The Radio Operator

by Ulla Lenze

  “No?” he asks and grabs the last slice of bread. “What does one say, then?” This too just slips out of him. He knows he’s only making things worse.

  “If you want to joke around, you’re in the wrong place.”

  For a while the only sound is the clatter of the silverware on the plates. He feels ashamed. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. He thinks of the water that surrounded them. It sloshed and crashed, and the wind sang in their ears. Birthday cakes with swastikas made of chocolate icing. Ingesting swastikas. “Pull yourselves together, gentlemen.” Swastikas carved into doorframes. Not being able to speak. And then, when you can speak, like now, you say the wrong thing.

  “They gave the kids sweets,” says Edith suddenly. “They seemed very friendly, the Americans. Didn’t they?”

  Täubchen nods. If he’d been arrested just four months later he would have landed in the electric chair. Just like the people after him. Wartime law would have applied. A pure formality, the only difference between him and the dead. “Yes, the Americans are very nice,” he agrees.

  That night he wakes up. Something is different. There’s a sound, and the sound slowly attaches itself to a word, and the word is rain.

  The first rain in weeks.

  The patter of raindrops is loud; it drowns out the creaking of the floorboards. He creeps through the kitchen to the balcony. He wants to be closer to the rain. The trees sway in the yard. Suddenly the air is cool. He realizes there’s something his body is looking for, right here.

  He leans against the wall, the cold brick at his back, and tries to draw the coolness into himself and hold on to it.

  When he opens his eyes, he sees a light on in the bedroom. Has he woken Edith and Carl? He hears their voices. He can hear Edith.

  “He’s a bachelor, Carl, he doesn’t know any better. He never had a woman to look after him.”

  “Sure, you can prattle on carelessly like him when you haven’t built anything and you’re not responsible for anything or anyone.”

  “Carl, don’t get so angry.”

  He holds his breath. Before he can learn anything more about himself, he creeps on tiptoe back to his room.

  In the morning, cool air blows through the open window. Reaches him as he lies half dreaming, half awake. Hands holding his. Musicians playing in a pavilion in the park. The taste of caramel candies. Carl in a bulky coat—it’s Josef’s coat; Carl, the younger brother, has to wear it. Facets of light reflecting in the tall glass of beer their father holds in his hand.

  Operetta music drifts in from the kitchen. Carl’s whistling accompaniment sets in. Josef picks himself up, gets dressed, and walks into the kitchen at a quarter to seven. The glass eye is lying on the table.

  “Good morning, brother of mine!” blares Carl.

  Edith smiles shyly in her bathrobe. “Coffee?” Her voice is still thick with sleep. Both seem like they got a late start today. Probably the storm, the heavy rain and their conversation last night. Is that what kept them awake? He feels a twinge of jealousy.

  “Can I come with?” he asks.

  “Come with? Where?”

  “Making deliveries.”

  “You’re not registered yet. People could ask questions.”

  Carl turns his back to him and puts his glass eye back in.

  “That’s true. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Edith presses a coffee cup into his hand, instead of just placing it on the table like she usually does.

  She can tell I don’t have anyone, he thinks.

  “Tomorrow,” says Carl. “But you don’t talk to the customers. Not a word.”

  6

  Neuss, June 1949

  New York, February 1939

  THE DELIVERY TRUCK IS PARKED OUTSIDE. CARL WEARS THE white shopkeeper’s smock, which makes him look like a doctor. Josef has on Carl’s nut-brown suit; Edith took it in so it would fit him. Now it’s his. A lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he props his elbow in the open window. Carl gives him a look but then just puts the truck into gear. The wind smokes the cigarette for him.

  He likes playing Carl’s sidekick. Boxes get pushed this way and that, papers get signed, and he holds on tight to whatever Carl puts in his hand. Shaving cream and detergent jostle together in the back of the truck. The bottles clink; a comfortable rhythm sets in. At every stop Carl says, “This is my brother. He’s helping out today,” and before any of the customers can ask a question, Carl quickly asks what they think about the new hair tonic.

