“His feelings are hurt,” said Christine, as the stranger drifted away. “Look at the way he hangs his head. I’m sure he was asking a direction. Now, why did you answer that way?” she asked the old man. “I’m sure you are not a refugee at all. What didn’t you like about the poor creature?”
“He’s not from around here,” said the old man. “He’s from somewhere else, and that’s enough for me.”
“And you,” she said to Herbert. “What didn’t you like about him? Such a harmless lonely person.”
He tightened his hold on her arm. “I saw the way he was watching you. Don’t you know a policeman when you see one?”
She looked again, but the man had crossed the tracks and vanished. Anything he might have wanted to let her know was damped out by a stronger current; their companion with the WINES OF GERMANY shopping bag could not be far away. On a hot day like today every plant on a grave can wither. Family spies on his side of the family inspect the grave, waiting for a leaf to fall or a flower to droop. But usually I’m right there with the watering can. He was fussy about the grave, often spoke of how he wanted it.
“There isn’t a restaurant,” said Herbert, again in French. “It’s hard on little Bert. Only a newsstand. I think on a day like today one might allow a comic book. Do you agree?”
But she was not the child’s mother: she would not be drawn.
Herbert’s answer to her silence was to march into the waiting room and across to a newsstand. She knew that by making an issue over something unimportant she had simply proved once again that wilful obstinacy was part and parcel of a slow-moving nature. She suffered from its effects as much as Herbert did. Holding little Bert, she trailed along behind him, thinking that she would show her affection for Herbert now by being particularly nice to little Bert.
Herbert waited for the curator of the local museum to be served before choosing the mildest of the comic books on display. The curator walked off, reading the local paper as he walked. A ferocious war of opinion took up three of its pages. Was it about the barbed wire? About the careless rerouting of trains that had stranded dozens of passengers in this lamentable, godforsaken, Prussian-looking town? No, it was about an exhibition of photographs Dr. Ischias had commissioned and sponsored for his new museum — an edifice so bold in conception and structure that it was known throughout the region as “the teacup with mumps.” Dr. Ischias was used to Philistine aggression; indeed, he secretly felt that his job depended to some extent upon the frequency and stridency of the attacks. But it seemed to him now that some of the letters in today’s paper might have been written a good fifty years in the past. This time he was accused not just of taking the public for dimwits, but also of sapping morals and contributing to the artistic decline of a race.
“Once again” (he now read, walking out of the waiting room, holding the paper to his nose) “art has not known how to toe the mark or draw the line. Can filth be art? If so, let us do without it. Let us do without the photographer in question and his archangel, the curator with the funny name.”
Well … that was unpleasant. Perhaps the show had been a mistake. It happened that the photographer in question had reproduced every inch of a model he said was his wife; in fact, the exhibition was entitled “Marriage.” These pictures had been blown up and cropped so peculiarly that only an abstract, grainy surface remained. As the newspaper had to admit, most adults honestly did not know what the pictures were about. However, most children, with their instinctive innocence, never failed to recognize that this or that form was really part of something else, which they named quite eagerly. And the local paper did not tiptoe round the matter, but asked, in a four-column double head on page two:
ARE GERMAN WOMEN BABOONS
AND MUST THEY ALWAYS EXHIBIT THEIR BACKSIDES?
This was followed up by a cartoon drawing of a creature, a gorilla probably, with his head under the dark hood of an old-fashioned camera on a tripod, about to take the picture of three Graces, or three Rhine maidens, or three stout local matrons who had somehow lost their clothes.
Now all this was libel — every word, and the drawing too. The curator folded his copy of the paper and began to walk up and down the platform, composing an answer.
Christine knew that Herbert could have helped him, because he was good at that kind of letter, taking a droll, dry tone, ending with, “Of course I am prepared to withdraw my allegations at any time,” mockingly humble. His letters always drew a deluge of new correspondence, praising and honouring Doctor Engineer Herbert B. But the curator did not know that Doctor Engineer Herbert B. was just behind him; in any case he was not doing badly with his own reply: “A ray of light has just as much chance of penetrating into the thick swamp of the German middle-class mind as …” He clasped and unclasped his hands, the newspaper tucked high under one arm. “The myth of German womanhood, a myth belied every day …” Walking up and down the platform near the sandy road, seen by the man in uniform looking through field glasses. “As for the photographer in question, his international status places him above …” “Only the small-minded could possibly …” “People who never set foot in museums until drawn by the promise of pornography can hardly judge …” “Only children should be allowed into art galleries …” Excellent. That had never been said.
Meanwhile the photographer had descended from a local train and started to tell a story about grass fires. He was wearing his tartan waistcoat with George-the-Fourth buttons, his cream corduroy jacket from Rome, his cream silk turtleneck sweater, an American peace emblem on a chain, dark-green shorts, Japanese sandals, and, because the sandals pinched, a pair of brown socks. His legs were tanned and covered with blond fur. Although slim and fit, he seemed older than usual. This was on account of his teeth. He had recently acquired two new bridges, upper and lower, which took years off his face but were a torture, so today he had changed back to the earlier set. The dentist had told the photographer’s wife, “His jaw is underdeveloped, like a child’s, difficult to fit.”
And she answered, “Yes, I see. Classic, aesthetic — no?”
“Well, jaws are always classical,” said the dentist.
The photographer wanted to look a bit younger for the sake of his wife. Every season the difference in time between them seemed to increase. Most young wives of middle-aged men bridged the gap by looking older, but his wife grew more and more childlike. On their honeymoon in Florence he had shown her the marble likeness of a total stranger, saying, “There, the ideal — classic, aesthetic,” and so forth; and she told her mother later and they had a good laugh. When the dentist made the remark about his jaws she saved it up for her mother too. Now the dentist had said he could make a third lot of teeth that would make the photographer appear to be twenty-eight and would not hurt as much as the last set, but the work would cost six hundred marks more.
As soon as he saw the photographer the curator began to shout everything he had just been thinking about the newspaper. The very sight of the photographer with his collapsed face and brown socks made the curator feel tense. He had to defend art as far as the first row of barbed wire, but he would have preferred doing this without ever meeting an artist, for they took up time. The curator’s angry voice carried along the platform to the waiting room, where a cultural travelling group, tossed up between trains like Christine and the others, sat hungry and miserable with their cultural group leader. These people distinctly heard the curator say that he was opposed to womanhood. They put their heads together and began to whisper.