by Ulla Lenze
He shows them his new papers.
“Joe Klein, born in New York,” one border guard reads to the other.
“Wanted to see Aachen,” he says, putting on a strong American accent.
“Then you’re pretty far off track. Germany is in the other direction.” One of them raises his arm toward Germany, ready to help. Waits. Josef also waits. The two of them—this much is certain—have seen all kinds of strange ducks come out of the woods by this point and are always glad to encounter a new variety.
“I’m actually trying to get to Brussels.”
“But you need a visa for Belgium.”
They stare at each other. Should he make them an offer?
“Let’s see your bag. Cigarettes, change of clothes, seems like you’re planning on going away for a while.”
“Care for one?” He holds out a pack of American cigarettes. Dörsam thought of everything.
“Gee, that’s nice of you.”
He can’t tell if they’re making fun of him. “I might also have five dollars,” he says carefully.
The border guard takes the bill and the cigarettes from his hand. “Let’s leave something for the others. You’ve got a long trip ahead of you, right?”
He nods. A car approaches. The guard steps in front of it. “Going to Eupen? Take our friend here with you. He’s an American.”
He whistles Josef over, claps him on the shoulder. “Good luck. Have a nice life.”
The buildings are dark. The driver doesn’t speak, only nods whenever Josef makes an attempt at conversation. Is it because he was introduced to him as an American? Josef clenches the handle of his bag till his fingers hurt. In Eupen the man drops him off at the train station. Josef checks the timetables for trains to Herbesthal. The next one doesn’t leave until morning.
He picks the most run-down hotel in the square, the Hotel Boston, and pays in advance. An old man takes him to a small room with no windows and damp walls, and when he lies down the bedsprings howl and squeak. The wet coat he draped over the radiator waits like his loyal servant and double.
He embraced Edith in front of the rest of the family. He breathed in the smell of her, which flooded into him like the words that she would never be able to find. What she said was something different. “You’re making the right decision. There’s no way of knowing if Germany will ever get back on its feet.”
And Carl agreed with her: “It could take decades!”
In the morning he drinks grain coffee in the breakfast room, spreads margarine and marmalade over the roll a surly young woman has brought him.
“You’re no American,” she says as he’s headed for the door.
“How’s that?”
“They don’t stay here. They can afford someplace better.”
At eight o’clock he takes the regional train to Herbesthal, easily catches the Copenhagen-Brussels Express at nine, and at eleven reaches the Brussels-North train station. The train to Paris doesn’t leave until the next morning. He wanders the streets, trying to keep his head down; around noon he checks into a somewhat nicer hotel, where he stays, or rather hides out, until tomorrow. He is able to smooth over his lack of a visa with American cigarettes. Carl sold his Linhof and gave him five hundred marks, which he exchanged for dollars at a bank in Cologne when he was there for his last meeting with Dörsam. A lot of money, but it won’t be enough for the whole trip. Dörsam advised him to sign on as a sailor on the ship to Buenos Aires.
In the morning he takes the overcrowded train to Paris. French soldiers stand in the aisles. He sits by the window and watches the villages and fields fly past, all for the last time, his last days in Europe, his homeland—but it means nothing to him. Carl and Edith, and also Täubchen and little Paul, they’re what matters to him.
Shortly before they reach the border a conductor starts to question him about his missing visa. Josef doesn’t dare offer him cigarettes—there are too many eyes on them. Instead he says he came from London; nobody mentioned anything about a visa. The conductor nods. “Next time, then.” He can sense the tension leaving his fellow passengers as they go back to their newspapers and books with a little sigh.
The French border guard doesn’t speak any English and simply stamps his ticket.
That evening, Paris, Gare du Nord. An unfriendly hustle and bustle, masses of people, a sea of suitcases, wrinkled suits, hundreds of languages.
He buys his ticket for Le Havre, then a postcard with the Eiffel Tower on it. He addresses it to Edith and limits himself to writing,
All the best from Paris.
But at least it’s something. He spends the night at a small overpriced inn. He’s been on the road for two days at this point, and as he sips weak coffee in the morning he peers into faces just as exhausted and poorly shaven as his. And still there is something that he scarcely wants to admit to himself: a feeling of euphoria and an almost religious sense of comfort and protection. But he’s not quite ready to trust this condition. He knows it from New York. For years he deluded himself into thinking he was in that city’s care, like Thoreau in the woods, and in the end all it gave him was a kick in the ass.
Any number of things can go wrong still, even if his papers look good, a little worn, even. They cost fifty marks. Carl was against it. He spoke of the law: “It’s just not right. Let’s go to the records office in Düsseldorf. Your birth certificate is bound to be there.” But he wanted to be Joe Klein, born in New York. He’s putting one over on Judge Byers, putting one over on America.
Because that’s the plan: South America is the first stop, then back to the USA.
Cursing and shoving on the train to Le Havre. After five hours they reach the port city—really more of a rubble-strewn wasteland on the English Channel. Sailors from all over the world loiter in the streets. The hotels are few and expensive. At the shipping company’s office he pays for passage to Dakar, with a short stop in Casablanca. The names fill him with excitement, as if what awaits him there is something wonderful, momentous, beautiful beyond belief. Africa!
