The Radio Operator

by Ulla Lenze

  “There, you see what all I can offer you outside the penitentiary?”

  Beads of sweat on Schmuederrich’s forehead and cheeks. By the time the sun has sunk behind the trees, about two hundred guests fill the terrace and garden. Schmuederrich runs into acquaintances every now and then, mostly care-package subscribers, but he just gives a brief nod; he wants to keep himself free for the big shots. Josef asks if they all got here after the war. “Of course, what do you think?” Schmuederrich replies curtly. Josef just wanted to hear it said. Cigars are passed around. Dior chitchat to the left, war chitchat to the right. “What a mistake, blowing Germany to shreds, the only bulwark against the Red hordes!” “America’s got another thing coming to them!” A special fury is reserved for the cowardly generals, the cowardly suicides.

  Something is wrong with Josef’s new shoes; the leather in the front has split off from the sole. Must be the heat. Cheap shoes, you end up paying for it later.

  “Some crackers and cheese cubes, gentlemen?”

  Schmuederrich sets down his empty martini glass, asks for cigars, and stares over at the men. He seems as lost as Josef, who notices that some of the men even seem to make a point of looking past them.

  “What are they calling you here now, José?” Schmuederrich asks absently.

  “I don’t care what people call me.”

  “Don’t you go along with it. They keep trying to call me Juan here. No way. The putas say it all the time.”

  “Putas?”

  “Whores. Got some pretty kitties out here.”

  One of the Schlüter children skips among the assembled guests in a nightshirt, hiding behind the ladies’ evening gowns. The nanny walks around in a crouch, arms outspread, searching, then gathers up the child, who bubbles over with laughter.

  “How’s your job at Casa Schirmer?”

  “They’re not keeping me on. End of the month, that’s it.”

  “It’s because you run your mouth too much about America. How you’re saving your money and want to go back. It’s gotten back to me.”

  “I might have my problems with the American government. But not with America.”

  Schmuederrich rolls his eyes.

  Frau Schlüter claps her hands and asks everyone to please join her in the salon for the Christmas festivities. He has to lift his foot well off the ground so the sole doesn’t drag on the floor. Schmuederrich doesn’t notice anything. In the salon, lined with fabric wallpaper, an old man is waiting at the piano, his face obscured by bushy white eyebrows. “Oh, du goldenes Meer!” he calls out. Oh, you golden sea! Some listeners close their eyes, gripped with emotion. “Oh, you stars!” he cries. “How you look down upon us and think of us, though we’re no longer here!”

  After the singing, a man in horn-rimmed glasses gives a lecture. The thrust, as far as Josef can tell, is that abstract art is a failure because it does not have the capacity to move the soul. Nodding all around. The ashtrays are overflowing; the maid slips quietly through the salon and empties them. The learned man complains that the omnipresent scourge of advertising and the tangos of Hollywood have a ruinous effect on the calm contemplation of art. The young Dior ladies exchange glances. Quiet snorting. They remind him of Lauren—she could laugh like that too. Afterward a hefty woman sings a Schubert song, “Du bist die Ruh,” then the buffet is opened. Schmuederrich simply walks off. Apparently Josef has served his time.

  His stomach is out of sorts. He limps outside, reaches for his cigarettes. The terrace is empty, but the group of gentlemen has stayed right where it was, as if in scornful indifference to whatever might be happening around them. They look at him, sizing him up. One of them, still young, has a prosthetic leg, a defiant smile in his well-chiseled face; Josef noticed him earlier. He doesn’t even know if he’s allowed to nod at them. Just as he’s about to leave, he hears the question: “Where did you serve?” He turns around, incredulous at the fact that they would speak to him. He identifies the source of the hoarse voice: a man with very white, well-manicured hands, who wears a uniform covered in medals, the only one of them so dressed.

  “Nowhere. I lived in New York. Happily, I might add.”

  “We thought you’d injured your leg in the war. You’re limping.”

  He suddenly feels inside him a strange mix of lightness and mirth. “My shoe’s busted. The sole is coming off. I have to lift my foot so it doesn’t drag across the ground, see, like this.”

  He lifts his foot, stands on one leg. The sole is dangling pitifully by this point. The gentlemen laugh; the one with the prosthetic leg laughs loudest.

  “Did you buy the shoes here?”

  He nods.

  “Looks like you got ripped off.”

  “They were cheap. I picked the wrong thing to skimp on.”

  “There are certain things one should never skimp on. A good pair of shoes is important. Without shoes you’ll never get ahead in life.”

  “I’ll make a note of that.”

  He wishes the gentlemen a good evening and starts making his way toward the other end of the terrace, where he runs straight into Schmuederrich.

  “What were they asking you about?” he whispers excitedly.

  “Where I served.”

  Schmuederrich looks over at the gentlemen, seems to take a moment to collect himself, and then calls out, “He was imprisoned! In New York!”

  “Oh, so you mean your adjutant isn’t an FBI agent? That’s a relief.”

  Laughter. “What about you?” one of them calls out, making it clear that there’s no need for him to come any closer.

  “We worked for Germany. We kept the faith.” Schmuederrich seems full of expectation.

