The Radio Operator

by Ulla Lenze

  A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

  But of course there is a lot he could tell them about. That he saw Duke Ellington live at the Cotton Club, that his doctor was named Dr. Weinrebe, that he stopped going to church and not a soul was interested. That he was free, because there were too many people who were all too different for anyone to be able to take anything all that seriously.

  He had lived in East Harlem, in one of the less pretty buildings—a plain, squat brick box. Still, he lived on the very top floor; he had no trouble fixing his antenna to the roof. He liked the neighborhood. There was nothing glamorous about it. There, any pressure he might have felt to try to prove something was gone. He walked the streets up and down, again and again. The tall buildings looming overhead no longer seemed to mock him, as they had in the beginning; instead they seemed to watch over him in a paternal way.

  His one luxury was his radio equipment, and maybe also Princess. A German shepherd. She waited patiently all day for him to come back from the print shop in the evening.

  Every day he took her to a weed-choked vacant lot by the Harlem River, where she did her business between old tires and the overgrown remnants of broken foundations. It always smelled a bit rotten and brackish there, which made Princess all the more excited. She had to sniff everything. Then they went shopping. On the way to Lexington Avenue, they fought their way through the children playing on the sidewalks—hopscotch and jump rope, baseball, marbles. The kids would pet Princess, would call her by her name, and Princess with her mouth open seemed to smile.

  He took her to the fish market with him, bought mullet wrapped in a giant page of newsprint. At the grocery store he bought Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and at Idrie’s he bought bean pies, a specialty that had its origins in New York’s Black Muslim community. At the intersection, a black cop with white gloves and sunglasses directed traffic; the butcher stood in his shop window between dangling sides of meat; the Italian hatmaker smoked under his awning. If he was lucky he’d see a showgirl from one of the clubs, catch sight of the sequin shorts she wore under her coat. Back home, he’d put on Ethel Waters, “Stormy Weather” or “Georgia on My Mind.” He had seen Ethel Waters once on Lexington. Tall and regal—and even though she was already a star, she returned his smile.

  One day his friend Arthur had suggested that they build a radio. For days and weeks they sat together, taking turns reading from the books they’d bought. They painted a cardboard tube with paraffin, wound wire around a spool, sketched out circuit diagrams, cut wires. The smell of oil and burnt metal, a pile of screws, wires, and electrical tape on the table in front of them, and Arthur twisting his strawberry-blond Charlie Chaplin mustache, when suddenly—he’ll never forget it—a sound came out. A faint, squealing sound, a bit like chirping. They turned the tuning knob, and out came a sound like wind and the beating of rain, and as they continued turning there were sounds he had never heard before, electronic sounds, whistling, sliding, leaping, bending. It sparked a tingling feeling inside him, a feeling of happiness. Then they started picking up voices. The voices crackled like leaves in winter. “CQ, CQ”—come quick. A shaky, warbling man’s voice singing, “Sweet Sally, Sally of my dreams.”

  They looked at each other as if they had summoned God.

  “Voices everywhere.”

  “People can tell each other everything now. What’s really going on in the world. Soon there won’t be any secrets at all anymore.”

  Arthur’s face lit up. He had just joined a group that was engaged in the fight against social injustice and for the Christian faith. Arthur was the son of Irish immigrants, but not at all devout. He only believed in friendship. And in German work ethic. As far as the latter went, he’d picked the wrong German, and soon realized it, but he still let Josef work at his print shop and live with him those first few years. When Arthur got married, Josef moved to East Harlem. The bars there served alcohol, despite Prohibition, for which reason Arthur often came to visit him and was soon bemoaning married life. “She comments on everything I do. Says I slice an avocado the wrong way, crossways down the middle instead of longways. I’d have been better off marrying you.”

  “Did you know that in California they tried to rename them alligator pears?”

  “Really?”

  “On account of the skin. Didn’t catch on, though.”

  “Yeah, dumb name.”

