The Radio Operator

by Ulla Lenze

  Schmuederrich shook his head. “There, up ahead, they’ll let us in. They know me. Don’t dawdle now, little man.”

  The flyers they’d printed were all over the sidewalk, caked with horseshit. He had FREE AMERICA! stuck to the tip of his shoe. BE UNITED! . . . BE A NATION, BE AMERICANS, AND BE TRUE TO YOURSELVES! Supposedly the words of George Washington. Today the German American Bund was celebrating Washington’s birthday. He told himself this and knew it wasn’t true. He touched a single patch of stubble on his chin that he had missed while shaving. His fingers kept compulsively going back to it as they neared the turnstiles, back to the rough, itchy stub of a hair. His fingertips twisted it this way and that. Once he tried to rip it out on the sly, his head lowered. He was short; his hat formed a screen.

  Beyond the turnstiles the shouting abruptly stopped. It was the quiet that comes after a fight—nothing settled, just a brief ceasefire. They walked down long, dimly lit hallways, Schmuederrich counting exits, explaining that they had to get to the front, he, as a Bund official, had very good seats, almost up on the stage, and after they had walked what seemed like an entire block, they finally stepped into the stadium. He knew the sight from the newspaper. Usually the floor on which thousands of people now sat was an ice rink for the New York Rangers or a boxing ring where Armstrong defeated his challenger Montanez. But now he, who was no fan of crowds, was right in the middle of it, and he could hardly breathe. A mass of people, bright in the floodlights. A hot, burning atmosphere, almost euphoric, it swept up everything and threatened to sweep him up too. We’ve done it, their voices said, all mixing together. We’ve managed to gather despite the hatred out there, the lack of understanding, the fury.

  Meanwhile the press was reporting that the devil was on the loose in New York tonight. And George Washington stood ten feet tall at the back of the stage. Couldn’t say a thing in his white curly wig, his bucket top boots, his coat buttoned only halfway down his chest, as if a burst of wind had opened it. BE UNITED. The swastika was banned, but it had been smuggled in here in a new design, rising into the air like a skyscraper, three-dimensional, surrounded by American flags. BE AMERICANS.

  Schmuederrich pulled him into the fourth row. People drew their knees in as they pushed past. The flat, cocked hats the ladies wore blocked his view. He sank into his seat almost with relief, a hideout of flowers, feathers, and tulle. Schmuederrich, ever gracious, greeted people left and right. He complained about the “riffraff outside” and was met with agreement.

  Schmuederrich was beloved. He created this flattering atmosphere of exclusivity and importance. But what was Josef’s role? What did Schmuederrich want from him? He turned to look around, and a pair of kids in the row behind them, a girl in a dirndl, a little boy in a man’s suit, stuck their tongues out at him.

  He withdrew deeper into himself. Suddenly regiments of flagbearers flooded the aisles. Onstage a group of storm troopers appeared, their gaze directed at nothing. The drums played a march. Enforced solemnity all around, he scarcely dared breathe. “This is incredible,” said Schmuederrich. “This is like Nuremberg!”

  Josef nodded. The wiry beard hair, when his fingertip passed over it, was capable of filling his entire consciousness. He could concentrate on a tiny point, allow himself to be absorbed by it. He could, like he’d done in the church pew with his parents, when a bit of lint from his sleeve danced in the light flooding in through the windows, exchange the big for something small.

  Applause roared from the bleachers. A speaker assured the people that they weren’t doing anything evil here. More applause. That the American press slandered them because they told the truth. Because they, like the best minds in Germany, warned against the dangerous mixing of the races—that was their duty. For everyone knew that a “standard human race,” such as Communism advocated for, was an illusion, a blasphemous error that only served the goal of making the world the same everywhere, in order to more easily control it. No one here had anything against other races. But each race should protect and honor its particular God-given qualities.

  He knew it all by heart. He’d had to proofread it again and again before printing it. Every time he read it he had the same thought, that the qualities they were talking about weren’t something that held true for all eternity. After all, he himself had gone from being a Rhinelander to being a New Yorker.

