Augusta Played Read Online Free Page A

In her reverie, from seeming miles away, like a man on a mountain top hallooing into the heavens, the Berliner could be heard saying, in answer to her question about whether he missed Germany, “Does a man miss his mother? His father? His wife, if she’s away?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Gus said—then blushed. She didn’t know what prompted her to answer rhetorical questions. She glanced at Norman, to see if he had been disturbed by her mistake.
    Norman had stopped eating and was looking at the Berliner. The man’s nose, he thought, looked like a live entity separate from the rest of his face. It had something of the character of a hedgehog. “It’s interesting,” Norman said, “that you think of your mother first.”
    â€œAnd isn’t it a pity more people do not.”
    â€œBut your childhood can’t have been very, uh—”
    â€œOften there was not enough to eat, this is true.”
    Norman looked down again, reflecting on the goulash on his plate. Suddenly he was angry. He didn’t want to be—he had just got engaged, for Christ’s sake, and coming into this cool darkness from the gaudy sunshine, the blue skies overblown and expansive like Anna Magnani in last night’s movie, he had felt fine. Really fine. Now he emptied his eyes of emotion and looked again at the Berliner, impassively, thinking, You liar, you pig. The man reeked of self-satisfaction, and nobody achieved that in middle age who hadn’t been born to it. Norman felt the muscles on the right side of his neck contract; his shoulders knotted. There was a film of soap on the spoon he hadn’t used. Shifting his gaze, he shivered at the prospect of snow. There were images in that landscape which the Berliner’s wife had failed to paint; they were there, hidden, waiting to be ferreted out, like the objects in one of those drawings for children. If he searched hard enough, he could make out hovels half-buried under mud and icicle, men on horses, men in tanks, the mangy cur licking its wounds beneath a fallen log, flash of bone jutting through the torn skin. Sometimes Norman dreamed this same scene. There was no excuse for it, no cause contiguous enough to serve as explanation, and yet the scene existed as a part of his brain’s terrain, he had a map imprinted on his cerebrum, he knew every crevice in the snow-laden fields, every turning of the town, knew Levke, knew Sammele the beadle, the rabbi, and hot-eyed Rebecca. He also knew better than to take any of it seriously, the woman’s mural or the mural in his mind. To the man, he said: “You were there during—”
    The man wiped his hands on the tablecloth.
    Gus lowered her eyes.
    â€œYou must have known,” Norman said.
    The man said, “We didn’t know.”
    â€œHow could you fail to know? You knew…”
    â€œThere were rumors, but there are always rumors. If not about Jews, then Communists. Your neighbor’s wife, the skinny old man who never talks. Maybe he doesn’t talk because his dentures fit not quite right and embarrass him.”
    â€œWhat in God’s name do false teeth have to do with anything?”
    â€œI know someone who has false teeth,” Gus said, “and he’s barely thirty. There are people in this country who just don’t have even the money it takes to take care of their children’s teeth.”
    â€œYou see?” said the man.
    â€œSee! Do I see? You’re fucking-A-right I see.” What he saw was that some irreversibly Aryan line of reasoning homed in on him no matter where he turned. It approached him from the East; it came at him from his left, where Gus hung on his elbow. He could feel the tension in her fingers as she touched his sleeve, five little jabs of nervousness. Don’t make a scene, she was saying; he could hear the words in her head.
    The man reached over and tapped him on the back of his hand, as if