The Radio Operator
Page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
1: San José, Costa Rica, May 1953
2: Neuss, June 1949
3: Neuss, June 1949
4: Neuss, June 1949
5: Neuss, June 1949
6: Neuss, June 1949, New York, February 1939
7: New York, February 1939
8: New York, February 1939
9: New York, February 1939
10: Neuss, July 1949
11: New York, February 1939
12: New York, January 1924
13: New York, March 1939
14: New York, March 1939
15: Neuss, July 1949
16: New York, April 1939
17: New York, April 1939
18: New York, May 1939
19: New York, May 1939
20: Neuss, July 1949
21: New York, May 1939
22: New York, May 1939
23: Neuss, July 1949
24: New York, July 1939
25: New York, July 1939
26: New York, July 1939
27: Neuss, August 1949
28: New York, November 1939
29: Neuss–Buenos Aires, September–October 1949
30: New York, June–July 1940
31: New York, August 1940
32: New York, September 1940
33: Buenos Aires, November 1949
34: Buenos Aires, Christmas 1949
35: Ellis Island, May 1946
36: San José, Costa Rica, June 1953
37: San José, Costa Rica, June 1953
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
A Note from the Translator
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
San José, Costa Rica, May 1953
EARLY EVENING. TWILIGHT. SWARMS OF INSECTS. THE WIND sweeps them into his face on the ride back; he has to squint. But still he can see her as he turns off the road, away from the green river and into the driveway: Maria. She’s standing on the steps leading up to the house, looking a bit nervous, fidgety. At one point she slaps her arm.
Something else he can see: she seems to have been waiting for him.
“Mail for you, Don José,” Maria calls out as he parks his moped. “On the stairs,” she says. And as he’s walking past her: “From Germany.” He slows down.
He hasn’t written his brother in three months. For the most part his silence has been met with reproaches: We’ve always made an effort. It’s always been important to us to stay in touch with each other.
“Do you want to come inside for a moment? I have cold lemonade.”
Carl’s letter will have to wait.
He steps into the room with its dark furniture. She turns on the ceiling fan. The air stirs; it smells of dust. The small birdcage that hangs from one of the rafters starts swinging violently back and forth. The squirrel trapped inside has been trying to get out for days. Maria caught it in the garden, con mis manos—with her bare hands. Its bushy tail flails around like a mad painter’s brush.
“When are you going to set it free?”
She looks at him, taken aback. “I like animals. Horses, dogs, squirrels.”
“But all it can do is go around and around in circles. It’s about to go round the bend.”
She laughs at his play on words—volverse; volverse loco—and leans back in her chair. Her body is shaped like a barrel. No waist. Five children, all of them married. She wears a shirt that belonged to her late husband, large and boxy. He knows Maria is lonely. The nights here lie shrouded in gauzy darkness. No light anywhere. The house enveloped in a warm caress, heat trapped in the walls.
He tells her about his flight over Santa Barbara. About how they have to go ahead and map out the roads that are to be built next year—that’s why they’re meeting with the engineers.
“Roads,” she says, “are important. There’s too much dust here.”
Darkness falls completely while they talk. He doesn’t talk about Germany anymore. “The country is divided now?” she once asked, uncertain.
Yes, there was a war in Europe. Surely you must have heard about it! “A world war,” he explained.
“There are so many wars,” she said, defending herself. We have had many wars here too.
When his glass is empty he gets up, walks outside, and finds his way up the stairs in the moonlight. As he climbs, he reaches for the large brown envelope.
Upstairs the heat hangs torpid. He occupies a single room with a veranda that looks out over the jungle. He can’t complain. Dörsam took care of everything, including finding him a job at the Geographic Institute.
He turns on the fan, throws open the windows. The sharp screeching of the cicadas assails him. There aren’t many distinct sounds here. A region blanketed by the green of the plantations and of the jungle. Sometimes the rumbling of a freight truck on the government road to San José, or the boy who sells bread pedaling to the last house in town and bleating a few lonely notes into the air on his bicycle horn.
