The Radio Operator

by Ulla Lenze

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “They turned up the pressure.”

  “So you went along with it out of fear?”

  “If you want to put it like that, sure.”

  Carl holds his empty beer glass at an angle, pondering this. “Fear. I was afraid too. But there are more important things.”

  Josef nods. He can live with this result. And of course he hasn’t told him everything yet. He has something else up his sleeve, and that gives him a good feeling.

  “But why didn’t you tell me this long ago?” Carl keeps probing; he too can sense that they’re not done yet.

  “Fear.”

  He ran out of cigarettes long ago. He sure could use one right now. They’re very expensive.

  “Fear again? Come now, my dear man. What could I do to you?”

  Anything you wanted, he thinks. “Throw me out.”

  “Oh, forget about that. One more time, why did it take you so long to tell me?”

  “I don’t know. Gandhi was shot last year. Bad things are happening all the time.”

  “You’re comparing yourself to Gandhi?”

  “He sat in jail a long time too.”

  He sees a vein start to swell on Carl’s forehead. “I’m trying to have a rational conversation here, man to man, brother to brother.”

  “The victor decides what’s right and what’s wrong. Or don’t they? A few miles away the Russians are in charge.”

  “Those who are in power aren’t automatically in the right, Josef. We were able to learn that lesson all too well over the past few years.”

  He feels a fire in his chest, tearing him in every direction at once.

  “You weren’t even at the front, Carl.”

  His brother looks at him in disbelief. “Have you ever tried to sleep when there are bombs falling on you night after night? When you’re in a bunker with water up to your waist and you have to hold your kids in your arms?”

  His brother is shouting.

  And he hasn’t even said everything he wants to say yet. Now he has to be quick, no doubt about it: “Just because you listened to Radio London doesn’t make you a resistance fighter.”

  And Carl screams, “Who do you think you are? What are you getting at? Why would you say such a thing?”

  And he hears Edith’s footsteps coming closer and then quickly moving away again. He stands up. Carl gets up too. Dishes clatter. He feels his heart pumping and suddenly a barrier has come down.

  “You always were an idiot,” he hears Carl saying.

  And now he rears back and slugs him. Just like long ago when Carl was a little squirt and easy to beat up—two years are a huge difference at that age. But not anymore. And yet Carl doesn’t hit back now, and he doesn’t shout either. No, Carl reaches up and touches his eye for a second, seems to be checking something, and Josef skulks over to the door and out onto the landing and almost falls down the stairs in shame. Yes, he seems to be stepping into shame, to be sinking into it, and he’s surprised, when he gets outside, in the pitch-black street, that there’s still anything left of him. He feels his face glowing red, his heart hammering in his throat. It’s painful, what kind of an idiot is he, but he doesn’t dare go back, not yet, and so he walks down the street, which mercifully swallows him up. Postwar Germany is saving energy. The darkness does him good.

  Then he starts to run. He’s panting, running over the bridge, over the Rhine, then to the old buildings on the opposite bank in Düsseldorf. They stand there like they’ve been glued to each other, the ones he knows from his childhood, the ones that have survived and that now remind him of the buildings in the Bronx, which at the time reminded him of the buildings in Düsseldorf, and now he’s out in the fields, where the air embraces him, humid and warm. He drops onto some hay in a barn, and when he wakes up in the morning he gets up immediately, knocks the dust off his suit, and heads back.

  He gets back to Sternstraße around noon, sweaty, sunburned, thirsty, and hungry. The boy opens the door, looks back at his mother. Edith sets down a basket of laundry, smooths the front of her blouse. “Sit. I’ll make you an omelette.”

  From the far corner of the living room he hears Carl’s thundering footsteps. A knot immediately forms in his stomach. But Carl is already calling from the hallway: “I’m sorry, Josef. Come on, let’s make peace.” He turns around and throws his arms around his brother’s neck.

