Other People’s Houses (30 page)

“And a thoroughly workmanlike list,” said Director Sommerfeld, He was an elderly American of Polish extraction, a small, ugly man with a large head, furrowed like a bloodhound’s, with moist little eyes and moist drooping lips. The three men stood before his desk in the carpeted front office. It was very sunny and
still. Paul watched the director check the items one by one with his pencil. When Sommerfeld looked up, he said, “We’re putting up a couple of houses in Bella Vista,” and Paul felt ill with excitement and misgiving to think that he might be about to farm his own farm. “But I see,” continued the director, “that you are asking for a three-house homestead.”

“We have talked this over, sir,” Paul
said. “Michel has the care of his mother, but Otto could live with my wife and me for the present.”

Director Sommerfeld nodded his great head and made a note in the margin. “And then who says we can’t build a third house, eh?” he said, and raised his face, transformed by a smile of very great charm.

Paul said, “Sir, I would also like to mention that I have some farm experience—six weeks’ training
on a
Hachscharah
in Vienna and almost a year’s farm work in England—though I’m very much aware that this is a mere beginning.”

“A beginning—very well put. That’s what we are all trying to accomplish here, my friends,” the director said. “A bitter, bitter beginning. Let me talk this over with Mr. Langley, see what the situation is as regards livestock, and I will let you know. Good-by, gentlemen.”

The three men made him little bows and turned toward the door, which had been opened from the outside to admit a burro carrying a man called Halsmann, from the Laguna settlement. He rode up to the director’s desk, upon which he upturned a basket of tomatoes, shouting, “A present from me to DORSA! It has taken me five months to raise a tomato crop, which the DORSA kitchen won’t buy because it gets
tomatoes from the DORSA
colmado
, which gets tomatoes from Puerto Plata.” He pulled his burro’s head around as if he were setting an Arab stallion into a gallop and trotted the little animal out through the lobby and the front door. The Steiner Group had got to its knees after the rolling tomatoes, but Paul says he looked up surreptitiously and saw Director Sommerfeld, not at all discomfited, looking
out of the window after the burro and rider with the open-mouthed interest of a child.

In July, Paul decided to remind Sommerfeld about the visa for his parents—afraid equally of making a nuisance of himself and of letting himself be forgotten. He went to the administration building, where he found Godlinger already sitting in the lobby. Shortly, Sommerfeld came through on his way to his office,
and he said, “Godlinger, you are becoming a fixture here. I have no time for you today. I’m expecting Señor Rodriguez, the representative of our so-called benefactor, from Ciudad Trujillo. Paul Steiner, my friend!” he cried in the pleasantest fashion to my astonished uncle. “And how is our little mother-to-be? We must see about that homestead for you people, before the arrival of the son and heir!”

“If you would be so good, sir,” Paul said. “But what I’ve come about today is to ask if there is any further opening for bringing my parents out of Austria.”

“And my wife,” said Godlinger.

“Tell me, Godlinger, you were a furrier in Vienna, were you not?”

“Yes, Director—‘Godlinger Furs.’ Maybe you have heard the name. On the Ringstrasse. I manufactured; my wife was in the shop. I have a brother
in the business in Chicago.”

“And you would like to join him there, would you not?”

Godlinger’s face opened up with joy. “Oh, Mr. Sommerfeld, if that could be made possible …”

“And I suppose, Godlinger, you consider that for a furrier it is a waste of his time training to be a farmer! I suppose, with your mind on your fortunes in the U.S.A., you have no interest in Sosua. I would like to know,
Godlinger, why you suppose that DORSA should take any interest in anything about you? If I had it in my power—which, however, I have not—to bring over anybody’s relatives, I should bring over Steiner’s here, who puts in a day’s work in the field instead of sitting in the DORSA lobby. Rodriguez! My good friend!” cried Sommerfeld. He turned his charming smile on the tall, elegant Dominican who stood
in the front door. “Walk in, walk in, and welcome to Sosua. I want you to meet two of our settlers, Godlinger and Steiner, who have been talking to me about getting visas for their relatives who are still in Germany—one of the subjects I want to persuade you to take up with the President, our good and great benefactor.” He took his visitor by the elbow and propelled him into his office.

