The Pegnitz Junction

by Mavis Gallant

  I don’t know what he remembered. He had taken my family as his, and expected me to smile. Actually, I did. I made him a present of my family. But by now he must have believed that whatever came into his head was true, for he did not thank me – neither then nor later. I leaned over the table and said, “I see what is making the difference. It is the dark glasses.” He immediately took them off, but I saw that I still did not recognize him.

  An excursion party now trooped into the buffet. Their accents were, I think, industrial England over, I think, Viennese. One of the women smeared thick white cream on her sunburned arms. “Let’s finish and pay and get out of here,” said Peter’s wife, sharply. I stared at him then, but his face showed nothing. He did not add or contribute. It might have had nothing to do with him. She slipped him folded money so that he could pay the bill. I tried to think, but they had stuffed me with food. I clung to one idea: no one would get me out of Switzerland again, as he once had to a city on the Rhine, as my old aunt had got me to Paris. Each time I returned I was wounded, or had failed. Outside the station, I stopped at the kiosk, but of course my newspapers were gone.

  The next afternoon, I sat in the lobby of their hotel. His wife now looked through the windows to the station, as if afraid of missing the train out. She poured tea from a leaky pot, and passed chocolate biscuits, shell-shaped, in a thin coating of sugar. They were Poodlie’s favourites; she was sorry he wasn’t here. She poured with a tense, strong hand – I admired the long fingers, and the short nails, on which the red was thickly spread. Absently but politely, she asked about my work, as if she were a headmistress interviewing me for a post.

  I described flowers next to snow, and plants so perfect and minute, rooted on stone, that they must be like the algae on Mars.

  “Oh, yes, edelweiss,” she said.

  He was a parcel posted without an address, and he had come to her. Now I heard her inviting me to join them. I heard the words “The twins would adore you, and he is a different person when you’re there. I’ve never seen him so gay and happy as he was yesterday at lunch.” He had put her up to it, and now he was out, walking around in the village, waiting for the barter to be completed. “He has talked about you such a lot,” she said.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Why, that you were a wonderful person. He said you had been so kind to him.”

  That part of it ended there. She explained that Peter was walking, not in the village, as I had supposed, but somewhere up a mountain. He had gone up in a cable car. “I didn’t bring the right clothes,” she said. “We could drive somewhere, but we never do.” It was the only sign of her discontent. The person she had gone to consult when she contemplated this marriage – a rapid psychotherapy, she explained – had warned her not to take over too many head-of-the-family functions from a young husband. That meant, among other things, that she was never to drive the car. But Poodlie was too wild to drive. She gave him cars, but could not trust him to drive them. I thought of him wandering along a steep, windy slope now, not knowing how to keep a foothold in his slippery shoes. He was up above the village in his dark suit and dark glasses and shoes. How could she let him go that way – as if he were lost or had strayed from the towns? He was alone, shivering (no one had told him how cold it would be), dreaming and inventing things to be remembered.

  I did not meet her children, but I saw her with them in a tearoom: two plump girls of about fourteen, in clay-coloured tights and long pullovers that covered their sturdy hips. They were not girls I had ever seen before. They looked sullen there in the dark shop, which was suffocating with the smell of chocolate. They were choosing éclairs, pointing, discontented and curt. Their school had not yet taught them manners, and their mother, with a stiff smile on her lips and her sunglasses hiding her opinion, could see only the distance between what they were and what they ought to be. She was not an educator. The girls’ clumsiness was a twist of the spirit, a sprain. She watched them choose and eat, and I thought how much time she spent watching people choose and eat their food. She removed the glasses and rubbed the space between her eyes. She saw me, and her glance meeting mine almost begged something. Information? Advice? She had the psychotherapy for advice, and she had Peter to tell her stories. Perhaps she wanted me to change my mind about going with them. He must have asked for me, as he asked for cars she would not let him drive because he broke them.