When he slits open the envelope, a magazine tumbles out. As if of its own accord, it falls open to the page where Carl put his letter. And he sees his own face.
The photo turned up all over the place back then, even in the New York Times. Him in front of his radio equipment, Princess on the chair next to him, both looking into the camera. Anyone seeing it would think something is wrong either with the dog or with him, because they’re both the same height.
Dear Josef (or Don José? We all had a good laugh about your new name!),
A report on your case has come out in Stern magazine. A real-life account of the German intelligence service’s activities in America. It’s a whole series! There are five more issues to come, I’ll send them to you as soon as I have them. That’s all for now. More soon.
Greetings from your brother, Edith, and the kids
p.s. Täubchen now has her own room on the ground floor. She’s a young lady now!
He lays the magazine out on the table and pulls the lamp closer. His eyes go line by line; he’s not reading, he’s looking for his name. But he doesn’t find it anywhere.
Now he starts over again from the beginning, actually reading this time. It’s the story he already knows, now told from the Germans’ perspective: Vaterlandsliebe—love of the fatherland. Written like a detective novel, as if it were all just entertainment. FBI! You’re under arrest! Why not confess and get it over with? If you talk, you might spare yourself the worst!
No wonder Carl sounded so cheery, almost excited, even. But it’s not entertainment. It’s his life.
Later, in bed, he just looks at the advertisements.
CAKES AND PASTRIES, CONDENSED MILK FOR EVERY OCCASION.
HEUMANN’S SLIMMING GRANULES WILL HELP YOU TOO.
SCHAUMA SHAMPOO—LOTS OF FOAM WITH EVERY USE.
GET MORE ENJOYMENT OUT OF TRAVEL AND FREE TIME—WITH HALLOO WAKEFULNESS TABLETS.
Germany seems to be back on its feet.
He awakens in sweat-soaked pajamas. Faint gray light—the sun hasn’t risen yet. He searches his room for cool air. All the doors and windows are left wide open at night, and still the temperature never disperses.
He steps out onto the veranda, reaches for the iron railing, grips the metal with his hand. Not cold, but cool.
He stares out at the palm trees, blissfully limp. Instead of New York skyscrapers, instead of German ruins, and instead of Argentinian pampas, he now has these green giants all around him. Hemming him in, keeping watch on all sides. A faint smacking sound when their leaves brush together.
Off in the distance the green river, made of glass this morning. No movement at all on the water. The river re
flecting palm groves and banana bushes. There’s nothing else here. Later he’ll dress and ride out to the Geographic Institute. Fly over Alajuela. They’re mapping Costa Rica, piece by piece: roads, rivers, lakes. They’ve acquired new machines, but they lack qualified workers; they roll out the red carpet for people like him. Dörsam wants to come up from Buenos Aires next month. Does it have to do with the report in Stern?
In Buenos Aires the Germans puffed thick cigars that made him feel ill. They talked and talked. About the conspiracy against Germany, about the government in exile that would soon oust the American puppet Adenauer. Sure. It was like a drinking song, they struck it up again and again; no one cared anymore what the words were. He was invited to the chess club and to tea and dancing at Club Union. Most of the time he kept his distance. When the opportunity came to work in San José, he took it.
Dörsam will be here soon enough.
At the washtub under the tree, Maria is scrubbing his pants and shirts. She gets everything done in the morning. In the morning, before the brutal heat of day has set in. Her body pitches forward and back. She scrubs with all her might, scrubs patiently. All the scrubbing makes little tears in his clothing. Granted, the clothes are old, most of them still Carl’s. From Germany. Carl’s underwear. Josef has worn them in Europe, North Africa, and South America. Carl’s underwear has traveled the world, while Carl has never left Germany. He’ll have to speak to Maria about the tears. But how? He doesn’t want to offend her. Maria irons his shirts, cleans his room, addresses him as “Don,” even though, at just fifty years old, he’s too young for that. Never a complaint, even when he leaves the maps and photos from the Institute lying around on the floor. She respectfully cleans around them. She’s even managed to match his old gray socks to their original pairs. Maria is easy to get along with. He can come and go as he pleases. A little chitchat in the evenings sometimes—he doesn’t want to have to move yet again. How many times has he arrived somewhere and had to act as though it were his home?