  Where was Fritz Kuhn, anyway? Kuhnazi. Chief of the Ratzis. That’s how he was mocked in the press. Schmuederrich had said that they were mainly here for Kuhn.

  An hour had already passed. He thought about whether he should go to Sam’s Pizza on the corner of 125th afterward or get out a stop early, then he could buy Chinese dumplings and heat them up at home. Work at the print shop didn’t start until eleven tomorrow morning. They had been working nonstop the past couple of days, printing flyers, brochures too. You could buy them at the tables all around, plus, despite the ban, swastika pins paired with little American flags.

  He was wasting his time. He’d rather be at home, sitting on the couch or in front of his radio. Especially now that there was W2DKJ. He followed her across the frequencies; he recognized her handwriting by now, slightly halting and jumpy. Mostly updates on the weather in the Catskills. Still snow, lots of snow. “Grab your skis and head on up, New Yorkers!” Yesterday he actually responded: “I’d love to come!” You could say anything you wanted, after all. She laughed, then they switched over to a different frequency, where they were alone, and she said, “No, I’ll come down there first.”

  Finally the applause was for Fritz Kuhn himself. His sizable belly was held in by a belt and a tight-fitting brown uniform. He stood there at the lectern and let his gaze sweep imperiously around the hundred-meter expanse of the stadium.

  “You all have heard of me, through the Jewish-controlled press, as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and a long tail.”

  The crowd laughed. It was a loud, lurching sound that came from all directions and went out in all directions, stopping nowhere, continually renewing itself as Kuhn kept up his derision. Kuhn meanwhile didn’t make the slightest effort to rein in his German accent; he rather seemed to flaunt it. Yorkville was teeming with such people.

  “Vee doo not say zet oll Tschus are Communists . . .”

  Kuhn paused. Looked to one side. A young man had jumped onstage—he didn’t get far; the brownshirts fell on him instantly, like he was a fire that needed to be put out. The man now hung pitifully over the edge of the stage, blows raining down on him, a tangle of legs, arms, hands; in the middle a face twisted in pain. The police stormed onto the stage, pulled the brownshirts off, hauled the man out. Boos, shouting, whistles, suddenly a glimpse of a pair of white underwear, hairy legs—they had pulled his pants down. Waves of laughter from the stadium. The police led the man off the stage.

  Kuhn didn’t move. His hands resting on the lectern, bent slightly forward, he patiently watched what was happening. Then he began speaking again.

  “A Jew,” said Schmuederrich.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Look, there’s a small delegation of Jews sitting up front. It was arranged with the German American Bund.”

  While Kuhn went on to demand a just America, a white America, an America not ruled by Jews, Josef tried to remember what kind of underwear he was wearing. Plaid?

  “It was brave of him, though,” he said to Schmuederrich.

  “Brave? When the SA really wants to rough a guy up, it looks different. These people here know nothing’s going to happen to them. Let them say what they want. He’s got his little crowd of supporters. Tomorrow he’ll be celebrated in all the newspapers as an anti-fascist.”

  A soprano performed “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Immediately afterward, shouts of “Free America!” mixed with cries of the banned “Sieg Heil!” Schmuederrich was busy shaking hands. He waved Josef over to him. Josef pointed apologetically at his wristwatch, could see Schmuederrich’s lips forming words, but he quickly fled outside.

  A
t a take-out place on 126th he devoured a giant portion of rice and beef in a spicy sauce with a Senegalese name.

  His building didn’t have an elevator. Six flights of stairs. He always tried to find that day’s rhythm, one that he could keep up all the way to the top.

  He was half a flight to the top when he heard the ringing of the telephone. He now took the stairs two at a time, unlocked the door, and reached for the phone on the wall out of breath. The ringing had stopped. He put the receiver back on the hook. For a while he stood motionless in his dark apartment. The dog licked his hand.

  He had sent his brother a photo of Princess.