  28

  New York, November 1939

  SHE GOT UP OUT OF BED, HER SHORT NYLON NIGHTIE CLINGING to her thighs, charged with static electricity. She had very white legs. He liked her white legs. She opened the window; cool air and the smell of burning leaves breezed inside. At this time of year small piles of them were swept together on the curb and lit on fire.

  Frost on the dormer windowpanes, fog from the ocean. Europe was at war. Germany had invaded Poland.

  Lauren walked around the room on her tiptoes.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “So I don’t disturb anyone.”

  “But there’s nobody here.”

  “Habit.”

  The landlady had broken her leg and was in the hospital, which was why he could spend the night at Lauren’s. For the first time. For him there was something slightly momentous about it.

  The view from Lauren’s bed was of the sky, against which the delicate leaves of the evergreens spread out like fans. The trees made him think of Asia somehow. A neighborhood of single-family homes with front yards, barely any immigrants.

  * * *

  Lauren ran water in the tub, took some soap, and went to work on her underwear. “Primitive.” She laughed. Lauren had taught him that you must only eat soft-boiled eggs with a plastic spoon; to his amazement, any kind of metal, even silver, was all wrong. Once Lauren told him that, as a girl, she had attached wings to her shoulders—an image he could no longer get out of his head.

  A wasp came reeling into the room, exhausted from the summer. He watched it with patient sympathy.

  “Come back to bed,” he said.

  She got back in bed and lay by his side so they could look at each other. She had a crooked line to the right of her nose in the morning because she slept on her side; by around noon the line would be gone.

  “Don’t you want to go back to your comfortable life in the Catskills?”

  She ignored the question. “Tell me again what it was like back then.”

  She always seemed moved when he told her that starting when he was a very young boy he had tended cows in exchange for milk and butter. That’s what things were like. Then at fourteen he was taken out of school, and after that working for the farmer was all he did. He turned over in bed, slipped down to her feet, and started massaging them. He knew she liked that.

  “Yes, I know how to milk a cow. Does that make me attractive?”

  She laughed. He bit her calf. He crawled over her, his foot in her face. She put up with it—he waited for her to knock his foot away, but she put up with him. Yes, she even started giggling. Now he could feel her nose with his big toe.

  “And your childhood, Lauren?”

  She crawled out from under him and lay down beside him.

  “I was an odd kid,” she said. “My parents told me, they said, ‘You’re an odd kid,’ but they said it lovingly and proudly. I went through a phase where I couldn’t explain anything with words. I’d say I could explain it better if I draw it, it’s simpler that way. They didn’t understand that. Because of course drawing is much harder. But it was true in a way. Back then I had the sense that words weren’t enough.”

  He thought about this. Even more unusual, he thought, than the drawing or Lauren’s difficulty explaining certain things was the idea that Lauren told her parents anything at all.

  The nights were different now. As soon as the war started all amateur operators had to silence their radios. On the other hand, now Lauren was in his life. As if she had walked in through a revolving door, and the radio had gone out the other si
de.

  She recommended books for him to read.

  A tall bookshelf on the one straight wall of the attic room was filled with books. Organized into sections, one of them novels by and about immigrants. He read the titles: Jews Without Money, Call It Sleep, Christ in Concrete. He wondered if Lauren had owned the books before—that is, before they’d met—or had bought them for the express purpose of trying to understand him. He couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  There were always at least three open books on the night table, spines pointed at the ceiling like wounded birds. She read everything all at once. Currently it was a lot about American history. She was applying for another scholarship and getting ready for the next exam—she wanted to start at Columbia next spring at the latest.

  At night, in bed, when Lauren was tired and thinking about something, she squinted a little.

  He worried about her sometimes. She seemed to him like a lamp that burned both day and night. He asked himself whether the hard work at Manhattan General might get to be too much for her. She claimed everything was fine. Said she had a better understanding of life now that she was seeing the world from the gritty streets of New York and not from the lofty perch of a mountain resort.

  But of course, thanks to her family, she always had a safety net beneath her. She could go back home at any time. That was the difference between her and him.

