Homeland

by John Jakes

  A waiter pointed out the proprietor seated on a stool behind a cash register. Pauli approached and addressed him haltingly, in English. “Sir? Any work?”

  “No.” The man scratched his formidable chin. “But Geizig over there, he’s looking for a boy, his helper quit last Friday.”

  Pauli was baffled by the confusing flow of words. The proprietor saw it, and repeated it in German.

  “Are you just off the boat?” he asked.

  “I am.”

  The man gave him a paternal smile and patted his arm. “I’ll bet you’re hungry. You surely look hungry.” He turned on his stool, beckoning. “Otto, this countryman of ours needs a plate of sauerkraut and a glass of beer. Take that table in the back, lad. Compliments of the house. You’ll do better asking about a job with a little food to buoy you up. Oh, and before you ask, slip into the kitchen and wash your face. Geizig is a stickler for personal cleanliness. Don’t worry, Geizig will be here for a while, he seldom goes back to his place before seven o’clock.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Pauli said with enthusiasm. The smell of sausages and bread and beer floating in the steamy air made him feel faint. He was liking America better every hour.

  Herr Geizig weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. His head was large and shaped like a cabbage. His ears stuck out prominently. He affected great joviality, but Pauli saw no humor in the small, shrewd eyes of light blue. He approached Herr Geizig’s table and respectfully asked in labored English about a position.

  “Speak German, English is a language for barbarians,” Geizig said with a sneer. Five empty beer steins sat in front of him, and a small ledger filled with figures, which he’d been studying between swallows.

  “What’s your name?” Pauli told him. Geizig asked some other particulars. “Well, I do need someone to clear and wash dirty dishes and glasses, sweep, mop—what do you know about my place?”

  Pauli admitted he knew nothing.

  “It’s a social club for Germans. Newcomers, like you—though my clientele is older. It’s small, cozy, not noisy like this. We serve light suppers in the evening, plenty of beer, wine, and coffee. I also help my guests with correspondence, railway tickets, that sort of thing. It’s a nice arrangement. I can pay thirty—uh, twenty cents a day, plus your food, and you can sleep in a shed behind the club.”

  “It sounds fine, sir.”

  “Not so fast. Are you willing to wear an apron?” Pauli nodded. “You’ll have to be neater, too. You’re a mess.”

  He reached for a stein with fingers resembling white sausages. “Wait for me outside, I’ll be along presently.”

  The name of the social club was Die goldene Tür, the Golden Door. Geizig told Pauli he’d taken the name from a poem written to commemorate the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. He said it with a snickering contempt in his voice.

  Pauli was distressed when he actually saw the club. It was no more than two airless rooms with adjoining kitchen on the second floor of a tenement-like building which backed up to an alley, within sound of the hooting horns of the river. Only one room in the club had a window, the first room as you came in the door. The outside stair leading up to the club was shaky, with several rotting risers. The solid door, perhaps a bright yellow once, had weathered and faded to a dirty mustard hue.

  A loft on the building’s top floor served as a dormitory with flimsy cots where newcomers could stay, for a price, until they settled locally, or made plans to travel farther. The shed which was to be Pauli’s domicile stood in a small, trash-strewn yard on the other side of the alley.

  But Pauli couldn’t be choosy. He would stay a month, no more, pocket his earnings and hop a train for Chicago. He would use his spare time to map his route.

  Die goldene Tür did a small but steady business, Pauli was surprised to discover. Most of the guests were young German immigrants in their twenties or thirties, bachelors; there were no female customers. The club apparently offered something immigrants wanted. Everyone spoke German, guests and workers alike; Herr Geizig’s rule.

  The club employed two barmaids who served drinks and food, which was prepared by Geizig’s gray and taciturn wife, in very indifferent fashion. Pauli quickly noticed that one or both of the barmaids usually disappeared with a customer at the end of an evening. The ritual of departure involved Herr Geizig handing a key to the woman, and the man handing some bills to Herr Geizig.

  One of the barmaids, Magda, had a pocked and hardbitten face, but a good disposition; she was more friendly than the other woman, Liesl. Pauli worked up nerve to ask her a question.

