The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [76]
Gordon had been smiling, too, thinking how he always forgot how young Mosca was, and was always surprised when that youthful, immature sincerity flashed through Mosca's reserve. And trying to help he said, “How about Hella, then, and your kid?”
Mosca didn't answer. Ann got up to fill their glasses, Leo said, “He doesn't mean what he says.”
And then Mosca, as if he had not heard, said to Gordon, “I make myself responsible.” And only Eddie Cassin felt that he had said these words as dogma, something he would have to live by. Mosca smiled at them and said it jokingly this time. “I make myself responsible.” He shook his head. “Who can do better than that?”
“And how is it you don't feel that way?” Ann Middleton asked Leo.
“I don't know,” Leo said. “I went to Buchenwald when I was quite young, and I met my father there and we were for a long time together. And people are different. Besides, Walter is changing. I caught him bowing, actually bowing good evening to his German neighbors.”
The others laughed, but Mosca said impatiently, “How a guy can spend eight years in a concentration camp and come out the way you did I'll never understand. If I were you and a kraut looked at me crosswise I'd send him to the hospital. And every time he gave me an answer I didn't like I'd kick him in the balls.”
“Please, please,” Ann said in mock horror.
“Too bad about you,” Mosca said, but he grinned at her. She had used worse language cursing black-market operators who had cheated her.
Leo said slowly, “You forget I am part <5erman. And the things the Germans did, they did not because they were Germans but because they were human beings. My father told me that. And then I am having a good time, I live a new life, it would poison that life if I were cruel to other people.”
“You're right, Leo,” Gordon said. “We need a more intellectual approach, not emotional reactions. We have to reason, to change the world by logical action. The Communist party believes in that.”
There was no doubting his sincerity, the purity of his belief.
Leo gave him a long look. “I know one thing only about communism. My father was a Communist. The camps could never crush his spirit. When the word came into the camp that Hitler and Stalin had signed a pact, my father died easily afterward.”
“And if that pact was necessary to save the Soviet Union?” Gordon asked. “If that pact was necessary to save the world from the Nazis?”
Leo bowed his head and put his hand up to his face to hold the muscles tight and stop the tic. “No,” he said, “if my father had to die that way the world isn't worth saving. That is emotional, I know, not your intellectual approach the party f avors.”
In the silence that followed they could hear the baby crying upstairs. “I'll go change him,” Gordon said. His wife gave him a grateful smile.
When he had left Ann said, “Don't mind him,” to Leo, keeping the tone of her voice absolutely without inflection so that she could not be thought disloyal. She went out into the kitchen to make coffee.
When the evening ended everyone shook hands all around. Aim said, “Til drop around tomorrow to say good-by to Hella.” And Gordon said to Leo, “Don't forget fiie professor, Leo, will you?” Leo nodded. Gordon added slowly and sincerely, “I wish you luck.”
Gordon locked the door behind them and went back into the living-room. He found Ann sitting thoughtfully in her chair. “I want to talk to you, Gordon,” she said.
Gordon smiled at her. “Well, here I am, talk.” He felt a sharp pang of fear. But he could talk to Ann without becoming angry when they discussed politics, even though she never agreed with him.
Ann got up and walked nervously up and down the room. Gordon watched her face. He loved the broad, honest planes, the blunt nose and the pale-blue eyes. She was a pure Saxon type, he thought, and yet she looked almost Slavic. He wondered if there were any connection. He would have to read up on it.
Her words smashed against his mind. She said, “You'll have to give it up, you will just have to give it up.”
“Give up what?” Gordon