In the
evening, the two men, nursing a magnum of champagne, were seen driving in the DORSA jeep to Puerto Plata, where they spent the night. Within the week after Señor Rodriguez’ return to the capital, came letters from the President’s office, granting certain privileges, including the return of two truckloads of lumber that had been extorted from the construction department, and thirty visas for the
relatives of Sosua settlers. These Director Sommerfeld distributed according to a system known only to himself. None was given to either Godlinger or Paul, and only one to Halsmann of the Laguna Settlement, though he had both his own and his wife’s parents to provide for. The Laguna people told of the hysterical weeping that came nightly from Halsmann’s clapboard house.

In the second week of
August, a batch of Red Cross letters arrived. Farber saw Paul reading the familiar twenty-five-word form and asked, “Hitler dead yet?”

“No, but my parents were alive as of May twenty-eighth,” Paul said. They were sitting at Bockmann’s. Bockmann had started selling coffee and his wife’s cake on the grass behind his house.

Dr. Marchfeld came over and said, “I’ve got Max Godlinger in my hospital.
He’s had news that his wife has been deported, and he’s cracked up completely. He keeps saying he didn’t put in enough work in the fields.”

“
Lieber Gott,
” Paul said, “I think I can explain that.…”

That week Sosua had its first suicide; one of the young men hanged himself in his room in the bachelor barracks and started the Sosua cemetery on the hill behind Bella Vista.

On the first of September,
Michel Brauner heard through his brother Robert’s little daughter, Susi, who had it from Hansi Neumann at school, that the Neumanns were to get the Bella Vista homestead. The Steiner Group went to the office to see Director Sommerfeld.

“What do you want from me?” Sommerfeld said. “You asked for a three-house homestead. Bella Vista has only two houses.”

“But we talked about that, sir,” Paul said.
“You remember, we said we could do with two houses? You made a note.”

“What note? Where? I don’t see any note! Here on your list it says three houses. You can see for yourself. You are too big a group for the Bella Vista homestead.”

“Sir, how about those houses going up in Barosa?”

“You’re too small a group for the Barosa homestead. I’m settling the whole Swiss group as a unit.”

“But they
came after us,” said Michel. “That’s not fair!”

Sommerfeld was studying their list again. “I have a note here that Steiner trained for six weeks in Vienna,” he said.

“On a
Hachscharah
, sir.”

“And that makes you an expert, I suppose.”

“And a year he worked in England,” Otto said, aghast.

“I said it was a mere beginning,” Paul said at the same time.

“Because you spent six weeks on a
Hachscharah
, I suppose you think it is unnecessary to avail yourself of our training program here. I spoke to Mr. Langley, and he says you have planted yams. You came in February. Now it is September, and you have planted yams. Go away, my friends, and train yourselves. Train, train, train! When you are ready,
then
come back and we will talk about a homestead.”

It was November. The rainy season had set in.
Ilse stayed in the “
Badekabine,
” “nesting,” as Paul said, while he put on his mackintosh and went to the settlers’ council. He had, after all, been chosen as one of three representatives to act as liaison between settlers and administration.

The meeting was a plenary session, held in the mess hall of one of the kitchens, and the mood was one of general complaint. Halsmann had lost two cows from
overgrazing his pasture in the drought that had preceded the rain. He complained that Mr. Langley had been riding around the country buying up cattle for the huge Swiss settlement, so that when the Laguna people came with their hard-earned pennies, the
Schwarze
were asking fancy prices. “They say, ‘That’s what the Americano is paying,’ but when
we
go to DORSA for three miserable cows, there are
no more funds. Meanwhile, our respected representatives, whose job it is supposed to be to look out for our interests, are busy negotiating with Sommerfeld about chairs and tables for Bockmann, here, to open himself a little café in the Batey—”

“Listen, Halsmann, you loudmouth,” said Bockmann, rising so that he appeared to be thrusting his large bland face into the other man’s red, irate face
across the width of the room. “I owned the best café on the Prater Allee, and the Nazis confiscated it, sent me to Theresienstadt, and took my oldest son to Poland, and I’d like to know if I shouldn’t be entitled to five tables and twenty chairs to put up in the grass back of my house.”

“They took away my slaughterhouse,” said Halsmann, “which supplied half of Frankfurt, and I’d like to know
what it would hurt DORSA to give me three miserable cows.”

