Trenton Makes

by Tadzio Koelb

  The prisoners, weak and cold and set to using unfamiliar machines under managers they couldn’t understand, were often hurt and sometimes even killed in the unwilling, lethargic rush to make and build, but kept here in the middle of Germany, what else were they going to do? There was no running, no escape, and if ever someone tried to get away, retribution fell on all of them who remained. Those who couldn’t work might be beaten as punishment for their hunger and exhaustion, and so they drove their empty, manless bodies from which the souls had flown frightened like ducks from a gunshot and tried hard as they worked not to think of the crates filling with the phantom limbs that were lightbulbs or buttons or rivets or springs. To make these things they lost fingers and eyes, burned their skin, crushed the bones in their feet.

  Kunstler’s accident involved a furnace, he told the girl quietly, its rage only barely contained by the hatch, a pyre-in-waiting wrapped in a hazy shroud of coal-dust and heat, and now from sternum to thigh he was misshapen, reduced and distorted by the needs of the machine. Speaking of his body and the furnace, he thought of blood, the compliant procession of liquid from wound, the slow dark lake, how long it took to dry. He heard the deathly knock of bone, and to drive the sound of it from his mind he described the room again: the trapdoor cut by a daylight strip that led to the road but not freedom, the burning world behind the boiler door, and himself condensed until he was nothing more than his circumstances: a thing spectral, empty.

  Through the memory he heard her, Inez, the naked milky girl, the puddle of pale skin and alcohol: she was crying for him, which he had never done for himself, and saying things—trite, calming things, the kind he would never allow himself to think or say, the kind he hated but knew must have their place somewhere: “It’s a part of you,” she said. “It’s part of what makes you who you are.”

  From just where he found himself on the floor, his back still against the wall, he accepted to hold her outstretched hand. When her breathing calmed at last he rose and carefully laid the blanket over her and spread his coat on top of that, and watched as in the morning light she slept.

  Kunstler moved quietly from beside the heavy-breathing body and switched off the lamp that sat on the floor beside the bed. Once inside the bathroom on the landing he carefully turned the key in the lock, then twisted the handle of the door once to be sure. Part of you, the girl Inez called his disfigurement in her weeping, but she had been upset to see the bandages that bound his chest, and for a time he let the words infuriate him: he would never accept pity, he told himself, not from anyone—and yet, when in the locked bathroom Kunstler took off his shirt and unwrapped the bandages, slipped off his trousers and drawers and then the athletic supporter, when he stood fully naked and looked gravely down at himself—he now, and no longer the she that once was, but still possessing the subjugated and forgotten breasts, and between his legs the tufted furrow with its despised bleeding that must be hidden—he felt a pain and thought, This has been no lie: it was me, really me, who was wounded in the war. On his fingers was the smell of the girl, intimate and distant, known but alien, the strange line between self and another and also between past and present, the odor of the wound he suffered, of the most private part of him, the most personal, unshared and unsharable, to be kept among those beating, pumping places within the body that you can’t expose and survive. Yes, he thought: I was wounded in the war.

  Naked in the locked bathroom, dizzied by the smell of the girl and the incandescent desire it had imported furtively from the bed, he sat on the rolled lip of the tub. The perfumed hand covered his face; the other he put to his body, a pilgrimage to his earlier self that he resented but that was also essential, natural somehow to the man he had become.

  Not yet he but the she that once was thought, I never sought it out. The transference of power, of kind, to overthrow him, even in his failure, had not been her place until the man her husband presented it to her, carved it from that which had been his own, and she accepted, found it not just open but demanding, an emptiness wishing and whimpering to be filled. So when he raised his hand she saw that he was pointing also to the coming end, that the blow she would once have considered it her natural duty to accept was now an invitation, and she knew that it would be a mercy to release him, so that when his weakness itself called to her with a fishy slap across the face she was ready to answer it with all the great power of the wire rope and the metal sheeting that made the planes. She hit him without waiting, ran a closed fist hard above his eye, and he staggered at the force, both of them taken aback by the dreadful knock of bone on bone, but there was no turning. He put out an arm but found only the bare light hanging by its twill cord over the table so that the shadows around them began violently to duck and swing. In the tilting room he threw a hand at her and missed; she struck him again now with all the power of her frustrated worker’s body, relieved happily of its forced idleness and inactivity, the power she had gained and earned in his lost war, and meeting again this power that had bested him once already and had been besting him since, he crumpled there in the tiny kitchen and hit his head first on the table corner beneath the dizzying pendulum of the circling light, then raised himself only to slip backwards to the hard edge of the sink with a resonant crack, and the blows called out his weak, thin blood, whose compliant procession bathed him in the medium of his passing. The man her husband fell to the floor, and she followed him down. Between the table legs and the revolving shadows she watched bone heavy and opaque as he left through the fractures in his body, fractures put there by time and bad luck and finally her own machine-strong hand. She saw now what she had always understood before, but never in a manner physical and set and so pronounceable in words: that nothing could be taken unless something somewhere was also given in exchange.

