The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick [best english novels for beginners .txt] 📗

waves you could look back and see black crenellated forms stretching all along the shore. In the dark, in silhouette, the towered hotel roofs held up their merciless teeth. Impossible that any architect pleasurably dreamed these teeth. The sand was only now beginning to cool. Across the water the sky breathed a starless black; behind her, where the hotels bit down on the city, a dusty glow of brownish red lowered. Mud clouds. The sand was littered with bodies. Photograph of Pompeii: prone in the volcanic ash. Her pants were under the sand; or else packed hard with sand, like a piece of torso, a broken statue, the human groin detached, the whole soul gone, only the loins left for kicking by strangers. She took off her good shoes to save them and nearly stepped on the sweated faces of two lovers plugged into a kiss. A pair of water animals in suction. The same everywhere, along the rim of every continent, this gurgling, foaming, trickling. A true smasher, a woman whose underpants have been stolen, a woman who has murdered her business with her own hands, would know how to step cleanly into the sea. A horizontal tunnel. You can fall into its pull just by entering it upright. How simple the night sea; only the sand is unpredictable, with its hundred burrowings, its thousand buryings.

When she came back to the gate, the latch would not budge. A cunning design, it trapped the trespasser.

She gazed up, and thought of climbing; but there was barbed wire on top.

So many double mounds in the sand. It was a question of choosing a likely sentinel: someone who would let her out. She went back down onto the beach again and tapped a body with the tip of her dangling shoe. The body jerked as if shot: it scrambled up.

“Mister? You know how to get out?”

“Room key does it,” said the second body, still flat in the sand. It was a man. They were both men, slim and coated with sand; naked. The one lying flat—she could see what part of him was swollen.

“I’m not from this hotel,” Rosa said.

“Then you’re not allowed here. This is a private beach.”

“Can’t you let me out?”

“Lady, please. Just buzz off,” the man in the sand said.

“I can’t get out,” Rosa pleaded.

The man who was standing laughed.

Rosa persisted, “If you have a key—”

“Believe me, lady, not for you”—muffled from below.

She understood. Sexual mockery. “Sodom!” she hissed, and stumbled away. Behind her their laughter. They hated women. Or else they saw she was a Jew; they hated Jews; but no, she had noticed the circumcision, like a jonquil, in the dim sand. Her wrists were trembling. To be locked behind barbed wire! No one knew who she was; what had happened to her; where she came from. Their gates, the terrible ruse of their keys, wire brambles, men lying with men…She was afraid to approach any of the other mounds. No one to help. Persecutors. In the morning they would arrest her.

She put on her shoes again, and walked along the cement path that followed the fence. It led her to light; voices of black men. A window. Vast deep odors: kitchen exhaust, fans stirring soup smells out into the weeds. A door wedged open by a milk-can lid. Acres of counters, stoves, steamers, refrigerators, percolators, bins, basins. The kitchen of a castle. She fled past the black cooks in their meat-blooded aprons, through a short corridor: a dead end facing an elevator. She pushed the button and waited. The kitchen people had seen her; would they pursue? She heard their yells, but it was nothing to do with her—they were calling Thursday, Thursday. On Thursday no more new potatoes. A kind of emergency maybe. The elevator took her to the main floor, to the lobby; she emerged, free.

This lobby was the hall of a palace. In the middle a real fountain. Water springing out of the mouths of emerald-green dolphins. Skirted cherubs, gilded. A winged mermaid spilling gold flowers out of a gold pitcher. Lofty plants—a forest—palms sprayed dark blue and silver and gold, leafing out of masses of green marble vessels at the lip of the fountain. The water flowed into a marble channel, a little indoor brook. A royal carpet for miles around, woven with crowned birds. Well-dressed men and women sat in lion-clawed gold thrones, smoking. A golden babble. How happy Stella would be, to stroll in a place like this! Rosa kept close to the walls.

She saw a man in a green uniform.

“The manager,” she croaked. “I have to tell him something.”

“Office is over there.” He shrugged toward a mahogany desk behind a glass wall. The manager, wearing a red wig, was making a serious mark on a crested letterhead. Persky, too, had a red wig. Florida was glutted with fake fire, burning false hair! Everyone a piece of imposter. “Ma’am?” the manager said.

“Mister, you got barbed wire by your beach.”

“Are you a guest here?”

“I’m someplace else.”

“Then it’s none of your business, is it?”

“You got barbed wire.”

“It keeps out the riffraff.”

“In America it’s no place for barbed wire on top of fences.”

The manager left off making his serious marks. “Will you leave?” he said. “Will you please just leave?”

“Only Nazis catch innocent people behind barbed wire,” Rosa said.

The red wig dipped. “My name is Finkelstein.”

“Then you should know better!”

“Listen, walk out of here if you know what’s good for you.”

“Where were you when we was there?”

“Get out. So far I’m asking nicely. Please get out.”

“Dancing in the pool in the lobby, that’s where. Eat your barbed wire, Mr. Finkelstein, chew it and choke on it!”

“Go home,” Finkelstein said.

“You got Sodom and Gomorrah in your back yard! You got gays and you got barbed wire!”

“You were trespassing on our beach,” the manager said. “You want me to call the police? Better leave before. Some important guests have come in, we can’t tolerate the noise, and I can’t spare the time for this.”

“They write