by Tadzio Koelb
After a deep breath he turned to the closed door that led from the restroom back to the place where the others—the cook and the counter girl, the busboy, the owner, the customers who sat on the vinyl stools or in the booths and waited now for something, food or revelation—either knew or didn’t. He was safe or exposed, alive or dead. He stood with one hand on the door handle and the other holding tight to the package, stayed that way for a moment, thinking about what would come next, what might be on the other side, an image of police arriving, of a desperate attempt at escape. When his breath returned, he clenched his jaw tight and turned the knob.
Finding no one waiting for him in the hall, he made a decision. He would not walk towards the front, where expecting him there was either a waitress ready for an evening at the pictures or else a room full of anger and disgust and recrimination, bunched fists and possibly worse. Instead he made his way straight out the back, into the alley behind, where the garbage was kept. He deposited the suit box in the trash there. Then he walked, steadily but not fast, to the lodging house. He didn’t look back or around or even really in front of him: he moved in a kind of daze that mingled gradually with the evening’s dark. He had no bag so he put his shaving things and underclothes into one of the land-lady’s pillowcases. He tied it tight, tucked it under his arm, and left.
He lay that night on a bench in the bus station, expecting that someone would appear with the annunciation of his fraudulence as spotted through the open bathroom door, tried to accept that he would soon be seized and destroyed; but it didn’t happen. No one came in but some salesmen with their sample cases and a janitor who cleaned around him as if he weren’t there. In the morning he took the bus out to the factory and with the same chanting focus as before he practiced again, this time the whole story, the encapsulation of who he was and always now would be: “My name is Abe Kunstler. I was a soldier and a POW. I can draw wire, and I was wounded in the war.”
When they gave him the job he told himself, Somehow despite all my mistakes I have made it here, and now at last I am home. He felt certain then that his plan must be a kind of destiny.
“That bastard is crazy,” Blackie complained to Ahern.
“Let me tell you something. You played a prank, which apparently he didn’t care for. He told a joke, which apparently you didn’t care for, any more than he did. As far as I can see, there isn’t anything else to it than that.”
“Come on. You don’t like that little jerk any more than I do.”
“You’re probably right,” said Ahern. “I don’t. But the way I figure, I would rather know why, and it don’t have a goddamn thing to do with his dirty jokes or your box of dirtied cig papers.”
It was after the incident with the papers that someone decided to go squealing to the floor manager, which was considered unthinkable, a break in the ranks they held as sacred as they might any sworn bond. The snitch claimed that Kunstler always seemed to be dressed by the time the others had barely opened their lockers. “We’re just punching out, and he shows up with his pansy tie all tied and his hat already on his head and a smoke in his puss. Some of the guys think he changes in the john.”
“So maybe he’s shy, so what?” the floor manager asked.
“So then he stands there and just watches us.”
“Watching you is hardly a crime, I hope,” the floor manager said. “Myself, I only do it for the money. I hope you’ll understand, not take it the wrong way.”
“Who’s joking? You know what I mean. He’s slipping out. He leaves the floor early, while the rest of us are still at it.”
“While the rest of you are still yakking, you mean. Kunstler’s not the one wasting time around here. He’s the first one on the floor in the morning, I might point out. Clocks in and out right, every time, I might point out. Never late back from breaks.”
“You might point out.”
“Hey, you’re catching on fine. You think maybe I don’t check the cards? Brother, you’re wrong. You get here twenty minutes early every day, you can be ready to punch the minute the whistle goes, too. You can even change in the john, if you like.” They figured the manager liked Kunstler because he didn’t need much training: the little man had walked in off the street dressed as he always was when not in his coverall, his clothes not expensive but too new, his tie too loud and his collar points too long, with a cigarette in his mouth the whole time and one eye closed against the smoke, and announced in his voice like scraping rust that he could draw wire.
“You look a little young,” the manager said, to which Kunstler only shrugged.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I can still draw wire.”
The manager walked the little man to a machine and around it. Butler was working it but the manager nodded at him and so he handed his gloves to the manager, who handed them to Kunstler. Kunstler accepted them inattentively and set about topping the powder in the stuffing boxes. Then he lit a new cigarette out of his pocket and waited silently for the spool to empty. When the new spool arrived, he turned to the manager and said, “Conditioned?” and the manager nodded, but Kunstler checked the wire anyway with his thumb before he strung it up, easing the work through the first lube box and die and then around the capstan, through the second block, and on around the machine. He handed the manager back the gloves and then stood by the receiving coil for a minute to watch for seams, his hands in his suit coat pockets, his cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
“You lay rope?” the manager asked. Kunstler dropped his butt on the floor and stepped on it before he shook his head and said, “Not me. I just draw wire.”
“Rod? Bar?”
“I guess maybe I could, but not really. Wire’s what I know.”