  All of this she accepted as part of the life that by the force of nothing more meaningful than chance was hers to accept as breathing was to be accepted if existence was to continue, as she had accepted the slaps of her sisters and the incomprehensible squirming of the boys in the alley and as later she would accept the man her husband’s body pushing as others had with dry blunt unseeing discomfort into her, when his every part, it seemed, had the smell of gin, and its flavor, also, mixed with sweat and coal-dust and the stink of its burning, and beneath them all the faintest taste of urine. Other women in their whispering she knew dismissed what she willingly did as unnatural, but she saw further than they did, past nature to the part that man had built for himself in nature’s clearings, the part to which she believed her disagreeable face and thick hands gave her access, the hidden places others couldn’t share because they didn’t see.

  Thus she knew what the others would never have been able to perceive, let alone understand: that the man her husband with his hand raised had been a sign of acquiescence, of election, a signpost indicating the direction of the future and a switch to set it running, an admission that he would have lost his place, would need to lose it to save himself from further humiliation, when this last attempt at restoration had failed. The man at least had recognized the aptness of the coming departure, a thing that was ripe, and this readiness connected them, not as love connects things but the way that a face is connected with its reflection: a recognition and a fastening never sought but still not to be undone. It was his choice, she believed, but they would call it a crime, one to rouse every aspect of the great paperwork giant that was order and civilization. She imagined its huge movements, its fine scrutiny, saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open: from this, at least, if from nothing else ever again, she could protect him.

  To consider this she did not need to move, or to stir in any way; instead she sat just where she had found herself across the room from him and let the day return through the high dirty window from the alley, press the shadows of the table legs across the humid floor now tacky with the signs of life expired, the slow dark lake of his mortality, then depart again.

  Sometimes during this motionlessness she dreamed. Once she
was walking through Trenton, but it had become a strange countryside, unfamiliar but not frightening, that she understood was somewhere near the front: the war was happening around her, she knew, although she couldn’t see or hear it. Looking to a clearing between some trees in a forest of birch, she found the dismantled parts of the man her husband. She set about to reassemble him, but before the parts could be united the dream was broken, its beauty gone, and she was awake again with across the room from her the empty broken flatness of his inanimate shell, the dark incisions of his eyes floating across his face.

  She could never tell how long she sat there, but eventually the ice in the box all had melted. The growing puddle mixed with the contents of the man’s emptied veins and bowels; it wet her clothes. She took the sensation as a warning, and she rose. When next the landlord came to yell at them about the state of things, to call the man to shovel coal and clean the hallways, he’d have to find them gone—just two more luckless people who disappeared into the funneling, endlessly multiplying complications of their own poverty. Now to step outside the apartment, cautiously to walk the building which from familiarity had become unseen and so needed to be encountered again: the door to the coal cellar was here, and another to the furnace room; there was a double hatchway cut by a daylight strip that led to the street. She considered carefully the stairwell that would take her to the front hallway, where lurked the unseen ones with their unseen jobs, porcelain-eyed and water-plain but present, and at the thought of their loitering turned instead to the furnace, shrouded in coal-dust and heat, where despite her resistance she discovered a resting place dusky with its own shadow, which, when opened, let a torrent of light in a dark world, a future into which the man her husband could disappear for the third and, she told herself, the last time, his lifeless body following the humanity and strength he had lost in Germany and the mindless instinct of breathing and eating and being animate that at last he had sacrificed to her fist.

  She waited a long time in the narrow passage for the delivery of an alien thought, something that wasn’t this thing on which she had settled, but she was bound to her decision by the impotence of her poverty, had no other resources to muster than what the building itself could offer: this place and she were, for the moment, one, and though it took time to reconcile herself to the terror of her thought, to find her breath in the stifling air, at last she returned to the closed door of the apartment, one hand on the rattling knob and another on the jamb. She braced herself to work now on the unthinkable task as before she had braced herself for the unfamiliar singing mechanized danger of the wire-rope machines, knowing that eventually this, too, would be somehow accepted and unfrightening, that a dullness would settle and let her move through the worst of it without even noticing, that a numb new consciousness would be implanted, because that is the way in which life is able to proceed, and she trusted to the mechanism of life to see itself through.

  Everything she had been so far disappeared in a way at that moment, was dispersed, and in the spectral steam of her evaporation she thought, For this there can be no forgiveness, even if she didn’t know who it was that remained unforgiven, herself or the man her husband dead on the kitchen floor or the world at large. Then she opened the door finally, and passed through it into a welcome, bewildering daze. The opening to the furnace was too small, she knew, and too far off the ground, but of course it was only a matter of work, of setting herself the task and seeing it through.

  She would be the strong one now, the one who would have to fight, to dig her fingers into the wall of indifference that faced them as the man had once done for them both, just as hers were the arms and hands that were strong with work, and the man her husband’s had fallen into weakness, deciduous, as in a permanent winter. She would be both of them now.

