“Tell us about Goethe,” Helena interrupts, laughing.
She has brought her little boy along. The three of them sit at a table spread with a clean pink cloth. On a silver dish, and on still another pink cloth, this one embroidered, are wedges of chocolate cake, and mocha butter cakes, and Linzer torte, and meringue shells filled with whipped cream, sprinkled with pink, green, yellow sugar. The champagne in the silver bucket is for the commissioner and Helena.
There is no view from here, not even of swimming pools. They are walled in by flowering shrubs. It is a pity, he says, for if they could only see …
“Tell the child what all these flowers are called,” Helena interrupts. But the commissioner does not know their names. He knows what roses or tulips are, but most flowers have names he has never needed to know. Flowers are pale mauve or yellow in spring, blue or yellow as summer wears on, and in the autumn orange, yellow, and red. On a hot autumn day, the garden seems picked out in bright wool, like a new carpet. The wine, the cakes, the thin silver vase of bitter-smelling blooms (“Nasturtiums,” he suddenly cries out, slapping the table, remembering) attract all the wasps in the neighbourhood. He is afraid for Helena — imagine a sting on that white skin! He tries to cut a wasp in two with a knife, misses, captures another in the child’s empty glass.
“The child needs men, you see,” Helena goes on. “He needs men to tell him what things are. He is always with women.”
Somewhere in her career she acquired this little boy. She does not say who the father is, but even when she was pregnant, enormous, the commissioner never asked. He treated the situation with great tact, as if she had a hideous allergy. It would have been a violation of their friendship to have pried. The rumour is that the father was an American, but not a common drunken one, an Occupation leftover — no, it was someone highly placed, worthy of her. The child is a good little boy, never troublesome. He eats his cakes with a teaspoon, and it is a wobbly performance. His fingers come into it sometimes; then he licks them. He scrapes up all the chocolate on his plate, because his mother dislikes the sight of wasted food.
“I mean it. Talk to him,” Helena says. She may be teasing; but she could be serious, too.
“Child,” says the obedient commissioner. “Do you know why champagne overflows when the cork is taken out of the bottle?”
“No, why?” says Helena, answering for her son.
The commissioner reflects, then says, “Because air got in the bottle.”
“You see?” she tells the boy. “This is why you need men.”
She is laughing, so she must be pleased. She is giving the commissioner her attention. On crumbs like these, her laughter, her attention, he thinks he can live forever. Even when she was no one, when she was a little actress who would travel miles by train, sitting up all night, for some minor, poorly paid job, he could live on what she gave him. She can be so amusing when she wants to be. She is from — he thinks — Silesia, but she can speak in any dialect, from any region. She recites for him now, for him alone, as if he mattered, Schiller’s “The Glove” — first in Bavarian, then in Low Berlin, then like an East German at a radio audition, then in a Hessian accent like his own. He hears himself in her voice, and she gets no farther than “Und wie er winkt mit dem Finger,” because he is laughing so that he has a pain; he weeps with it. He has to cross his arms over his chest to contain the pain of his laughter. And all the while he knows she is entertaining him — as if he were paying her! He wipes his eyes, picks up his fork, and just as he is trying to describe the quality of the laughter (“like pleurisy, like a heart attack, like indigestion”), she says, “I can do a Yiddish accent from Silesia. I try to imagine my grandmother’s voice. I must have heard it before she was killed.”
She has left him; he is alone in the garden. He does not know the word for anything any more. He has forgotten how one says “hedge” or “wasp” or “nasturtium.” He does not know the reason for the transparent yellow light in his glass. Everything assembled to please her has been a mistake: the flowers on the table smell too strong; the ice in the bucket is melting because the sun, too hot, is straight upon it; and the bottle of champagne, half empty, tipped to one side, afloat, is inadequate and vulgar. He looks at the red trace of the raspberry cake he had only just started to eat, at the small two-pronged fork, at the child’s round chin — he daren’t look at Helena. He discovers a crumb in his throat. He will choke to death, perhaps, but he is afraid to pick up his glass. Here he is now, a man in his fifties, “a serious person,” he reminds himself, in a bright garden, unable to swallow a crumb.
She sits smoking, telling herself she doesn’t need him — that is what he imagines. The commissioner is nothing to her, a waste of time. It is a wonder she sees him at all. He feels the garden going round and round, like the restaurant in Frankfurt that revolves on its hub. He would have taken her there often if she allowed it. He likes spending money on her, being reckless; and also, when he gives his card, the headwaiter and all the waiters know the commissioner and Helena are friends. But the restaurant is too high up; it makes her ill and giddy just to look out the window. And anyway she has enough publicity; she doesn’t need to have a waiter bow and stare. What can he do for her? Nothing, and that is what makes her so careless — why she said the wounding thing just now that made him feel left out and alone.
Oh, that grandmother! That mother! She has a father somewhere, alive, but she shrugs when she mentions him, as if the living were of no use to her. The commissioner knows nothing about the mother and grandmother. He never met them. But he knows that where Helena was concerned a serious injustice was committed, a mistake; for, when she was scarcely older than the child at this table, she was dragged through transit camps on the fringes of Germany, without — thank God — arriving at her destination. He has gone over it so many times that her dossier is stamped on his mind, as if he had seen it, typed and signed, on cheap brownish wartime paper, in a folder tied with ribbon tape. To the dossier he adds: (One) She should never have been arrested. She was only a child. (Two) She is partly Jewish, but how much and which part — her fingers? Her hair? (Three) She should never have been sent out of the country to mingle with Poles, Slovaks, and so on. Anything might have happened to her. This was an error so grave that if the functionary who committed it were ever found and tried, the commissioner would testify against him. Yes, he would risk everything — his career, his pension, anonymous letters, just to say what he thinks: “A serious mistake was made.” Meanwhile, she sits and smokes, thinking she doesn’t need him, ready at any second to give him up.
The proportion of Jews in the population of West Germany is.04, and Helena, being something of a fraction herself (her fingers? her hair?), is popular, much loved, and greatly solicited. She is the pet, the kitten — ours. She wasted her lunchtime today on an interview for an English paper, for a special series on Jews in Germany. Through an interpreter (insisted upon by Helena; having everything said twice gives her time) she told a story that has long ago ceased to be personal, and then the gaunt female reporter turned her head and said, filtering her question through a microphone, “And was the child? … in these camps? … sexually? … molested?”
Rape is so important to these people, Helena has learned; it is the worst humiliation, the most hideous ordeal the Englishwoman can imagine. She is thinking of maniacs in parks, little children attacked on their way to the swimming pool. “Destruction” is meaningless, and in any case Helena is here, alive, with her hair brushed, and blue on her eyelids — not destroyed. But if the child was sexually molested, then we all know where we are. We will know that a camp was a terrible place to be, and that there are things Helena can never bring herself to tell.