2
Neuss, June 1949
THE LEFT EYE DOESN’T MOVE. IT’S A GLASS EYE. JOSEF HASN’T seen it in a quarter of a century. He’d forgotten about it.
They embrace, briefly, not too tenderly—a solemn moment. Carl wears a suit despite the heat, and over it a white shopkeeper’s smock.
“Look at how thin you’ve gotten, my dear man!” Carl cries. “And we thought America was the land of milk and honey!”
Josef smiles and follows his brother into the redbrick house, photos of which he’d seen before the war, narrow and tall, but the bricks beginning to shift. It was cheap, Carl had said in his letter, but it hadn’t been Aryanized—seized from Jewish owners and resold. That Carl had refused to do. “Something like that just can’t end well.”
He trudges up the stairs behind his brother. Carl has combed his graying hair back over the beginnings of a bald spot; the ends form little curls over the nape of his neck. He stops on the second-floor landing.
“We have so much to talk about! So much catching up to do! I told Edith, ‘I do hope he stays a bit longer.’”
“Does that mean I wasn’t supposed to stay long?” Josef asks with a wink. When he sees the look on Carl’s face he wishes he hadn’t.
“No, I mean it just like I said,” Carl replies and holds the door open for him. Inside, it smells of detergent and pastry.
“Edith’s been baking. She’s just out picking up groceries, she’ll be back any moment.”
Josef sets his bag down on a chair and notices Carl’s gaze following his hand.
“That’s all you have?”
“Just this here.” When Carl doesn’t say anything else Josef picks the bag back up, and now he doesn’t dare set it down again. Carl takes the bag from him and carries it into the next room, a kind of parlor: brown velvet curtains, dark-colored period furniture, oil paintings of landscapes, dramatic teardrop-patterned wallpaper.
“All this made it through the war with us.” Carl tries to help the conversation along. Josef is silent; he can’t force himself to utter any praise. He feels a twinge of pain and steels himself against it. “Come,” Carl says quietly. “You’ll be sleeping in this little room back here.”
The room is furnished with a sofa, armchair, and writing desk. No telephone here either. He needs to call Dörsam.
“Edith will make the sofa up for you to sleep on. What do you think, will you be able to bear it in here?”
“Of course, absolutely. How neat everything here is.”
“That’s Edith’s handiwork! A capable housewife—that’s something you won’t find so easily.”
In Carl’s letters the word “capable” appeared again and again in reference to Edith. Carl seemed unable to find any other words to describe his wife. In the photos he saw a pretty, dark-haired woman with a startled look in her eyes. He suspects that Edith might be a bit taller than Carl, assuming Carl still stood on his tiptoes when getting his picture taken, like he’d started doing years ago.
“Here, have a glass of water.” Josef drinks and looks at Carl, who paces back and forth before him, telling him now about his business as a soap wholesaler. Business is picking up more and more, he says.
Josef limits himself to helpful prompts: “So the new powdered laundry detergent is better, the customers are saying so too?”
“Yes, and I relay that back to the manufacturer. Paul is thirteen now. Helps out with the business in the afternoons. Next year we’ll take him out of school. Then he can work full-time.”
Carl pauses for a moment, straightens a picture frame on the wall.
“You’ll meet the kids any minute now. They really wanted to skip school when they found out yesterday that their uncle from America is in the country! The chocolate you sent them—they’ll never forget you for that!”
There was more than chocolate in the thirty packages he’d sent.
Package 1: coffee, lard, powdered milk, powdered butter, powdered eggs, soap, shaving cream, tobacco, cigarettes, needles, thread, aspirin, saccharin, bouillon cubes, chocolate, pepper, nutmeg, cloves, darning wool.