  “What’s the key for, Magda?”

  “A locked room upstairs. Don’t get nosy.”

  Thus he learned that the Golden Door was not quite the innocent social club it pretended to be.

  Pauli didn’t start work until noon. His first job was to sweep up trash, mop the clubrooms and wipe down the tables. He was on duty until the club closed, sometimes as late as half past two in the morning. When she wasn’t cooking and her husband nagged at her sufficiently, Frau Geizig hammered out German songs on a scarred piano in the room with no windows. The customers might sing with drunken abandon, but Frau Geizig’s face remained strained and sour while her hands chopped up and down on the keys.

  Other occurrences in the club disturbed Pauli. On four separate occasions he saw a patron overcome by an apparent fainting spell. These guests were helped down the stairs by Herr Geizig personally. None of the four had been drinking very much, Pauli was aware of that. Why they fell ill was a mystery. He never saw any of them a second time. Whatever luggage they had disappeared.

  The atmosphere of Die goldene Tür made him uneasy, eager to be away. And never more so than the night he heard a man shouting threats in the alley.

  Herr Geizig jumped up to soothe the half dozen customers. “It’s nothing, don’t trouble yourselves, I’ll take care of it.” He rushed outside. Pauli peeked around the door jamb. In the dark at the foot of the stairs, Herr Geizig was brandishing something silvery at a bearded young man.

  Someone pressed against Pauli’s back, making him start. “Magda,” he whispered, “Herr Geizig has a gun.”

  “Yes, come back in, it’s none of your affair.”

  “But who’s that man shouting and cursing?”

  “A friend of mine. He’s very jealous. He usually stays away when he’s sober. He must have drunk too much tonight. Come back in,” she repeated, with noticeable alarm.

  After a few minutes the stranger’s voice was suddenly stilled, and Herr Geizig lumbered back up the stairs. Of the silvery pistol there was no sign.

  Herr Geizig went straight to Magda and grabbed her by the wrist. “Keep your crazy friend away from my club or it’ll go hard with you.”

  Magda twisted free. “Yes, sir.”

  Geizig shot truculent looks around the room dimly lit by oil lamps—the tenement, empty on the first floor, didn’t even enjoy the luxury of gas. No one dared ask a question or comment about the altercation, least of all Pauli.

  His birthday passed. He didn’t mention it to anyone. It was enough that he was filling out, growing taller. Hard work developed thick bunches of muscle on his upper arms.

  When he wasn’t on duty, he studied his grammar and phrase book furiously. Forced to deal with the new language every day, he learned faster than he had in Berlin or on the ship.

  He and Magda talked whenever they had a chance. He told her about his uncle, and Chicago, and his need to get there before bad weather set in. She came around at ten one morning, wearing a poor threadbare cape and bonnet, and showed him the way to the Jersey City free library, a small one-story building of granite. There, she said, he could find the maps that he needed.

  Hesitantly, he went inside. There was a rich, warm smell of paper and book bindings, then a rustle of skirts belonging to the librarian who came from behind her great mahogany desk.

  “May I help you, young man?”

  Phrase book in hand, he attempted to tell her wh
at he needed. Maps of America. She seemed kindly, interested in helping. She was a stout young woman, ten or fifteen years older than Pauli.

  She sat him at one of the tables, then disappeared down a shadowy aisle between tall shelves. She brought back two large atlases.

  “I’ll assist you with these. I am the librarian, Miss Lou Stillwell.”

  With Miss Stillwell seated next to him, he pored over colorful maps of the United States. Miss Stillwell took his hand and guided his index finger from Jersey City across a likely route to Chicago, a word printed large over the blue of a long slender lake. On the route there was at least one range of mountains, in a province named Pennsylvania. Then came another large province, Ohio, and another, Indiana—strange, musical names, but he was finding many of those in America. They were not provinces, Miss Stillwell told him, but states.

  He came back several mornings in the following week, to study and dream over the maps. “It would be thoughtful of you to write your uncle,” Miss Lou advised him during one visit. “To tell him you arrived safely. Do you have his address?”