  She went regularly to charity events at the big hotels, like the Waldorf Astoria or the Plaza. She gave blood (“Don’t you want to, Joe?” “No, thanks.” “German blood!” “Very funny.”). She went to demonstrations against Hitler’s Germany. There were two factions: intervene or stay out of it.

  Lauren spoke out in favor of intervention. He argued, “That’s exactly why the Germans in America are so demonized. It’s a way of mobilizing the population so that soon the US can start sending American troops to Europe.”

  “Don’t you realize what’s happening in Europe right now? Germany is invading other countries, plundering and murdering.”

  He nodded. Yes, of course he knew that. And it troubled him. But couldn’t what he was saying also be true? “Not all Germans are like that,” he said quietly. “And yet you still see these posters around the city, DON’T BUY FROM GERMANS.”

  She grew pensive. “Maybe that’s just how it’s got to be, Joe. Maybe there’s no other way.”

  She snored at night. He didn’t know if he should tell her or not. Men were allowed to snore, not women.

  He sometimes felt a shadow over his right shoulder. Someone would come creeping up suddenly and do awful things; they’d throw a bag over his head and start working him over. He could feel it in every sinew of his body. He felt the punches, hooks to the chin, kicks in the stomach, in the head, he lay on the ground, couldn’t breathe anymore, his nose swollen, blood in his throat, the pain so bad he was losing his mind, and yet he didn’t lose consciousness; that relief still wouldn’t come. Every image of violence he had ever seen in his life came flooding back to him, things he’d seen in movies and at night, on dark side streets. The images assailed him.

  Lauren sometimes shook him gently as he slept. “You were screaming.”

  He hadn’t heard anything from Carl since the war began.

  He had started dreaming of his father from time to time. His father going off to war. One minute he’s standing there and looking different than usual: in uniform, ready to become someone else. A vise on his heart. It’s uncomfortable for him how his father tries to say goodbye and doesn’t know how—a clap on the shoulder, that’s all. A few days later his father is dead. Shot in France. They’re moving with a cart to the next rundown flat, his mother, Carl, and him.

  The father who beat him and Carl once a week. He didn’t miss his father. He was happy he wasn’t around anymore. But Carl cried a lot. Carl was just nine, after all. While he, at eleven, suddenly felt like he’d grown up in the span of a day. And really, not much had changed since then.

  She got out of bed and went looking for the blow-dryer. Spent many long minutes blowing warm air on her legs, stomach, and face and made quite a lot of noise. She’d said at one point that the hot air helped her relax. Sometimes she even brought her blow-dryer with her to his place.

  “You’re a spoiled rich girl,” he shouted over the noise.

  “Let’s go to Coney Island,” she shouted back. “The weather’s beautiful.”

  A sky of azure blue—a perfect sky. The sun shining low, touching everything with devotion, and drawing out the colors that lay hidden within.

  They took the train to Brighton Beach, from there they would walk along the beach to the heart of Coney Island. To the left and right, under the copper-green elevated train tracks, were shops selling Russian goods—caviar, sweets, furs. Lauren looked at the displays with interest.

  “So have they still not tried to contact you?” she asked, looking at a white fur coat. But it was his face she was looking at, reflected in the windowpane.

  “I would tell you right away.”

  “Yes, you would.”

  He was working full-time for Arthur again, but the pay was less, because there were fewer jobs. Arthur had sent the Hitlerites packing. “If I don’t the FBI will shut me down.” Mrs. Dollings was outraged over Hitler, the prince of peace, and had resigned as head of the Park Avenue Patriots.

  The Bund had quieted down; its leader, Fritz Kuhn, was behind bars for tax evasion. When he was arrested he was falling-down drunk.

  His deal with Lauren was that he would go to the FBI immediately as soon as his old friends tried to contact him. She was certain they would try to contact him. The war was on, and they needed him.