  Impressive animal. But not all women like dogs. Did you think of that before you got her?

  This was Carl’s way of trying to find something out about his distant brother.

  After standing still for some time, feeling like he’d forgotten his way around, he turned on the overhead light. Again he could see the face twisted in pain, the bright white underwear amid the uniformed men, the hairy legs, the arms pinned back.

  He put on Bunny Berigan, “I Can’t Get Started,” poured himself some whiskey, and fell back onto the couch. He put his feet up on the coffee table and felt the stack of papers shift. Goebbels. For Arthur. He still had to translate it. No, he still had to refuse.

  He grabbed a newspaper and learned that the television was the next big thing; it would change society, just as the radio had in the twenties.

  The phone rang again. This time he got to it in time.

  “You took off so soon, little man. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come to the Old Heidelberg next Tuesday at seven. There are a few German businessmen who want to meet you. The textile business. Could be interesting for you financially with those radio skills of yours. Dörsam will be there too. Don’t let your nerves get the better of you, you sissy.”

  Josef knew Dörsam fleetingly from the Rotesandbar, where Dörsam usually stood at the bar drinking beer. Gray hair, bald spot, wiry, an engineer at Ford, old—the kind of person who had always been old.

  He went into the bathroom and shaved for the second time that day, staring at the sad hard water spots on the fixtures. He took a rag and started cleaning. Whenever he cleaned, he felt like he was being watched. It wasn’t possible for him to simply clean; he felt eyes on him every time. It was the only thing that kept him from cleaning—nothing else did—but today he made himself do it.

  After he finished, he sat down at the desk with his radio. A call sign, ON4JC, came through: Jerome in Belgium. Jerome’s English was quite decent. But when he realized that Josef was German, because his accent was thicker than ever before, he hissed something that sounded like “Asshole,” and after that there was only empty static.

  9

  New York, February 1939

  SO THERE STOOD W2DKJ. A SHORT, PALE FIGURE UNDER THE boathouse awning. He was a bit taken aback—she was very young.

  “Hello, W2DKJ.” He walked up to her with hand outstretched.

  “Nice we can talk without everybody listening in for once,” she said with a laugh. He guessed twenty, twenty-one. She was a bit taller than him. Her blond hair fell onto her shoulders from under a sturdy hat.

  “May I, Lauren?” He stepped forward to join her under the awning and closed the umbrella. The park was empty and rainy—a disaster for a date. If that’s what this was. He wasn’t exactly sure. Plus, she wasn’t pretty, not really. Her lips were too thin, her face square and boyish. He offered her a cigarette. She reached for one, and he tried some comradely conversation, asked about frequencies and times.

  Then a silence ensued. She pulled on her cigarette and nodded, though he hadn’t said anything. Rain beat down on the sandy path. Together they looked at a wall of water, the park in a blur behind it.

  “So what brings you to New York anyway?” he asked. Then she started talking, and he quickly found out that she had made a break for it. That the aunt she was staying with on the Upper East Side still thought it was just a visit, but Lauren was checking the classifieds for apartments and had her eye on a furnished room in Brooklyn. Lauren spoke with the conspiratorial intimacy that sometimes sets in between complete strangers when they know they won’t ever see each other again—in a remote harbor bar, on a train ride, on the beach. Yes, she was looking for a job—didn’t matter what kind, could be in a kitchen, as a salesgirl, just so long as she could stand on her own two feet. Later she wanted to go to college. He didn’t know anyone who had gone to college and said uncertainly, “That’s a good idea.”

  Lauren looked him in the eye as they talked. She had none of the self-consciousness of other women, the kind who played with their hair a lot, laughed too loud, and locked both themselves and him into a perpetual smile.

  “The Catskills. That’s where New Yorkers go for vacation, right?”

  “My parents run a hotel in Woodstock. No vacation for us. Our vacation was coming to New York City.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  “Was it the same for you, back then? That you felt you just had to get away? You’re not from here, right?”

  “No, I’m not from here.”

  A pause set in. She waited for him to keep talking.

