The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [54]
Ah, Dana, now he claimed a respectable fiancée. She would have none of it. Heidi’s eyes were so beautifully wide and blue. She shrank farther into shadow, took my hand, and placed her index finger’s silken nicotine whorls against my opening lips.
Günter had taken on quite a load back at the pub and was discharging still. He could neither accelerate nor stop, and it seemed the bobby was going to wait him out and hold each passed milliliter against him, each drop an affront to English law. “This is acceptable behavior and hygiene in Germany, is it?” he sneered, though he had likely urinated on his share of British buildings (and German ones, blearily following some football club to Munich, looking for a brawl).
When Günter’s untimely release came to its hesitant, dribbled conclusion, he called out, “Heidi? Our-toor? Where are you?” The cop said, “Oi, that’s making a noisome disturbance, Fritzy, on top of the indecency. Come on, then. Off we go.”
“Please, police, wait. Heidi!”
No indecision pinched Heidi’s face as we heard Günter arrested and walked away. She showed so little hesitation, I wondered if she hadn’t sent for the policeman in the first place.
“You sure you don’t want to …” I began.
“No woman shall succeed in Salic land,” she quoted Henry V in a whisper and took my hands. You’d have liked her, Dana. “Which Salic is at this day called Meisen. This is the only line I like. He knows me in this.” We heard “Heidi!” echo along the stones and streets as we walked in the opposite direction.
“He called you his fiancée,” I said, only to know if she felt any remorse at all about Günter’s approaching night, or if she meant ever to save him.
“Yes, but fiancée is a French word,” she purred. “There is no word for it in German.” And that was the end of Günter.
Heidi was wonderfully distracting. She did not like Shakespeare at all, carried a grudge about him, in fact. Obviously, we bonded over this. “Is it okay to say I do not like him?” she asked very quietly, not unreasonably fearing the town’s scorn and violence. Her long holiday of plays in Günter’s company had driven her to an endearing madness: “Here is what I hate,” she said as she pinned me to a tree on the Thames embankment and sniffed at my neck like a werewolf thinking it over. “Macbeth meets these witches. They say, ‘You will be king. Just sit still. Wait a little.’ And so immediately he kills everyone.”
“Human nature?” I suggested as her lips found the pulsing part of my neck. “Maybe he’s saying that once we have seen what we want, impatience—”
“Stop excusing him, because this is scheisse.” She kissed me angrily—that’s really the only word for it, D. “ ‘Look!’ says the watcher man, ‘Old King Hamlet’s ghost just walked by! Also, wait, don’t get yourself excited about this, though, because let’s talk about the Norwegian army for an hour first.’ ”
“Some clumsy exposition,” I murmured, feeling oddly defensive of Shakespeare on our shared birthday, as I was reaping the benefits of another man’s misguided, expressive love for the Bard.
“Oh, nein! ‘No, nothing is clumsy, Heidi! He is perfect! If you don’t like this, it is you who has the problem.’ ” She was raving a bit now, at Günter, at her holiday, at the playwright. “Every play is like this, you know. Every one. You like the Lear? It’s all about the nice girl making the speech about honesty, and she would not do this. But if she do not, then no play for us. Othello? Iago knows everything. He is a machine devil. General Othello is, lucky for Iago, gullible, needy, easy to make a fool. Like every general, I am sure.”
“Complexity of character?”
“Don’t be a stupid man, too. You are not like Günter in this, I hope. The Merchant of Venice? You are the Jew, right?”
“Well, a Jew.”
“Okay, so all your Shylock has to tell to that little bitch is ‘Hey, it is Antonio’s debt to pay me, so he can cut his own flesh without me and give me my