  Down a narrow side street they saw a bright strip of yellow sand and above it the ink-blue Atlantic. The boardwalk was almost empty—just a few doormen out walking dogs. Seagulls hovered over the ocean, wings outspread. In the distance a tight group of structures soared into the sky: the roller coaster, its track twisting through the air like a spinal column; the large Ferris wheel rising up out of the yellow-blue emptiness. Everything was closed for the winter. He carefully put his arm around Lauren. She could react indignantly at times, try to shake his arm off, but here on the beach she allowed it.

  He had been on the Ferris wheel with his girlfriends a few times. They all wanted to get married and have kids. Because of this he never said things like “I love you”; he had always been afraid of seeming invested. He acted casually, and when the women left, their leaving was just as casual, no fuss, no ceremony.

  Lauren sat down on the wooden steps leading down to the beach. He sat down beside her. They watched the layers of surf rolling one on top of the other. White foam at the edges, armies of white bubbles crawling forward, churning. A hiss and roar, and farther out to sea a crash and thunder. A rug of glass, many feet wide, was rolled out and then pulled back, again and again, leaving crinkled patches on the hard, smooth sand.

  “Europe’s over there,” she said.

  “You can’t see it.”

  “But it’s still there.”

  “I love you, Lauren.”

  She gave him a kiss. He didn’t know if that was supposed to mean the same thing.

  29

  Neuss–Buenos Aires,

  September–October 1949

  THE HEADLIGHTS OF AN ONCOMING CAR BOUNCE UP AND down, like a friendly nod. The road is bumpy. Gravel knocks against metal.

  Fields and small groups of trees along the length of the road. In the distance a dark strip rising on the horizon. The country road takes a sharp turn. Carl keeps an even distance from the edge of the wood as he drives, his eyes searching.

  “Anywhere,” says Josef.

  They stop. He gets out, slaps the hood. “Carl, drive!”

  Clouds fly across the night sky. The moonlight shines in the truck’s metal finish. Carl is standing next to him. “Well, you’re off to a good start. Here, your bag.”

  Josef laughs. Then they embrace again. They know this is the last time they’ll se
e each other; granted, they thought the same thing twenty-five years ago, but this time it really will be. For a small-time businessman from the Rhineland there’s no reason to ever go on vacation in South America.

  “Write us along the way whenever you can. Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  He can feel an intensity of emotion and has to shut himself off to it, or else he’ll start blubbering again. “Now drive!” says Josef and starts walking across a field. The crop has been harvested. The soil is black, rich; it stinks a little. “This thing’s not going to end well,” Carl calls after him. “Bad seeds grow tall,” Josef calls back, looking ahead toward the woods, tears in his eyes. This is crazy, he tells himself. You wanted out of Neuss, out of the little Klein family prison. And now you’re crying. Because now you’re free.

  He turns around. Carl is still standing there; he raises his hand and waves. Josef raises his hand and waves back.

  Then he plunges into the wood. Quiet envelops him; he hears only the snapping of twigs under his feet. The gap in the border, the smuggler route, runs along here. They bent over the map, shoulder to shoulder, like they once had as young men over the map of Manhattan. This time drawing a line through Aachen, rural roads, the forest, and on the other side Belgium, Eupen the closest town. If he keeps going straight, he’ll be in Belgium in half an hour. He doesn’t have a visa for Belgium. “Not a chance. They’ll be able to tell in an instant that your passport’s a fake,” Dörsam had said. But he does have one for Argentina. “That you can risk.”

  It’s eight o’clock. Faint light falls through the treetops; he can hardly see a thing. An autumn wood. He smells the peaty earth and something like gunpowder, lubricating oil, iron. He trudges over roots and tree trunks, panting, but doesn’t give himself any time to stop and rest. He’s afraid of what he’ll hear, sounds that are more than the echo of his own and that could turn his legs leaden with fear.

  He’s relieved when the forest opens up to fields. Now he’s in Belgium. A needling rain has started to fall. He turns up his coat collar, pulls his hat down lower over his forehead. The lights of a town glow on the horizon. The Belgian guards seem to have been watching him for some time. They step into the road and plant themselves in front of him. “Papers?”