  It would have been easy for her to make me believe my choices were wrong, but it would have been another matter to make me change my mind. Once when she was busy with the twins, he came to me. He looked at the saucer full of moss and Alpine plants; and the shelf with tea and hard biscuits and cereal and powdered milk; and at my bed with its shabby cushions; and my walls decorated with photographs of snow and skiers – searching for something. He twitched a curtain as if it hid a view he liked and said, “It’s all dirty green, like a customs inspector’s uniform.”

  But I had travelled nearly as much as Peter, and over some of the same frontiers. He could not impress me. I think (like the remark about semiprecious stones and snow-capped mountains) it was a way of talking he had developed because it amused his wife. He knew it was no good talking about the past, because we were certain to remember it differently. He daren’t be nostalgic about anything, because of his inventions. He would never be certain if the memory he was feeling tender about was true.

  I watched him at the window – the town lad, hating the quiet. “What is that racket?” he said angrily. It was the stream running outside through the garden. There was also Coco, the donkey, braying in his enclosure. He would have preferred a deafening, continued, city noise. I remembered him on streets full of trains and traffic; I remembered the quick turn of his head. When I remembered the horror of the room over the café, I thought it had been the horror of living on a street.

  The view here, after the long garden, was of the roof of the chalet farther down the slope. A crash: my bookshelf, containing Wild Flowers of Germany, fell from the wall. The house shook.

  He looked at the perpendicular, windless rain that had begun to fall. He turned back to the room; he was still searching. “You used to read,” he said, still in pursuit of something. I pointed to the floor. “Didn’t you hear them fall?” He made a silly remark – I remember the sense of it, not the words. He could not trust me, because I had once run away, vanished, but as he had long ago fabricated something else, he could not remember why he could not trust me. The room grew dark. I served coffee in cups with Liberté and Patrie and a green-and-white shield of the Vaud on them. The parents of a pupil had bought them in Montreux for me once. He held his cup close to his eyes and read the words, and put it down without saying anything.

  I said to myself that he was only a man about whom I had known a great deal and it was so long ago that much of it might have been told to me by someone else. Nostalgia is a weakness; he would be the one to indulge in it, if he dared. I had not gone to him out of duty and had not left him out of self-preservation. It was not that simple. I would have talked, for I knew he was waiting for me to scrape away the dreams and begin again with the truth, but I thought, I shall write him a letter. That will be easier. I shall write about everything, all of the truth.

  They came up by train and they left by train – the little red train that has its start among the hotels and swimming pools along the lake. As neither of them could drive the other, they had to take the train. They were leaving the twins behind. The twins were happy, and the fresh air was doing them good. They were enrolled for the autumn term.

  The first-class carriages of those trains look as if they had been built for miniature royal tours. There are oval satinwood panels and Art Nouveau iron roses. Some of the roses had iron worms eating their hearts. I imagine the artist meant something beautiful and did not know it was hideous. As you can imagine, the trains are beautifully polished. The panels gleam, and dust is not allowed to accumulate in the rose petals. The windows are clear for a view of cows and valleys,
the ashtrays are emptied and polished, and the floors are swept. I like best the deep-rose velvet, with its pattern of brown leaves and ferns, that covers the seats. It wears slowly; in some very worn places the colour is light apricot and the palest lemon, and the pattern can scarcely be seen. Somewhere in storage, preserved from dust and the weather, are bales of the same velvet, and when a seat becomes too worn they simply patch it up again.

  He would have stayed if I had wanted. Yes, Poodlie would have left Poodlie. He knew I would never go with them. I might have been for sale, but not to her. At a word of truth he would have stayed, if only to hear the rest. He would have made furious plans, and left such an imprint on this place that after his departure I could not have lived here any more. Or perhaps this time one of us would have stayed forever. These are the indecisions that rot the fabric, if you let them. The shutter slams to in the wind and sways back; the rain begins to slant as the wind increases. This is the season for mountain storms. The wind rises, the season turns; no autumn is quite like another. The autumn children pour out of the train, and the clouds descend the mountain slopes, and there we are with walls and a ceiling to the village. Here is the pattern on the carpet where he walked, and the cup he drank from. I have learned to be provident. I do not waste a sheet of writing paper, or a postage stamp, or a tear. The stream outside the window, deep with rain, receives rolled in a pellet the letter to Peter. Actually, it is a blank sheet on which I intended to write a long letter about everything – about Véronique. I have wasted the sheet of paper. There has been such a waste of everything; such a waste.