  “In his—uh—letter. I lost it. But he said Chicago. Mitch-i-gun Avenue.”

  “He said what?” She couldn’t help giggling.

  He tried to pronounce it more carefully. “Mich-i-gan. But I don’t have no street number.”

  “Any street number.”

  “Yes, that is what I said.”

  “Not quite, but never mind, sweet boy. You’ll be going to Chicago soon, won’t you?”

  “Soon, yes, I save money now.” He had not, however, revealed that he planned to travel by stealing rides on freight trains.

  He was going to Chicago sooner than Miss Lou Stillwell knew. He’d had his fill of the grim, vaguely sordid atmosphere of Die goldene Tür, and had made up his mind to leave at the end of the week. It would take a bit of nerve to inform Herr Geizig and ask for all the wages which the owner had credited to him, and retained for safekeeping. It was the first week of August; he’d been working for two months. Herr Geizig owed him something like twelve dollars.

  “About your uncle,” Miss Stillwell said. “I have an idea. We’ll write him, care of Michigan Avenue, Chicago, and we’ll just hope he is prominent enough to receive the letter without a street number.”

  It was a simple letter, three sentences, in English. The first said Pauli had landed on the first day of June. The second said he was well. The last was three words. Expect me soon. At Miss Stillwell’s insistence, he closed by writing Your affectionate nephew, P. Kroner. The librarian promised to post the letter that afternoon.

  “Thank you,” Pauli said to her. Outside, another hot rain was pelting down, hiding Jersey City in a heavy murk. The library was stifling; overheated rooms seemed to be popular in America.

  “Thank you,” he said again. “I have learned from the maps. I may not be here again soon.”

  “I hope you’ll come back,” Miss Lou said with an odd catch in her throat.

  “I will try.” He would be gone by the following Monday, but he didn’t want to tell her and possibly hurt her feelings.

  “Yes, please do,” she said. “Don’t lose these.” She handed him a packet of tracings from the atlases. She had traced the states that lay between New Jersey and his uncle’s house. On these she had neatly printed the names of major cities, and drawn precise lines indicating railways.

  Miss Lou Stillwell brushed her fingers against his cheek. “You’re a fine person, Pauli. A lovely boy.” She seized his head between her hands and kissed him, thrusting her tongue between his lips.

  Then, with a little cry of shame, she ran back into the gloomy stacks.

  Pauli didn’t quite know what to make of the experience.

  After a day of debating with himself, he decided to confide in Magda, and ask her to help him understand the incident.

  “Why, Pauli, first, I expect the lady was lonely. But there’s another reason, and you may not have guessed it yet. You’re only fifteen, but even so, you’re attractive. Strong shoulders, muscles in your arms—definitely an attractive young man. Women are drawn to you. Oh, you aren’t the handsomest thing I’ve ever seen. But you’re smart, you have a good nature—those qualities are in short supply in men. So women prize them. Also you have a wonderful smile. You’d turn my head if I weren’t such an old lady.” She said this teasingly, planting a kiss on his cheek.

  “I’ll tell you one more thing. You’ll always have a lot of girls falling for you. Of course when you find one you want to keep, she’ll probably be the one you can’t get. Life has a funny way of pulling tricks like that, Pauli.”

  That Saturday night, his plans were abruptly changed.

  Magda came in late, looking drawn. Herr Geizig shouted at her. She ran into the kitchen, weeping. As the door swung shut, Pauli saw a purpling bruise under her left eye. Her jealous friend again?

  There were six men in the club. Four were drinking and playing cards. Herr Geizig was helping two with a railway itinerary; he often bought train tickets for newcomers who were baffled by English, or too intimidated to arrange transportation for themselves. Magda had told Pauli in confidence that Herr Geizig routinely cheated the men by charging fifty percent more than the actual price.

  Just before nine o’clock the owner put on his hat and went out without an explanation. About half past nine, Pauli was wiping down a table when the other barmaid, Liesl, stopped near him. “What is that funny smell?”

  “Coming from downstairs,” one of the card players said.

  Frau Geizig burst from the kitchen. “Something’s burning, what is it?”

