The Pegnitz Junction (5 page)

Aunt Barbara seemed thoroughly pleased to see everyone; she always liked a crowd. But she was bothered because her skirt was not hanging as she wanted it to, her undergarments having become tangled and twisted. She had to unzip the placket of her skirt, so that it looked as if she meant to take it off; but all she did was give a good wiggle and shake, and when everything had settled she zipped it up again and cried, “Oh, the dear sweet beautiful dogs!” So everything ended well, and as the two boys led Granny back up to the little castle, through the still sunny day filled with such exquisite green lights and shadows, she could be heard saying that she had known all along it could not have been a museum; the beds looked too soft.

Now all this family of visitors save one, the child, were struck dead before long. Five of them carried the germ of the cancer that would destroy them, and one died of a stroke. The little boy was allowed to grow up, but his parents were killed when a military helicopter exploded over a crowded highway on a Saturday afternoon. As for the horrible Jürgen, he was found murdered in a parking lot. A man who signed an
IOU
for five hundred marks in Jürgen’s favour disappeared one day. The man’s wife said he was dead, but Jürgen had yet to see an account of the funeral. He grew tired of waiting and went to call on the widow. She was obstinate, said she knew nothing about a debt, that her husband was buried. The death certificate had been lost. There was no stone on the grave because she had no money to pay for one. When she began to contradict herself, turned vague and weepy, Jürgen gave up talking
and looked to see what he could take instead of the money. He lifted a coffee table out of the way and began rolling up a small rug. All the while he was doing this the widow howled that it was her best carpet, the only thing she owned worth selling. True – everything else was trash, probably bought secondhand to begin with.

Instead of crossing the road to the parking lot Jürgen strode down to the corner and the traffic lights (he was law-abiding) and around the corner; made a detour to compare his new rug with some in a store window; turned up a side street and back to the parking lot across from the widow’s place. There he saw one of her sons, aged about thirteen. “What now?” Jürgen sang out. He held the rug overhead, thinking the kid would grab for it. He was good-tempered, laughing. He had an advantage; not only was he powerful and large, but he was not afraid of harming anyone.

The kid broke into a run, with a hand behind his back.

“You don’t want to do that,” said Jürgen. He was ready to cripple the kid with a knee and step on his right hand, but only if he had to. He must have seemed like a great statue to the boy, standing with both arms straight up supporting the carpet. Jürgen brought his knee up too high and too soon; he was used to fighting with men. The kid bent gracefully over the knee and pushed the length of the blade of a kitchen knife above the buckle of Jürgen’s belt.

T
he train trembled and slid round a curve, out of sight of the dappled lawn and the people climbing slowly up to the castle,
on their last excursion together. Christine moved back to the compartment to make way for a vendor in a white coat pulling an empty trolley.

“We have had drinks without ice,” said Herbert. “Coffee without cups. Now nothing at all.”

The woman in the corner fanned herself briskly with a fan improvised out of postcards.
They came over every night and for lunch on Sundays. When the other couple had God’s own darling, our precious Carol Ann, they would bring her in a basket lined with dotted Swiss. I remember Carol Ann’s first veal cutlet. I had a wooden hammer – no American butcher knew how to slice veal thin enough. Later they went on their diets, wanted broiled steaks, string beans, Boston lettuce, fat-free yogurts. Carol Ann the little cow came home from summer camp with a taste for cold meat loaf made from stray cats and chili sauce. The little bitch grew older, demanded baker’s cakes, baker’s pies, cupcakes in cellophane, ready-mix peach ice cream, frozen lasagna, pineapple chunks, canned chop suey, canned spaghetti, while the big cow, the little cow’s mother, got a craving for canned fudge sauce their way, poured it over everything, poured it over my fresh spicecake. I stopped making spicecake
.

“We could move, you know,” said Christine to Herbert. “I’ve noticed one or two empty compartments.”

“I have seen them too,” said Herbert, “but the seats in those compartments have been reserved and we would eventually have to come back here.”

“It’s just that I don’t feel well,” she said.

“Heat and hunger and thirst,” said Herbert. He shrugged, though not through indifference; he meant that he was powerless to help.

