The Pegnitz Junction (17 page)

“Hurry,” says the mother when she and the child reach the middle of the court. She takes the chestnuts and the boy’s gloves, and the child vanishes behind the rotting wooden door of the courtyard lavatory. The mother, waiting, looks up at a window for a friend. She has a crony – a hag Ernst sees in the store where he and she, without speaking, buy the same ink-thick, unlabelled red wine. She buys one litre at a time, Ernst several. Her window is just below his, to the left.

The mother might be twenty-six. She stands in cold light from an open window. Her upturned face is broad and white, the angora beret on her head is white moss. She has wrapped a tatty fur around her neck, like an old Russian countess. Her handbag seems the old displaced-person sort, too – big, and bulging with cancelled passports. She speaks in the thin voice of this city, the high plucked wire of a voice that belittles the universe.

“I’ve had enough, and I’ve told him so,” she says, without caring who might hear. It sounds at least the start of a tragedy, but then she invites the hag, who, with a tablecloth around her head, is hanging out the window, to stop by and share the television later on. At half past seven there will be a program called
L’Homme du XXe Siècle
.

Ernst followed this woman because she was fit for his attention. He would have sought a meeting somewhere, but the
weather was against it. He could not have brought her to Willi’s room, because Willi has scruples about gossip and neighbours. Ernst could have gone upstairs (he does not doubt his success for a moment), but the walls are cardboard and he would have drawn notice to his marked civilian self.

E
arly in the morning, the mother’s voice is fresh and quick. The father leaves for work at six o’clock. She takes the child to school at a quarter to eight. The child calls her often:
“Maman
, come here.”
“Maman
, look.” She rushes about, clattering with brooms. At nine she goes to market, and she returns at ten, calling up to her crony that she has found nothing, nothing fit to eat, but the basket is full of something; she is bent sideways with the weight of it. By noon, after she has gone out once more to fetch the child for lunch, her voice begins to rise. Either the boy refuses what she has cooked for him or does not eat quickly enough, but his meal is dogged with the repeated question “Are you going to obey?” He is dragged back to school weeping. Both are worn out with this, and their late-afternoon walk is exhausted and calm. In the evening the voice climbs still higher. “You will see, when your father comes home!” It is a bird shrieking. Whatever the child has done or said is so monstrously disobedient that she cannot wait for the father to arrive. She has to chase the child and catch him before she can beat him. There is the noise of running, a chair knocked down, something like marbles, perhaps the chestnuts, rolling on the floor. “You
will
obey me!” It is a promise of the future now. The caught child screams. If the house were
burning, if there were lions on the stairs, he could not scream more. All round the court the neighbours stay well away from their windows. It is no one’s concern. When his mother beats him, the child calls for help, and calls “Maman.” His true mother will surely arrive and take him away from his mother transformed. Who else can he appeal to? It makes sense. Ernst has heard grown men call for their mothers. He knows about submission and punishment and justice and power. He knows what the child does not know – that the screaming will stop, that everything ends. He did not learn a trade in the Foreign Legion, but he did learn to obey.

G
ood-natured Willi danced a java this morning, with an imaginary girl in his arms. Fortunately, he had no partner, for she would have been kicked to bits. His thick hands described circles to the music from the radio, and his thick legs kicked sideways and forward. Ernst saw the soles of Willi’s shoes and his flying unmilitary hair, and his round face red with laughter. When the music stopped, he stopped, and after he had regained his breath, used it to repeat that he would come home early to cook the stew for their last supper. Willi then went off to work. Today he is guide and interpreter for seventeen men from a German firm that makes bath salts. He will show them the Emperor’s tomb and the Eiffel Tower and leave them to their fate up in Pigalle. As Willi neither smokes nor drinks, and is not even objectively interested in pictures of naked dancers, he can see no advantage in spending an evening there. He weighs the free banquet against the waste of time and
chooses time. He will tell them what the limit price is for a bottle of champagne and abandon them, seventeen of them, in hats, scarves, overcoats, and well-soled shoes, safe in an establishment where
Man spricht Deutsch
. Then he will hurry home to cut up the leeks and carrots for Ernst’s last stew. Willi has a sense of responsibility, and finds most people noisier and sillier than they were ten years ago. He does not know that ten years have gone by. His face does not reflect the change of time, rate, and distance. He is small in stature, as if he had not begun his adolescent growth. He looks and speaks about as he did when he and Ernst were prisoners in the west of France eighteen years ago.

