834: The theater . . .
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 24 begins
24
THE THEATER was small and dank. We stuck together, an uncertain little trio, trying to hide our uncertainty, suspecting, possibly rightly, that if we did something to betray our immaturity, authorities of some sort—the ushers, the owner, the manager, the cops—might swoop down on us, demand to see our birth certificates, and, when we couldn’t produce them, scowl at us, scold us, and give us the bum’s rush, out of the theater and into the night.
“Let’s—um—get some popcorn or something,” I said, “to make it seem as if we know what we’re doing, instead of standing here looking guilty.”
“Okay,” said Margot.
“Good idea, Peter,” said Martha.
Popcorn was not available in those sophisticated surroundings. For refreshment, our only choices were coffee and éclairs. We bought three éclairs and, to extend the illusion of our maturity, a cup of coffee. It came in a paper container imprinted with the slogan “The Fine Arts Theater: Where Babbington Watches the World,” which we passed around, taking reluctant sips, until the cup got soggy and we dropped it, gratefully, into a trash can. We went inside to find seats. The theater darkened at once. I ate the last of my éclair in a hurry and licked my fingers.
L’Amour, La Guerre, La Poussière confused and—I may as well admit it—frightened me from start to finish. The story concerned a group of Resistance fighters who kept calling themselves “the underground” but never went under the ground, and operated an “underground” radio transmitter that they moved, each time it was discovered by the authorities, from one quite clearly above-ground location to another: from a shadowy corner in a wharfside warehouse to the food locker of a dingy café to the dusty workroom of a haberdashery to a pigeon coop on the roof of an apartment building.
However, the film opened in a much vaster setting: a huge stadium somewhere in an unnamed European country. Wartime. An enormous crowd was assembling, composed mostly of powerful, confident, witless young men in jackboots and tunics. All of them looked like the sort of boy who would steal your homework, your lunch, and your girlfriend, knock you to the ground, and kick you when you’re down. They marched to compelling but disturbing music. We would find, all of us in the audience, that when the film was over and we had gone home and were going about our lives, that the tune stayed with us. We would find ourselves, quite independently of our will, whistling it or letting it run through our minds, and we would find this fact—not the music itself but the fact that it had insinuated itself into our minds—annoying and distasteful.
A town square somewhere in the same unnamed country. A line of trucks was waiting. A line of people was filing into the trucks. The trucks had slatted sides, of the kind that would keep pigs or potatoes in the load bed. A dust devil formed and swept through the square.
Another part of town. Squads of the brainless young men in tunics swept pedestrians off the streets, herding them from their homes and shops, and loading them onto the trucks. The men held their rifles by the butt and barrel and made a shoving motion. The people shrank before them and some scurried inside, hoping to hide, hoping to escape, hoping to live.
I looked at the girls. They sat identically openmouthed, a couple of fingers resting on their lower lips, dragging them downward. “Maybe we should go,” I said. They said nothing at all, just sat there, watching.
The stadium. The crowd of close-cropped goons continued to file in.
The town square. The thugs were driving a long line of people into the trucks. They made the same shoving motion with their rifles. One man in the herd pushed back. A thug let his rifle fall to the crook of his arm and fired. The man fell into the dust. A woman began to scream. She dropped to the fallen man, weeping hysterically. Another goon hit her with the butt of his rifle. A black fluid oozed from her eye. Two thugs grabbed her by the arms and legs, swung her back and forth a couple of times the way children swing one of their pals before tossing him into the old swimming hole, and heaved her into the truck.
The girls leaned against me. They turned their heads into my shoulders for a moment, hiding their eyes, then turned back to the screen. I wanted to leave, but I suffered the paralysis of a dreamer in a nightmare. I had seen many a cowboy bite the dust in the Westerns I watched on Saturdays, but I had never seen anything like this. This was evil. I wished that I had stayed out of that stinking alley (and I think I know now that it was then, there, that I began the retreat from life that has brought me here, to my isolated hideaway).
[to be continued]
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