How German Is It

by Walter Abish

  How’s the weather at this time of the year in Germany?

  Answer.

  We’re having a splendid summer.

  Yes?

  An exceptionally fine summer. The weather is ideal for an outing, or for sailing on a lake, or for fishing in a stream or river, or for rowing with one’s friends, or for constructing a small house for the summer, a simple one-room house, or for visiting some of the magnificent castles on the Rhine, castles once inhabited by people with names such as von Hargenau. One can really go on and on, in English as well as in German, on the topic of the weather without once making a sexual or political innuendo, anything, in other words, that might cause one or both of the people engaged in the conversation to feel a sudden unease, a sudden restlessness or impatience, and as a result bring about a surging of the blood to the brain, a sense of impending disaster, even panic at what might happen if by chance a wrong word slipped out.

  His father, Ulrich von Hargenau, Sr., always had the right words for the right occasion. He only slipped slightly from his always graceful choice of words when facing the firing squad, but that is to be understood. Two or three of the men aiming their rifles at him came from Würtenburg. Most likely he did not recognize them. Just run-of-the-mill fellows who had been handed a rifle and told by their commanding officer: When I say fire, you fire.

  .

  14

  This is an introduction to a window on the fifth floor of a fairly modern, fairly new apartment building in a middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Würtenburg. The window frames are made of metal, and the windows glide noiselessly open and shut at the slightest pressure. They are well-constructed window frames. At one time, about ten years ago, they were frequently used in new construction, but now they are considered too expensive. Every effort is made to keep the price of new buildings within reason. As a result, the window frames have become an accurate gauge of the building’s age. The time when they still favored the metal window frame. Still, all in all, the apartment building is not an ostentatious one. Far from it. It may be newer than most of the buildings on this street, but it does not call attention to itself.

  Daphne’s apartment like his own overlooked the small park across the street. Standing at her window she could observe people, mostly single men, walking their dogs at night. Frequently the men would stop to speak to each other. Most likely they by now recognized each other’s dogs. Sie haben einen schönen Hund, one of the men might say. The other, in all likelihood, will respond with a simple Danke. It was extremely harmless. Nothing sinister about it. Whenever he had trouble falling asleep he would take a turn or two around the park. On several occasions he had briefly conversed with one of the men walking a dog on a leash. Once he had caught sight of Daphne at the window. But she quickly ducked out of sight as soon as she caught him looking up.

  .

  15

  He kept asking himself how he could possibly base an entire novel on his brief, evanescent affair with Marie-Jean Filebra when nothing remarkable or memorable ever took place. Of all the women he had met in Paris, why her? Why this particular woman? Shortly after their meeting he was surprised by the many people, acquaintances of hers, who in one way or another indicated their intense dislike of her. They admitted that she was bright, attractive … and ambitious. I don’t know why, one of her colleagues, an editor, once said to him almost despairingly. I just can’t bear that woman. She devours people. Was that what was happening to him?

  Hardly.

  Repeat

  Repeat instantly.

  When I die, Marie-Jean once said to him, I won’t leave the slightest ripple on the surface. You’ll see. People will hardly notice. She was quite matter of fact about it. The comment had not required a response. It had not been made in order to elicit one.

  What else? She was an accomplished liar. She even took a certain pleasure in lying. She promised to have his books published in France by a friend of hers. She also promised to introduce him to a filmmaker who had voiced an interest in his work. She lied where she had been and where she was going. Yet, he knew that she did not lie about her past love affairs. She answered all his questions with a disconcerting candor.

  Paula Hargenau, on the other hand, had never lied to him. But neither had she ever volunteered any information on her life prior to their meeting.

  .