“Where do you work now?”
“Nowhere. I was in the service. I might have lied to them about my age. I’ve been out a bit now.”
“And since?”
They watched the wire run through the blocks to the spool for a moment and then Kunstler shrugged again. “Lot of nothing,” he said. “More or less.” Then he talked about being in the POW camp, and how there was an accident, and how he had been hurt. Wounded was the word he used. The manager nodded.
“Okay,” the manager said.
The next day Kunstler was there before anyone else, ready to work, and work was all he did, hardly talking, barely even looking at the others, just waving wordlessly to the man who worked the trolley when it was time to spider the finished wire onto the drum. They didn’t have a coverall small enough for him at first, so he wore an old one with the sleeves and legs cut down, and the name O’Brien on the patch. He taped the wrists and ankles shut so they wouldn’t get caught in the works.
“They like him upstairs because he’s just one more machine,” Foley said. “That’s why they let him get dolled up to come in and stare at the rest of us dressing.”
“Le dernier cri,” said Augie, who had been stationed in Paris.
Blackie said, “That and his spiel about being a POW. I bet you he carries his draft card in his pocket, along with his dog tags and the box number for his CO.”
“Probably sleeps with his service pin under his pillow.”
“Did you ever hear him talk about it? Says, ‘I was wounded in the war.’ Everyone else gets shot, or stabbed, or blown up. Something normal that they can goddamn name. But Abe Kunstler? No, not him. He gets himself wounded.” Blackie was getting steamed, too steamed, or at least so it seemed to Butler, who stood up at that, and asked, “Any of you get captured and taken to Germany? He was in a camp, he got cut up like a piece of fruit from what I understand he told the foreman, so for all I care the guy can call it wounded and a boo-boo and whatever the hell else he wants.”
Everyone was quiet, because they all knew that in 1944 Butler had spent seven days locked in a shit-filled cattle car from Belgium to Poland with fifty other men. Not all of them survived the trip but it hadn’t always been possible to tell because they were packed in so tight that the dead didn’t necessar
ily fall, but swayed on with the others as if feigning life. Everyone had heard, although always with the courtesy not to remember where, that he still woke up with nightmares. Then Bobby, the young guy who worked the winder, said that he had come in early once and found Kunstler putting on his gear, and seen clearly visible beneath his undershirt the blue-edged beige bandage around his ribs. Kunstler hadn’t said anything as he finished buttoning himself into his coverall, not a word, just watched Bobby, who in shame or fear or something else it would have been hard for him to name had looked away. “I almost felt like he was daring me to say something to him about it,” Bobby said. And Butler, still standing, looking down at a grease rag he was worrying now in his hand, said, “He could walk around here with that scar showing all the time, give you something really shocking to start at. Instead he just dresses solitary, like, on his own. You should all lay off him for a while, give him a break. Give us all a goddamn break.”
That put an end to it, although in a sense it had been ended long before, because as Blackie said, “That was some day, when Kunstler pulled the thorn out of Jackson’s paw.” Jacks was already and forever the means through which Kunstler communicated with the rest of the floor, the wedge by which he pried open the unyielding shell of their society, because although the others might have treated Jacks to pranks and thought of him as a kind of servant and even called him poor dumb Jacks without always checking first to be sure he wasn’t there to hear, they felt for him that automatic sense of ownership that sometimes comes from knowing someone too long to consider it any sort of choice. Soon enough they felt something similar for Kunstler, too, came to think of him as theirs alone to disparage, although it’s likely that not one of them at any point realized it, and certain that not one of them would have admitted it in any case if he had. That was why nearly a year after he had first showed up they still called him the new guy, no matter how many others had come since, and it was also why, when Jacks said, “The new guy should come, too,” no matter what anyone else thought they wanted, no one argued about it, and in the end he came, the new guy, Abe Kunstler, accompanying them to the dance hall.
* * *
·
Unclothed and boozy on Kunstler’s narrow bed beneath the unshielded bulb the girl was a bright, creamy pool, braced by the cool air, and he skimmed the goosed surface with his small, factory-stained hand while they kissed, watched the tips of her breasts pucker and rise. Released from the amending circumstance of her clothing she was more than ever a girl, the unwrinkled youthfulness of her body, stubby and blunt as a kitten’s, almost shocking. She stroked his face and they stayed like that for a while, Kunstler sitting on the edge of the bed, the girl Inez setting slowly into half sleep and the mess of unwashed bedclothes beneath his moving hand. “Spooning is what I like the best,” she admitted again, “but I like the rest well enough when I’ve had something to drink.” He had given her plenty to drink, but still he was not aggressive. He looked her in the eye and made each movement of his hand slow, taking a long while before finally with a spit-wet finger he unpicked the gate of hair woven between her legs.