  When they’re in the truck, Carl has a wealth of jokes to pull from, but only of the sort that can’t be told at the kitchen table: “Two friends get to talking. One of them asks: ‘When you see a pretty woman, what’s the first thing you look at?’ The other one says: ‘My wife.’ ‘Your wife?’ ‘Yeah, to make sure she’s not looking!’”

  The sky is totally clear. A radiant blue. It makes the town look even more ruined. Carl seems in high spirits, downright relaxed.

  Did Edith talk to Carl? Put in a good word for her brother-in-law? It just takes time. It’s all new for him. And it must be a shock to suddenly come back to Germany. To a completely devastated country. His homeland!

  They stop in front of a small grocery store. A boy takes the delivery and signs his father’s name.

  Josef thinks of Peter, also a child.

  “By the way, I used to make deliveries too. Not soap, the things we printed.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I went all over New York.”

  “And now you’re going all over Neuss.”

  He sees himself, shoulders hunched, walking through Harlem with that shy boy on that unbelievably cold day, so cold it felt like the city would shatter under their feet. February 1939. The handcart clattered over icy, hard-packed snow, but it wasn’t carrying soap. It was carrying filth.

  The fact that they printed everything except for Communist literature comforted him, let him think it was just a job. The flyers got tossed from tall buildings by the bucketful. They hung up in the trees and got stuck under people’s shoes. The rest were handed out to passersby by speakers on soapboxes who shouted their contents into the streets.

  Above them a fiery blue sky. He kept looking up at it, while next to him the boy struggled with the handcart. Josef was training him. The boy was supposed to handle the deliveries on his own soon, then Josef could go back to the heated print shop.

  As often as they’d delivered to the American Nazi Party’s headquarters, every time they went the address seemed to have moved a few buildings down. His eyes searched the storefronts. Sam’s Famous Pizzeria. Barber shop. Smoke shop. Then finally Nancy’s Beauty Parlor, a salon that specialized in hair straightening. In the doorway it smelled of food. Without a word, the hairstylist, a Negro woman, pointed to the back. He touched a finger to the brim of his hat. They had to go one floor up. A nest of cigarette butts on the floor helped him find the door. No sign anywhere. The Party operated in secret.

  He knocked four times—that’s what they’d worked out with Stahrenberg. The door opened. Stahrenberg extended his hand in the Hitler salute. Josef stared at his tiepin, a metal swastika. The boy hastily placed the bundle of flyers on the table. Josef had Stahrenberg sign.

  In the hair salon a toddler had appeared and was pressing his nose against the windowpane. He turned to them and pointed an outstretched finger at Josef, laughing. “We used to print greeting cards,” Josef said sheepishly to the hairstylist. She didn’t respond.

  Smoke hung in the air. The metallic winter sun was like a molten lump of coal in the sky. At the 116th Street subway station they carried the cart down the rusty stairs.

  The train was packed. He told the boy to lean against the doors and keep a firm grip on the handcart. He himself stood in the middle. With effort he reached a grab handle and hung on tight as the movement of the train pulled his ribs apart.

  It was just six stations, but when they reemerged into daylight, suddenly the old world had been swapped out for a new one, poor
for rich, shabby for ornate. They stood in a ravine of twelve-story buildings that radiated might. Turrets and gables, castles soaring into the sky. Park Avenue.

  He was nervous. A flyer meant for the Negro leader Samuel Jordan, DON’T BUY WHERE YOU CAN’T WORK, had been sent by mistake to the elegant Mrs. Dollings, director of the Park Avenue Patriots, while their flyer, AMERICA FOR WHITE PEOPLE, had been sent to Jordan. The boy had mislabeled the parcels. Arthur had screamed at the boy so viciously that he hadn’t said a word since.

  They stepped into a heated, brightly lit lobby adorned with gold and marble. The doorman leapt up and pointed toward the service entrance. “Mrs. Dollings is personally expecting us”—words that he had gone over in his head beforehand. They waited for the doorman to call up, the boy staring at the upholstered armchairs and mahogany table. No one invited them to sit.