  Ernst in Civilian Clothes

  Opening a window in Willi’s room to clear the room of cigarette smoke, Ernst observes that the afternoon sky has not changed since he last glanced at it a day or two ago. It is a thick winter blanket, white and grey. Nothing moves. The black cobbles down in the courtyard give up a design of wet light. More light behind the windows now, and the curtains become glassy and clear. The life behind them is implicit in its privacy. Forms are poised at stove and table, before mirrors, insolently unconcerned with Ernst. His neighbours on this court in the rue de Lille in Paris do not care if he peers at them, and he, in turn, may never be openly watched. Nevertheless, he never switches on the table lamp, dim though it is, without fastening Willi’s cretonne curtains together with a safety pin. He feels so conspicuous in his new civilian clothes, idling the whole day, that it would not astonish him if some civic-minded and diligent informer had already been in touch with the police.

  On a January afternoon, Ernst the civilian wears a nylon shirt, a suede tie, a blazer with plastic buttons, and cuffless trousers so tapered and short that when he sits down they slide to his calf. His brown military boots – unsuccessfully camouflaged for civilian life with black Kiwi – make him seem anchored. These are French clothes, and, all but the boots, look as if they had been run up quickly and economically by a little girl. Willi, who borrowed the clothes for Ernst, was unable to find shoes his size, but is pleased, on the whole, with the results of his scrounging. It is understood (by Willi) that when Ernst is back in Germany and earning money, he will either pay for the shirt, tie, blazer, and trousers or else return them by parcel post. Ernst will do neither. He has already forgotten the clothes were borrowed in Willi’s name. He will forget he lived in Willi’s room. If he does remember, if a climate one day brings back a January in Paris, he will simply weep. His debts and obligations dissolve in his tears. Ernst’s warm tears, his good health, and his poor memory are what keep him afloat.

  In an inside pocket of the borrowed jacket are the papers that show he is not a deserter. His separation from the Foreign Legion is legal. For reasons not plain this afternoon, his life is an endless leave without the hope and the dread of return to the barracks. He is now like any man who has begged for a divorce and was shocked when it was granted. The document has it that he is Ernst Zimmermann, born in 1927, in Mainz. If he were to lose that paper, he would not expect any normal policeman to accept his word of honour. He is not likely to forget his own name, but he could, if cornered, forget the connection between an uncertified name and himself. Fortunately, his identification is given substance by a round purple stamp on which one can read Préfecture de Police. Clipped to the certificate is a second-class railway ticket to Stuttgart, where useful Willi has a brother-in-law in the building trade. Willi has written that Ernst is out of the Legion, and needs a job, and is not a deserter. The brother-in-law is rich enough to be jovial; he answers that even if Ernst is a deserter he will take him on. This letter perplexes Ernst. What use are papers if the first person you deal with as a civilian does not ask to see even copies of them? What is Ernst, if his papers mean nothing? He knows his name and his category (ex-Legionnaire) but not much more. He does not know if he is German or Austrian. His mother was Austrian and his stepfather was German. He was born before Austria became Germany, but when he was taken prisoner by the Americans in April, 1945, Austria and Germany were one. Austrians are not allowed to join the Foreign Legion. If he were Austrian now and tried to live in Austria, he might be in serious trouble. Was he German or Austrian in September, 1945, when he became a Legionnaire because the food was better on their side of the prison camp? His mother is Austrian, but he has chosen the stepfather; he is German. He looks at the railway posters with which Willi has decorated the room, and in a resolution that must bear a date (January 28, 1963) he decides, My Country. A new patriotism, drained from the Legion, flows over a field of daffodils, the casino at Baden-Baden, a gingerbread house, part of the harbor at Hamburg, and a couple of sea gulls.