  16

  His apartment overlooked the small park. The park attendant arrived punctually at eight each morning. Solemnly he greeted Max, the Hausmeister’s right hand. They exchanged a few words … then both set off to their respective jobs. Max taking care of the furnace, the garbage disposal, and all minor repairs. He replaced burnt-out fuses, burnt-out lightbulbs in the hallways. When he had nothing else to do, he painted the metal railing of the steps leading to the entrance of the building. He was slow, patient, but extremely thorough. Impossible to know if he derived any satisfaction from his work. Ulrich knew that Max would not approve of Paula’s political activism. He did not know if Max was on good terms with Mullheim, the Hausmeister, but he did know that the Hausmeister, who had lost a leg in the war, and now needed an assistant, did not like to be caught chatting with Max. Perhaps he was afraid that it might give the tenants an erroneous impression of his status. On the other hand, the park attendant did not give two hoots if anyone saw him speaking to Max, who could always be recognized by his stained and faded blue overalls.

  On one occasion Ulrich had mentioned to Max that he thought the Hausmeister to be a stuck-up asshole who acted as if he were still a regimental sergeant major in the great German Wehrmacht, but Max, sensing trouble, refused to be drawn into the conversation. All he did was grunt his assent, but since it was only a grunt, it remained open to many interpretations. Since that occasion Max kept avoiding him, as if afraid that he might wish to draw him into another controversial conversation.

  Max was at least ten years younger than the Hausmeister. He had spent four years in a Russian prisoner of war camp. He once told Ulrich that during his incarceration he kept a diary, but that he had not looked at it in years. In fact, he avoided looking at it. It was intended as a memento, Max said, for his children, or his children’s children, once they grew up. Ulrich had expressed an interest in seeing the diary, but Max made no offer to show it to him.

  Now and then, when Ulrich had trouble falling asleep, he would think of Max somewhere in Russia, sitting next to a wood stove and laboriously writing in a notebook what had taken place on that day. He could almost see the childish handwriting and the words taking shape: zwei Kartoffeln, Fieber, eine tote Feldmaus, die ewige Frage …

  As he emptied the garbage cans daily, Max’s experienced eye could by now pick out what was discarded by whom. He could always spot Ulrich’s garbage and that of the American woman on the fifth floor. Ulrich once heard him laughingly mention this to the Hausmeister and then caught the look of extreme annoyance flash across the Hausmeister’s face, as if he found the remark deplorable.

  All three, the Hausmeister, Max, the park attendant, were aware that Ulrich’s father had worn a monocle, and that his name was Ulrich von Hargenau, and that he had died for his fatherland, another euphemism, and that Ulrich and his brother had dropped the von, a gesture that was universally regarded with suspicion and a quite irrational anger. As a rule, people did not drop their von. The Hausmeister, Max, and the park attendant also knew that Ulrich had been up to his neck in left-wing politics, and that as recently as nine months ago he had been involved in a long drawn-out trial in which his evidence had been used by the prosecution to build an airtight case, enabling them to lock up what everyone considered a bunch of ill-mannered agitators. In some quarters there was more outrage about their alleged bad manners than their left-wing rhetoric. Of course, the Hausmeister, Max, and the park attendant also knew Ulrich to be a writer of sorts. The Hausmeister had accumulated more information on Ulrich, since a number of the tenants saved their old magazines for him to read. Ulrich had seen the Hausmiester reading
Der Spiegel, a news magazine that at the time of the trial had depicted Ulrich and Paula in the most unflattering terms, devoting a good part of the article to a comparison of his cowardly actions to the selfless conduct of his father in 1944.

  Ulrich was certain that the Hausmeister knew that Daphne and he would occasionally get together, either at his place or at hers. That would explain those sly glances he had been receiving every time they entered or left the building together. Also the Hausmeister’s good morning and his good evening seemed to convey an insinuation Ulrich found displeasing. As a result, he stopped discussing the weather with him while waiting for the elevator. They were waging an undeclared war. It’s absolutely childish, Ulrich told Daphne, but I’ve begun to detest the man. Where was he during the war? The Hausmeister had once mentioned Russia. Where exactly in Russia? All over, the Hausmeister had replied. We showed those pigs how to fight. What a ludicrous statement. You mean they showed us. No, the Hausmeister had stubbornly shaken his head. We showed them how to fight. Had he ever, Ulrich wondered, been a member of an execution squad?

