Extreme Magic Read Online Free PDF Page B

afternoon. He will come to us, here.”
    “Oh, no!” said Portia. “Not to you, of all people. Tell them, Ernest.”
    “N-now, honey,” said Ernest. “You’re just building something up.”
    “Well then, I’ll tell them. I’d hoped not to have to. But they can’t let themselves in for that.”
    “For what, Portia?” Weil said.
    “Your Mr. Pines. He’s an anti-Semite.”
    Weil put a hand over Hertha’s, which had just begun to tremble. “You have proof?”
    “Something he said. About you.”
    “Hans,” said Hertha. “Hans.” Her hands gripped the table.
    “Du wilst gehen, Liebste?”
    “Nein, nein. I will stay.”
    “Repeat it then, Portia,” said Weil, holding his wife’s hands in his. “Repeat it exactly.”
    She repeated it.
    “So,” he said. “So.” He got up, tucked the afghan around Hertha, and walked over to Portia. “Look at me.” He leaned over her. “I am short, not? I wear now and then a beret?” He extracted two nods from her. “And I am a Jew?” She nodded again, head down.
    “Ah,” he said, “the muscles are a little stiff. So it is insult then, to be called a Jew.” Drumming on the table, he brought his palm down flat. A cup turned on its side, spilling a stream of brown that seeped into the cloth. “Ja, the insult is there. Not in his mind. In yours.”
    He waved aside Ernest, who had moved to mop up the coffee. “The Jew is so sensitive, hah, and you want to be so sensitive too. So you will take special care not to notice what he is.” He blotted at the coffee with a napkin. “I like better your Mrs. McFarland. She refuses me her house, because I drink wine. She is not afraid to include me in her prejudices, as she might any other man.”
    He went to the door. “Excuse me. Ernest. I am sorry. But maybe the evening is over.”
    When he had seen them out, he came back up the stairs to Hertha. “T-t-t,” he said, “was für ein Esel bin ich. I make everybody cry.” He sat down beside her. “Come, laugh. You know what she said to me at the door? She said, ‘Hans, I wouldn’t hurt you for the world. You of all people.’” He put his arms around her. “Na, na, it’s all right. We are all here together.” He pressed her head on his shoulder. “Come, it was no tragedy, just a little comic opera. Only—me—I still think I am Heldentenor.” He rocked her back and forth. “I spilled no blood, hein?” he said, rocking. “Just a little Kaffee.”
    On the following Sunday, one of those honey-warm fall days that brought out summer habits like chilled bees, the professor and Alastair Pines sat over a bottle of wine in the Weil garden, a small high terrace overlooking the main highway that ran below. Alastair, member of the household for the past week, had already formed a gourmet’s alliance with Hertha, who had taken to producing in triumph at dinner the Wienerschnitzel or Knödel over which Alastair would have reminisced so charmingly the day before. Now Weil uncorked the wine and set the bottle on the table in the middle of the picnic lunch—roast duck and beetroot Salat, that Hertha had left with them before going to Lansing.
    “We let the wine breathe a little first, it will be better,” he said, and sat back, thinking of how long it had been since he had said that to someone, and of how pleasant this was, this pause so male, so European.
    Alastair leaned back, stretching his arms. “Soft berth, this,” he said, smiling. “Very. You’ve both been so kind. Perhaps now you wouldn’t mind telling me what was at the bottom of that business at the Mabies’. Not, of course, unless you want to.”
    “Not at all,” said Weil. “It is very instructive.” He explained some of Mrs. Mabie’s suspicions.
    “I say!” said Alastair. “How amazing! But I say, she can’t be typical.”
    “Oh, no, no, she’s a silly woman. One can’t generalize about this big a country. Still, so often these unilateral fantasies about others. After two wars, still such