This morning, before attending to his seventeen men from the bath-salts factory, Willi went to the market and came back with a newspaper someone had dropped in a bus shelter. What a find! Twenty-five centimes of fresh news! He also had a piece of stewing beef and a marrow bone, and he unfolded an old journal to reveal four carrots and two leeks. The grocer weighed the vegetables and the journal together, so that Willi was cheated, but he was grateful to be allowed to purchase any vegetables at all. The only vegetables on public sale that morning were frozen Brussels sprouts.

“It is like wartime,” says Willi, not displeased that it is like wartime. He might enjoy the privations of another war, without the killing. He thinks privation is good for people. If you give Willi a piece of chocolate, he gives half of it away to someone else and puts the rest aside until it has turned stale and white. Then he eats it, slowly and thankfully, and says it is delicious. Lying on the floor, Ernst has watched Willi working – typing
translations at four francs a page. His blunt fingers work rapidly. His eyes never look up from the paper beside the machine. He has taught himself to translate on sight, even subjects about which he cares nothing, such as neon tubes and historical principles. They have come only a short distance from their camp in 1945, where someone said to Ernst, “You have lost the war. You are not ordinary prisoners. You may never go home again.” At the other end of the camp, on the far side of a fence, the Foreign Legion recruits played soccer and threw leftover food into garbage cans; and so Ernst left Willi with his bugs, his potato peelings, his diseased feet, his shorn head, and joined the Legion. Willi thought he would get home faster by staying where he was. They were both bad guessers. Willi is still in Paris, typing translations, guiding visiting businessmen, playing S.S. officers in films about the last war. It is a way of living, not quite a life. Ernst teases Willi because he works hard for little money, and because he worries about things of no consequence – why children are spoiled, why girls lose their virtue, why wars are lost, won, or started. He tells Willi, “Do you want to go to your grave with nothing but this behind you?” If Ernst really believes what he says, how can one explain the expression he takes on then, when he suddenly rolls over on the floor and says, “Girls are nothing, Willi. You haven’t missed much. You’re better off the way you are.”

T
his is a long day without daylight. Ernst’s duffelbag is packed. He has nothing to do. He has forgotten that Willi asked him to put the marrow bone and stewing beef in a pan of
water on the electric plate no later than four o’clock. In the paper found at the bus shelter Ernst discovers that because of the hard winter – the coldest since 1880 – the poor are to be given fifty kilos of free coal. Or else it is one hundred and fifty or one hundred kilos; he cannot understand the news item, which gives all three figures. Gas is to be free for the poor (if consumed moderately) until March 31st. Willi’s gas heater flames the whole day, because Ernst, as a civilian, is sensitive to weather. Ernst will let Willi pay the bill, and, with some iridescent memory of something once read, he will believe that Willi had free gas – and, who knows, perhaps free rent and light! – all winter long. When Ernst believes an idea suitable for the moment, it becomes true. He has many troubles, and if you believe one-tenth of anything he tells you, he will say you are decent.

Once, Ernst was a Werewolf concealed in civilian clothes. His uniform was gone, and his arms and identity papers buried in the mud outside a village whose name he cannot remember. It begins with “L.” He lay on the ground vomiting grass, bark, and other foods he had eaten. He had been told to get rid of the papers but not the arms. He disobeyed. He walked all one night to the town where his mother and stepfather were. The door was locked, because the forced-labor camps were open now and ghosts in rags were abroad and people were frightened of them. His mother opened the door a crack when she recognized the Werewolf’s voice (but not his face or his disguise) and she said, “You can’t stay here.” There was a smell of burning. They were burning his stepfather’s S.S. uniform
in the cellar. Ernst’s mother kissed him, but he had already turned away. The missed embrace was a salute to the frightening night, and she shut the door on her son and went back to her husband. Even if she had offered him food, he could not have swallowed. His throat closed on his breath. He could not swallow his own spit. He cannot now remember his own age or what she was like. He is either thirty-four or thirty-six, and born in Mainz.