They wanted Aunt Jemima pancakes, corn syrup, maple syrup, hot onion rolls, thousand-island dressing, butter that would give you jaundice just to look at, carrots grated in lemon Jell-O, and as for the piglet Carol Ann, one whole winter she would not eat anything but bottled sandwich spread on ready-sliced bread, said only Jews and krauts and squareheads ate the dark. Had been told this by her best friend at that time, Rose of Sharon Jasakowicz
.

“There’s too much interference!” said Christine, though little Bert was not being a bother at all, was nowhere near her. She sprang up and went back to the corridor, untied her scarf and let the wind lift her hair. The Norwegian stood close beside her and showed her his yoga method of breathing, pinching his nostrils and puffing like a bullfrog. The train stopped more and more erratically, sometimes every eight or nine minutes. Presently she noticed they were standing in a stationyard that seemed so hopeless, so unlikely to offer even the most primitive sort of buffet, that none of them made a move to go out. The yard buildings were saturated with heat, grey with drought, and the shrubs and trees beyond the station contained not a drop of moisture in their trunks and stems. A loudspeaker carried a man’s voice along the empty platform: “All the windows on the train are to be shut until further orders.”

“They can’t mean this train,” said the Norwegian.

Herbert, evidently annoyed by such a senseless direction, immediately went off to find the conductor. The woman in the corner began peeling an orange with her teeth. “I have diabetes, I am always hungry,” she said suddenly, apparently to little Bert.

Herbert soon came back with an answer: there had been grass and brush fires along the tracks. “They may even have
been set deliberately,” he said. She could hear him explaining calmly to little Bert about the fires, so the child would not be alarmed.

“We can’t shut all the windows in this heat,” said Christine. “Certainly not for long.” No one answered her.

After the train had quit the grey stationyard she continued to stand at the open window, her hair flying like the little girls’ purple crêpe-paper streamers. Each time the train approached a curve she imagined the holocaust they might become. She thought of the ties consumed, flakes of fire on the compartment ceilings, sparks burned black on the first-class velvet. All the same, she kept hold of the two window handles, ready to slide the pane up at the first hint of danger. No one challenged her except for the bun-faced conductor, who asked if she had heard the order.

“Yes, but there aren’t any fires,” she said. “We need air.” It was true that there were no signs of trouble except for burned-out patches of grass. Not even a trace of ash remained on the sky, not even a cinder. The conductor continued to look at her in his jolly way, head to one side, a smile painted on his face, looking as round and as stuffed as a little clown. “All right,” she said. “I shall close the window, at least until Backnang. Then you can say that we all obeyed you.”

“The train has been rerouted because of the danger,” he said. “No Backnang.”

“That seems fairly high-handed of you,” she began, but of course she was wasting her breath. He was only a subaltern; he had no real power.

With its shut window, the compartment was unbearable now. Even little Bert was looking green.

“I was going to tell you about the change,” said Herbert. “But you were having a yoga lesson and I didn’t want to interrupt. We go through Coburg now. We shall be a couple of hours late, I imagine. I believe we change trains. Coburg is a pretty place,” he added, to console her.

“Will it be explained at the station at home?” she said. “Someone is supposed to be meeting me.”

“Meeting us,” Herbert corrected, because in the eyes of these strangers he and Christine were married. The truth was that they would separate at their home station as if they were strangers.

The woman in the corner emptied one of her plastic bags of all the food it contained and filled it with the rubbish.
Sundays I had them for the two meals. They wanted just soup for supper, with cold ham and iceberg lettuce, dressing their way. The men ate Harvard beets in the factory canteen; they started wanting them. They wanted two or three different kinds of pizzas, mushroom ketchup, mustard pickles
.

Little Bert kept an eye on Christine. “You never finished reading,” he said.

“I can’t remember what I was reading about,” she said.

“What is the book called?” he said.

“
All About Bruno
,” said Christine. “What else could it be?”

“No, that might confuse him,” said Herbert. “He knows Bruno is his own invention. The book is supposed to tell Christine how to think, little Bert. The Bruno story might be there. I don’t say it is.”

“Now who is confusing?” said Christine.

“But
is
the Bruno story inside?” said little Bert. “Look again,” he urged Christine.

She looked, or pretended to. “Bruno goes to the moon?”

“No, I know about the moon.”

“Bruno goes to an anti-authoritarian kindergarten?”

“Don’t tease him,” said Herbert.

