“Ça vous plaît, Monsieur?” the manager asked.
“Çava,” the bronzed young man said.
“Merci, Monsieur.” The hotel manager backed out of the room.
The two bronzed young people went out onto the balcony and looked at the sea. They kissed against the blueness. The smell of jasmine and thyme became stronger.
Or …
It was only a small log cabin, with the snow piled high against its sides. The mountains reared behind it. The two bronzed young people came in shaking the snow from their clothes, laughing. There was a fire roaring in the fireplace. The snow was so high it covered the windows. They were all alone in the high world. The two bronzed young people sank down to the floor in front of the fire.
Or …
The two bronzed young people walked along the red carpet on the platform. The Twentieth Century to Chicago stood on the tracks, gleaming. The two young people went past the porter in his white coat, into the car. The stateroom was full of flowers. There was the smell of roses. The two bronzed young people smiled at each other and strolled through the train to the club car for a drink.
Or …
Rudolph coughed miserably in the rain as he turned into Vanderhoff Street. I’ve seen too goddamn many movies, he thought.
The light from the cellar was coming up through the grating in front of the bakery. The Eternal Flame. Axel Jordache, the Unknown Soldier. If his father died, Rudolph thought, would anyone remember to put out the light?
Rudolph hesitated, the keys to the house in his hand. Ever since the night his mother had made that crazy speech about thirty thousand dollars, he had felt sorry for his father. His father walked around the house slowly and quietly, like a man who has just come out of a hospital after a major operation, a man who had felt the warning tap of death on his shoulder. Axel Jordache had always seemed strong, terrifyingly strong, to Rudolph. His voice had been loud, his movements abrupt and careless. Now his long silences, his hesitant gestures, his slow, apologetic way of spreading a newspaper or fixing himself a pot of coffee, careful not to make any unnecessary noise, was somehow frightening. Suddenly, it seemed to Rudolph that his father was preparing himself for his grave. Standing in the dark hallway with his hand on the banister, for the first time since he was a little boy he asked himself whether he loved his father or not.
He went over to the door leading to the bakery, unlocked it and passed through it to the back room and descended into the cellar.
His father wasn’t doing anything, just sitting on his bench, staring ahead of him at the oven, the bottle of whiskey on the floor beside him. The cat lay crouched in the corner.
“Hello, Pa,” Rudolph said.
His father turned his head slowly toward him and nodded.
“I just came down to see if there was something I could do.”
“No,” his father said. He reached down and picked up the bottle and took a small swig. He offered the bottle to Rudolph. “Want some?”
“Thanks.” Rudolph didn’t want any whiskey, but he felt his father would like it if he took some. The bottle was slippery from his father’s sweat. He took a swig. It burned his mouth and throat.
“You’re soaking wet,” his father said.
“It’s raining out.”
“Take off your coat. You don’t want to sit there in a wet coat.”
Rudolph took off his coat and hung it on a hook on the wall. “How’re things, Pa?” he asked. It was a question he had never asked his father before.
His father chuckled quietly, but didn’t answer. He took another swig of the whiskey.
“What’d you do tonight?” Axel asked.
“I went to a party.”
“A party.” Axel nodded. “Did you play your horn?”
“No.”
“What do people do at a party these days?”
“I don’t know. Dance. Listen to music. Kid around.”
“Did I ever tell you I went to dancing school when I was a boy?” Axel said. “In Cologne. In white gloves. They taught me how to bow. Cologne was nice in the summertime. Maybe I ought to go back there. They’ll be starting everything up from scratch there now, maybe that’s the place for me. A ruin for the ruins.”
“Come on, Pa,” Rudolph said. “Don’t talk like that.”
Axel took another drink. “I had a visitor today,” he said. “Mr. Harrison.”
Mr. Harrison was the owner of the building. He came on the third of each month for the rent. He was at least eighty years old, but he never missed collecting. In person. It wasn’t the third of the month, so Rudolph knew that the visit must have been an important one. “What’d he want?” Rudolph said.
“They’re tearing down the building,” Axel said. “They’re going to put up a whole block of apartments with stores on the ground floor. Port Philip is expanding, Mr. Harrison says, progress is progress. He’s eighty years old, but he’s progressing. He’s investing a lot of money. In Cologne they knock the building down with bombs. In America they do it with money.”
“When do we have to get out?”
“Not till October. Mr. Harrison says he’s telling me early, so I’ll have a chance to find something else. He’s a considerate old man, Mr. Harrison.”
Rudolph looked around him at the familiar cracked walls, the iron doors of the ovens, the window open to the grating on the sidewalk. It was queer to think of all this, the house he had known all his life, no longer there, vanished. He had always thought he would leave the house. It had never occurred to him that the house would leave him.
“What’re you going to do?” he asked his father.
Axel shrugged. “Maybe they need a baker in Cologne. If I happen to find a drunken Englishman some rainy night along the river maybe I could buy passage back to Germany.”
“What’re you talking about, Pa?” Rudolph asked sharply.
“That’s how I came to America,” Axel said mildly. “I followed a drunken Englishman who’d been waving his money around in a bar in the Sankt Pauli district of Hamburg and I drew a knife on him. He put up a fight. The English don’t give up anything without a fight. I put the knife in him and took his wallet and I dropped him into the canal. I told you I killed a man with a knife that day with your French teacher, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” Rudolph said.
“I’ve always meant to tell you the story,” Axel said. “Anytime any of your friends says his ancestors came over on the Mayflower, you can say your ancestors came over on a wallet full of five-pound notes. It was a foggy night. He must’ve been crazy, that Englishman, going around a district like Sankt Pauli with all that money. Maybe he thought he was going to screw every whore in the district and he didn’t want to be caught short of cash. So that’s what I say, maybe if I can find an Englishman down by the river, maybe I’ll make the return trip.”
Christ, Rudolph thought bitterly, come on down and have a nice cosy little chat with old Dad in his office …
“If you ever happened to kill an Englishman,” his father went on, “you’d want to tell your son about it, now, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t think you ought to go around talking about it,” Rudolph said.
“Oh,” Axel said, “you planning to turn me over to the police? I forgot you were so high principled.”
“Pa, you ought to forget about it. It’s no good thinking about it after all these years. What good does it do?”
Axel didn’t answer. He drank reflectively from the bottle.
“Oh, I remember a lot of things,” he said. “I get a lot of remembering-time down here at night. I remember shitting my pants along the Meuse. I remember the way my leg smelled the second week in the hospital. I remember carrying two-hundred-pound sacks of cocoa on the docks in Hamburg, with my leg opening up and bleeding every day. I remember what the Englishman said before I pushed him into the canal. ‘I say there,’ he said, ‘you can’t do that.’ I remember the day of my marriage. I could tell you about that, but I think you’d be more interested in your mother’s report. I remember the look on the face of a man called Abraham Chase in Ohio when I laid five thousand dollars on the table in front of him to make him feel better for getting his daughters laid.” He drank again. “I worked twenty years of my life,” he went on, “to pay to keep your brother out of jail. Your mother has let it be known that she thinks I was wrong. Do you think I was wrong?”