The Radio Operator

by Ulla Lenze

  Carl’s shouting. He hasn’t heard his brother’s voice in twenty-five years. And now he sounds like their father.

  When they parted twenty-five years ago, the wound was still fresh. They had removed the eye quickly after the accident at the factory. At the time, they couldn’t get anything more out of Carl about what happened to him; first a yell, then he started screaming and couldn’t stop. That was what his fellow welders later reported, and Carl, in the hospital bed, said nothing. A mute reproach in this silence, and this reproach was directed at life itself, or maybe America’s immigration laws. The first thing the loss of his eye meant was losing his entry visa. They had learned English together, but at Ellis Island Carl would have gotten an X written on his shoulder in white chalk and been sent back.

  In his first letters Josef restricted himself to saying how hard life as an immigrant was, how disliked Germans were, how difficult it was to find work, how high the rents were. And it was all true too.

  That evening they all sit at the large dining table in the parlor. Edith serves vegetable soup and explains defensively that it all comes from the garden. Carl stares at the beer glass filled with water in his hand.

  “By the way, Josef, in the next few days we have to go to city hall and get you registered.”

  “I think they know I’m here,” he answers with a crooked grin, his teeth showing a bit on the left side of his mouth. It’s his special Joe grin, and he closes his eyes for a second. It’s gone. It doesn’t belong here, this grin, he can tell.

  “It’s about the ration stamps,” Carl explains. “They have to verify who you are.” He grabs his beer glass and drinks, keeping his eye trained on Josef as he does.

  “Josef?” Edith is standing next to him. He nods, and she gives him another ladleful of soup. He is now distinctly aware of Edith’s scent. It’s the same plain soap smell that envelops the whole family, but there’s something else there too, something that is uniquely hers, and if he could touch the smell, it would be as soft as velvet.

  “Did you never think about getting married?” Carl asks suddenly.

  “Thought about it, sure.”

  “But never found the right one?”

  “Might well have found the right one, but something got in the way.”

  Carl nods and doesn’t probe any further. Now it’s Josef’s turn to speak. But Josef sees no point in speaking of a love that by Carl’s standards would be a useless love, completely useless and even harmful.

  “Do you like it?” asks Edith.

  “Very much, thank you,” he says without hesitation and smiles.

  Does he like it? Food had always been important to him. Yes, very important. Eating could be revelatory for him, as if there were dead recesses of his being that could be resurrected by the aromas of a given meal, as if an unusual herb could tickle something in his brain awake.

  “Do you know what Mama called you when you were away?”

  “No, what?”

  “Jö!”

  Josef doesn’t understand but smiles. Edith laughs, though; she seems to understand.

  “You wrote to her back then and said that in America they called you Joe now. Mama came over to us with your letter and said, ‘Our Josef has a new name, Jö!’ I told her, ‘No, Mama, you say it like this: Dscho.’ That’s right, isn’t it?”

  He nods. He finds the story funny, but something about it hurts. As he keeps eating he gets more and more tired and doesn’t mind when Carl starts conferring about various things with Edith—a table that has to be moved, a dresser down in the cellar that has to be repaired and painted. The girl keeps looking at him the whole time, and he asks quietly, in English, “How are you, my little dove?” She smiles and murmurs, “Good, thank you,” and keeps looking at him.

  They go to bed early. It’s just afternoon, American time, but he’s happy at the chance to be alone. On his pillow he finds a neatly folded set of pajamas, a towel, and a toothbrush. His life is over, but they make it easy for him to act as though he still has one; he just has to play along. Carl sets the rules. Even in the letters, a web of painstakingly detailed questions—though when no answers were forthcoming Carl was quick to beat a retreat, the next letter admitting that well, certainly, he of course had little sense of the political circumstances there.

  In his first letters in 1946 he had had to inform his brother that since the start of the war Ellis Island had been a detention station for enemy aliens.

  Enemy aliens?

  I’ll explain everything later.