  “You didn’t exactly do much over there, did you? What’s your name, anyway?”

  When Schmuederrich doesn’t answer, one of the gentlemen says in a conciliatory tone, “Oh, that’s just old Hans Schmuederrich. He’s the one who sells us the care packages.”

  Laughter.

  Schmuederrich wishes them a pleasant evening and walks off into the garden. They’re still talking. Scornful laughter. “You have to be charitable. After all, they never really knew the Third Reich.” “They weren’t even allowed to carry a weapon over there.” “Supposedly there were traitors among them.”

  Angels made of silver paper are hanging from the trees; a striped cat sets them to dancing. The river is lost in the darkness.

  Josef takes his shoes off, walks barefoot over the lawn. He sees Schmuederrich by the pool; he sits slumped on a deck chair, bending over and reaching for a cigarette that’s rolling away from him.

  I should have turned you in, thinks Josef. You, myself, everyone.

  35

  Ellis Island, May 1946

  EVERY MORNING WHEN HE WOKE UP HE SAW THE STATUE OF Liberty in the right half of the window frame. She was trapped, just like him. Every morning like that moment in the past. When he sailed toward Manhattan on the steamer. The moment lingered for the rest of the day, then night erased everything completely. At night, when he turned onto his side in his bed in the dormitory, it felt like he was falling. As if the rumble of the fishing boats, the lapping of the waves, were pushing him over a cliff, pushing him away, into another world almost.

  In the morning it all started over again. To the right the Statue of Liberty, in the distance the city, rising up out of the water, its slender, smooth towers pressed together like people holding their breath in a crowded elevator, keeping their outward calm and dignity at any price.

  When he was transferred, surprisingly, to Ellis Island in the fall of 1945, what it meant more than anything else was that he would see Lauren again. At Sandstone, high up in the north, she hadn’t been able to visit him. He had understood that; he had even thought it was for the best. This way she wouldn’t have to see him in a striped prison uniform—crossed out, from head to foot, the bars still on his body.

  Every year they had written each other less, but from the start it was without any romance. The letters were s
creened. He wondered, however, if that was the only reason she left out anything of interest, any warmth.

  His letters always went to the same address in Brooklyn, which led him to assume that Lauren lived alone. No husband, no kids. Something about that pleased him, and he examined the feeling—was it schadenfreude? Or the hope that things might still turn out between them? Forgiveness, a fresh start, and maybe America would even take him back in. Everything would be good again.

  He now found himself close to Lauren, and Lauren wanted to come visit him. Could she bring him anything, a bean pie for example? The second he read this, he knew that she was actually going to come. A few weeks had passed since, but today she would be here. It would be their first time seeing each other in five years.

  He was still sitting by himself. It was ten past three. The room had filled up. He kept his eye on the door and the guard, and sometimes he looked at the two-tone Florsheim slippers worn by the German man next to him. He was having a discussion with his wife, an American, about her taking over the business, a shoe store in Bushwick. He knew that the two of them had children, and they were very lucky that their American mother hadn’t been taken onto the island with them.

  There were so many young people here. They played badminton in the afternoons in the giant registry room, where once someone had looked into his mouth, eyes, and ears. And no one told them how long they would have to stay on the island. Or what would happen after they left. Lawyers pocketed their money, then regretfully informed them that things hadn’t gone their way in court.

  Sometimes his favorite line from Thoreau would echo in his head, something about how a man’s wealth had nothing to do with his outer circumstances, but he’d long found it questionable.

  A woman had appeared, seeming somewhat antsy as she looked around, craning her neck shortsightedly. And then she was standing there in front of him, looking down at him with a little smile; without meaning to he had remained seated, and now he decided to stay seated. Her breasts fuller, her face rounder. Her hair styled in a helmet of stiff curls—it made her look stuffy. She was thirty-one now.

  “You have to go through a tunnel and then through all these different doors before you finally get here.”

  “I wasn’t checking the time,” he said and tried to understand what she was saying. She was still telling him about her trip here.

  Because she was so close and yet so different, he couldn’t look her in the eye. He looked at the shoes next to him, the Florsheim slippers, and nodded, yes, a tunnel when you get off the ferry, and then the room where they search you. “But it wasn’t so bad,” she said quickly.

  “Are you dying your hair now?”

  “This is my natural hair color. Did you never notice that I dyed it?”

  He shook his head.

  Hotel manager, she said, when he asked, but she had to pitch in herself every now and then, making beds when the girls didn’t come in on time. It was a small hotel on Long Island. What had become of her dream of being a journalist? He didn’t dare ask the question.

  She clasped her hands together and set them on the table. These familiar hands that he had held so many times. The red polish so pristine that he figured it was for him; there was no doubt she had just painted her nails today. Now here she sat, where she didn’t belong—where no one belonged; they were only warehoused. Suddenly he saw everything in a kind of double vision, saw the artificiality of it all becoming even greater: their island container, which they were stuck in, and this small portion of freedom that was contained within Lauren and that she had brought with her here, her connection to the outside world. He could sense how she too suffered from it: they were two people who sat here in unequal circumstances.