  .

  17

  Daphne had moved into the building less than three months ago. She had found her apartment the way he had, by looking at the real estate pages of the Würtenburger Zeitung. Her German was fluent, and she had no difficulty in following the lectures at the University of Würtenburg, incidentally, a university with an unparalleled reputation in ancient and medieval history, the history of religion, and philosophy. She had studied German in America. Why not French or Italian? I wanted to study under Brumhold, she admitted shyly. Was Brumhold the principal reason why she had come to Germany? he had asked her with what must have been a look of astonishment. She laughed. Hardly. By the time she had come across Brumhold’s philosophical work, she had already been taking German at college. Her father, she added, had a great many friends in Germany. He had been there during the Occupation. It was he who had encouraged her to study German. When he inquired if her father was connected to a university, she replied with a curt “no.”

  When Daphne discovered that he was a former student of Brumhold’s she danced a little jig, which he took to be an American way of expressing enthusiasm. He was not a particularly successful student, he hastened to tell her. I don’t believe that Professor Brumhold ever paid the slightest attention to me. All the same, I’ve sent him a copy of every book I’ve published. Once or twice, said Ulrich, he was kind enough, despite his heavy schedule, to send me a note thanking me for my book. He greatly looked forward to reading the book of one of his former students, he wrote. Something Ulrich had every reason to doubt. Though he did not mention this to Daphne. He did not want her to think of him as discontented with the notes he received from Brumhold. Naturally, as soon as she discovered that he was a writer she felt impelled or obliged to buy several of his books, which was more than he could say for most of his friends or acquaintances, who expected free signed copies which they did not read. Daphne, however, having completed or partially completed one of his books, felt compelled to say something about the work and, being straightforward and candid, as well as a student of philosophy, she could not, he recognized, simply say that she had enjoyed it and let it go at that. She had to say something that would express on her part a recognition of what he had attempted to achieve, or what she thought he had tried to achieve. Obviously, she had tried to like the books because she liked him, or was prepared to like him, or, possibly, because she wanted to like him, but no matter how hard she tried the work remained somehow inaccessible to her. Although that was hardly surprising in someone who admitted that she found the exploration or probing of a relationship between people as something distasteful. She felt that the writer was trespassing, and Ulrich had to admit that writing in some respect was a form of trespassing. Instead of reading on and on about the tenuousness, ambiguity, or uncertainty of someone’s feelings, she preferred to question the meaning of a thing or the meaning of a thought, preferably raising the question in German, a foreign or at any rate adopted language that enabled her to reduce these crucial questions to pure signs, since in German the word thing and the word thought did not immediately evoke in her brain the multitudinous response it did in English, where the words, those everyday words, conjured up an entire panorama of familiar associations that blunted the preciseness needed in order to bring her philosophical investigation to a satisfactory conclusion. Could this be the reason why she had come to Germany? To think in German, to question herself in a foreign language?

  Had she ever slept with a German?

  Clearly, she must have, he reasoned.

  Why this curious constraint on his part?

  Answer.

  Answer immediately.

  .

  18

  The police in Ulrich’s precinct had moved into their new quarters with a great deal of fanfare. His brother’s photograph was in all the papers. All along Helmuth had been convinced that his design for the police station would be selected out of the nineteen or twenty that had been submitted. There had been no lack of insinuations that he had won only because he also happened to be the son-in-law of the police chief of Würtenburg. Perhaps it did influence the jury’s unanimous decision. Ulrich recalled having urged Helmuth to abstain from participating for that very reason. If you win, they’ll say it is because of your father-in-law. Helmuth called him naïve. In fact, every Christmas, he declared gleefully, he had sent the policemen at the old police station a case of Piper-Heidsieck. Prost. Of course the newspapers did not neglect to state that the architect Hargenau happened to be the brother of Ulrich Hargenau, the author who had admitted to having been a political activist in the Einzieh group.

