The Oriental Wife by Evelyn Toynton Page B

they waited for him in the lobby, where the chairs were covered in the same red-and-green plaid as the bedspread intheir room upstairs. Louisa, keeping an eye on the revolving door, felt a childish excitement at the thought of seeing Dr. Joseftal again. A man in a loud blue suit entered—“What is it about Americans?” Phillip said. “They all look so newly hatched somehow”—and then two women in feathered hats and clanking gold bracelets. They did not look so newly hatched, it seemed to her, but she refrained from saying this. She was humming to herself, a tune the black pianist had played the night before, and thinking with pleasure of the length of embroidered ribbon she had bought at Saks that morning, when a gaunt shabby man came through the door, blinking, and looked around with the furtive air of a criminal. The desk clerk, his attention alerted to the presence of someone so clearly out of place, narrowed his eyes and watched his progress across the floor, to where Phillip and Louisa sat.
    She jumped up, holding out both hands, babbling about how lovely it was to see him, and he parted his lips in a facsimile of a smile, showing two broken teeth. Phillip stood and thanked him for coming.
    “Would you like some coffee?” Louisa asked. “Or some tea? I could ask them to bring it.”
    “No, thank you,” he said, seating himself, very upright, in the plaid chair opposite. He pulled the too-short sleeves of his jacket down over his wrists. “It’s very kind of you, but no.”
    “I was just remembering you and the rabbit,” she said, in the same bright social voice. When he looked puzzled, she repeated the words in German.
    “Do you speak German?” he asked Phillip, and Phillip said no, unfortunately not.
    “Then we shall converse in English.”
    They sat looking at each other.
    “What precisely is the information you are seeking from me?”
    “I’d hoped you’d be willing to tell me about your experiences in Germany. Your impressions of what is happening there.”
    “So you said on the phone. You are a newspaperman, I believe.”
    “Of a sort. A journalist, anyway.”
    “You are a Communist?” he asked, pronouncing it in the German way. “In my experience, it is only the
Communisten
who are interested in these stories.”
    “Surely not. Would you tell me what happened to you?”
    “It is not so very interesting. Two years ago I moved to München—you would say Munich—because I thought things would be better there. It was not so Nazi a city as Nuremberg. And for a while things were tolerable. I built up a practice. I could not see any Aryan patients, but the authorities did not interfere with me much. Then a little girl was hit by a car outside my house, which was also my office; her mother rang my bell, she was hysterical. I told her I could not treat the child, I was forbidden, but she pleaded with me, she wept and clung to my hands, until I brought the child upstairs to my consulting room. In fact she was not so badly wounded, it is only that head wounds bleed very much, but the mother thanked me over and over; she kissed my hands. I made her promise not to tell anyone what I had done, but she was a foolish woman, or maybe some of the neighbors had witnessed it. At any rate, the next day the Gestapo came and took me away.” He stopped, he crossed his legs; he was wearing the same sort of high, round-toed shoes, laced throughhooks, that Louisa’s father had always worn. Dr. Joseftal’s were cracked but highly polished.
    “Yes? And then?” Phillip asked, looking up from his notebook; he had been writing while the doctor talked.
    “And then they did what the Gestapo does,” he said harshly. He breathed through his nose for a moment. “In Germany nobody would ask such a question. It is enough to say they came.”
    “So they tortured you.”
    The doctor made a face. “I would not use that word. To me it suggests something more … systematic. They shouted, they took out