The Pegnitz Junction (22 page)

Michael was trying to take the political temper of the house. He would stand up and sit down and seem alternately interested in Roma’s television program and wretchedly uneasy. He wondered if he would bother the three older people by too much attention to the screen, or lose Roma forever by not showing enough interest. Roma was so young then that Michael, at twenty-two, must have seemed like a parent. Bibi sat reading a speech Julius was to make at a congress where English would be the working language. From time to time she glanced at the screen, then went on making corrections with a green pencil. Her English was better than Julius’s, but he said it was too perfect. Afterward he would alter half the changes she had made, saying, “It may be good English, but nobody talks that way.” The look on Bibi’s face as she glanced at the screen seemed to me overly patient, as though “the children,” as she called Roma and Michael, were in above their heads. What does it matter now, she seemed to be telling herself. As for me, I went about my business. I never interfered with Roma, and certainly never with Julius in the room. As I watched the program, my allegiances shifted back and forth. Sometimes I hated the men and women who had done something in my name, and sometimes I hated the victims – yes, passionately. It is not normal conversation to talk about old deaths. No matter what was shown on television, no matter what we had to reconsider or see in a new light, my house was large and I had no servant except for an Italian half the day. Even with Bibi helping after work in the
evenings, the house was too much for me. I saw that Roma’s myths might include misery and sadness, but my myths were bombed, vanished, and whatever remained had to be cleaned and polished and kept bright. At times like these, Bibi seemed to know more than I did. She seemed so lofty, so superior, with her knowledge of hardship, that I wanted to scream at her, “Damn you, Bibi, I saw my mother running, running out of a burning house with her hair on fire. Her hands and face were like black paper when she died.” Then the program came to an end and Julius stood before the screen lecturing Michael. He said, “A mission in life – a goal. Without an ideal, life is nothing.” He stood with his hands behind his back. He has never smoked, not even when cigarettes were hard to get and everyone craved them. He is frugal, neat; every other day he eats nothing for dinner but yogurt. He said, “These unfortunate people you have just seen had a mission.” Michael, the future executive, sat worshipping every word that fell from Julius. “Oh, a highly spiritual mission,” said Julius easily. “A goal of a highly – spiritual – nature. That is why they are remembered.” Bibi said (had she been drinking too much?), “Encouraging people to buy synthetic products they don’t really need will be Michael’s mission. Do you think it compares?”

The roof did not cave in. Julius merely laughed. How soft, how easy Julius had become!

“Papa is so short that when he sits down he looks like a little dog begging for sugar,” said his beloved Roma, somewhere about that period. Roma had just tasted her first champagne. Julius smiled and touched her bright hair. It was shameful, but
once Roma had made that remark about the little dog Julius began appearing in my dreams in that form. He was a terrier who simply would not stop barking. Roma was growing up, but he did not seem jealous. He had, in fact, selected the husband he wanted for her. He chose Michael when Roma was only fourteen or so, and began to train him, and then he went back to having other women again.

The girl and the diary had long been forgotten. Some new person called Julius on the telephone day after day. He trailed the long wire of the bedroom phone to his bathroom. Even Roma would never have dared to listen on an extension; he could smile if Roma was impertinent and pretty and had just drunk a glass of wine, but he could also be frightening. I have never seen anyone outstare him. He would take the phone to the bathroom and talk for a long time. The ringing stopped. In the weeks of lull that followed I dreamed of gunfire, of someone who claimed to be my mother, and of dogs. Julius suddenly ordered me to go with him on a long business journey to Hong Kong, Japan, California, and Vancouver. He said he was sick of travelling alone. I understood that he wanted protection from a woman who had become tiresome – someone who was either over there and waiting, or planning to follow. I remembered the telephone and the peculiar long ring of long-distance calls, the ring that continued after you lifted the receiver. Sometimes I thought I would take Roma and vanish, but the thought never lasted. I did not want to live outside my own house.