  The grate closed soundlessly. The elevator boy took them to the twelfth floor, the penthouse, now considered the last word in fashionable living. Once it was barely good enough for laundry facilities, storage rooms, and servants’ quarters. In the perfumed hallway they were encased in that silence only the rich were entitled to. They went past apartment doors spaced a generous distance apart from one another to an open door at the very end of the hall. There they were received by a housemaid. He gave the hesitating boy a push, and when he noticed the look on the maid’s face he added kindly, “Oh, go ahead, kid.”

  The girl led them into a parlor, the kind of room he had only ever seen in Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers movies. Oriental carpets, antiques, an enormous chandelier, and behind the glass doors a snowy balcony. Everything here was dignified and harmonious. The girl took his hat and coat. He wasn’t even wearing a tie, and he’d been wearing the same shirt for a week. The skin on his face began to get hot, as if he had a bad sunburn.

  He heard Mrs. Dollings’s voice and quickly wiped his moist hand on his pants. But there was no handshake. She wore a long, dark dress, was tall and gaunt, and smiled in the warm-hearted, almost selfless manner of very high-placed people—statesmen, movie stars, priests—who from the lofty perch of their position are able to display great kindness toward anyone they choose.

  “Good day, ma’am. How are you?” he asked, feeling that he was being hopelessly ingratiating. He was relieved when she returned the question. “Our delivery boy wants to apologize to you.”

  But Mrs. Dollings grasped the boy’s hand and led him into the daylight shining through the glass doors. The boy wore a coat that was too big for him and shoes with busted seams.

  “How old are you?”

  “He’s fourteen, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Dollings shook her head—“Nonsense, he’s no more than twelve”—and then sighed and said something about illegal child labor, how it didn’t reflect well on America.

  Next she started waving the flyer around, AMERICA FOR WHITE PEOPLE, and started telling Josef about major changes that needed to be made. She ignored the table, as if she feared the unavoidable closeness it would bring. She remained standing, and he made an effort, as he stood next to her, not to inadvertently touch her.

  “Do you see this word here? This we must avoid.” Her index finger, its nail painted red, rested on the word that was to be avoided; she didn’t say it aloud, and when he did, she snorted. “Everyone knows by now who we mean when we write ‘alien’ or ‘minority.’ We mustn’t let ourselves be associated with the rabble, like those in the Christian Front.”

  He nodded sympathetically.

  “The same goes for Hitler.”

  “What do we put instead?” he asked carefully.

  “‘Führer,’” she said with a clear voice.

  “‘Führer,’” he repeated.

  “Alternately, we can also write ‘the George Washington of Germany and Europe.’ Or ‘the humanitarian and bringer of peace.’”

  He nodded, as if he were making mental notes. Mrs. Dollings was now writing on the flyer, crossing things out and making corrections. “We now say ‘new leadership’ instead of ‘revolution’ and ‘save America first’ instead of ‘Heil Hitler.’”

  He actually had nothing to do with the content, and that was important to him. He just fed everything into the mimeograph machine. Normally he didn’t make deliveries either, only when a new delivery boy had to be trained. Maybe she was confusing him with Arthur? Arthur who was full of understanding and always showed interest. Sometimes when Josef went into his office while he was on the phone, his boss would roll his eyes. “Why do we print the stuff, then?” Josef had asked once.

  “Why? I have to make sure the money adds up so I can pay all of you,” replied Arthur.

  “You must be very proud of your country, Joe. Have you thought of going back?”

  “Back? I’m an American.”

  Mrs. Dollings raised an eyebrow and smiled inquisitively. “You mustn’t misunderstand me. We are so full of admiration for the Führer!”

  “Not everyone is. The New York Times for example, they aren’t.”

  She looked at him without a word, then she nodded to the housemaid. “Let me help you find the door, Mr. Klein.” Josef felt her watching him as he stiffly left the room.

  The truth was, in the beginning he actually was proud. He had written his brother a letter and congratulated him on the strongman who was helping Germany to assume a new significant role in Europe. The papers were saying the same thing then. But Carl wasn’t having it. He never wrote a word in response.