  As soon as things quieted down on the street outside, he would turn on the voices in his apartment. Early morning in South Africa, a storm in Mexico, in Helsinki dead fish on the shore. He heard of a moderate northwesterly wind in Perth and catastrophic flooding along the Yellow River in China.

  He was good at Morse code. The jaunty beep-beeping could be heard over anything, whether it was street noise or the neighbors’ shouting. In the beginning, he would sit there with pencil and paper to work out the sequences, but soon it would happen automatically in his head. He recognized some operators immediately from certain hesitations, drawn-out tones, or a particularly galloping rhythm. Everyone sounded a bit different; everyone had their own handwriting.

  It took a whole year before he could bring himself to speak. To talk without seeing anyone. To build confidence. To just sit there and talk. To send something of himself out into the world and hope for the best. And then he discovered how freeing it was. No one could see him. No one knew anything about him. Not how tall or short he was, or whether he lived in a house with a yard in Brooklyn or a tenement in Harlem.

  To be only a voice, everywhere, at any time. In the beginning, he tried to trick himself into believing that this precious state, like magic, was enough to shield him from misery. With the Depression, the universal rules grew clearer; there were forces stronger than his inner life.

  Arthur had to shutter the print shop indefinitely. They sometimes met at the soup kitchen by Bryant Park. Josef found a poorly paying job delivering flyers for a large furniture store. A pretty big step down, considering he used to produce the flyers himself. But he liked the work. When he got into a rhythm, when he felt more like he was dreaming than working, he could lose all sense of time. Use his index finger to flip open the lid of the mailbox and slip in the piece of paper pinned between his thumb and middle finger, his other hand free to hold his cigarette. The city became an animal with countless hungry mouths, and it was his job to feed them. By the time the economic situation had eased a bit, he had hit almost every building at least once. But he still couldn’t send his mother any money; he could only send news of just scraping by. His mother asked if he didn’t want to come back: in Germany a new era had begun; Germany was reborn. No. Never. New York was his city, especially now that he’d fed it.

  5

  Neuss, June 1949

  THEIR DAYS AREN’T YET IN ALIGNMENT. THE FAMILY IS SIX hours ahead of him. He drags after them, dead tired, and at night turns restlessly in bed while they’re already peacefully asleep.

  Mornings at six he hears Carl whistling merry melodies. He briefly wakes up, rolls over again, and goes back to sleep until ten. Carl returns shortly before noon, at which point Josef has been up for just two hours. Once Carl says, “My dear man, we’re always tiptoeing around to keep from waking you.”

  “It doesn’t seem like tiptoeing to me. But that aside, noise doesn’t bother me.”

  The heat has made its way inside, filling each room like a thick liquid. His scalp is burning. Sweat runs down his face.

  Carl gamely continues wearing suit and smock and seems to be the only one not sweating. He looks like a character from a book.

  There’s a white line of salt on the nape of Edith’s neck. Josef can’t stop looking at it.

  He spends the morning hours with her. It’s going better and better between them, a good reason to get up a bit earlier every morning. Little by little they find things to talk about, from the German goods and foodstuffs for sale on “Sauerkraut Boulevard” in German Yorkville (she finds this funny) to the preparat
ions for the daughter’s birthday (sugar, butter, and cocoa need to be stored up weeks in advance!). All the while, Edith darns socks, irons shirts, peels potatoes, mops the floor. Josef offers his help, but she declines every time, amused. She sticks to her opinion that it’s all women’s work. He could tell her that having lived as a bachelor for many years, he has had to perform women’s work himself, but she doesn’t want to hear it. She shakes her head in disapproval. It’s not clear if it’s pity or reproach.

  And so he watches. And allows himself to be a little bit intoxicated by her energy, the casual air with which she, like the conductor of an orchestra, exercises control over a hundred different things. Sometimes he thinks the Edith he’s watching doesn’t exist at all. She vanishes into her activity. There’s something girlish about her—not a hint of sensuality, not even innocence; rather, in all her industriousness, an air of something like sleep or a trance.