  The room faces south, hence the heat. Even here it smells of the cigar that Carl lit up after dinner. Sharp, a bit like piss.

  He opens the window and hears the train. He can only marvel. Two nights ago he was still lying in a bed always cold and damp from the sea air, all around him the rumble of the tugboats that sailed past the island and the deadening tediousness of imprisonment, a life devoid of choices. Time pervaded everything. There was only time. It was the element in which they all lived. Time as punishment. Much worse, however, were the four years in Sandstone, Minnesota—a real prison with real criminals.

  Up there in the north it always felt like winter. He moved at a run. He had to, they all had to—never stand still. Don’t stop. Move! For if ever the men did stop, that’s when the fights would start.

  Carl doesn’t know about Sandstone. In Germany they were busy with the war, and Carl didn’t seem surprised that Josef too was silent for five years.

  3

  Neuss, June 1949

  NOISE WAKES HIM. SHOUTING FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF the wall. “How can he do that? Doesn’t the boy have any sense?”

  So it’s about the son this time.

  The clock shows 6:30. For the self he left behind in America it’s just past midnight, and so he decides to turn over onto his other side.

  The next time it’s operetta music that wakes him. Carl sings along, if only to the most memorable bits. Edith says, “Try to be quiet,” and Carl says, “This is my house. I can do as I please.” But the radio is switched off. And then the door falls shut.

  The next time he wakes up the clock says ten o’clock, and needles of sunlight shine in through the window. Carl’s voice again. In the short pauses in between whatever Carl is saying he hears Edith say something. He swings himself up off the sofa, hurries into the kitchen. Carl turns to him and stops speaking mid-sentence.

  “Ah, the gentleman awakes. Slept well?”

  “I’m six hours behind you.”

  The look on Carl’s face shows incomprehension.

  “The time difference. For me it’s still the middle of the night.”

  “Here. I haven’t drunk out of it yet.” Carl hands him a cup. Josef drinks, if only so as not to offend him. “If we hadn’t had that coffee of yours, Josef, seriously, I wouldn’t have been able to run this business. I need coffee. I need coffee more than anything in the world!”

  He stops, looks Josef up and down. “Don’t you want to put some clothes on?”

  “I have clothes on.”

  “A set of sweaty pajamas. We’re in the kitchen, my dear man!”

  Edith turns around and stirs a pot.

  “Beg your pardon,” says Josef.

  “Edith left some clothes in your room for you. Come, I’ll show you,” and with that he pushes Josef out of the kitchen.

  In the room, in fact, are a pair of suit pants, a white shirt, a jacket, and a pair of underwear. It’s clear that they’re Carl’s clothes. They’re the same height, five foot three. It should all fit.

  Carl looks out the window as Josef peels off the pajamas. The pants are a bit big at the waist; he has to fasten the belt as tight as it will go. As he’s buttoning up the shirt, he hears Carl say, as if from far away, “So all right, let’s hear it.”

  “What?”

  “What are you doing here all of a sudden? How is it possible to just hop on a plane that takes you from New York to Frankfurt? How do you have the money for something like that?”

&nbs
p; “For the FBI it’s no trouble at all, Carl.”

  He thought the mere mention of it would shut him up. But Carl asks, “FBI? What’s that?”

  “It’s the American federal police.”

  He starts to roll his sleeves up. Then stops in the middle of doing so and rolls them back—it could be that Carl finds rolled-up sleeves as improper as pajamas in the kitchen.

  “Did you commit a crime?” asks Carl.

  “After 1941, after Germany declared war against the United States, it was a crime just to be German.”

  He buttons the cuff of his left sleeve. Then the right. Carl stares at him. Clearly waiting for further explanation.

  “There were just five of us Germans left on Ellis Island. Five enemy aliens. Plus a few Italians and one Japanese guy. They didn’t want to have to keep the island in operation just for our sake.”

  Carl nods and looks over to the door; Edith is calling.