  A thin layer of fresh snow covered the street. The boy kept trying to find spots where there were no footsteps. The cart lurched from side to side. He really was just a child still.

  A dull ache flared up behind his forehead. They passed by a pharmacy and he considered buying some aspirin, but he didn’t want to show any weakness in front of the boy. If he had his choice he would have gone home. But they had to go to the headquarters of the German American Bund, where Hans Schmuederrich wanted to discuss the mock-ups for February 20th.

  A cold wind blew from the East River. Darkness fell. The cold smelled of snow. Of fire. Of damp basements. They turned from Third Avenue onto 86th Street. The Germania bookstore already had its shutters down. He was supposed to pick up something for Arthur there, speeches from the Reichstag that Arthur had translated and then sold. Josef had started a translation once, but he had had to look up too many words, and some he couldn’t even find. “Volkszorn” for example—the people’s anger—seemed to exist only in German.

  He and the boy kept walking down 86th, past the Schwarzer Adler, Café Geiger, the Jägerhaus, and the United Bavarians of Greater New York. From the beer halls came the sound of people enjoying themselves. Little red swastika flags adorned shop windows and the windows of the apartments above.

  Two young women in fur coats walked past them, arm in arm, talking loudly in German. Reflexively he placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder and steered him to the other side of the street.

  They walked toward signs bearing words like “Möbelladen,” “Konditorei,” and “Bremenhaus.” German words in New York’s rigid street grid. Whimsical confections, like Bienenstich and Frankfurter Kranz, framed by cold geometry. In the beginning he had come to this neighborhood as one might to a grave. Did the Germans not notice? It may have started with the honest desire to cobble together an imitation of the old country, but as the memory grew less distinct with each generation, foreign elements had crept in. By now he probably didn’t notice himself anymore. He felt something like comfort when he went to Schaller & Weber and ate mettwurst. But he knew it didn’t taste like it did in Düsseldorf. Maybe it started with the pastureland, the sun, the wind. Because even the pigs and cows tasted different than they did back home.

  They stepped inside a bright, three-story building and went up to the second floor. In German he read PRESSEBÜRO, SCHATZMEISTER, SEKRETARIAT—press office, treasurer, administration. “Herr Schmuederrich is expecting you. Go on in, Herr Klein,” the secretary called through the open door.

&
nbsp; Schmuederrich, seated at a polished oval desk, stood up and held out his hand. He was a tall, big man. When he laughed he displayed a large gap between his front teeth that had something childlike about it, as if he still carried his baby teeth around in a little jar in his pocket. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man.

  There was a big rally planned for February 20th at Madison Square Garden. They were printing the flyers, posters, and speeches. Josef glanced through all of it and nodded. Mein Bundesführer, Josef read. Fellow white Americans and other nonparasitic guests! He didn’t feel good. There was a buzzing inside his head. He looked at Schmuederrich, who sat across from him and proudly held forth on the security measures.

  “We’re expecting twenty thousand patriots! And La Guardia is providing seventeen hundred policemen for our protection! I’m liking this country more and more!”

  They spoke German, which felt hard and sharp-edged in his mouth, not like English, which flowed like liquid over the tongue. They had first met last year at the Rotesandbar in Yorkville, but right away Schmuederrich had started talking as if they’d known each other for years. “I might look like I have a small dick. But I’ve got a big one.” And he’d gone on: “We can’t do enough cheating and spreading our German seed around.” The women had squealed, Eeek, but with a certain excitement. A light and carefree feeling had set in around the heavyset Schmuederrich. A kind of fun.

  “How’s that radio hobby of yours? You’re a bit of a tinkerer—am I remembering that right?”

  Josef nodded. He had heard somewhere recently that Schmuederrich’s American wife wanted a divorce.

  “Let me see that photo again, would you?”

  Josef took out the photo. He always had it with him. He and Princess in front of his radio equipment; the dog looked as tall as him.

  Schmuederrich seemed to be thinking about something. “Sometime soon I’m going to put you in touch with some German businessmen. They’re looking for new means of communicating with Europe. Could be interesting for you. Some nice cash on the side. Would you be interested?”