  At midday, the kids come home from school. When they’re close he can hear them on the street outside. Laughing. This makes him happy. Walking home in the sunlight, they bring the sun in with them. But inside they go quiet. Paul is the son’s name. Irene, the girl’s. Josef calls her Täubchen, “little dove.” Täubchen is quiet but alert. Her gaze is always on him, and when he returns it she is slow to lower her eyes. He tries to coax her out of her reserve with jokes. Is she too dainty for housework? he asks, as she pores over her schoolbooks at the kitchen table, where Edith is peeling potatoes. He has to fight back the urge to laugh when he sees the offended look she gives him. “How ’bout it, Täubchen, still working on that arithmetic?” he asks a half hour later. “Don’t you have to go to Maikelowski’s and pick up some bread?”

  “Michalowski,” she corrects him. Mi-scha-lov-ski, not Mike-a-lov-ski.

  He laughs and looks at Edith. “She always knows best. She’s going to drive her husband nuts one day!”

  Täubchen doesn’t show any response. But he can tell she’s pleased by what he said.

  “You could go get the bread yourself,” says Edith.

  “Gladly. Well, off I go to Maikelowski’s, then.”

  Later he hears the kids saying, “I haff ta go ta Mikealowski’s.”

  He can’t speak decent German anymore. He hadn’t realized.

  On the fourth day he’s allowed to hand Edith her tools, though it might only be because, him being a man, she doesn’t dare deny him his natural connection to tools. She kneels by the old wing chair, a gray work apron tied around her waist. The tools lie in a circle around her.

  “May I help?”

  She looks up, surprised. “I don’t need any help.”

  “I know that, Edith. But maybe you’d like some company?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, but he’s already kneeling down next to her.

  “I can hand you the tools.”

  This, even though they’re all lying there within reach. She frowns. But he hands her the scissors, then a pair of pliers, then the scissors again, and looks on attentively as she removes the worn upholstery with a single cut. Then he helps her pull the fabric off the chair, their arms brushing together for a brief moment. “You’re the surgeon and I’m the nurse,” he says, trying to come up with some way for her to think about this whole thing, even if it’s only to break the awkward silence. A sheepish smile flits across her face.

  On the fifth day he gets to help Edith hang up the laundry in the yard. They move back and forth between the clotheslines and from tree to tree. The underwear, her own, she has already separated out back in the house and banished to a back corner of the balcony. He has taken a close look at them: worn out, graying white panties and small brassieres that look hand sewn.

  He gets to hand her the children’s underwear, then, not without awkwardness, his own (which ultimately are Carl’s; it falls to Edith to decide who gets which). Edith, who has just been talking about fertilizer for the tomato plants, goes silent. Her embarrassment is so strong that it carries over to him. They can’t find their way out of this silence.

  When they’re finished, Edith bends to pick up the empty tub and starts heading back to the house.

  “Wait, Edith, let’s sit down on the bench and rest for a second.”

  Reluctantly—she can’t think up an objection just then—she sits down next to him. Her legs pressed close together like two objects that have been neatly put away. Everything about her is measured, plain; even to cross her legs would probably seem to her to be too coquettish. He, on the other hand, lets his legs splay out to either side like an exhausted construction worker.

  “You’re very different, the two of you. Was it always like that?”

  The question takes him by surprise. He looks at Edith and wonders what she’s really trying to get at.

  “Yes. But it’s gotten worse. Back then I was the stronger one, and then I left him behind when I went to America. I always looked after him, he was my little brother.”

  Her face darkens, seems to seal itself off. She doesn’t say anything for a long time, and then, as if coming to a decision, she says, “He puts it very differently. He says you were always making trouble, and he was the one who had to answer for it.”

  “No, that’s not how it was.” He says it too quickly and a bit testily. Now he tries to collect himself and to speak calmly. “He took most of the beatings from our father. Two left hands—you know how it is. Something was always going wrong. A torn pair of pants, lost change, spilt milk. Then our father would have to punish him.”