That night he is still skulking around horrible Le Havre, past construction fences, mounds of rubble, and backhoes. Finally he gives in to the overtures of an old prostitute, pays a thousand francs just for the privilege of lying in her bed till morning. The woman could be his mother—he really does just want to sleep. In her tiny room the old woman slides toward him on the mattress, starts rubbing herself against him. He says wearily, “For all that money you could at least give me some peace.”
She laughs. “You and your comrades destroyed our city—that’s what you’re paying for, you pig.”
She figured out he was German too. Alarmed, he asks how.
“Your underwear’s got a German tag.”
“Were you a spy in the war?” he asks jokingly, and she says in the same tone, “Yes—for the Germans.”
He knows she’s telling the truth.
In the morning she wakes him by smacking him in the head. “Your time is up.” Out by the harbor there’s an old workhorse pulling a giant tree trunk. Josef can’t look away until finally the horse is out of sight. Giant white ocean liners are moored in the water, belching out black clouds of smoke. Again this feeling of happiness.
Before he boards the ship he buys Gitanes, chewing gum, and a postcard that he addresses to Carl:
You can send my luggage now like we discussed: general delivery, Buenos Aires. The next card will come from Casablanca in Africa!
Feeling proud, he tosses it into a mailbox.
The ship is overcrowded. Third-class passengers, like him, have been moved to the cold-storage rooms and the original third-class cabins rebranded as first class. He makes friends with his bunkmates, an Englishman and a Frenchman. They all get seasick immediately. The seas in the English Channel are rough; a strong wind is blowing. The ship turns into a hospital ship. Only when they pass through the Bay of Biscay does the sea grow calm, and off the coast of Spain they start to cruise through the warm, velvety salt air of the
Atlantic. It gets warmer almost by the hour, and when, passing Portugal, he finds he’s back in fit condition, he goes out walking on deck, feeling reborn, and sees that all of Europe is on this ship—Italians, Germans, Austrians, Eastern Europeans—just like twenty-five years ago, when he was on his way to the New World.
“They’re fleeing,” the Englishman explains.
“Fleeing?”
“Still.” The Frenchman nods. “They’re still being persecuted in Eastern Europe, even today. It’s only in Germany that they’re not. Ironic, no?”
“How do you know all of this?”
“They tell me.”
“You talk to them?”
“Of course.”
He would never dare. What if they ask who he is? What he did? Why he’s on this ship?
His new friends take him for an American, or maybe they just act like they do. They grumble about the Germans onboard. Their assessments are not good: they find them to be arrogant, to be shirking responsibility, to be cowardly and without remorse.
“They’re not exactly popular in New York either,” he is able to add.
Two days later they’re approaching Casablanca. The sea is calm and the air hot. They have six hours before the ship leaves. The Frenchman acts as their guide, tells them that the city is divided into two sections, the new section and the medina, the old city, which one shouldn’t venture into alone. Wide streets, horse-drawn carriages, everything bathed in white light. A boulevard runs along the ocean, past a grand hotel with Arab women sunbathing in bikinis outside. Tall, skinny palm trees line the streets. It’s the first city he’s seen in a long time that’s still intact. He’s captivated by the white townhouses with French balconies and the light that seems to come straight from the Atlantic.
He tries to stamp it all on his memory, every detail, like an image he will later have to paint.
As they near the equator the ship is covered with a white canvas. The sun beats down; the Atlantic glitters. They sail past the Canary Islands. Two days later they reach Dakar. He goes onto shore, sees pith helmets, sees black men in flowing garments, strolling through the streets and speaking French.
And yet it’s all familiar to him, as if he were peering behind a curtain that artificially screened off his life in New York. At the museum in New York he had read about Dakar, had read that for three centuries slaves were sent to America from here.
The tips of his shoes are covered in dust, no matter how often he cleans them.
The money he has left isn’t enough for passage to Buenos Aires. He has someone show him the way to the shipping company’s offices and asks to sign on as a sailor. They laugh at him. “What do we want with a pip-squeak like you?” Then someone takes pity on him and they hire him for a job in the kitchen. Passage and lodging included; no wages. It’s fine with him. The next ship leaves in two days. He checks into a rooming house. Spiderwebs cling to the windows; the mattress lies on the stone floor. Outside, a network of yellow dirt alleyways. Lying down, he says aloud to himself, “Dakar, Dakar,” and feels content. He feels the periodic call to prayer trickle through his body, lies there and listens to the garlands of words, which, because he doesn’t understand a thing, take him to a place beyond all language, a place where he feels an almost physical connection with everything. He thinks of Idrie’s bean pies.
This time he writes the whole family.
Even the cemeteries have palm trees here!
He draws a little palm next to the words and tosses the card into a mailbox on the way to the harbor.
* * *
The work in the kitchen usually lasts all day. Peeling potatoes, chopping onions, running off to the storeroom, taking orders from a Spaniard who calls him José, even when Josef protests. “My name’s Joe.”
“José. Get used to it.”
José it is, then.