  .

  19

  Helmuth took him on a tour of the new police station. Why had he agreed to come? Immaculate corridors, large well-lit offices with wide plate-glass windows, white formica-topped desks, everything gleaming and new, and everyone present, in and out of uniform, smiling broadly at them. A circus atmosphere. Everyone beaming their approval of his brother, Helmuth, who also happened to be, a detail that was not to be overlooked, the son-in-law of the chief of police. Helmuth introduced him with a special flourish to everyone they met. Helmuth kept saying: And this is my radical brother, Ulrich Hargenau, the writer. You may have read some of his work. To Ulrich’s surprise a number of policemen said yes. Then they all smiled at each other as if sharing a huge joke. Any questions? Helmuth asked him in the presence of a group of senior police officers, all holding glasses of champagne, all a bit red in the face and a slight bit unsteady on their feet.

  Yes, said Ulrich. Is the young American woman on the floor above mine a radical? I can easily find out for you, said the chief of police, smiling, feeling proud of the Hargenaus. Old, old family with a castle somewhere in Westphalia. Pity they decided to drop the von.

  Ulrich returned the chief of police’s smile. A brief sense of camaraderie. His period of irresponsibility was past. He had become respectable again. When it came to the crunch he did the right thing. He swallowed his medicine, and now he was back again, free to do what he wanted, to go where he wished.

  My brother is working on another book, Helmuth announced.

  This time be sure to make it a killing success, said the chief of police, and they all roared with laughter.

  .

  20

  You spend an awful lot of your time sleeping, don’t you? said Daphne, wrinkling her nose critically. How do you manage to get any work done?

  I work late at night.

  Did she look skeptical?

  At the university library he looked up her father in the International Who’s Who.

  Mortimer B. Hasendruck, Engineering Executive, b. Domus, Illinois. s. Wilfred Christopher and Clara Mae (Crowley). B.S. cum laude (Desmond Fitzgerald scholar). Northeastern University, 1940. M.S. in Engineering Mechanics, Harvard 1943. B.S. in Mathematics, U. of Michigan, 1946. Married Flora Bates, April 19, 1947. Children: Susan Vivian, Joseph Christophe
r III, Rose Daphne. 1946–1949 member staff Los Alamos Science Lab. 1949–1952 Group leader, Advanced Material Concepts Agency. U.S. Army. Alexandria, Va. 1952–1956 Science advisor. Nuclear Rocket Engine Controls. Missile Range instrumentation. 1956–1960 Dust Industries. Partner I960–, President 1970–1977, Chairman of the Board 1970–, Chief Executive Officer 1978. Presidential Commission of White House Fellows 1971–1973. Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement. Registered Professional Engineer, N.H. Vt. Conn. R.I. Me. Mass. N.Y. Member American Rocket Society. National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

  What? said Helmuth. You mean you have never heard of Dust Industries? He seemed incredulous at Ulrich’s ignorance. What kind of an activist were you? Dust is one of America’s largest armament manufacturers. They produced most of the advanced equipment used in Vietnam.

  I guess, said Ulrich, that’s why Daphne doesn’t wish to speak about her father.

  We must have her over for dinner, said Maria.

  Sure. Ulrich agreed, but in a voice that lacked conviction.

  .

  21

  Another unsigned note in the mail. It was brief and to the point. We know where you are. Did you expect to hide from us? Because of you, Ilse, Hermann, Adalbert, Heinz, Helga, Assif, Lerner, and Mausi are rotting in jail. Did you expect to get off scot-free? We intend to get you. If not tomorrow, then the day after. If not the day after, then next week, or next month. Soon. We promise.

  He did not destroy the note. He couldn’t bear to discard anything. It was not the first note he had received. Did they really believe that he moved into this building in Würtenburg to escape from them?