  Actually, there may be misstatements in his papers. Only his mother, if she is still living, and still cares, could make the essential corrections. He was really born in the Voralberg in 1929. When he joined the Legion, he said he was eighteen, for there were advantages in both error and accuracy then; prisoners under eighteen received double food rations, but prisoners who joined the Foreign Legion thought it was the fastest way home. Ernst is either thirty-four or thirty-six. He pledged his loyalty to official papers years ago – to officers, to the Legion, to stamped and formally attested facts. It is an attested fact that he was born in Mainz. Mainz is a place he passed through once, in a locked freight car, when he was being transported to France with a convoy of prisoners. He does not know why the Americans who took him prisoner in Germany sent him to France. Willi says to this day that the Americans sold their prisoners at one thousand five hundred francs a head, but Ernst finds such suppositions taxing. During one of the long, inexplicable halts on the mysterious voyage, where arrival and travelling were equally dreaded, another lad in man’s uniform, standing crushed against Ernst, said, “We’re in Mainz.” “Well?” “Mainz is finished. There’s nothing left.” “How do you know? We can’t see out,” said Ernst. “There is nothing left anywhere for us,” said the boy. “My father says this is the Apocalypse.” What an idiot, Ernst felt; but later on, when he was asked where he came from, he said, without hesitating, and without remembering why, “Mainz.”

  Ernst is leaving Paris tomorrow morning. He will take the Métro to the Gare de l’Est at an hour when the café windows are fogged with the steam of rinsed floors. The Métro quais will smell of disinfectant and cigarette butts. Willi will probably carry his duffelbag and provide him with bread and chocolate to eat on the train. He is leaving before he is deported. He has no domicile and no profession; he is a vagabond without a home (his home was the Legion) and without a trade (his trade was the Legion, too). Some ex-Legionnaires have come out of it well. András is a masseur, Thomas a car washer, Carlo lives with a prostitute, Dietrich is a night watchman, Vieko has a scholarship and is attending courses in French civilization, Piotr is seen with a smart interior decorator, Lothar is engaged to marry a serious French girl. Ernst has nothing, not even his pension. He waited for the pension, but now he has given up. He is not bitter but feels ill-used. Also, he thinks he looks peculiar. He has not been to Germany since he was carrie
d through Mainz eighteen years ago, and he is wearing civilian clothes as normal dress for the first time since he was seven years old.

  His Austrian mother was desperately poor even after she married his stepfather, and when Ernst put on his Hitler Youth uniform at seven, it meant, mostly, a great saving in clothes. He has been in uniform ever since. His uniforms have not been lucky. He has always been part of a defeated army. He has fought for Germany and for France and, according to what he has been told each time, for civilization.

  He wore civilian clothes for one day, years ago, when he was confirmed, and then again when he was sixteen and a Werewolf, but those were not normal occasions. When he was confirmed a Christian, and created a Werewolf, he felt disguised and curiously concealed. He is disguised and foreign to himself today, looking out of Willi’s window at the sky and the cobbles and the neighbours in the court. He looks shabby and unemployed, like the pictures of men in German street crowds before the Hitler time.

  It is quite dark when the little boy, holding his mother’s hand with one hand and a cone with roasted chestnuts in the other, enters the court. The mother pushes the heavy doors that hide the court from the street, and the pair enter slowly, as if they had tramped a long way in heavy snow. They have returned safely, once again, from their afternoon stroll in the Jardin des Tuileries. The chestnuts were bought from the old Algerian beside the pond near the Place de la Concorde. The smoke of the blue charcoal fire was darker than the sky, and the smell of chestnuts burning is more pungent than their taste. In a cone of newspaper (a quarter-page of France-Soir) they warm the heart and hand.