Flotsam by Erich Maria Remarque

bought two tickets and hoped she hadn’t noticed. But in a moment that didn’t matter; the important thing was that she was sitting beside him.
    The room grew dark. On the screen appeared the native quarter of Marrakesh. The wastes of the desert blazed, sun-drenched and exotic, and through the hot African night came the monotonous and exciting beat of the tambourines and flutes.…
    Ruth Holland leaned back in her seat. The music swept over her like a warm rain—a warm, monotonous rain from which memory arose tormentingly.…
    She was standing beside the moat in Nuremberg. It was April. In front of her in the darkness stood the student Herbert Binding with a crumpled newspaper clenched in his hand.
    “You understand what I mean, Ruth?”
    “Yes, I understand, Herbert! It’s easy to understand.”
    Binding nervously twisted the copy of the
Stürmer
. “My name in the paper for keeping company with a Jewess! For being a profaner of the race! That means ruin, do you understand?”
    “Yes, Herbert. My name is in the newspaper too.”
    “That’s something entirely different! How can it affect you? You can’t go to the University even as it is.”
    “You’re right, Herbert.”
    “So this is the end, isn’t it? We’ve separated, and we’ll have nothing more to do with each other.”
    “Nothing more. And now good-by.”
    She turned around and walked away.
    “Wait—Ruth—listen a minute!”
    She stopped and he came up to her. His face was so close to hers in the darkness that she could feel his breath. “Listen,” he said, “where are you going now?”
    “Home.”
    “You don’t have to right away—” His breathing became heavier. “We understand each other, don’t we? And that’s not going to change! But after all you could—we could—it just happens that tonight there is no one at my house, you understand, and we wouldn’t be seen.” He reached for her arm. “We don’t have to part like this, so formally I mean; we could just once more—”
    “Go!” she said. “At once!”
    “But be reasonable, Ruth.” He put his arm around her shoulders.
    She looked again at the handsome face, at the blue eyes, at the waves of blond hair—the face she had loved and had implicitly trusted. Then she struck it. “Go!” she screamed, tears streaming from her eyes. “Go!”
    Binding recoiled. “What, strike me? Why, you dirty Jewish slut! Would you strike me?”
    He seemed about to spring at her.
    “Go!” she screamed shrilly.
    He looked around. “Shut your mouth!” he hissed. “Do you want to bring down the whole neighborhood on my neck? Maybe that would suit your plans! I’m going, yes, indeed, I’m going! Thank God I’m rid of you!”
    “
Quand l’amour meurt …
” sang the woman on the screen, her dark voice drifting through the noise and smoke of the Moroccan Café. Ruth ran her hand across her forehead.
    Compared to that, all the rest had been unimportant—the anxiety of the relatives with whom she was living; her uncle’s urgent advice to take a trip so that he would not become involved; the anonymous letter informing her that if she did not disappear within three days her hair would be cut off and she would be pulled through the streets in a cart, with placards on her breast and back labeling her as a defiler of the race; the visit to her mother’s grave; the wet morning when she had stood in front of the War Memorial from which the name of her father, who had fallen in Flanders in 1916, had been scratched out because he was a Jew; and then the hasty, lonesome trip across the border to Prague, taking with her her mother’s few pieces of jewelry …
    Once more the music of flutes and tambourines came from the screen. Above it rolled the march of the Foreign Legion—a quick, stirring clarion-call above the company of those proceeding into the wilderness, fighters without home or country.
    Kern bent toward Ruth Holland. “Do you like it?”
    “Yes.”
    He reached in his pocket and