516
PARTISAN
REVIEW
had a drink with her, and a young man she was travelling with made
the oddest scene about it. Travelling with? He suddenly realized that
even such a harmless episode as that was not the kind of thing he
would tell Mary. It was not important enough, it was outside of their
lives altogether, he would have forgotten by the time he saw her.
He felt his own life within him, something intact with a smooth
surface very hard for the fishes to get their teeth in. He would keep
away from that girl and her affairs, whatever they were. She was evi–
dently at loose ends, ready for a little excitement. Her way of talking
was too personal, too intimate, she asked questions; she wished to
confide and explain about herself.
There "was nothing he wished to confide or explain to any one
but Mary. He was quite simply transporting himself, like something
inanimate sent by freight, stored in the hold, until, from the house
he had taken and begun to prepare for Mary in Mexico, he should
be set down in the house where Mary was waiting for him in Mann–
heim. In that interval, he had no concern with strangers. When they
returned together, the ship and the passengers would still be no busi–
ness of theirs, for it would be the voyage of their lives. They would
never see Germany again, it was no good hoping. Mary must
be
his
native land and he must be. hers, and they would have to carry
their own climate with them wherever they went; they must call that
climate home and try not to remember its real name.
That was the way it would be. Could it be true that he was no
longer free to live where he chose, but must stay wherever people
could be persuaded to tolerate him? His pride sickened. What a
shameful existence for any man, what a doubly shameful existence
for a German. No matter what he might say, to that Jenny Brown,
for example, about his mixture of bloods, he knew he was altogether
German, and the whole world except that one country had been
for him merely a hunting ground, a foraging territory, a place to
make encugh money to go home some day for good. Wherever he had
been, there
was
no other country except his own for
him,
and now he
must leave it, and he could not even imagine the end. He knew that
on the surface affairs might be made to go well enough for a good
while, perhaps he might keep his job as a minor executive of the
German oil company in Mexico until the time came to look ·about
for something else. But maybe not after he introduced Mary to the
German colony in Mexico City. They would never be deceived by
her blonde hair and little tilted nose. They would know she was
Jewish as far as they could see her. He had seen
it
happen before,
in all sorts of places, all kinds of company-his mind closed, there
