The Acrobats Read Free Page A

clumsily off his lap, hugging him still. He waited until she had slipped into her skirt before he ushered Fräulein Kraus into the room.
    He had been expecting this visit ever since Colonel Kraus had taken to loitering about the club. Now she sat before him, her quick blue eyes hard with contempt because she had been obliged to seek an appointment with her brother’s employer, the Jew Chaim. Fräulein Kraus’s hair was straight and fell in sharp lines from her face like a meticulously combed wig of string. Her face was bony and dry and tanned. Wrinkles were evident. Her body was thin, without sex, and the colour of old paper. She wore a short plaid skirt and a neat sweater. A pair of heavy woollen stockings were pulled up to her knotted knees.
    Chaim spared Fräulein Kraus an introduction to Carmen. He nodded briefly when Carmen left the room. He felt as if Carmen and himself were part of a human conspiracy, and he enjoyed that thought.
    “Well, Fräulein Kraus. Are you enjoying the
Fallas?”
    “No. Not very much.”
    “You would prefer the festival at Bayreuth? Or Munich?”
    “You do not like Germans,” she said, smiling coldly.
    Chaim had a short, plump body. He was conscious of his dull physique so he preferred sitting to standing. His face was round and ordinary and his grey hair was thinning. Only his eyes illustrated the particular man. Liquid grey, profoundly expressive, they were the eyes of a melancholy clown, the eyes of a man who had absorbed so much of anguish that he was inclined to defend his human vulnerability behind a deprecating jest.
    Chaim shrugged his shoulders. “Why should I dislike Germans? Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Goethe – I could go on. Even Karl Marx was a …”
    “Marx was a Jew.”
    They sat in his office above the Mocambo Club. The reflected light of the desk lamp glittered sternly on her steel-rimmed spectacles.
    “Will you join me in a glass of muscatel?”
    “I do not drink.”
    He refilled his own glass. First they must murder the human spirit, he thought. Stifle small selfishnesses, pleasures, then the organisation of inferior society might begin.
    “We dislike each other, Herr Chaim,” she said stiffly, “but … Spain is not my country and to be frank I find Valencia
dégoûtant
. Yet the Bolsheviks have made it quite impossible for a decent person to exist in my homeland today. I am a fascist.” Fräulein Kraus paused. She felt it was necessary for Chaim to protest. But he said nothing, so she continued. “Don’t think for a moment that I am prejudiced against you because you are a Jew. I respect a man for what he is. The only important thing in the world today is money.
Avec de l’argent même un juif peut épouser une comtesse française.”
    “Then you are a bit of a philosopher, Fräulein Kraus?”
    Fräulein Kraus folded her hands in her lap. “You are making fun of me,” she said.
    Chaim lit his cigar. Yes. Fun, he thought. The fun will be for André and Toni’s generation. They will have to pay the unpaid bills of the past, account for the dishonesties, the vagrancies, of Fräulein Kraus and myself. He switched off the desk lamp.
    “You are fatigued, Herr Chaim,” Fräulein Kraus said dryly.
    “Please, you must have come about something in particular.”
    Suddenly she realised that if Alfred still lived, had he not perished on the Malaga front, he would now be about the Jew’s age, perhaps a trifle younger. “It is Colonel Kraus. My brother. He frequents your club often. I believe the fool is infatuated with one of the prostitutes in your employ.”
    Chaim felt spiteful. “Not the girl you just saw leaving my office,” he said. “That would be most …”
    “No.” And to lay her tired ugly body down nightly, the taste of fifteen-year-old kisses still clinging to her lips moistly, ridiculing the pain of her unshared bed. “No,” she said firmly. “Her name is Toni.”
    “But Toni is in love with somebody else. A Canadian. He is a very