The Collected Stories

afraid to walk alone at night in a strange city?” I asked.
    “I’m not afraid of anybody. I took a course in wrestling and karate. I also take shooting lessons. It’s not allowed boys my age, but I have a private teacher.”
    “Oh, he takes more courses than I have hairs on my head,” Mrs. Metalon said. “He wants to know everything.”
    “In America, I’ll study Yiddish,” Mark announced. “I read somewhere that a million and a half people speak this language in America. I want to read you in the original. It’s also good for business. America is a true democracy. There you must speak to the customer in his own language. I want my mother to come to America with me. In Turkey, no person of Armenian descent is sure of his life.”
    “My friends are all Turks,” Mrs. Metalon protested.
    “Once the pogroms start they’ll stop being your friends. My mother tries to hide it from me but I know very well what they did to the Armenians in Turkey and to the Jews in Russia. I want to visit Israel. The Jews there don’t bow their heads like those in Russia and Poland. They offer resistance. I want to learn Hebrew and to study at Jerusalem University.”
    We said goodbye and Mark wrote the number of their room on a small sheet he tore from a notebook. I went to my room for a nap. My legs wobbled as I climbed the stairs. I lay down on the bed in my clothes with the notion of resting a half hour. I closed my eyes and sank into a deep slumber. Someone woke me—it was Mark. To this day I don’t know how he got into my room. Maybe I had forgotten to lock it or he had tipped the maid to let him in.
    He said, “Sir, excuse me but you’ve slept a whole hour. You’ve apparently forgotten that you are coming to our room for your bath.”
    I assured Mark that I’d be at his door in ten minutes, and after some hesitation he left. Getting undressed and unpacking a bathrobe and slippers from my valise wasn’t easy for me. I cursed the day I had decided to take this tour, but I hadn’t the courage to tell Mark I wouldn’t come. For all his delicacy and politeness Mark projected a kind of childish brutality.
    I threw my spring coat over my bathrobe and on unsteady legs began climbing the two floors to their room. I was still half asleep, and for a moment I had the illusion that I was on board ship. When I got to the Metalons’ floor, I could not find the slip of paper with the room number. I was sure that it was number 43, but the tiny lamp on the high ceiling was concealed behind a dull shade and emitted barely any light. In the dimness I couldn’t see this number. It took a long time of groping before I found it and knocked on the door.
    The door opened, and to my amazement I saw Celina Weyerhofer in a nightgown, her face thickly smeared with cream. Her hair looked wet and freshly dyed. I grew so confused that I could not speak. Finally I asked, “Is this 43?”
    “Yes, this is 43. To whom were you going? Oh, I understand. It seems to me that your lady with the diamonds is somewhere on this floor. I saw her son. You’ve made a mistake.”
    “Madam, I don’t wish to detain you. I just want to tell you they invited me to take a bath there, that’s all.”
    “A bath, eh? So let it be a bath. I haven’t had a bath for over a week myself. What kind of tour is this that some passengers get privileges and others are discriminated against? The advertisement didn’t mention anything about two classes of passengers. My dear Mr.—what is your name?—I warned you that that person would trap you, and I see this has happened sooner than I figured. Wait a minute—your bath won’t run out. Since when do they call it a bath? We call it by a different name. Don’t run. Because you’ve forgotten the number, you’ll have to knock on strangers’ doors and wake people. Everyone is dead tired. On this tour, before you can even lie down you have to get up again. My husband is a good sleeper. He lies down, opens some book, and two minutes later he’s snoring like a lord. He carries his own alarm clock. I’ve stopped sleeping altogether. Literally. That’s my sickness. I haven’t slept for years. I told a doctor in Bern about this—he’s actually a professor of medicine—and he called me a liar. The Swiss can be very coarse when they choose to be. He had studied something in a medical book or he had a theory, and because the facts didn’t jibe with his theory this made me a liar. I’ve been watching you sitting