  “The customers are waiting.” As he leaves he claps Josef on the shoulder. It feels like he’s been marked.

  Now he tries to read Carl’s steps. In the kitchen the radio starts playing. A man sings of a red sun on Capri, a fisherman and the ocean. At one point he hears Carl say, “All very mysterious.” Then the front door falls shut.

  He goes to join Edith in the kitchen. When she notices him she puts on an apron and bends over a pot: “You must be hungry. I can make you some eggs. Our hens have been busy.”

  She wears the same dress she wore yesterday. It clings to her stomach; she seems to be sweating around her navel.

  He can’t look away.

  Edith is taller than Carl; he noticed it the night before. She must be five five. That means she’s taller than him too. She seems absorbed in watching the eggs, which make a very quiet thok sound when they knock together in the boiling water.

  Now she finally turns toward him. She hesitates for a moment. Then she starts setting the table with great vigor. Plate, salt shaker, a basket of bread—and with a final elegant flourish she places an egg spoon next to the plate.

  But there is something bashful in her movements nonetheless. A strange man in her kitchen. That’s what he is, and suddenly it’s clear to both of them.

  “Carl was very happy to hear from you all of a sudden after the war. We were always happy to get your letters.”

  “His letters meant a lot to me as well,” he said. “To have a family.” And he thinks of Carl’s constant words of encouragement. Which sometimes he could only smile at. But still: they were from his brother. He didn’t have another. He clung to those words, to the ragged cursive on smudged postwar paper with holes where Carl’s pen had punched through it.

  “I’ll be in the laundry room if you need anything.”

  He has a mouthful of egg and can only nod. He’s not very hungry; for his American self it’s only six o’clock in the morning. But he wants to do what’s expected of him.

  After breakfast he looks up Dörsam’s address in his notebook. He sits down at the writing desk, grabs some letter paper, and writes:

  Dear Herr Dörsam,

  I’m in Neuss, staying with my brother. Where can we meet?

  Respectfully yours,

  Josef Klein (Joe)

  He finds an envelope, then stamps, and puts Carl’s address as the return address. But then he folds the letter again and again and puts it in his pants pocket.

  By laundry room Edith must have meant the bathroom downstairs. Because he can’t think of anything better to do, he goes to join her. She kneels by the tub, and when he clears his throat, she turns her head to look at him over her shoulder. Her face is sweaty. Dark strands of hair cling to her temples.

  “Can I help you, Edith?”

  “Washing clothes isn’t a man’s job.”

  “It isn’t a woman’s either.”

  She keeps scrubbing as if he hadn’t said anything.

  He doesn’t give up: “I would have my clothes picked up once a week. A boy would come by and then drop everything off again the next day, clean and pressed.”

  She keeps scrubbing.

  “Nothing fancy about it. Wasn’t expensive.”

  Again he regrets what he said. He slips out of the laundry room without another word. Soon afterward he’s outside on the street.

  There are no sidewalks. In the rubble and in the footstep-flattened dirt, children are crouched down playing marbles. The air smells of potato peels and dust.

  The folded-up letter is crammed in his pants pocket. A few blocks away he stares at a pile of rubble, what’s left of a building that collapsed. When he’s sure he’s not being watched, he risks a few steps into the rubble heap, crouches down, and digs a little hole with his hands. He lights the letter on fire and waits until it has crumpled into black scraps of ash. Back on the street he knocks the dirt from his pants.

  At the train station, where he means to call Dörsam, government officials are standing around checking bags. He turns around immediately, heads back to the brick house on Sternstraße.

  The house casts a blue shadow over everything. At the northern edge of the property is a shed. Next to it, a chicken coop. He can hear clucking and fluttering sounds coming from inside, a strange yet comforting ruckus. He sits down on the bench in the garden and waits.

  He’s good at waiting; for eight years he did nothing else. He closes his eyes and is overcome with sadness, sadness that has something to do with Carl, with the look Carl gives him, his two eyes drifting apart. He’d like to give Carl a reassuring pat on the back and say, as he might have in New York, Relax. Let’s have a good time.