  It meant the sight in the watery glass the next morning was a strange one, but not somehow entirely unexpected: she, altered, not yet he, exactly, for that was a matter of more than clothing and hair, more than even the thick jaw and flat chest and strong hands—but already it looked convincing, even though of course there would be years spent forgetting the truth, the pattern of which would later fade so far as to be indecipherable from the whole, the past an era confused and indistinct. It required so little at first: the hair cut short and oiled with Wildroot, the soft-collared shirt, the legs of trousers, the man’s coat.

  Not so different was this figure in the mirror from the others who had left for war poor and come back poorer still in spirit and body, who were not part of the great new land that was to be built on the missing bodies of the dead, who no longer thronged around the factories or shuffled the breadlines. To the eye almost nothing worth noting—and yet she believed there would be this: that the many had been remaindered in the war’s great division, rounded down and then casually set aside, while this new figure, alone, invented in their dying, was no less than a successor, fresh born and taking its first steps where they were tossing down their last. It was clear from the mirror’s face that no one would question or wonder. The transformation was inconceivable, and in this, too, it was a rebirth, bringing to life again the subversive and powerful spirit of the man her husband, his body spread now into the city, smoke and ash that joined the air and ground, one with the place and indivisible from it, and so she would remain with him here, in the city where he would reside in the dust and the dirt, in the soil and the water, where all of Trenton was his body, where the strength and freedom once his were retained, hers by bequest, something set carefully aside to be handed down, a tradition to accept at last as her own when all others had been lost. It belonged to the short hair and hard eye, the much-boned face in the mirror, to the vanishing woman who would be the man her husband’s first and only son: something inherited by proximity of blood. It had taken only a suit, a pair of scissors, and the sharp knife from the kitchen.

  “Which one was it?” asked the tall one again. He took up almost the whole room, standing there looking down at the still man on the little cot-like bed. He was difficult to see: the lamp lay dark beside the overturned bedside table, and the bare bulb down the hallway pushed only a half shadow through the door. “Son of a bitch must have clocked him hard. He’s out cold.”

  “He’s breathing?” asked the heavy-set one from just outside the doorway.

  “I’m not an idiot, Wade. I’d have told you if he wasn’t breathing.”

  “I think it was that little fellow, kept his hat on, didn’t talk to anybody,” said Wade. “I saw them walk back here together. He left in a hurry, too, I saw.”

  “What ‘little fellow’?” asked the tall one.

  “There’s no ‘little fellow.’ That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” said the one with the bloody nose. He started to stand up from his stool in the hall but Wade put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him down.

  “Will you hold your horses for a minute, Al, Jesus. What did I say? Keep your head back, and pinch here. It won’t stop otherwise.” Al put his head back and pinched with one hand. With the other he wiped his handkerchief pointlessly over the blood caked under his nostrils and in the tiny cracks in the skin around his mouth. “Where’s the goddamn light in here,” Wade said, pushing his hand around along the wall inside the door. “Have you checked his eyes?”

  “I can see from here, he still has his eyes.”

  “I mean are they rolled up in his head. Is he having a seizure or is he just out?”

  “Here’s the water,” said the barman coming down the hall. Al, eyes on the ceiling and bloody handkerchief to his nose, had to turn his knees to let him pass. The barman handed the glass to Wade, who passed it to the tall one, who looked at it with discomfort.

  “What do I do? I throw it on him?”

  “No, no. For Christ’s sake, you wet his lips. Didn’t they teach you this in basic training? Just get out of my way, now, and will somebody find the goddamn light?” He took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and dipped a corner in the glass of water, then rubbed the wet
corner across the lips of the man on the bed.

  “We couldn’t all be medics, Wade,” said the tall one. “Somebody had to shoot at things from time to time during the war.” Al started to chuckle but then said, “Ow,” and stopped.

  “I don’t need to call the cops, do I? Or an ambulance?” the barman asked. The others responded with an expanding chorus of noise, and Al rose anxiously. Wade waved his handkerchief in the air. “Okay,” said the barman. “I was just asking. Jesus. Guy’s dead for all I know.” He tucked his towel into his apron and left, and Al sat back down with a sigh.

  “I should have asked him to bring a shot and a beer, too,” Al said.

  “I think he’s coming around,” said the tall one. “Who was it?” he asked loudly. “Was it that little guy?”

  “I’m telling you,” said Al, but Wade said, “For Christ’s sake, will everyone be quiet, I can’t hear myself think with all this yakking. And will someone find the goddamn light already, please, for the love of God? I need to check his eyes.”

  “Ah, nuts,” said Al.

  The tall one hitched up his pants legs and squatted down beside the lamp and the toppled bedside table. “Just unplugged,” he said.

  Wade slid part of a thigh onto the bed beside the unconscious man, who was now groaning. The light came on and the tall one righted the table and set the lamp there. Wade unclipped the shade and for a second they all shut their eyes.

  “Don’t move,” Wade said to the man on the bed. “Now, look at me. Can you tell me your name?”

  “You know my name.”

  “I’m not the one we’re worried about. Now: can you tell me your name?”

  “My name is George, goddamn it. What the hell happened?”