I know you're here, he said to her.
His laugh was calming and offensive, but she had already learned what was in store for her, a whole year in a closed room she had acted at night the wife of a child thrown into the fire, learned in books what she could have known if only she had opened her eyes earlier while acting herself in another garb, and learned to hate in herself what Lionel loved in her. She knew he was searching for Ebenezer to try to forgive himself and she couldn't take part in the forgiveness. She had nothing to complain about. He called her. He heard her body rustling in the distance. She asked where are you and he told her, and she said: I need you here, and she blushed. And she told him she blushed. I'm dining with the fellow who appeared with the Last Jew in the nightclub, he said, Boulevard Canbiere, Cafe Glacier, upstairs.
I'm coming, she said.
And now Samuel Lipker is looking at her. The light in the hall dims, the erection still prevents him from standing up. A torn ad for Ritesma cigarettes waves on the wall. He knows the ad hung in the room of the guard who'd hug him and give him candy. On the ad for Ritesma or Koli cigarettes was a photo of a typist, maybe it was a drawing, the drawing was Lily. Now he could know how German guards' cigarettes create for him the Melissa that Lionel tried to tell about earlier. The guards in the camp loved her too, and that strengthened her unimaginably, now he could sit across from her, loathe her, understand her, he already teased Lionel who probably beat and tortured her to teach her what love is. She was and still is the girl of all our dreams he thought. Even of Leibke who was shot by the guard, and the man who castrated himself after Bronya the Beautiful refused him. Bronya the Beautiful with the apple in her mouth. No, they didn't look alike. Bronya looked like his mother, Lily was a wild song in the Tyrolean Mountains. With her he could capture stars or hunt electric rabbits. Beautiful only for herself. And the love she showered on Lionel made her forbidden. Like death, he thought, to sleep with her is to sleep with cancer, she looks at Samuel and at Lionel and recalls the frightening lad she saw in the nightclub, and when Lionel looked at her and caressed her with his eyes, Lionel thought: She may not know that a disaster happened, but she knows exactly who it didn't happen to. Lionel pronounced the names of the dishes he had ordered for her in a charming French accent that made Samuel measure Ebenezer against Lionel again, he also wanted to understand what they wanted from him and how much he had to pay, and what he would have to pay. The ships in the port hooted, the noise in the cafe grew louder, waiters tried to please Lionel, Samuel imagined himself sleeping with Lily and stroking Lionel's hair, and for a moment, his parents appeared to him walking arm in arm in the street, houses began falling on them and they vanished along with the pain in him whenever Ebenezer would recite the past that none of them knew. Lily tried to eat but had no appetite. Her lips were shaped like her eyes. The lines are clear, a slight flush rose on her cheeks, something in her image recalled not only ads for Ritesma cigarettes, but also pale northern twilights. Some total defeat melted in her. The struggle between himself, thrown into the fire, and the pallor of her face enchanted him, and he could understand things in her face that Lionel couldn't. Her hair was especially fair in the light of the lamp above her. When she fixed her eyes on Samuel, his erection stopped and he calmed down, as if he had met his mother's lover. He said: My mother was an actress in a house full of carpets and she'd act for me. Ebenezer's memories were enough for me, my mother also had a husband. He was an unsuitable lover for my mother, she wanted opera generals. I'm a corrupt angel and look like it. So do you. In her late youth, after she finished being a communist, my mother seriously thought of going to a convent or into international prostitution-I imagine from Ebenezer-her lover was an old man by then, made hundreds of children with weary women, Ebenezer sometimes recites some of his poems, once I was in love with them.
I know, said Lionel.
Samuel glanced wearily, laughed at Lily, and said: So will you marry me, Lily?
And she looked at him and decreed, No! and turned pale. He tried to pretend to weep, but he burst out laughing and they looked at him. Suddenly, maybe for the first time in years, he didn't know how to act himself.
And then he started telling Lily about the lampshade they made of his parents. He said those words while his eyes, where a rusty gray flash now sparkled, were fixed on Lionel. She stopped trying to eat the duck wing and Samuel measured her movements like a panther waiting to pounce. Lionel's hands moved, the smile was a mask for tension, Samuel smoked another cigarette and didn't want to light it with the lighter he had taken from Lionel before. He was afraid she'd recognize the lighter and despise him. The ash straggled until it dropped. When the ash dropped, Lily felt as if her belly were shriveling.
People wearing clothes too big for them, with berets and caps or shabby Hollywood hats on their heads, entered and sat around the tables and ate eagerly. The waiters ran back and forth. A woman in a sparkling red dress sang on a small stage, lighted with a beam that turned her face into an overcultivated mask. At the piano sat a pianist with a thin beard who looked bored and tired. Now and then, he sipped from a bottle standing on the piano. American, Swedish, and African sailors came in with their temporary, dyed women. They would all order cognac or calvados and slurp fish soup. The Bay of Marseille was lighted, a motorboat groaned rhythmically, drunken sailors banged on the tables and shouted demands for food. The light outside was growing dim, and the locked balcony was full of cigarette butts and papers flying in the wind. In the distance, the sea looked like a black mass.
Ebenezer, now looking for Samuel in the city, said to the investigator years later: I didn't look like a Muselman because Samuel Lipker and Kramer would bring me thin beet soup and bread.
Dear Renate,
You asked me why, back then in Marseille, that is, what impelled us, what exactly happened, I didn't know what to answer you then and today I don't either. Aside from my love, I don't find words that can convey the precise experience. But since you asked, I'll try. I sat facing the two of them, Lionel and Samuel Lipker, and longed with all my soul to die.
Lionel then looked toward the balcony, I don't know if we saw that sea. Samuel tried to steal me from Lionel. He also got up and recited to the diners an excerpt of Ebenezer they knew by heart, but they didn't applaud him. They were furious that he had disturbed their eating, and had disturbed the fat singer's singing. The sea was locked in the distance. A balcony full of cigarette butts. I wanted to go to the movies. They were then showing The Arch of Triumph with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, who sat like us in Cafe Glacier, on Boulevard Canbiere and drank Calvados. Lionel sketched something on the white paper on the table, sipped the wine that Samuel gulped, and said sadly to Sam (Samuel): If you think you have to go back to the line you can. The two of you can open a war souvenir shop in Jerusalem named for Joseph Rayna. I heard that his songs became national anthems there. Sam looked at Lionel and Lionel looked at Sam. Those two men suddenly looked like two dead men fighting over me. I wanted to express my opposition, but I didn't know if I had it coming. I knew I had to perform Gretchen for them and not talk. I don't know if you've ever been for sale in the Jew market, Renate! I was an essential enemy to them, maybe (and this is ridiculous) a desired enemy, and Sam was so sunk in the moment, in the happening itself, that he had to measure it carefully since he wasn't used to it. I wanted so much to return things to their simple and human concreteness, to deviate from the tragicomic event, as Lionel put it later. Those two poets, great-grandsons of messiahs, didn't see me with flesh-andblood eyes, maybe not only with those eyes. They saw me as some substitute for an argument in order to gore one another. The singer sang in a nasal voice and Sam mocked her, maybe that was a certain response to his failure to make the drunken sailors laugh by reciting things Ebenezer remembered and that weren't important to them. The sailors tried to defend the play of their love with the wretched streetwalkers and would hit and shout and kiss, and Sam thought, I read his mind didn't I; I can't swindle this man anymore. Precisely in his weakness, he's strong! A weakness of supple and tense softness and Lionel said to him: But on the other hand, you can also stay with Lily (he didn't say "you can stay with me," he only uttered my name).