“If it is only for the sake of company, then take Bibi,” I said. “Roma is at a delicate age. I can’t leave her. Bibi has never been
anywhere. You said you wanted her to study at one of the Anglo-Saxon universities.” He had said that once, but fifteen years ago. However, because the idea had once been his, he now decided it would do Bibi, and thus Possner, some good. There was something else – being honourably rid of her. It was obvious that the idea of travelling with Bibi for company bored him. She was an old friend of the family now, plain and pedantic. He was a busy man with not much time for conversation. He had personal and professional acquaintances in South Africa, Argentina, Sweden, Milan, and many other places I had never seen. He was still very kind to young people if they were worth his while and knew how to make good use of an education. In what manner was he ever less than fair to Bibi? What would Bibi have done without Julius? How many refugees would have given years of their lives to have been in Bibi’s place? Julius was very fit. He did yoga exercises every Sunday. I had given in to twin beds, but I refused the idea of separate rooms.

Bibi accepted the interesting journey and the chance to study at an Anglo-Saxon university without thanks and without joy. It meant an interruption of work that interested her, and she was frightened of planes. “It will be like a fairy tale,” she said sadly. She must have been remembering stories where little children are abandoned in deep woods by parents who no longer can feed them. She was thinking of dark branches, night, crows spreading their wings, inch-high demons squealing a hideous language.

“Well, of course you are thinking of fairy tales,” I said. “But do remember you are a grown woman.” I looked at her pale
cheeks and tried to see another Bibi, with spokes of sunflower hair. She had nothing in common with Julius now except an adoration for Roma. I had showed her that other girl’s diary and she had been shocked. “An
ignorant
person,” she said, and I saw how little she knew about him. If Bibi herself had not at one time had the
appearance
of an inferior, if she had not said “Heidi, you swine!” in a farm girl’s accent, then Julius would never have looked at her twice.

J
ulius, who was good at arrangements, abandoned Bibi at a university in the west of Canada and came home alone. Her wounded, homesick letters followed, one a day. She told about a sign reading, “Gas at City Prices,” which she never understood and which became the symbol of everything she never would grasp over there. She went to an Italian grocery and stood weeping because it was Europe. She had knifelike memories of towns and streets. Every girl reminded her of Roma. She wrote that she had suddenly learned she was old and plain. Her gestures were awkward; her hair was changing colour with age. She entered a bookstore and found a shelf of German poetry. She congratulated the owner, who said, “Oh, we try” so sarcastically that she knew her accent and her appearance were offensive. She wanted to answer, but the English Julius had considered “too perfect” turned out to be full of holes. She became frightened of shops and when she went into one she would stand near the door, not daring to say what she wanted, letting other customers push in front of her. She stopped a stranger in the street to ask a direction.
“Go to hell,” he said. She counted the weeks, days, and minutes until she could be with us again. The first person she embraced at the airport was Roma.

Roma whispered, “Michael thinks he has me, but wait and see. Papa said he could live with us, but I would never let anyone take Aunt Bibi’s room.”

I heard, and thought, Now I shall have Bibi for the rest of my life.

Was that such a bad prospect? While Bibi had been gaining experience and writing those despairing letters, I had fallen ill. One day Julius asked me to unpack a suitcase for him and I found myself unable to move or speak. This passed, but the attack returned each time Julius gave me an order. The neurologist he sent me to said that my paralytic seizures were caused by nothing more serious than a calcium deficiency. I was instructed to eat sixty grams of cheese four times a day. With Bibi there, I had no more calcium problems. She took over her old duties of ironing and washing the supper dishes – anything the Italian had forgotten or had left undone – and I began reading again. I read fewer books and more magazines. Possner now owned several. It was at Julius’s suggestion that a sign was put up in the editorial offices of each saying, “Your readers never went to high school.”

Julius was now a colonel, and we moved here, to the newest and best of our homes. It was our house, and Julius put it in my name, as he had promised me long ago. Every windowpane belongs to me.