  Magda dropped a full stein of beer that shattered and splattered. Deathly white, she clutched her bruised face.

  “Oh my God, he’s done it.” Pauli’s eyes popped. Did she mean her jealous friend? Had he set the place on fire?

  The frightened guests jumped up from their chairs. Pauli smelled smoke and saw a faint orange glow outside the single grimy window. He ran for the door, blindly, and bumped into a chair, hurting his leg. Full of rage and fear, he seized the nearest table and threw it over. He could feel heat in the floor; curls of smoke were seeping between the pegged boards. He could hear a roaring down below. The light outside the window glared. The whole rickety building was ablaze.

  He yanked the door open. A blast of heat drove him back. He clung to the frame of the door while he looked down into an inferno of flame and sparks and disintegrating wood. “God in heaven. The stair’s gone.”

  He slammed the door and leaned back against it to think. The wood was hot on his palms. He jumped away.

  Frau Geizig wrung her hands. “We must escape.”

  “Did you hear me? The stairs are useless.”

  “We’ll die, we’ll all die,” Liesl moaned.

  “Isn’t there another door?” one of the guests screamed at Frau Geizig. The rest knew the answer. Sobbing, Frau Geizig shook her head.

  Everyone seemed stupefied with fear. Thick choking smoke was boiling from the kitchen, as if the fire had already eaten through the floor in there. Pauli shook himself out of his dazed state; he was cursed if he’d die in this mean, filthy place, accidentally, after struggling so hard to reach America. He shot across the room, yelling, “Out the window, that’s the way.”

  “Oh, I can’t jump, I can’t,” Frau Geizig wailed. One of the greenhorns, trying to find someone to blame for the sudden horror, slapped her across the face.

  “Shut up, you old bitch.”

  The heat and smoke were intensifying. Pauli knew there wasn’t much time. He ran to Magda. Ruddy light from the kitchen was reflecting off the tears on her bruised face. “Come on, we’re not going to die here,” he yelled, pulling her arm so hard she cried out.

  He forced her to the window. Flames were licking up from the vacant floor below. In the darkness on the other side of the alley he glimpsed the faces of neighbors, round white blurs.

  He shoved the window all the way up, struck in the face by a gust of scorching a
ir. The flames were shooting up directly beneath the window; they’d have to leap wide. “Come on, the rest of you, it’s the only way,” he shouted.

  “Right behind you,” one of the greenhorns said, but Liesl was nowhere to be seen in the smoke, and Frau Geizig had collapsed on the floor.

  “Hold on, Magda.”

  “I can’t, I’m scared—”

  “No you aren’t, don’t say that.” Panting, he boosted her to the sill and worked his arm around her thick waist. For a moment he was truly terrified—the fire would consume his possessions: the stereopticon card, the globe, the map tracings—but then he remembered those things were stuffed in his grip in the shed, across the alley.

  “Jump,” he cried, and pulled Magda with him, out into the dark and the smoke and the billowing flames. As he plummeted, his left trouser leg caught fire. Then the ground rushed up to strike him.

  10

  Joe Crown

  JOSEPH EMANUEL CROWN, OWNER of the Crown Brewery of Chicago, was a worried man. Worried on several counts, the most immediate being a civic responsibility he was scheduled to discuss at an emergency meeting this Friday, the fourteenth of October; a meeting he had requested.

  Joe Crown seldom revealed inner anxieties, and that was the case as he worked in his office this morning. He was a picture of steadiness, rectitude, prosperity. He wore a fine suit of medium gray enlivened by a dark red four-in-hand tied under a high collar. Since the day was not yet too warm, he kept his coat on.

  Joe’s hair was more silver than white. He washed it daily, kept it shining. His eyes behind spectacles with silver wire frames were dark brown, rather large, and alert. His mustache and imperial showed careful attention; he had an appointment at twelve for the weekly trim. His hands were small but strong. He wasn’t handsome, but he was commanding.

  Three principles ruled Joe Crown’s business and personal life, of which the most important was order. In German, Ordnung. Without order, organization, some rational plan, you had chaos.