The Pegnitz Junction (11 page)

no one is giving the good jobs right now because the economy is slow the only thing I have to pay besides you is 12 a week to my sister for staying here so I’ll be sending you money every week until I get you paid off it really sucks living here with my sister and her husband he’s a nice guy but he and my sister are really concerned over me and they think I
’
m a great guy and when I
’
m here with them they never leave me alone they
’
re great, it
’
s just that they get on my nerves you’ll understand this better once you get out

when you come over we could take a place together

write and tell me if the junk you had was good or not and how you all came out on it don
’
t bring any back with you – mail it it
’
s like gold here my other advice is get out of the army first and forget about her. Once you
’
re out she can
’
t touch you tell her you want to find a job first

you
’
re crazy if you do it any other way tell her you can
’
t support a family till you
’
re twenty-one (joke) I hope we can get together after you get out answer this letter right away tomorrow I’m going to get some grass I’ll send you some good luck Ken love PS it
’
s 80° and I’m going to the beach

“Is it finished?” said little Bert.

“I suppose so. Though nothing is ever finished,” said Christine. She had been disappointed by both the substance and quality of this information.

“You never finished a story,” little Bert said.

“I realize that. I’m sorry.” He did not reply; living with adults had accustomed him as much to apologies as to promises.

She was always running
, Herbert complained suddenly.
She streaked off like a hare. I went after. She doubled back. I tripped and fell. There we were, together. She seemed confident and competent, and I thought she did not need to be looked after. I must have dozed off. She woke me quite roughly saying, “You are supposed to be awake and making decisions
. You
are the man. That
’
s how I
’
ve always heard it was played.” The day she left she cut a lock of the child
’
s hair. It was flaxen then. She took it close to the roots along the hairline. Destructive. Careless. When she needed money she sent the lock back to me. I understood immediately, sent money to a post-office address which was all she gave me, and returned the lock as well. After long-distance dialling was installed in the remotest villages she took to calling me late at night, never from the same place twice. So she said. Other people paid, without knowing it. You could tell she had her hand around the mouthpiece. She would say a few words and laugh. I never knew what she wanted. One night I heard, “Do you still love me?” I thought for a long time, wanting to give her a complete answer. After a while I said, “Are you still there?” She called again late in the winter. I said, “The answer to your last question is yes.” She hung up quietly. Then silence. She was twenty-six, would now be twenty-eight
.

This fell like dirty cinders. As information, it offered nothing except the fact that Herbert was not far from the waiting
room. Perhaps it had no connection with him; in this particular game no one was allowed an unfair advantage. It was old and tarnished stuff which had come to her by error. Complete information concerning Herbert had certainly been caught by someone who had no use for it. It was like the Pottenstein letter – each person involved with it was now in a different place, moving steadily in a new direction. A day of indecision could make all the difference between silvery flakes and mud.

Little Bert yawned and pressed the sponge against his mouth. His muffled voice said, “Read!”

The trouble about the grave is that he
’
s got family living around Muggendorf. My cousin-in-law tipped them off. They
’
re watching the grave closely. At the first sign of drought, weeds, plant lice, cyclamen mites, leaf hoppers, thrips, borers, whiteflies, beetles feeding, they’ll take colour photographs of the disaster and use them as evidence. Which would mean the end of the eight hundred dollars
.

“What are we waiting for now?” said little Bert.

“For the conductor to tell us about our train. It is much cooler in here.” She had been going to add, “and there is less interference,” but that wasn’t true. At least the other women were silent; ever since Christine had put the conductor in his place they seemed afraid of her too.

“Read,” said little Bert. “You never finished anything.”

“What do you want as a beginning this time?”

“Whatever it says.”

“I did read you a bit of that,” she said. “You didn’t like it.”

Last Sunday they happened to find one bare spot and they planted an ageratum. A reproach. What nobody understands is that it isn
’
t usual to buy a plot for just a can of ashes. I would have kept them at
home, but his will had one whole page of special instructions. What can you put on a plot that size? Not much bigger than a cat
’
s grave and the stone takes up room. The begonias are choking the roses and vice versa
.

Little Bert yawned again, even wider. “You’ll soon be home,” she said.

“What do we do when we get home?” He had been away for a whole week, plus this long day.

And yet they managed to find room for one ageratum. Only one year to go. Hang on, I keep telling myself. Hang on for the eight hundred dollars. Worth hanging on for. After that I’ll be ready to go. Plot purchased and paid up. Nowhere near him
.

“You’re not reading,” said little Bert.

She waited a few seconds longer, until the air was clear. Perhaps the silent women were attracting everything to themselves without being conscious of it. Then she distinctly heard Herbert saying,
“En quel honneur?”
It was loud, for him, and rather frantic. She guessed it must have been his response to a piece of irritating news – that there would be a long delay, for instance. She wondered if she and little Bert should go out to him; but the child was tired and once they had left the waiting room they would have to stand, perhaps for a long time. While she was wondering and weighing, as reluctant as ever to make up her mind, a great stir started up in the grey and wintry-looking freight yards they could see from the window. Lights blazed, voices bawled in dialect, a dog barked. As if they knew what this animation meant and had been waiting for it, the women picked up their parcels and filed out without haste and without looking back.

“No, you stay here,” said Christine, holding little Bert, who had made a blind move forward. He looked at her, puzzled perhaps, but not really frightened. When the door had closed softly behind the last of them she felt a relief, as at the cessation of pain. She relaxed her grip on the child, as if he were someone she loved but was not afraid of losing.

“Read,” said little Bert. “Look in the book.”