I knew quite a great deal about Julius; not everything. One summer evening we sat on our terrace, all five of us, with a
portable television between us, and the remains of a sunset. Julius went indoors to fetch a bottle of white wine. With two wives and a daughter to serve him he need not have lifted a finger, but he was particular about wine (his cellar is shock-proof and soundproof) and he thought no one else knew how to take the cork out of a bottle. Presently I followed to see if he had everything he needed. He was in the kitchen with a glass of wine in his hand, and he stood sipping it in front of a mirror, deep in silent conversation. “What a good time you and I are having,” he might have been saying. He smiled, and his face went wry. “Oh, you know how it is sometimes,” he might have said now. He was seducing someone in the mirror – only it was himself. Julius was watching Julius seducing Julius. I remembered how confident he was when he was in love. I went back to the terrace and sat down.

I said, “Julius is a brilliant, clever man.” No one answered. That opinion was the rule of the house.

The sunset died; Michael switched on lights hidden in trees and at the bottom of the pool. Waiting for the evening news, we watched, with some disgust, a beer-drinking contest.

“Why show this to us?” said Julius. He had a bouquet of long-stemmed glasses between his fingers. He set the glasses down carefully. “No one here is Bavarian.”

“Right,” cried Michael. “We are not Bavarian! Roma is not, and her mother is from Dortmund, and Aunt Bibi is from … and … and
you
are from …” He should have known where Julius was born. He must surely have read the vital facts about Julius in Possner house publications often enough. “…  here, in Cologne,” Michael gasped, correctly.

On the screen a slight girl downed a stein of beer in six seconds. Her throat worked in anguish and tension. She turned out to be a Berliner, not a Bavarian, either. She said she had noticed her gift of rapid drinking when still very young. It worked with milk or beer, but not so well with water.

As soon as the news came on, Julius showed signs of annoyance. The conversational aspect of world affairs has always been an irritant to him. What good is talk? In the middle of a remark about the Common Market he turned it off. He said that everyone was incompetent.

Michael the sycophant said, “Why don’t you send very efficient well-trained men from Possner into politics? You could take someone promising and give him a sound education and launch him in a good party – in fact, you could launch several in all parties. Then no matter who was elected you would be certain everything would run efficiently.…” He always let his sentences run down. Even when a sentence normally might have come to a stop, it sounded as if the end were nowhere. Sometimes my future son-in-law looked like a terrier too, peering from one large human to the other, wondering who would slip him a morsel of something good.

“Wouldn’t that strike you as immoral, Michael?” Here was Bibi sitting in the shadows – lumpy, wearing heavy stockings, saying prickly, difficult things. Bibi is raving, I thought. It seemed to me that the girl’s voice had grown rasping. A “girl,” I called her, but the person determined to spoil our enjoyment of the summer weather was nearly forty, had popping blue eyes, and had failed as an emigrant.

As if Bibi’s remark weren’t enough, now impertinent Roma spoke up: “You aren’t much of a generation to talk about morality.” This was annoying, for it meant she was mixing up the generations and making us older than we really were.

Bibi laughed and said, “Little girl, what do you know about some of us?”

“Enough of that,” said Julius, who did not need to shout to be frightening. “Enough from Bibi. Bibi, don’t you dare touch my daughter’s innocence.”

My heart was pounding. For the first time I felt that Julius and I were thinking as one. Our marriage was our house. I said to myself, “Here we are together in the fortress. The bodies pile up outside. Don’t look at them.” I forgave him for Bibi, the girl of the diary, the twin beds, the long-distance calls, for being a peacock who preened before mirrors. I put a hundred injuries and injustices behind me.

Bibi had pushed her chair back and risen and, after hesitating, looking over our heads and all round the garden, she walked away, down the sloping lawn. The pool, the trees, the imported white camellias in pots, were beautifully lighted. We – particularly Roma – had looked charming, I thought, and now here was one person walking out of the picture. Michael suddenly said, “The neighbours!” and pressed a switch – a foolish gesture that left us sitting in semidarkness. Later he said he thought Bibi was about to drown herself in the pool and that our neighbours, excited by the sound of a quarrel (What sound? We were speaking quietly), might peer at us through field glasses.

“Turn the lights on immediately,” said Julius, without moving.