The Pegnitz Junction

by Mavis Gallant

  Instead of crossing the road to the parking lot Jürgen strode down to the corner and the traffic lights (he was law-abiding) and around the corner; made a detour to compare his new rug with some in a store window; turned up a side street and back to the parking lot across from the widow’s place. There he saw one of her sons, aged about thirteen. “What now?” Jürgen sang out. He held the rug overhead, thinking the kid would grab for it. He was good-tempered, laughing. He had an advantage; not only was he powerful and large, but he was not afraid of harming anyone.

  The kid broke into a run, with a hand behind his back.

  “You don’t want to do that,” said Jürgen. He was ready to cripple the kid with a knee and step on his right hand, but only if he had to. He must have seemed like a great statue to the boy, standing with both arms straight up supporting the carpet. Jürgen brought his knee up too high and too soon; he was used to fighting with men. The kid bent gracefully over the knee and pushed the length of the blade of a kitchen knife above the buckle of Jürgen’s belt.

  The train trembled and slid round a curve, out of sight of the dappled lawn and the people climbing slowly up to the castle, on their last excursion together. Christine moved back to the compartment to make way for a vendor in a white coat pulling an empty trolley.

  “We have had drinks without ice,” said Herbert. “Coffee without cups. Now nothing at all.”

  The woman in the corner fanned herself briskly with a fan improvised out of postcards. They came over every night and for lunch on Sundays. When the other couple had God’s own darling, our precious Carol Ann, they would bring her in a basket lined with dotted Swiss. I remember Carol Ann’s first veal cutlet. I had a wooden hammer – no American butcher knew how to slice veal thin enough. Later they went on their diets, wanted broiled steaks, string beans, Boston lettuce, fat-free yogurts. Carol Ann the little cow came home from summer camp with a taste for cold meat loaf made from stray cats and chili sauce. The little bitch grew older, demanded baker’s cakes, baker’s pies, cupcakes in cellophane, ready-mix peach ice cream, frozen lasagna, pineapple chunks, canned chop suey, canned spaghetti, while the big cow, the little cow’s mother, got a craving for canned fudge sauce their way, poured it over everything, poured it over my fresh spicecake. I stopped making spicecake.

  “We could move, you know,” said Christine to Herbert. “I’ve noticed one or two empty compartments.”

  “I have seen them too,” said Herbert, “but the seats in those compartments have been reserved and we would eventually have to come back here.”

  “It’s just that I don’t feel well,” she said.

  “Heat and hunger and thirst,” said Herbert. He shrugged, though not through indifference; he meant that he was powerless to help.

  They wanted Aunt Jemima pancakes, corn syrup, maple syrup, hot onion rolls, thousand-island dressing, butter that would give you jaundice just to look at, carrots grated in lemon Jell-O, and as for the piglet Carol Ann, one whole winter she would not eat anything but bottled sandwich spread on ready-sliced bread, said only Jews and krauts and squareheads ate the dark. Had been told this by her best friend at that time, Rose of Sharon Jasakowicz.

  “There’s too much interference!” said Christine, though little Bert was not being a bother at all, was nowhere near her. She sprang up and went back to the corridor, untied her scarf and let the wind lift her hair. The Norwegian stood close beside her and showed her his yoga method of breathing, pinching his nostrils and puffing like a bullfrog. The train stopped more and more erratically, sometimes every eight or nine minutes. Presently she noticed they were standing in a stationyard that seemed so hopeless, so unlikely to offer even the most primitive sort of buffet, that none of them made a move to go out. The yard buildings were saturated with heat, grey with drought, and the shrubs and trees beyond the station contained not a drop of moisture in their trunks and stems. A loudspeaker carried a man’s voice along the empty platform: “All the windows on the train are to be shut until further orders.”

  “They can’t mean this train,” said the Norwegian.

  Herbert, evidently annoyed by such a senseless direction, immediately went off to find the conductor. The woman in the corner began peeling an orange with her teeth. “I have diabetes, I am always hungry,” she said suddenly, apparently to little Bert.

  Herbert soon came back with an answer: there had been grass and brush fires along the tracks. “They may even have been set deliberately,” he said. She could hear him explaining calmly to little Bert about the fires, so the child would not be alarmed.

  “We can’t shut all the windows in this heat,” said Christine. “Certainly not for long.” No one answered her.