  “It was different. I didn’t have a choice.” She looked confused, ready to object—as if he didn’t understand how serious her situation was. But he didn’t want to talk about war and hunger. He wanted instead to hear her voice, a voice that was more familiar to him than her face. “Tell me more about the hotel.”

  “A small family hotel. With a ballroom, a dance orchestra, and a swimming pool outside with a view of the mountains.”

  “Sounds horrible. I’d take off too.”

  “Cut it out, Joe,” she said with a laugh. “You’re not in my shoes.”

  He felt the sleeve of her coat brush against his when she took a step back, away from the rain, and he used the moment to glance down. She wore shoes with tall heels. If she took them off she’d be the same height as him.

  He lit up another cigarette, held the pack out to her again, but this time she shook her head.

  “And where are you from, Joe?”

  “Germany.”

  “Germany,” she repeated and paused in case he wanted to elaborate.

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to give in to the indignity of having to state where he stood on things, as had been expected of Germans for some time now. Finally he said, “You know, Lauren, in America you’re actually supposed to act as if you were always here. I always liked that. It’s only recently that things are different.”

  She nodded and took a step out from under the awning. “It’s stopped.”

  They went south, the majestic Plaza Hotel in sight ahead of them. He told her that he particularly liked Central Park at this time of year, when the trees were bare, the view of the surrounding buildings clear. Lauren liked the park’s hills and dales, the winding paths, and she explained that the architects who designed it in the nineteenth century had tried to reproduce the natural American landscape rather than the manicured parks of Europe. He gave her a look to show he was impressed. She pulled a New York travel guide from her pocket: “It’s all in here.”

  She told him about the world’s fair that would take place in New York two months from now, with new innovations, like television and a machine for washing dishes, and a big meetup for amateur radio operators. According to Lauren this was something you just had to go to—after all, over fifty thousand hams were registered in the US, so there were sure to be at least several hundred coming. That was amazing, almost like a family reunion. She lifted her eyes and looked at the skyscrapers, a gray set of teeth surrounding the park.

  She reminded him of himself when he first arrived in the city fifteen years ago. The excitement of the beginning, the many beginnings—at that age, everything is a beginning. What had he actually been doing in all the time since then? Not much. Hadn’t built anything, hadn’t started anything. It
was more like he’d mastered the art of disappearing. As if that was the one thing he’d succeeded at. The cabin in the woods in Harlem. Arthur was right. But things were going well for him, at least most of the time! The whole city was his.

  She interrupted his thoughts: “What was your farthest contact?”

  “Sydney. You?”

  “Haiti. Not very far.”

  Where had she even learned to operate a radio? he asked. It wasn’t exactly typical for women.

  “Sure it is,” she objected. “At my school they offered classes for girls. I even built my first radio myself.”

  “How long ago were these classes?” he asked.

  “Oh, a long time ago. At least four years.”

  “Yes, that is a long time,” he sighed.

  She laughed. It was the first time he’d hinted at the age difference between them. A test without clear result. He told her about his apartment, that it seemed to him more and more like a radio station, like a window to the world. It was quickly apparent that they both shared the joy of turning a dial a few millimeters and drawing a whole continent closer, then turning the dial again to send it away and make yourself disappear. Feeling your pulse quicken when voices came through, never knowing whom they belonged to, observing your own reactions as if through a magnifying glass.

  Was this her first time meeting with a man she didn’t know? He’d have liked to ask her. Whatever the case, Lauren didn’t seem the least bit self-conscious. Maybe because she was constantly interacting with strangers at the hotel? Did the thought please him? Her lack of insecurity made him insecure. Suddenly he didn’t know if he was supposed to let her, the lady, walk ahead of him whenever they came across a big puddle that left only a narrow bit of dry sidewalk, or if he as the man should go first and make sure the way was clear. Once, because he hesitated and Lauren finally went ahead, he lost his balance and stepped in a puddle. His foot got soaked immediately, sock and shoe both. He tried not to show it.