The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

She was not the only one deprived of her future. The lawyer had had his own practice in Dresden; Mann, who was a trained engineer, had been a union leader and a delegate at an international labor conference. In England they were earning their livings in humbler ways, but Marta was never able to get anything going. She said it was because her English was not good enough, but Kohl said it was because she was a lazy lump who couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings. It was true that she usually slept late and had her first cup of coffee at noon.

It may have been her waiflike quality that made one want to serve her, but there was also something imperious in her personality that blurred the line between wishes and commands. During the day, I was often the only person available, and as soon as she heard me come home from school, she called down for me. She said she was too sick to get out of bed, she was starving, and though she had called and called, no one had answered. She wasn’t sulky, just pathetic, so that I was apologetic to have been at school and my aunt on a shopping trip a tube ride away where prices were cheaper. But there had been Kohl just across the landing-hadn’t he heard her? She laughed at that: “Kohl! I could be screaming in my death agony, he’d stuff up his ears and not hear a thing.” But again she was not reproachful, only amused.

He too was often waiting for me to come home from school: either he needed to finish a drawing of me or had an idea for a new one. Of course he never summoned me the way she did; he requested, suggested, timidly ready to withdraw. It was only when he saw that she had preempted me and was sending me about her business that his manner changed. Once he came into her room while I was washing her stockings in the basin and she was warming her hands before the gas fire. His face swelled red the way it did in anger: “What is she-a queen to be served and waited on?… You should have seen where she came from, before I pulled her out of the mire!”

She admitted it freely-that she came out of the mire-but as for his pulling her out: oh, there were plenty of others, bigger and better, to do that.

“Then why me? Why did I have to be made the fool who married her?”

“Because you wanted it more than anyone else. You said you’d die and kill yourself without me.”

“And now I’m dying with you!”

It began to happen that on the days when I was sitting with him in his room, she would call for me from hers. Then he kicked his door shut with his foot; but I could still hear her voice calling, weak and plaintive, and it made me restless. I wanted to help her; and also, I have to admit, I wanted to be with her more than with him. I was bored with the long hours of sitting for him. And I was embarrassed by him, too young for his shy approaches, too unused to such respectful gallantry. I began to find excuses not to accompany him on his Sunday excursions, though I felt sorry when I saw him leave alone. Perhaps Marta felt sorry too: I heard her offer to go with him, and then his brusque, indignant refusal.

One day Kohl was waiting for me outside my school. He was standing beside someone's boyfriend, a tall youth with straw-colored hair and a big Adam's apple, this paunchy little old man who tucked his arm into mine and walked away with me. Next day I told everyone he was my uncle, and whenever he stood there again, it was announced to me that my uncle was waiting. I couldn’t even tell him not to come-not for fear of hurting his feelings (though there was that too) but for not wanting anything significant to be read into his presence there. What could be significant? He was old, old! I wept into my pillow at night, ashamed and frustrated at some lack that it was ridiculous to think someone like him could fill.

On a Sunday when I had just told Kohl that I had too much homework to go with him, Marta called after me on the stairs to accompany her. I didn’t dare accept there and then, with Kohl listening, but she knew how eager I was, and maybe he knew too: when we set out, I glanced up guiltily and there he was, standing at a window on the landing. It seemed she was as aware of him as I was: she put her arm around my shoulders and talked in the loud and lively way people do when they want to show others that they are having a good time.

After that first Sunday, I waited for her to invite me again, and sometimes she did. Outings with her were very different from those with Kohl. We were never alone, as I was with him, but there were Mann and the lawyer, and later others joined us, and they had conversations about art shows and films, and a lot to say about people they knew and seemed not to like. Although it hardly ever rained when I was with her-it inevitably did on Sundays with Kohl-they spent little time enjoying birds and sunshine. They gathered in cafes for afternoon coffee and cake, never in the sort of depressing eating holes that Kohl frequented but in large, lavish places; these were probably imitations of the luxury cafes they had once known. Their favorite was one called the Old Vienna, which was not too expensive but was smothered in atmosphere. There were chandeliers, carpets, red velvet banquettes, and richly looped creamy lace under the curtains that were also of red velvet. Here many languages were spoken by both clientele and waiters, and there were continental newspapers on poles for anyone who cared to read them. But few did-they were there to talk and laugh and pretend they were where and how they used to be. Some of the women were chic, with little hats and a lot of lipstick and costume jewelry. Yet Marta, not chic but bohemian with her red hair and long trailing skirt, drew more attention than anyone-maybe because she was enjoying herself so recklessly, surrounded by a group of friends, all male and all eager to supply and then light the cigarettes from which she flicked ash in all directions.

I was always excited after these excursions with Marta and her friends, and my aunt enjoyed hearing my descriptions of the cafe and its clientele, nodding in recognition of something she had once known. But Kohl frowned and told her, “You shouldn’t let her go with them.”

“But it's so nice for her! Poor child, what chance does she have to go anywhere?”

He said, “She's too young.”

“Too young to go to a cafe?”

“Too young to go with people like that.”

“Oh, people like that,” La Plume repeated dismissively in her everyone-has-to-live intonation.

As so often with this mild little man, he became a red fighting cock: “You don’t know anything! None of you knows-what she was like, how she carried on. Every day was carnival for her-and how old was she? Sixteen, seventeen, and I, who was forty, I, Kohl, became her clown. She made me her carnival clown.”

“Yes, yes, sit down.”

La Plume pressed him into a chair. She made tea for him, and he drank it with his hands wrapped gratefully around the cup. It calmed him, changed the mood of his thoughts though not their subject. “What could I do? For years and years I had been alone, and poor-poor! And now people were coming to my studio. When I went into a cafe there were whispers, ‘It's Kohl, the artist Kohl.’ So that was meat and drink for her, other people's whispers… But she was always laughing at me, making a fool of me. Even her cap made a fool of me! This little striped monkey cap she wore riding on top of her hair… Her hair was red.”

“It's still red.”

“Nothing like it was!” He gulped tea, gulped heat. “I painted her, I wrote poetry for her, I slept with her, I couldn’t get enough of her. I tell you, she was a flame to set people on fire.” He broke off, pleaded with me, “Come and sit for me. Come tomorrow? After school? I’ll wait for you. I’ll have everything ready.”

That time I was glad to go. There was a stillness, a purity in his empty studio that I have never experienced in any other place; nor at any other time have I felt as serene as in the presence of this artist, drawing something out of me that I didn’t know was there. But then Marta came in and stood behind him to comment on his drawing of me. Once he took off one of his slippers, which he always wore in the studio to save his feet, and he threw it in her direction. It hit the door, which she had already shut behind her. But as always with her intrusion, our peace was shattered.

All this was in my last two years at school: 1946, 1947. After that, things began to change, and some of our lodgers left us to resume their former lives or to begin new ones elsewhere. Mann, for instance, went back to Germany-to East Germany, where he was welcomed by the remnants of his party and returned to an active life of rallies and international conferences. The lawyer started a new practice of his own, taking up cases of reparation for his fellow refugees, which made him rich and took him all over Europe. Their rooms remained empty; there were no more emigres of the kind my aunt was used to, and she did not care for the other applicants who spoke in languages none of us understood. Anyway, the landlord was keen to convert the house into flats and offered her a sum of money to quit. I was by this time living in Cambridge, having won a scholarship to the university, and stayed with her only during my vacations. She took a little flat over some shops in North West London and led a more restful, retired life, made possible by the monthly payments of refugee reparation the lawyer arranged for her.

He also offered to arrange such payments for Marta, but she was too disorganized to locate her birth