Diamond earrings, I’ve read in the paper.’
‘It’s getting late,’ says Lise. Her lips are slightly parted and her nostrils and eyes, too, are a fragment more open than usual; she is a stag scenting the breeze, moving step by step, inhibiting her stride to accommodate Mrs Fiedke’s pace, she seems at the same time to search for a certain air-current, a glimpse and an intimation.
‘I clean mine with toothpaste when I’m travelling,’ confides Mrs Fiedke. ‘The better stuff’s in the bank back home, of course. The insurance is too high, isn’t it? But you have to bring a few bits and pieces. I clean them with my toothbrush and ordinary toothpaste, then I rub them with the hand-towel. They come up very nicely. You can’t trust the jewellers. They can always take them out and replace them with a fake.’.
‘It’s getting late,’ says Lise. ‘There are so many faces. Where did all the faces come from?’
‘I ought to take a nap,’ says Mrs Fiedke, ‘so that I won’t feel too tired when my nephew arrives. Poor thing. We have to leave for Capri tomorrow morning. All the cousins, you know. They’ve taken such a charming villa and the past will never be mentioned. My brother made that clear to them. I made it clear to my brother.’
They have reached the circular intersection and turn into a sidestreet where a few yards ahead at the next corner there is a taxi-rank occupied by one taxi. This one taxi is taken by someone else just as they approach it.
‘I smell burning,’ says Mrs Fiedke as they stand at the corner waiting for another taxi to come along. Lise sniffs, her lips parted and her eyes moving widely from face to face among the passers-by. Then she sneezes. Something has happened to the people in the street, they are looking round, they are sniffing too. Somewhere nearby a great deal of shouting is going on.
Suddenly round the corner comes a stampede. Lise and Mrs Fiedke are swept apart and jostled in all directions by a large crowd composed mainly of young men, with a few smaller, older and grimmer men, and here and there a young girl, all yelling together and making rapidly for somewhere else. ‘Tear-gas!’ someone shouts and then a lot of people are calling out, ‘Tear-gas!’ A shutter on a shop-front near Lise comes down with a hasty clatter, then the other shops start closing for the day. Lise falls and is hauled to her feet by a tough man who leaves her and runs on.
Just before it reaches the end of the street which joins the circular intersection the crowd stops. A band of grey-clad policemen come running towards them, in formation, bearing tear-gas satchels and with their gas-masks at the ready. The traffic on the circular intersection has stopped. Lise swerves with her crowd into a garage where some mechanics in their overalls crouch behind the cars and others take refuge underneath a car which is raised on a cradle in the process of repair.
Lise fights her way to a dark corner at the back of the garage where a small red Mini-Morris, greatly dented, is parked behind a larger car. She wrenches at the door, forcefully, as if she expects it to be locked. It opens so easily as to throw her backwards, and as soon as she regains her balance she gets inside, locks herself in and puts her head down between her knees, breathing heavily, drawing in the smell of petrol blended faintly with a whiff of tear-gas. The demonstrators form up in the garage and are presently discovered and routed out by the police. Their exit is fairly orderly bar the shouting.
Lise emerges from the car with her zipper-bag and her hand-bag, looking to see what damage has been done to her clothes. The garage men are vociferously commenting on the affair. One is clutching his stomach proclaiming himself poisoned and vowing to sue the police for the permanent damage caused him by tear-gas. Another, with his hand to his throat, gasps that he is suffocating. The others are cursing the students whose gestures of solidarity, they declare in the colourful derisive obscenities of their mother-tongue, they can live without. They stop when Lise limps into view. There are six of them in all, including a young apprentice and a large burly man of middle age, without overalls, wearing only a white shirt and trousers and the definite air of the proprietor. Apparently seeing in Lise a tangible remnant of the troubles lately visited upon his garage, this big fellow turns on her to vent his fury with unmastered hysteria. He advises her to go home to the brothel where she came from, he reminds her that her grandfather was ten times cuckolded, that she was conceived in some ditch and born in another; after adorning the main idea with further illustrations he finally tells her she is a student.
Lise stands somewhat entranced; by her expression she seems almost consoled by this outbreak, whether because it relieves her own tensions after the panic or whether for some other reason. However, she puts a hand up to her eyes, covering them, and in the language of the country she says, ‘Oh please, please. I’m only a tourist, a teacher from Iowa, New Jersey. I’ve hurt my foot.’ She drops her hand and looks at her coat which is stained with a long black oily mark. ‘Look at my clothes,’ Lise says. ‘My new clothes. It’s best never to be born. I wish my mother and father had practised birth-control. I wish that pill had been invented at the time. I feel sick, I feel terrible.’
The men are impressed by this, one and all. Some are visibly cheered up. The proprietor turns one way and another with arms outstretched to call the whole assembly to witness his dilemma. ‘Sorry, lady, sorry. How was I to know? Pardon me, but I thought you were one of the students. We have a lot of trouble from the students. Many apologies, lady. Was there something we can do for you? I’ll call the First Aid. Come and sit down, lady, over here, inside my office, take a seat. You see the traffic outside, how can I call the ambulance through the traffic? Sit down, lady.’ And, having ushered her into a tiny windowed cubicle, he sits Lise in its only chair beside a small sloping ledger-desk and thunders at the men to get to work.
Lise says, ‘Oh please don’t call anyone. I’ll be all right if I can get a taxi to take me back to my hotel.’
‘A taxi! Look at the traffic!’
Outside the archway that forms the entrance to the garage, there is a dense block of standing traffic.
The proprietor keeps going to look up and down the street and returning to Lise. He calls for benzine and a rag to clean Lise’s coat. No rag clean enough for the purpose can be found and so he uses a big white handkerchief taken from the breast pocket of his coat which hangs behind the door of the little office. Lise takes off her black- stained coat and while he applies his benzine-drenched handkerchief to the stain, making it into a messy blur, Lise takes off her shoes and rubs her feet. She puts one foot up on the slanting desk and rubs. ‘It’s only a bruise,’ she says, ‘not a sprain. I was lucky. Are you married?’
The big man says, ‘Yes, lady, I’m married,’ and pauses in his energetic task to look at her with new, appraising and cautious eyes. ‘Three children — two boys, one girl,’ he says. He looks through the office at his men who are occupied with various jobs and who, although one or two of them cast a swift glance at Lise with her foot up on the desk, do not give any sign of noticing any telepathic distress signals their employer might be giving out.
The big man says to Lise, ‘And yourself? Married?’
‘I’m a widow,’ Lise says, ‘and an intellectual. I come from a family of intellectuals. My late husband was an intellectual. We had no children. He was killed in a motor accident. He was a bad driver, anyway. He was a hypochondriac, which means that he imagined that he had every illness under the sun.’
‘This stain,’ said the man, ‘won’t come out until you send the coat to the dry-cleaner.’ He holds out the coat with great care, ready for her to put on; and at the same time as he holds it as if he means her, temptress in the