Willi is always reading about the last war. He cuts up newspapers and pastes clippings in scrapbooks. All this is evidence. Willi is waiting for the lucid, the wide-awake, and above all the rational person who will come out of the past and say with authority, “This was true,” and “This was not.” The photographs, the films, the documents, the witnesses, and the survivors could have been invented or dreamed. Willi searches the plain blue sky of his childhood and looks for a stain of the evil he has been told was there. He cannot see it. The sky is without spot.

“What was wrong with the Hitler Youth?” says Willi. What was wrong with being told about Goethe Rilke Wagner Schiller Beethoven?

Ernst, when he listens to Willi, seems old and sly. He looks like a corrupted old woman. Many of the expressions of his face are womanish. He is like the old woman who says to the young girl, “Have nothing to do with anyone. Stay as you are.” He knows more than Willi because he has been a soldier all his life. He knows that there are no limits to folly and pain except fatigue and the failing of imagination. He has always known
more than Willi, but he can be of no help to him, because of his own life-saving powers of forgetfulness.

It is the twentieth anniversary of Stalingrad, and the paper found at the bus stop is full of it. Stalingrad – now renamed – is so treated that it seems a defeat all around, and a man with a dull memory, like Ernst, can easily think that France and Germany fought on the same side twenty years ago. Or else there were two separate wars, one real and one remembered. It must have been a winter as cold as this, a winter grey on white and full of defeat. Ernst turns on the radio and, finding nothing but solemn music, turns it off. From the court he hears a romantic tune sung by Charles Aznavour and is moved by it. On an uncrowded screen a line of ghosts shuffles in snow, limps through the triumphant city, and a water cart cleans the pavement their feet have touched. Ernst, the eternally defeated, could know the difference between victory and failure, if he would apply his mind to it; but he has met young girls in Paris who think Dien Bien Phu was a French victory, and he has let them go on thinking it, because it is of no importance. Ernst was in Indo-China and knows it was a defeat. There is no fear in the memory. Sometimes another, younger Ernst is in a place where he must save someone who calls
“Mutti!”
He advances; he wades in a flooded cellar. There is more fear in dreams than in life. What about the dream where someone known – sometimes a man, sometimes a woman – wears a mask and wig? The horror of the wig! He wakes dry-throated. Willi has always been ready to die. If the judge he is waiting for says “This is true, and you were not innocent,” he says he will be ready to die. He could die tomorrow. But Ernst,
who has been in uniform since he was seven, and defeated in every war, has never been prepared.

I
n the court it snowed and rained and the rain froze on the windows. By three o’clock he could not see without a light. He pinned the curtains together, switched on the table lamp, and lay down on the floor. In the paper he read the following:

It must mean something. Would Willi cut this out and paste it in a scrapbook? Willi, who will be home in two or three hours, is made sick by the smell of cigarette smoke, and so Ernst gets up, undoes the curtains, and airs the room. He must have fallen asleep over the paper, for it is quite dark, and the child and his mother have returned from their walk. The room is cold and smells of the courtyard instead of cigarettes. He shuts the window and curtains and looks for something to read. Willi has saved a magazine article by an eminent author in which it is claimed that young Werewolves were animals. Their training had lowered the barrier between wolves and men. Witnesses heard them howling in the night. When the judge arrives, Willi will say to him, “What about this?” Ernst begins the article but finds it long-winded. He grins, suddenly, reading, without knowing he has shown his teeth. If he were
seen at this moment, an element of folklore would begin to seep through Europe, where history becomes folklore in a generation: “On the rue de Lille, a man of either thirty-six or thirty-four, masquerading in civilian clothes, became a wolf.” He reads: “Witnesses saw them eating babies and tearing live chickens apart.” He buried his arms and his identity in the mud outside a village whose name he cannot remember. He vomited bark and grass and the yellow froth of fear. He was in a peasant’s jacket stiff with grease and sweat. Ernst is rusting and decomposing in the soft earth near a village. Under leaves, snow, dandelions, twigs, his shame moulders. Without papers he was no one; without arms he was nothing. Without papers and without arms he walked as if in a fever, asking himself constantly what he had forgotten. In the village whose name began with “L,” he saw an American. He sat throwing a knife at a mark on a wall. He would get up slowly, go over to the wall, pull out the knife, walk slowly back, sit down, balance the knife, and aim at the mark, holding the knife by the blade.