He frowns, pulls himself up tall, and begins to speak in a hoarse, monotonous, and familiar voice, barking: “On Lake Geneva stands a house, and many men go in and out, and talk and talk and talk!”
“Ow!” he interrupts himself. “Ow! Disarmament’s got me in the stomach. I’ll have to leave the room. Clean up your own mess!” He makes a face, shakes his head in disgust and rage, sticks his tongue out, and spits. The play’s over; he steps back, out of character. He has acted gracefully and rather well, but without the slightest emotion or real concern. “That’s what they’re like,” he says, offhandedly, “all of them.”
He knows other plays, too, and where to find them. That one was published in Spiele der Deutschen Jugend, which the Department of Culture of the Reich Youth Führung publishes, and there is a pamphlet called Camp Circus, which has games and charades — questions and answers. “Do you know this one?” he asks. “What’s this?” He opens his mouth as far as possible, holding his head with its soft blond shock of hair far back. “Give up? That’s French lockjaw, that they got when they noticed that the Rhineland was occupied again.”
Not bad at all! Any more?
He pulls out one of the fair hairs, and dangles it before you. “See that? That’s the hair the League of Nations hangs by!” Then, in the game, another boy comes up and says, “Thinking about the League will give you a toothache. We’ll fix that; we’ll pull it out.”
The tooth? you ask.
“I don’t know — the tooth or the League,” he says indifferently. “It’s all the same to me….”
It’s the only opinion he has given, and he has gone through the routines with complete lack of emotion. He does not care about the games. They are what he is compelled to play, and have become a habit to which indifference is the best reaction.
But he has to go now. He has an examination tomorrow.
Of course, go home now, you tell him, and get to work at your books….