“I’ll read for a minute,” she said. “Then we will have to do something else.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Go out, or wait here. I’m sorry to be so uncertain.” He sat as near to her as when the room had been full. She opened her book and saw, “ ‘The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil.’ Well,” she said, “no use going on with that. Don’t be frightened, by the way,” she told little Bert, who was not frightened of anything, though in Paris he had pretended to be afraid of the dark.

That was the end of it. He
’
s in Muggendorf and I
’
m hanging on. When Carol Ann learned to pronounce “th” did that make her a better Christian? Perhaps it did. Perhaps it took just that one thing to make her a better Christian
.

She had been hoping all day to have the last word, without interference. She held little Bert and said aloud, “Bruno had five brothers, all named Georg. But Georg was pronounced five different ways in the family, so there was no confusion. They were called the Goysh, the Yursh, the Shorsh …”

P
art of the plot of their friendship, the reason for it, is that the police commissioner has become an old bachelor now, and his life rests upon other lives. He rests upon people for whom he is not really responsible. Helena is by far the most important. She is important quite in herself, because anyone with television in this part of Germany knows her by sight. The waitress, just now, blushed with excitement when she recognized her, and ran to the kitchen to tell the others.

The commissioner and Helena have been friends forever. He cannot remember when or how they met, but if he were asked he would certainly say, “I have
always
known her.” It
must be true: look at how charming she is today – how she laughs and smiles, and gives him her time; oh, scarcely any, if the minutes are counted, but as much as he needs, enough. She is younger than the commissioner, but if she were to turn away, dismiss him, withdraw her life, he would be the orphan. Yes, he would be an orphan of fifty-three. It is the greatest possible anxiety he can imagine. But why should she? There is no quarrel between them. If ever there was, he has forgotten it. It was never put into words. He is like any policeman; he knows one meaning for every word. When, sometimes, he seems to have transgressed a private rule of hers, it is outside the limits of the words he knows, and he simply cannot see what he has done. She retreats. In a second, the friendship dissolves, and, without understanding why he deserves it, he is orphaned and alone.

When the weather suits her and she has nothing urgent to do, she lets him drive her to a garden restaurant on a height of land above Frankfurt. It is in a suburb of quiet houses – “like being in the mountains,” he says. He sniffs the air, to demonstrate how pure it is. “But you really should come here at night,” he says; for then the swimming pool in each of the gardens is lighted blue, green, ultramarine. The commissioner flew over in a helicopter once, and it looked … it was … it should have been photographed … or painted … if it had been painted … described by
Goethe
, he cries, it could not have been more …

“Tell us about Goethe,” Helena interrupts, laughing.

She has brought her little boy along. The three of them sit at a table spread with a clean pink cloth. On a silver dish, and
on still another pink cloth, this one embroidered, are wedges of chocolate cake, and mocha butter cakes, and Linzer torte, and meringue shells filled with whipped cream, sprinkled with pink, green, yellow sugar. The champagne in the silver bucket is for the commissioner and Helena.

There is no view from here, not even of swimming pools. They are walled in by flowering shrubs. It is a pity, he says, for if they could only see …

“Tell the child what all these flowers are called,” Helena interrupts. But the commissioner does not know their names. He knows what roses or tulips are, but most flowers have names he has never
needed
to know. Flowers are pale mauve or yellow in spring, blue or yellow as summer wears on, and in the autumn orange, yellow, and red. On a hot autumn day, the garden seems picked out in bright wool, like a new carpet. The wine, the cakes, the thin silver vase of bitter-smelling blooms (“Nasturtiums,” he suddenly cries out, slapping the table, remembering) attract all the wasps in the neighbourhood. He is afraid for Helena – imagine a sting on that white skin! He tries to cut a wasp in two with a knife, misses, captures another in the child’s empty glass.

“The child needs men, you see,” Helena goes on. “He needs men to tell him what things are. He is always with women.”

Somewhere in her career she acquired this little boy. She does not say who the father is, but even when she was pregnant, enormous, the commissioner never asked. He treated the situation with great tact, as if she had a hideous allergy. It would have been a violation of their friendship to have pried. The rumour is that the father was an American, but not a
common drunken one, an Occupation leftover – no, it was someone highly placed, worthy of her. The child is a good little boy, never troublesome. He eats his cakes with a teaspoon, and it is a wobbly performance. His fingers come into it sometimes; then he licks them. He scrapes up all the chocolate on his plate, because his mother dislikes the sight of wasted food.

“I mean it. Talk to him,” Helena says. She may be teasing; but she could be serious, too.

“Child,” says the obedient commissioner. “Do you know why champagne overflows when the cork is taken out of the bottle?”

“No, why?” says Helena, answering for her son.

The commissioner reflects, then says, “Because air got in the bottle.”

“You see?” she tells the boy. “This is why you need men.”

She is laughing, so she must be pleased. She is giving the commissioner her attention. On crumbs like these, her laughter, her attention, he thinks he can live forever. Even when she was no one, when she was a little actress who would travel miles by train, sitting up all night, for some minor, poorly paid job, he could live on what she gave him. She can be so amusing when she wants to be. She is from – he thinks – Silesia, but she can speak in any dialect, from any region. She recites for him now, for him alone, as if he mattered, Schiller’s “The Glove” – first in Bavarian, then in Low Berlin, then like an East German at a radio audition, then in a Hessian accent like his own. He hears himself in her voice, and she gets no farther than
“Und wie er winkt mit dem Finger,”
because he is
laughing so that he has a pain; he weeps with it. He has to cross his arms over his chest to contain the pain of his laughter. And all the while he knows she is entertaining
him
– as if he were paying her! He wipes his eyes, picks up his fork, and just as he is trying to describe the quality of the laughter (“like pleurisy, like a heart attack, like indigestion”), she says, “I can do a Yiddish accent from Silesia. I try to imagine my grandmother’s voice. I must have heard it before she was killed.”