“You’ve had three cows, Halsmann. You’ve had six cows. Nine cows,” said Otto Becker. “Listen, I worked in the office. I know exactly how many cows you have had.”

“Let me tell you,” Bockmann said, “that when I get my tables and chairs I won’t keep coming back for handouts.
I
happen to know how to run a café.”

“So that the people in the
Batey can sit more comfortably on their fat behinds,” said Neumann, who had recently moved to the Bella Vista homestead and looked sick with worry and overwork.

“And they, if you please, get
their
mothers and
their
brothers brought over here!” Halsmann shouted, looking at little Michel Brauner, who flushed scarlet. “While I, who have been working for thirty hours a day for two years, can’t get
a visa for my wife’s parents!”

Dr. Marchfeld spoke in a chilly, still voice, without rising from his chair. “And you would encourage Sommerfeld’s method for punishing those who are so unfortunate as not to have been settled yet by refusing them the salvation of their nearest relatives. I’d like to remind you, it’s a method that has driven Godlinger out of his mind.”

Paul, who had been looking
from one to the other, stood up. “Gentlemen, if I might have the floor,” he said.

“
Ja, ja
, Steiner,” Halsmann said. “You are going to explain the whole thing to us.” Paul felt his mind deliciously clear and his words so easy that he laughed. “Halsmann,” he said, “rest awhile. Let me talk. If I’m not mistaken, we were considering whether DORSA, which has driven the price of cattle out of the range
of Halsmann’s pocket (which may or may not be empty as a result of his own mismanagement), should or should not supply Halsmann with three more miserable cows. However, through inattention, I suppose, I lost the thread of the discussion. We seem now to be considering the question of Halsmann’s responsibility for the deportation of Max Godlinger’s wife.…” Looking around him, Paul saw that he had
the attention of the assembly. Afterward, Otto Becker put his arm around Paul as they walked out together into the rain, which was still coming down with a steady intensity. “That was telling them, Professor.”

“Old loudmouth Steiner, eh?” Paul said and laughed. He was looking forward to telling Ilse how he had taken over the meeting, for here at last he had found something he was good at.

In
the barracks, Ilse was lying on the bed.

“Are you ill?” Paul asked.

“Oh, no, it’s just that when you’re not doing anything in particular in this ‘
Badekabine
’ the only thing to do is get into bed—especially when it’s raining outside. Renate was here all afternoon. She has left Michel.”

“Poor old Michel,” Paul said. “He’s been getting it from all sides today. Halsmann gave him a hard time at
the meeting. What excuses did Renate have?”

“She says that in Berlin Michel was going to be a doctor, but now he’ll never do anything, and she can’t remember why she ever said she would marry him. She’s sorry for him. She cried.”

“Well, when she dries her eyes,” Paul said, “she can marry Otto.”

“She says Otto isn’t an intellectual.”

“Poor Renate, she has swallowed culture and doesn’t know
how to digest it.”

“It’s you she likes, you know,” Ilse said.

“Me!”

“I was terrible to her,” Ilse said. “I used to just love to talk about quarrels and boy friends, but all afternoon while she sat here talking I kept wishing she would get off the bed, because I needed the space to put your shirts. Look, I put all the long sleeves together and all the short sleeves, and I rearranged the suitcase
to make a space for the baby’s things. And don’t you notice anything? I’ve moved the furniture. The washstand is where the chair used to be and the chair is where the washstand used to be. Don’t you think it makes the room look bigger?”

That year, the seasons behaved unnaturally. In December, the rain stopped and there was an intense wave of heat. Mr. Langley started a program of instruction
in animal husbandry. Paul came back from the sun-struck fields and found Ilse lying on the bed, crying with fright. She said she had been bleeding. “Poor Pauli,” she said, “you look so exhausted, and now I’m worrying you.”

“Ilselein, I’m just tired, and you’re not worrying me. Where’s the diagram I drew you? You remember what I told you about the baby descending?”

Ilse said, “Tell me about the
first time you saw a baby born.”

“All right, you lie back.” He told her once again about the first delivery he had attended as a medical student. There had been the laboring woman, the doctor, the nurse, and Paul Steiner the student—four people in the room. And in an instant the baby had come out and there were five people.