Despite it all he feels a rapture that he can’t explain. He is free. For the first time in years. Truly free. He’s not young anymore, true, but he’s not old yet either. He can make a fresh start, and that’s exactly what he plans to do.
The weedy Italian who works alongside him is always friendly but says only gloomy things. “Don’t get any illusions,” he says often and without any context.
“He’s going to meet up with his family,” the Spaniard tells him. “His wife and daughter made it out before the war.”
At night the sky is black and full of stars. He has never seen such a clear night sky, not in energy-saving Neuss and definitely not in New York, where the night sky glowed red.
The Italian tosses his cigarette butt overboard and says, “Tell me your story, Josef.”
Smooth black water beneath them.
“I don’t know my story yet,” says Josef. “I’m still in the middle of it.”
He’s glad when, soon afterward, the Spaniard sends him to clean the giant pots, scraping the burnt remnants of thick soups off the bottom, an unpopular job. When the Italian comes around he tries to act invisible and not to breathe.
“Josef? José? Joe? Which is your real name?”
His tongue feels thick, his throat tight. He manages a smile, one that is no longer crooked like a grifter’s. Not since Neuss, not anymore.
30
New York, June–July 1940
TIMES SQUARE. THE CALLER HAD ALMOST WHISPERED IT—“The entrance to the Apollo Theater”—and then hung up.
Josef went back to the printing machine, weaving a garland of red roses through black calligraphy. The Christian Front had been disbanded. Yet another important client gone. More greeting cards and wedding invitations since then.
At half past two he headed out, walking purposefully, but not hurrying. The newsboys waved photographs of tanks and steel helmets. In Times Square the news ticker wrapped around the Times Building. Paris had fallen last week. The passersby stared at the moving text.
He loosened his tie. He felt an itch in his throat and a feverish sensation rising from his legs up to his shoulders. If he hadn’t emigrated, he might be stalking through the forests of France right now. The thought triggered anxiety. He had almost forgotten this feeling, even though it had been with him constantly in the last year, when the two Germans had taken over his apartment—feelings were something to be forgotten and only remembered when they came back.
Things had been going well for him. Lauren was in his life. Sometimes Lauren showed him newspaper articles that she thought were especially important; even that made him happy.
He still made an effort to look and act his best around her. He always made sure his shoes were shined, took care shaving and put on expensive aftershave, even thought about what he would say when he first greeted her. He always had time for her. If she called while he was busy tinkering with something, he didn’t even mention it. On evenings when he expected her to call, he didn’t leave the apartment so that she wouldn’t have to call more than once. He suspected she wouldn’t appreciate that.
He bought a paper off a newsboy. The swastika flag was flying from the Eiffel Tower. The streets deserted, the Parisians had fled.
A sharp pain sat just beneath his skull. He smoked and hoped it would help, waited for the numbness to set in. Two office girls were standing in the entrance of the Apollo Theater, sharing a cigarette. They looked over at him; he ignored them.
He knew that he was looking for a tall figure with slumped shoulders—for Max. He hadn’t heard anything from either him or Ludwig since Schmuederrich had fired him. He had wanted to believe the Germans weren’t interested in him anymore—after all, in a free country like the US, in a democracy, they couldn’t force anyone to do anything.
He finished his second cigarette, and as he was about to stamp it out with his foot, there was Max, standing in front of him. He pulled him over to the wall of film posters and placed his hand on Josef’s shoulder, which caught the attention of the two girls. “A new agent has come over from Germany. His name’s Sebold and his orders are to expand the network in New York. Every contact is nee
ded now. You have to finish building the radio for us.”
“I don’t work for you people anymore. That’s all I came here to tell you.”
Max laughed. “You’re still just as stupid as you were last year.”
There was something else he was itching to say, but it seemed more wise not to antagonize Max any further. He walked into the flood of pedestrians on Seventh Avenue and realized after a few feet that Max was following him.
He stopped and raised both hands, palms out, posing a question. Max also stopped. They looked at each other. Max followed him for another few hundred feet before he finally gave it up. Max too was just as stupid as he was last year. Germany wants peace. That’s what you said last year, and now there’s a war on—that’s what he’d wanted to say to him.
That evening he met Lauren at a diner near Manhattan General before her shift started. She hadn’t gotten the scholarship this time either. The reason, she thought, was that she came from a wealthy family. He had offered her another reason, his German background, but she thought that was nonsense.
Now Lauren was simply working more—she was going to pay for college herself. He didn’t understand her. If he were her he would go back to her parents, back to the nice hotel with the swimming pool and the dance orchestra, but he didn’t tell her that. He had just bitten into something that felt wrong and tasted wrong. It reminded him of childhood somehow, of sunny afternoons in the forest and in the field. Turning his face away, he spit the lettuce leaf he’d been chewing into his napkin. He didn’t want to look any closer, but he recognized the crushed shell of a beetle. And Lauren saw it too. “We have to tell the waiter!”
“No, Lauren. Leave it.”
“But the kitchen messed up.”
“No, they didn’t. This was intentional.”
She gave him a skeptical look.
Amiably he said, “I might do it too. Yell at Germans. Spit in their food.”