  “How’s Princess?”

  “She’s an old girl now. Her hearing’s bad.”

  They smiled at each other. For a fraction of a second he saw something in her eyes from back then.

  “That meant a lot to me, you taking care of her. It was like a part of me had remained free.”

  She looked at him with interest as he spoke, and under her gaze he realized what she was noticing: he spoke too slowly. As if the stopped time on Ellis Island had crept into his speech.

  “How’s your family in Germany? Have you heard from them?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You have to write them.”

  He played the doltish immigrant with the thick accent. “I haff done zat. I vait for answer.”

  She smiled indulgently.

  “And your family,” he now asked, making an effort to be polite. “Your parents in the Catskills, how are they?”

  She made a dismissive hand gesture that could have meant anything from Not worth talking about to They’re all fine.

  So this was about him. All right, then.

  In the window he saw the waves rising and breaking with a peaceful irregularity that was all their own.

  He didn’t know if his family was still alive.

  He could have written from Sandstone to try to find out, but he had been ashamed to write from a prison. Only when he got to Ellis Island had he dared to write a letter. Two weeks ago. From an internment camp. That didn’t sound quite as bad.

  He leaned forward. He would start with the generals. Throughout his years in prison he had clipped out all the articles he’d seen about their executions.

  “Canaris was executed in 1945 in a concentration camp. Canaris. You know who that was? The head of military intelligence. He had been fired not long before then on account of there being too many slipups.”

  She interrupted him. “What are you trying to get at, Joe?”

  “Do you remember the Nazi agents in the movie? Those saps? Don’t you think they had better people?”

  “What exactly are you trying to say?”

  He leaned forward and whispered, “They intentionally took on people who were incompetent, or people like me who weren’t involved voluntarily and ended up betraying the whole effort. They didn’t want to see America reduced to rubble and ash. They always made it look like they were carrying out Hitler’s plans, but they were secretly working against him. It was a kind of resistance.”

  She seemed reluctant to hear this. Only little by little did she grasp his meaning, and when she did she put on an empty smile. As if she wanted to give him a chance to drop the subject.

  “There was opposition! For a long time they weren’t talking about it here at all!”

  “I understand. You want to be one of the good guys.” She smiled icily. Her lipstick had rubbed off on her front teeth.

  “No. I want to know what happened!” he said angrily.

  She pushed back from the table a bit, looked over at the window, the glass clouded with salt.

  He gave her an imploring look. He had imagined this moment being different, easier.

  Finally she raised an eyebrow. “Joe, in Germany today they’re claiming every little thing was resistance and opposition. Suddenly everybody was a resistance fighter. And now you’re saying you were too?”

  He now pulled the newspaper article with the tear down the middle fold from his pants pocket and handed it to her, just like she’d always done with him.

  “Look, Lauren. Here it is in black and white. In summer 1942 eight saboteurs were sent to America by U-boat, without any training, without anything. Canaris was head of military intelligence. All he said was ‘Well, I guess we’ll lose eight good Nazis.’ It was a sham operation, put on for show.”

  She looked at him dismissively, with hostility, even. He didn’t have anything else to offer. That was his biggest argument, the eight good Nazis.

  “When is the article from? And who’s the source?”

  “The head of sabotage, Lahousen, gave an interview to the international press in Nuremberg in December 1945.” He was afraid of what Lauren’s reaction would be and looked at the feet in the Florsheim slippers, feet that jittered nervously—everybody was nervous here.

  “He’s saying it after the war. At t
hat point they can say anything to try and present themselves in a good light.”

  “But what could they have said about it at the time? It’s not the kind of thing you brag about!”

  “Joe, there’s no point in clinging to something for which there’s no proof.”

  Did she really not understand him? He laughed bitterly. He wanted to stand up and leave, as if he were a free man—and in fact he would be a free man for those few seconds in which he left a woman behind, but of course he could only shuffle back to his group cell.

  “Lauren, I’ve lost everything. And I don’t know what to think about myself anymore.”

  “I can imagine that. But your theory is pure speculation.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. Of course it was all in his head. There it was, clear and radiant; it blazed a glittering path through the gloom of the day. He felt humiliated.

  “Joe, even if it is true, that would mean they sacrificed those people. Six months later and you’d be dead now too. You’d have been sentenced by a court martial. The people who could accept others’ sacrifice like that are no heroes.”

  “I don’t care about heroism. I care about the truth.” He said it so weakly that he barely believed it himself.

  “Yeah? This is the truth.” She took the article, crumpled it, and let it drop back on the table.

  He stared at Lauren in disbelief, tried to imagine her treating the girls at the hotel this way when they forgot to change a towel.

  She wet her lips, then she scooted her chair forward a bit and said in a conciliatory tone, “You’ll never know what the others’ motives were. But you do know what you did. And if you find you have something to reproach yourself for, learn to live with it.”

  He couldn’t remember them saying goodbye to each other, but suddenly he felt her hand in his once more. Yes, she had given him her hand after all, saying, “So long, Joe. Take care of yourself.” The paper bag with the bean pie in it sat on the table in front of him. And that’s where he left it.