This was the distorted mirror of his imagination come to life, a moment he had pictured and which had looked so much like this in thought, but which now in acting had expanded dangerously beyond control: for of course he had not dreamed far enough, and when she reached awkwardly to open his shirt, Kunstler pulled away so suddenly in his surprise that he slipped to the floor and hit his back on the wall with a force that nearly winded him. Panic and confusion cast the girl out of her twilight, and she seemed abruptly aware of her nakedness, bunched what could be reached of the sheet between her legs with one arm, and wrapped the other around her breasts.
It took her a moment of looking around as if to get her bearings to ask, “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” He didn’t respond and she asked again, then again, her voice starting to rise: “What’s wrong? What is it?”
Kunstler said, “Wait, just wait.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said. “I don’t understand.”
He struck the floor with his palm and said, “Wait, now,” and she started, and he said, “Look, okay?” Then he said, “Look, but wait.”
Slowly then he lifted his undershirt to display a broad section of tightly wrapped medical bandage, the blue edges crisscrossed, bright safety pin beneath his arm, telling her at first only what he had told the factory others when Jacks kidded him for always being first into the locker room, an explanation that had been brief, reticent, almost angry, a wire-like barrier of hostile sensitivity, hardly more than an admission that something was different, that he had been hurt—although wounded was the word he had used in speaking to the foreman: I was wounded in the war. “Not fighting,” he said. “Prisoner-of-war camp, inside Germany.” His look and his tone had challenged everyone to take this as explanation enough. He anyway had nothing more to tell them. There was no story: there was just the wound.
Now, however, sitting on the floor across from the naked girl wrapped for safety in her own arm, Kunstler suddenly knew the history of his misfortune in a strange and easy detail that before had eluded him, and he spoke to himself however much it sounded as if he were speaking to her, because to speak was to explore it, stake it out, talking with growing urgency and almost satisfaction of it all, of the camp where the soldiers had been taken and of their misery, of his injury, his consciousness held suddenly captive by the words he found. Confused and indistinct events in being told became clear, durable, and he experienced anew the original era of his being, the strange countryside like the landscape in a dream, the body found dismembered by a bomb in a clearing between the birch trees, followed now by panic and failed flight from capture. Then the details, apprehended as if through a keyhole, commandeered: that there had been Negro men at the camp, dozens of them, more than the man had ever seen in one place before, and darker than he had ever seen, too, their vein-streaked eyes a permanent shock in the night of their faces, who spoke French and had French names, and who were luckier in that at least than the man had been with his German name for which the others distrusted him. There were Russians, too, beyond a double line of fence, treated worse than all the rest, who got hardly anything more than a half bucket of potatoes to eat between them and lived on the cold floors of their tents, anticipatory retribution meted out for the horrible but expected revenge they would and did exact when the Reds marched in and it was the turn of the camp guards to attempt a terrified escape. Kunstler heard again but in his own voice for the first time the forgotten names the man had brought back from Germany: Stalag III-A and Luckenwalde. Brandenburg. Markendorf.
The men held in these names were no longer soldiers. “They weren’t even really men, any more,” Kunstler told her. They were just struggling and wasting bodies, the person inside driven out, missing, refuged elsewhere and perhaps never coming back. To the Germans they were less maybe even than that: they were enemies and prisoners, which is to say, little more than tools if they were anything at all other than a burden, and so to justify their right to a physical form they were made to work. There were factories outside the camp, each with machines to run, fires to stoke, crates to lift and stack, then lift again. Guards drove the prisoners from the camp in frozen canvas-covered trucks to buildings all across Brandenburg.
Kunstler knew it had been a fertile place, trees thick along the edges of villages and fields, solid and venerable, a landscape strong with the strength of things that live through winter—but he could not see any of that now. In his mind instead he and the dozen faceless others and their silhouetted guards traveled on the half-open flatbed across a brown-grey and dusty plain, a place ever-withered and leafless, deciduous, hard, where wind blew down endless miles of road and railway, and he imagined that from the truck they had watched trains roll by filled with the things they had made with their soulless hands in the factories for their captors, otherwise safe, otherwise normal things—buttons, metal knobs, lightbulbs
, things that might be and likely were here, right now, in the building where they lay, the girl on the bed, half naked in her sheet and loosening arm, he on the floor with his bandages exposed. They were everywhere, in fact: in every building he could think of, the factories and the stores and the bars, and though he knew they were harmless, the sight of them in his dream of dust and tarmac brought on such a feeling of disgust that they might have been the organs and limbs of the dead.
The factory, too, he saw differently than he knew it must have been: not the high, lofted hangars as housed the great spools of wire rope, but rather a low, long building of orange brick with a tiled roof, and rising from the center a square turret under which the train line ran. It was as still in his mind as a photo, so that however long his thoughts approached along the beckoning tracks, it grew no closer.