  He seems to be calling up what to her mind is a strange image, her husband as a clumsy and abused child. He could go on, say something like: And he still is today, plus he’s missing an eye on top of that. It must take a huge toll on him trying to make up for all these weaknesses. Instead he says, “But there is one thing we have in common. We’re both short men.”

  Edith stares at her hands, the veins that run over her slender wrist. She has pale skin; it neither burns nor turns freckled in the sun. As if she were kept under glass.

  She interrupts his thoughts: “He wishes you would confide in him.”

  “Ah, I see,” says Josef, trying to buy some time.

  “Can you do that?” she asks.

  What can he say to her? Sure, I’ll do it? Again he is silent for far too long. Edith’s body tenses up; her fingers intertwine. He almost feels bad for her. Now it’s clear to him that she’s under instructions from Carl to ask him. And she doesn’t want to go back to him empty-handed.

  “I can’t confide in him because I myself don’t know what happened.”

  She looks at him in disbelief, yes, almost angrily. “Did you not have enough time to think it all over when you were in prison?”

  He leans back, smiling, sneering a bit at her question. “You can’t think freely in prison.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  All he says is “Hmm” and rests his arm on the bench behind her, which makes Edith slide forward a bit.

  “Look, Edith, I’m not one of those people who go to prison and write great books or find God. Some people become religious in prison. Not me. I never had any kind of profound insight.”

  “That wasn’t my question at all, Josef.”

  No, that wasn’t her question.

  He sees the dress fluttering in the sun, then he hears the door, which closes with a creak behind her.

  He’d clipped articles from the newspaper. He’d started at Sandstone. Then Lauren crumpled them up right in front of him. She didn’t dare go so far as to rip them up. She’d wanted him to stop. Had he? No. Of course not.

  One of the first articles he’d clipped was about Canaris. The man they’d been working for. Canaris had neglected to inform Hitler that US troops were already in North Africa.

  That evening he keeps peering over at Edith, trying to tell if she’s still angry with him. No, everything seems the same. The children concentrate on pushing their peas onto their forks and taking care that none should fall off or, worse yet, fall from the
plate to the floor. This draws a stern look from Carl. Or a question. “What did you two learn in school today?”

  The son speaks fearfully into his plate.

  “Look at me, please!” says Carl.

  “We gathered herbs for medicine,” says the son and lists off the varieties: stinging nettle, birch leaves, coltsfoot, dandelion greens. When he’s finished, he blinks. Clink, clink.

  “The teacher is sending the kids off into the woods with the homeless and the unemployed. If that’s how it is, we can in good conscience take them out of school and put them to work in the business.”

  He butters a slice of rye bread, adds a slice of sausage, and takes a bite. Notices the look the girl gives him—Carl couldn’t find any better way of going about it. Täubchen has also buttered a slice of bread, but has only another filling slice of bread to lay on top.

  “Now you’re free and you still can’t get anything good to eat,” Edith says suddenly.

  This isn’t quite true.

  “The food at Ellis Island was excellent,” Josef hears himself saying. “We got everything we asked for. Hans Dörsam was our spokesman. He insisted that they honor the Geneva Convention. Starting in 1946 we got our own kitchen and our own cook, we ate sauerbraten, schnitzel, Königsberger Klopse. The food was so good that the guards wanted to eat with us. We sat in the former registry room, a giant room with chandeliers and a view of the ocean.”

  It’s all true, but why is he telling them this?

  “Why did you want your own cook?” Carl asks.

  “It was to make sure that no Jew would be cooking for us.” Dörsam’s words.

  It gets quiet, and they look at him as if they are seeing him for the first time.

  “You can’t talk like that here, Josef.”

  “No, no, you’ve got the wrong idea. The Germans were afraid that someone would poison them.”

  Carl clears his throat, exchanges glances with Edith. “Even then, one doesn’t say that.”

  He looks at Edith as well, but she stares at her plate.