for two hours dink! clink! she spent her money like never before!” Paula: “I bought me a beautiful dress made of that stuff we used to call ‘koronka,’ and a cute little brocade chapeau, très gai, with little loops over the forehead and ears, ooh these Paris fashions, and something they call a ‘pelisse’ trimmed with velvet, and I also bought some underclothes, you should pardon the expression, made of real synthetic English silk! And French soap I bought, and eau de Cologne, sweet-smelling crêpe-de-Chine, and did it cost me, mama droga! And then I came home in the evening and scrubbed away the zoo smells of so many years, and put on my new dress, and the pelisse, and some fingernail polish, and rouge on my checks, and I brushed my hair for about an hour to get the tangles out, I had hair down to my waist, sir! The only time I ever cut it was during the typhus epidemic of ‘22! So anyway, I went down to the flamingo pool, because there were no mirrors anywhere in the zoo, and I saw I was beautiful, a little high-flown maybe, all dressed up like that, but definitely feminine-looking, even though ‘aunty’ hadn’t paid a call in twenty years, and I went back just to say goodbye to Otto, ’cause with him I didn’t have to explain anything, he understood right away.” Otto: “And off she went on her nuptial journey, past the cages on the Lane of Eternal Youth, with the animals staring after her in a way that made me pray they wouldn’t start laughing, but you can count on animals more than you can on certain people, whose names I won’t mention, and it was obvious that they knew exactly what was going on.” Fried: “Only I, idiot that I am, understood nothing, and when I opened the door for her I was completely mystified by that carnival getup, and all her perfumery—” Wasserman at this point offers theplausible explanation that the doctor felt a little sorry for the elegant lady, who even with all these womanly accoutrements, was not really beautiful: her age showed and her arms and legs were coarse and scratched, but her eyes shone blue. Fried smiled a shy, crooked smile because he didn’t quite understand, or dare to hope perhaps that his love had at last been requited and his loneliness would soon end. Wasserman: “Just as sometimes mayhap it troubles us to bid adieu even to the woes and miseries to which we are accustomed, even as a dog becomes accustomed to the fleas on his back.” Paula did not allow Fried time to recover his wits. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him hungrily on the mouth. Only Fried’s mouth, fearful and well schooled in shameful aridity, recoiled sideways, and he felt her thin, lively smile trembling in the fold of his neck, like a drop of water on rocky soil, till suddenly, without wasting words, they fell upon each other with the passion that had been waiting for so long. Wasserman: “And the old doctor found joy—and with your permission, Herr Neigel, it is only at such moments that we are justified in using the term ‘joy’—because all his emotions and deepest stirrings, and even, begging your pardon, his lust, had been stored away for so many years of loneliness, far from the destructive hand of time, and afterward, nu, you understand, they lay nestled together, his left hand under her head, his right shall embrace her, half dead, heaven forbid, from the rapture that almost plucked them out by the roots of their existence.” Paula: “And then, silly me, me and my big mouth, I had to tell him all the swinishness I’d heard about on the radio, and at first Fried didn’t understand why I was talking about that just now and what the connection was, he never thought of himself as a Jew and me as a Pole, and always said, I am a Pole of the Fried persuasion (that was a saying of his), and when he finally figured out why I mentioned this, Jesus and Mary! he turned white as this wall here, and at first I thought he was angry because of the swinishness, but then I saw it was because I hadn’t come to him out of LOVE [q.v.] but for political reasons, as they say, yes, my Friedchik was always getting angry over the wrong things, and I, well sure, I was hurt, because that’s no way to treat a lady, and I got up to leave but then—” Fried: “But then, nu, I saw the bloodstain on the sheet, yes, and then, well, the rest is clear enough, I believe.”
[Editorial comment: Of course, Neigel demanded that Wasserman delete all references to the Führer and the Nuremberg Laws. Wasserman refused categorically. A sharp dispute ensued. See under: TRAP.]
HITABDUT
SUICIDE
The violent act of putting oneself to death.
1. One evening, after Wasserman had finished telling Neigel the daily installment of the Children of the Heart, he requested “my medicine, sir.” A certain closeness had grown between them on this particular evening as a result of the story, and Neigel informed Wasserman indignantly that under no circumstances would he agree to shoot him. Neigel had been behaving strangely that evening: he listened to the story intently, chuckled, and even cheered out loud, too loud sometimes, in the right places, enjoyed the exciting descriptions, generously contributed intimate details from his own life, and—in brief—was the ideal audience. It is quite possible that this relaxed mood was enhanced by the new bottle of 87 proof on his desk, only one-third full by now, and it is also possible that a new letter in a blue envelope from Munich was a contributing factor, or there may have been a different reason altogether, like the hints coming in from Berlin to the effect that those concerned had approved Neigel’s patriotic request
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