  Someone is shaking him by the arm. He must have fallen asleep.

  “If you’re planning on staying with us for a while, you have to go get registered. It’s the law. I’ll have hell to pay if I let somebody live here who isn’t registered.”

  Josef, still half asleep, looks up at Carl. Upstairs in the kitchen window he sees the curtains fall back into place.

  “I don’t have papers.”

  “You don’t have papers?”

  Josef shakes his head.

  Carl starts to say something, and then, without a word, he lets out a sigh. Takes a few steps across the yard, as far as the shed, thinking. A quick glance at Josef. “If you wouldn’t mind helping me move a table, that would be nice.”

  It’s dim inside the shed, but Carl doesn’t turn the light on. Once his eyes have adjusted to the darkness, Josef can see shelves lining the walls filled with boxes of detergent, tubes, bottles, and little packages of soap. It’s all neatly organized, but there’s still a sense of chaos, maybe owing to the strong smell of medicine, of lavender, lemon, and toothpaste.

  There’s a telephone on the desk. He’ll call Dörsam from here.

  He hears his brother’s voice. “Josef? Will you come over here, please?” He finds him in a back room, an office.

  “It’s not heavy, just bulky,” says Carl as they get ready to carry the table on its side through the shed.

  “Do you want me to carry the front end?” he offers. He can feel his brother’s body through the table. His hesitation.

  “I can do it,” Carl answers gruffly and starts easing his way backward through the door until his hands get caught in the doorframe and prevent him from going any farther. Josef doesn’t say anything.

  “The table is too wide,” sighs Carl.

  “Grab the tabletop from the inside. Then your hands won’t be in the way.”

  Carl laughs. “My goodness, of course.”

  Outside in the yard Carl insists on being able to continue walking backward all the way to the house. When they’re finally there, Carl wipes his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “Thanks for your help.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Carl hesitates, then he takes a deep breath and says, “We listened to Radio London.”

  “Radio London,” Josef repeats.

  “The so-called Feindsender—enemy radio. If it’d gotten out, I’d have been facing
prison or worse.”

  Josef nods.

  “We always kept ourselves informed about what was really going on in this country. The American press must have been critical as well?”

  “Yes, always. Always critical.”

  Carl nods, apparently satisfied with the result of the conversation.

  4

  Neuss, June 1949

  HE WOULD LIKE TO TELL CARL AND EDITH ABOUT IT. HIS life in New York as a free man. But they don’t ask. Are they worried he might tell them something alarming or indecent? He has to laugh. Maybe they figure he’s got nothing interesting to tell. Also possible. He does what’s expected of him, doesn’t draw attention to himself. Maybe they confuse that with insignificance? He was never able to get across what was important to him, not well.

  Lauren was surprised that he had hardly any books. “But I do, on amateur radio.” He pointed shyly at the stack. Finally she found an explanation: “Do you know why you’re not a reader? You don’t need the double consciousness.”

  What did she mean by that?

  “You’re always completely present wherever you are, and that’s enough for you.”

  “And for you too, apparently.”

  She laughed, loudly. She laughed like a kid.

  “And what about Thoreau?” he asked.

  “You and your Thoreau.”

  She had still been polite then.

  Later she told him he hadn’t understood Thoreau. But Walden was his book. It was enough for a whole life. Thoreau’s life in a cabin in the woods sparked a yearning within him. He read of the joy of being in nature. He sometimes saw the city as if it were made of trees and mountains, a landscape of stone and geometry. He could disappear within it. It was big enough.

  Lauren asked if he’d read the other American writers and transcendentalists, Emerson and Whitman. He didn’t even know the names. And the word “transcendentalist” confused him.

  Thoreau’s words flowed straight into him, without hindrance, and thanks to Thoreau he knew his own mind. That was enough. Most of the time talking about something was just a sign that you didn’t understand it. His favorite line was: