She spoke in a voice deep and warm with feeling, softly but volubly, her hushed tones keeping the content of her words from the earshot of the curious, spoke only with her mouth, while her smile, perfectly disciplined, mimicked flawlessly the artless mimicking of social banter, smuggling into her act some of the tension we'd left behind in the rehearsal hall, thriftily using her unexpended energies to reduce and deflect the elemental joy and passion evoked by Melchior's mere presence, by the proximity of his body, but however sparing her histrionic means, or because they were so masterfully pared down to perfect proportions, no one could ignore her presence; people stopped, turned, followed her with their looks, whispered behind our backs, clandestinely or quite openly stared into her face, jabbed each other, pointed fingers, the women checking out her clothes, ogling her supple walk, the men affecting cold indifference, imagining kneading her breasts gently or wondering what it would be like to feel her slender waist or slap her shapely round behind; in a word, they all had her; while she was walking up the stairs, seemingly fully absorbed in her man, her audience, each in his or her way according to his or her taste, made as though she were their exclusive property, their lover, their younger sister, and we, too, gained attention, becoming in the spectators' eyes professional extras in this little scene of Thea's procession.
Prompted more by the situation than by genuine curiosity, and feigning ignorance and surprise, I inquired of the lanky, dark, tousled young Frenchman how he happened to be here; we were still walking up the stairs as he leaned over to me with an expression at once friendly, reticent, and condescending, with his surprisingly narrow, flatly cut eyes in which there didn't seem to be much room for the eyeballs to move freely, which is perhaps why his gaze was so rigid and piercing, but what I really wanted to know was what Thea was buzzing so lullingly into the ear of the man whose closeness my shoulder, arm, and side were registering.
The Frenchman answered in perfectly idiomatic though heavily accented German that he didn't live here, at any rate not in this part of the city, but liked to hop over, and did so frequently; our invitation couldn't have come at a better time, because he'd meant to see this performance, but frankly, he didn't quite understand why I was surprised, why shouldn't he be here? for him this world was not nearly so alien as I might think, on the contrary, he felt more at home here than in the western part of the city, for he was a Marxist and a Communist Party member.
The cleverly manipulated rhetoric of his reply, the unmistakably antagonistic edge on his assertion, the touchiness with which he discovered in me a possible adversary, his self-righteous tone, his flippantly insolent though hardly lighthearted demeanor, his rigid and provocative stare radiating both narrow prejudices and something attractive, youthful, combative — all this I found so remarkable that I took up the challenge right away, though a heated political debate in these coolly, lifelessly formal surroundings seemed out of place: teased by contradictory impulses, I had a strong urge to laugh: what kind of drivel was he trying to palm off on me? his statements struck me as a pleasantly irreverent joke might, an impression only intensified by the childishly defiant expression on his handsome face and the animated elegance which another culture gave his appearance, which, judged by local standards, was rather slovenly: a thick, soft, slightly threadbare sweater, not quite clean, a fire-engine-red woolen scarf wrapped twice around his neck and tossed over his shoulder, attire that the gathering audience, scrubbed to the required level of festive cleanliness and therefore looking pitiful and lacking style, scrutinized with such shock and disapproval you could almost hear the indignant groans, but I didn't want to offend him, if only because I, too, scrutinized by the same audience, felt obliged to remain collected, and so I smiled politely, somewhat superciliously, and without bothering to take the sting out of my words replied that he must have misunderstood my surprise, since no rebuke or calling to account was intended and I considered it a privilege to meet him, it was just that in this eastern hemisphere during the last six years — and, I emphasized, for at least six years — I hadn't met anyone who'd call himself a Communist and claim careful personal consideration as the reason for being one.
Just what was I getting at?
With the superior air of a native I said I wasn't getting at anything, but he could check the arithmetic.
If I was referring to the spring of '68, he said somewhat less confidently — I, enjoying my advantage, nodded that that's exactly what I'd had in mind — and he stared into my eyes, waited for me to stop nodding, and then continued all the more vehemently, he did not believe that the lesson to be learned from those events was to give up the struggle.
The ringing, slogan-like phrase issued so innocently from his youthfully soft lips, so engagingly, strongly, and therefore convincingly — Thea was meanwhile vilifying her director to Melchior — despite the implied question of what sort of struggle he was talking about, struggle against whom or what? that I lost the presence of mind for a proper answer, staggered by the humor of the situation, and in the lull, at once comic and serious, I could hear Thea's unceasing chatter — Langerhans would make a splendid ambassador in, say, Albania, or maybe only a good stationmaster somewhere, well, all you had to do was look at him, the way he kept pushing his glasses up and down his pug nose, the way he dug his stubby fingers into his greasy hair, he reminded you of a large sheet of white paper with nice round stamps on it, he could bang away all day with his official-looking stamps, blues and reds and who knows what other colors, but for God's sake he shouldn't be directing! and this was no exaggeration, no joke; Melchior knew the scene, yes, Act III, Scene 2, the one with the privy council, now that scene had become the only one worth watching in the whole production, that awful council session, with six impossible characters sitting around this huge table, he'd had this impossibly long table made especially and picked six of his lousiest actors for this scene, and Melchior could just imagine how much those poor suckers must enjoy doing it, how grateful they were to Langerhans for the opportunity, but that's what made the scene! the way they sat there shuffling their documents and scratching themselves, and stammering, and chewing their nails, Langerhans chewed his nails all the time, too, disgusting! — and these six weren't even eager to go home like everyone else, it made no difference to them, they'd been waiting thirty years for these tiny parts, for thirty years they hadn't understood a thing, and now it was certain they never would, and just try to imagine, but he'll see it for himself, the whole thing was so incredibly, stupefyingly boring you could fall off your chair, and this was the only thing Langerhans could come up with, this boredom, because what a woman was really like or what she could want from a man he hadn't the foggiest, this bloodless theater bureaucrat.