“The kindergarten,” said little Bert. He leaned against her, out of fatigue, apparently. She might have felt pity for the fragile neck and the tired shadows around his eyes, but there were also the dirty knuckles, the bread-and-butter breath, the high insistent voice.

During the depression the factory laid off, nobody was buying the kitchen units. I went to collect the relief, he was too ashamed. They didn
’
t send you cheques in those days, you had to go round and see them. The other couple still came for dinner. We ate beans, sardines, peanut butter, macaroni. You could get lambs’ kidneys for twenty cents, nobody in the USA ate them. Also heart, tongue. He was laid off from February 16, 1931, to September 23, 1932. Went back part-time. I did part-time work cooking in Carol Ann
’
s school. She called me “Mrs.,” would never say I was a relative. My cousin-in-law never worked, always had headaches, had to lie down a lot, never learned English. Then the factory picked up full speed, getting ready for the conflict. I fed them all through the war, stood at the electric stove, making oxtail soup on the one hand, baked squash on the other, bread and milk when my cousin had his ulcer
.

“I have something he might like to look at,” the woman in the corner said. She offered little Bert part of her collection of
postcards, but he put both hands behind his back and pressed even closer to Christine. Taking no notice of him, the woman began handing the cards around clockwise, starting with Herbert. “My friends on their summer holidays,” she said. Herbert passed on the dog-eared coffee-stained views of Dubrovnik, Edinburgh, Abidjan, Pisa, Madrid, Sofia, Nice. “Very nice,” she said, encouraging Herbert. “Very nice people.”

The Norwegian looked at each card seriously, turned it over, examined the stamp, read the woman’s name and address, and tilted the card at an angle to read the message. The messages were aslant, consisted of a few words only, and ended in exclamation marks. He read aloud, “ ‘Very nice friendly people here!’ ”

The woman was smiling, handing the cards around, but her mind was elsewhere.
We never took the citizenship so we never voted. Were never interested in voting. During more than forty years we would only have voted four times anyway. Would have voted:

In 1932 – for Repeal
.

In 1936 – against government interference and wild spending. Against a Second Term
.

In 1940 – against wild utterances and attempts to drag the USA into the conflict on the wrong side. The President of the USA at that time was a Dutch Jew, his father a diamond cutter from Rotterdam, stole the Russian Imperial jewels after the Bolshevik revolution, had to emigrate to avoid capture and prison sentence. Within ten years they were running the whole country. Had every important public figure tied up – Walter Winchell, everybody. Their real name was Roszenfeldt
.

In 1944 – against a Fourth Term. My cousin had a picture, it looked like a postcard, that showed the President behind bars. Caption said, “Fourth Term Hell!!!!!! I’m in for Life!!!!!”

Apart from those four times we would never have voted
.

“We are on an electric line again,” Herbert told little Bert, who could not have had the faintest idea what this meant. The child looked wilted with heat. Their conductor had opened all the windows – there seemed to be no further news about fires – but nothing could move the leaden air.

“I want it all in order,” Herbert said to Christine. “I really do intend to write a letter. Most of the toilets are still locked – true? There isn’t a drop of drinking water. The first vendor had no ice and no paper cups. The second had nothing but powdered coffee. The third had nothing at all. All three were indifferent.”

“True,” said the woman, answering in place of Christine. She took off her black shoes and put her feet on top of them as if they were pillows.

The conductor returned to check their seat reservations for the third or fourth time. “This is only a flag stop,” he said, as their train slowed. To make it easier for him, those who were in the wrong places – Christine, the Norwegian, and little Bert – moved to where they were supposed to be. The train was now inching along past a level crossing, then gave a great groan and stopped, blocking the crossroad. The barriers must have been down for some time because a long line of traffic had formed, and some of the drivers, perspiring and scarlet, had got out to yell protests and shake their fists. The sight of grown people making fools of themselves was new to little
Bert, or perhaps the comic side of it struck him for the first time; he laughed until he was breathless and had to be thumped on the back. The woman in the corner kept an apple between her teeth while she looked in her purse for the ticket. Her eyes were stretched, her mouth strained, but there was no room on the table now, not even for an apple. As for the three men – Herbert, the conductor, and the Norwegian – something about the scene on the road had set them off dreaming; the look on their faces was identical. Christine could not quite put a name to it.