Package 2: oats, flour, sugar, starch, rice, gelatin, bandages, aspirin, baking powder, chocolate, thread, adhesive tape, needles, wool, tobacco, comb, socks, razor blades.
Package 3: lentils, tobacco, chocolate, lard, sugar, jerky, honey, coffee, pepper, gelatin.
Package 4: wheat flour, coffee, condensed milk, honey, pancake mix, soap, tobacco, chocolate, cigarettes, vegetable oil.
Package 5: coffee, sugar, condensed milk, lard, cocoa, chocolate, razor blades, shoelaces, vanilla extract, yarn, needles.
Et cetera.
The money that was meant for his lawyer, six hundred dollars, went into these packages. His case was hopeless anyway. Thirty packages from 1946 to 1949; he’d heard about an agency that would put them together and ship them.
Carl sits down in a wing chair and starts rubbing a spot on the arm where the fabric is already worn. He’s grown pensive.
“We’re through the worst of it. But ’47 was a hard winter. Soup kitchens, warming centers, the neighbors chopped their piano up to feed their stove. Then the summer after that it was flooding and hailstorms, the harvest completely ruined. Times like this, you have to grit your teeth, do without, make sacrifices, stretch every penny. Don’t you agree?”
He looks at Josef, and in the look is a question. The silence swings back and forth between them. Now Josef is meant to fill it with his explanation for why he’s come back from wealthy America with nothing to show for it. A poor lout. He didn’t break even; he’s in the red. Again he feels a slight pain in his chest.
They’re released by the creak of floorboards. Both look toward the door. A woman is standing there. “Well,” says Carl, “we’ve got time. We can talk about everything soon. No need to rush! Here, first things first. Come meet Edith.”
She is thin. Thin is the first impression, then beautiful. A slightly Madonna-like, ascetic beauty. If she were a bit better nourished
she could work as a fashion model. But he cannot tell her this. She holds her hand out to shake, very proper, stiff. He squeezes her hand and doesn’t let go, cradles it a bit in his; let her think this is how they do it in America. He gives it another squeeze and then he does something that surprises even him: he takes her hand and lifts it to his lips to kiss it.
“Oh-ho, the boy’s brought manners back with him,” Carl cries.
Edith blushes, and Josef too feels his face turn red.
“Are you two hungry?” she asks. “I’ve baked cherry pie. Or would you care for something else, Josef?” He can sense that she’s having to force herself to speak. Already she’s heading toward the door to hide her face.
“Pie sounds wonderful,” he says to her slender back.
“He’s got an accent. Do you hear it, Edith? You sound like an American,” laughs Carl.
“Coffee will be ready in ten minutes!” Edith calls from the kitchen.
When Carl gets up he gives Josef’s shoulder a quick squeeze. A firm squeeze, as if to say, Everything’s all right now. You’re here. You’re here. That’s how it was before: they were simply there, and all of a sudden it’s like it used to be, for a brief, fleeting second. Then he stands up and follows his brother into the kitchen.
He keeps catching himself staring at Edith. She wears a thin, floral-print summer dress that catches between her legs when she stands up. Her hair is set in waves, an old-fashioned hairstyle; it’s been a long time since he’s seen a woman wear it. She is both shy and self-possessed, the latter whenever she can set the table and serve. She does it almost forcefully.
They eat a very sour pie with lots of cherries—“We don’t have any butter or sugar,” Edith explains. The children, a boy and a girl, are so quiet and obviously frightened that later, when he lies down on the sofa, he can’t say what they look like. He remembers, however, that the boy kept nervously blinking, clearly a tic. Carl at one point raised his hand and whispered, “Stop that!” But the son didn’t stop.
He dozes off for a moment and is woken by Carl’s voice: “Leave it. You’ll let the heat in! Leave the door closed!” Then he hears Edith’s mild voice, and again Carl shouting: “Let her live out on the street, then, if she likes the sun so much!”