except that he was as absorbed and as oblivious to everyone else as she was herself, and asked, "What did you mean a while ago when you said you didn’t want to go on living in Montreal indefinitely, because you couldn’t be ’effective’?"
"I meant that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a place where no matter how bad social conditions are, I can’t change anything".
He paused and then said, "I don’t know whether I can explain it or not", wondering if she realized that he had never even tried to explain it to anyone else. "It’s this feeling of being completely helpless, of having to watch people suffer, through a combination of bigotry and stupidity and sheer backwardness, without ever being able to do anything about it".
His eyes left her face and looking out over the city again, he remarked, "I don’t know which is worse, the feeling of not knowing what’s going on behind all the barred windows and high walls of these so-called ’welfare’ institutions run by the Church, or the feeling that it wouldn’t make any difference if you did. You’re up against a colossal organization that interferes everywhere, in the life of its own people, but which must never be interfered with-even by its own people. In its treatment of the poor and the sick, of orphans, illegitimate children, juvenile delinquents, adolescent and women prisoners, unmarried mothers, and in fact almost everyone who gets into trouble-it is responsible to no one and nothing but itself. What it chooses to tell you about the way it deals with these people, you are permitted to know; what it does not choose to tell you, is none of your business. And of course, if you’re not a Catholic, it’s none of your business anyhow".
His oblique, greenish eyes came back to her face and he said, "I suppose it all boils down to the one question of just how you want to live, or what you think you’re living for. You can make a lot of money in Montreal, you can be a big success, but you can’t change anything outside your own little racial category. You have to adjust your conscience so that it doesn’t function, except in relation to people who bear the same label as you do, and then spend most of your life passing by on the other side of the road, minding your own business".
She could not think of any way of telling him that she knew what he was talking about, because he was talking from the same point of view as her own. Instead, she looked up at him and smiled, and then realized that there was no need to tell him. He already knew.
Marc offered her another cigarette, then found he was out of matches and as Erica started up to get them, he said quickly, "No, I’ll do it. If you go, someone else will stop you and start telling you the story of his life. Where are they?"
"Over there on that little table at the end of the sofa".
Her eyes followed him as he made his way through the groups of people toward the fireplace, and she said to herself that he would stop to look at the Arlésienne. He did.
When he returned with the matches she asked him where he lived.
"In a rooming house on Sherbrooke Street".
"Is it a nice one?"
"No, it’s awful. You don’t know where I could get a furnished apartment, more or less central, on a month-to-month lease, do you?"
"Well, there’s that new building on Côte des Neiges. I don’t know whether it’s open yet or not-I think it’s called ’The Terrace’."
"I know, I’ve been there".
"Didn’t they have any vacancies?"
"Yes, they did have then, but the janitor told me they don’t take Jews".
He said it so matter-of-factly that Erica almost missed it, and then it was as though it had caught her full in the face. There was an interval during which she was simply taken aback, and then she looked up at him, her expression slowly changing, and found that he had begun to draw away from her, to recede further and further into the back of her mind until finally she no longer saw him at all. He said something else which she did not even hear; she was listening to other voices repeating phrases and statements which she had heard all her life without paying much attention, because they had been said so often before and were so tiresomely unoriginal, but which had abruptly become significant, like a collection of firearms which have been hanging on the wall for years unnoticed, and then are suddenly discovered to be fully loaded.
The voices were talking against a background of signs which she had seen in newspaper advertisements, on hotels, beaches, golf courses, apartment houses, clubs and the little restaurants for skiers in the Laurentians, an endless stream of signs which, apparently, might just as well have been written in another language, referring to human beings in another country, for until now she had never bothered to read them.
She had met a good many Jews before Marc, but in some way which already seemed to her inexplicable, she had neglected to relate the general situation with any one individual. Evidently some small and yet vital part of the machinery of her thought had failed to work until this moment, or worse still, she might have defeated its efforts to function by taking refuge in the comfortable delusion that even if these prejudices and restrictions were actually in effective operation, they would only be applied against-well, against what is usually designated as "the more undesirable type of Jew". In other words, against people who more or less deserved it.
Now she saw for the first time that it was the label, not the man, that mattered. And even if it had been the man, there was still the good old get-out, "Yes, so-and-so’s all right, the very best type of Jew, and we’ve nothing against him personally, but first thing you know, he’ll be wanting to bring in his friends". And so "the best type of Jew" was thereby disposed of.
That human beings, regardless of their own merit, should take upon themselves the right to judge a whole group of men, women and children, arbitrarily assembled according to a largely meaningless set of definitions, was evil enough; that there should not even be a judgment, was intolerable.
It made no difference what Marc was like; he could still be told by janitors that they didn’t take Jews, before the door was slammed in his face.
"Hello", said Marc. He smiled at her, then the smile faded. He stared at her, straightening up so that he was no longer leaning against the window-frame, without taking his eyes from her face, and then he said with an undercurrent of desperation in his voice, "You did realize I was Jewish, didn’t you?"
"Yes, of course", said Erica, appalled. "Of course I did!"
"I’m sorry, I thought…"