Augusta Played Read Online Free Page B

sounding it to find out where to drive the nail. “I tell you, our parents knew nothing at that time, and what does an adolescent ever know? Behind my ears, I was wet.” But his eyes, Norman saw, had adopted a deeper hue, filling with the same sentimentality that the discussion of his absent wife had called up in him. It was as if somebody was pouring soft nougat centers into those chocolate-candy eyes. What can he be thinking of? Norman asked himself, confronting the novel notion that someone might remember the Holocaust with affection. What is he remembering?
    â€œNear the end, when everybody was called up, including boys, I was a member of the Hitlerjugend , and to fly the aeroplane I learned speedily. When you are flying, you are feeling less as though you are holding yourself above the ground, and more as though someone is keeping you from falling. You are suspended on a string from heaven. It is superbly beautiful. The puppeteer is as close to you then as ever he will be, and you can almost make out his visage behind the curtain of sky.”
    Jerk the string and the bomb hatch opened; jerk on another string, and a dozen shower stalls were soaked in gas; again on another, and Norman, his head flopping uselessly on his body, jigged away a lifetime to tunes he heard but barely, or heard and didn’t like. Long before the man across from him had handed him this mirror, this way of looking at himself, Norman had seen himself in search of freedom. Something tugged at him, and something yanked him this way and that. As he grew older, he began to be able to predict the steps in the dance and could make several educated guesses as to the identity of the person or persons who pulled the strings, but he couldn’t control the movements of his arms and legs, hold his head up or sit a given number out. Once or twice he had thought (waking in the dead of night, clammy as a corpse shocked into resurrection) that there might prove, ultimately, to be no release in knowledge—and since such a statement ran counter to the basic tenet of his lifework, he dismissed it again at once, as just another expression of his own desperation, an extremity, as it were, with which he had become intimately acquainted during his psychoanalysis. He believed, and knew that he must believe, that if he kept looking, if he dug deep enough, a beam would show and he could come out on the other side, and look back, and make sense of the shadows and fetid air that threatened any night now to suffocate him in his sleep.
    Gus shuddered. Unlike Norman, she saw herself, listening to the Berliner, turned loose, floating in deep space, disconnected from everything she loved. “That kind of experience, it seems to me,” she said to the ex-pilot, “hinges on a terrific confidence in yourself.” She blushed. “Or in God. Suppose he tires of holding the string?” She imagined he might have gotten bored with the whole show and walked away. “Or suppose he dozes off and lets your line get tangled up with some others? His hand could cramp.” But she shouldn’t be talking in parables. She didn’t know Norman well enough yet to know how he might interpret them.
    Norman was watching her lips, pink but enterprising even in repose, never really slack, the wayward upper lip full of determination and humor, the way both lips took on purpose and shape in the act of speech. And thinking about her mouth, he lost track of what she was saying. He slipped his hand casually under the table, letting it lie on her lap, not with intent to quicken but just to let her know that he was with her. Maybe, he thought, he had some intent to quicken.
    The man said, “I crashed in a meadow but no one would have known it from my face. One would have known it from the aeroplane, which was thoroughly destroyed. I washed my face in a brook. The accident made me thirsty, so I drank also from the brook. Then I walked away, as if nothing had