  After the train had quit the grey stationyard she continued to stand at the open window, her hair flying like the little girls’ purple crêpe-paper streamers. Each time the train approached a curve she imagined the holocaust they might become. She thought of the ties consumed, flakes of fire on the compartment ceilings, sparks burned black on the first-class velvet. All the same, she kept hold of the two window handles, ready to slide the pane up at the first hint of danger. No one challenged her except for the bun-faced conductor, who asked if she had heard the order.

  “Yes, but there aren’t any fires,” she said. “We need air.” It was true that there were no signs of trouble except for burned-out patches of grass. Not even a trace of ash remained on the sky, not even a cinder. The conductor continued to look at her in his jolly way, head to one side, a smile painted on his face, looking as round and as stuffed as a little clown. “All right,” she said. “I shall close the window, at least until Backnang. Then you can say that we all obeyed you.”

  “The train has been rerouted because of the danger,” he said. “No Backnang.”

  “That seems fairly high-handed of you,” she began, but of course she was wasting her breath. He was only a subaltern; he had no real power.

  With its shut window, the compartment was unbearable now. Even little Bert was looking green.

  “I was going to tell you about the change,” said Herbert. “But you were having a yoga lesson and I didn’t want to interrupt. We go through Coburg now. We shall be a couple of hours late, I imagine. I believe we change trains. Coburg is a pretty place,” he added, to console her.

  “Will it be explained at the station at home?” she said. “Someone is supposed to be meeting me.”

  “Meeting us,” Herbert corrected, because in the eyes of these strangers he and Christine were married. The truth was that they would separate at their home station as if they were strangers.

  The woman in the corner emptied one of her plastic bags of all the food it contained and filled it with the rubbish. Sundays I had them for the two meals. They wanted just soup for supper, with cold ham and iceberg lettuce, dressing their way. The men ate Harvard beets in the factory canteen; they started wanting them. They wanted two or three different kinds of pizzas, mushroom ketchup, mustard pickles.

  Little Bert kept an eye on Christine. “You never finished reading,” he said.

  “I can’t remember what I was reading about,” she said.

  “What is the book called?” he said.

  “All About Bruno,” said Christine. “What else could it be?”

  “No, that might confuse him,” said Herbert. “He knows Bruno is his own invention. The book is supposed to tell Christine how to think, little Bert. The Bruno story might be there. I don’t say it is.”

  “Now who is confusing?” said Christine.

  “But is the Bruno story inside?” said little Bert. “Look again,” he urged Christine.

  She looked, or pretended to. “Bruno goes to the moon?”

  “No, I know about the moon.”

  “Bruno goes to an anti-authoritarian kindergarten?”

  “Don’t tease him,” said Herbert.

  “The kindergarten,” said little Bert. He leaned against her, out of fatigue, apparently. She might have felt pity for the fragile neck
and the tired shadows around his eyes, but there were also the dirty knuckles, the bread-and-butter breath, the high insistent voice.

  During the depression the factory laid off, nobody was buying the kitchen units. I went to collect the relief, he was too ashamed. They didn’t send you cheques in those days, you had to go round and see them. The other couple still came for dinner. We ate beans, sardines, peanut butter, macaroni. You could get lambs’ kidneys for twenty cents, nobody in the USA ate them. Also heart, tongue. He was laid off from February 16, 1931, to September 23, 1932. Went back part-time. I did part-time work cooking in Carol Ann’s school. She called me “Mrs.,” would never say I was a relative. My cousin-in-law never worked, always had headaches, had to lie down a lot, never learned English. Then the factory picked up full speed, getting ready for the conflict. I fed them all through the war, stood at the electric stove, making oxtail soup on the one hand, baked squash on the other, bread and milk when my cousin had his ulcer.

  “I have something he might like to look at,” the woman in the corner said. She offered little Bert part of her collection of postcards, but he put both hands behind his back and pressed even closer to Christine. Taking no notice of him, the woman began handing the cards around clockwise, starting with Herbert. “My friends on their summer holidays,” she said. Herbert passed on the dog-eared coffee-stained views of Dubrovnik, Edinburgh, Abidjan, Pisa, Madrid, Sofia, Nice. “Very nice,” she said, encouraging Herbert. “Very nice people.”

  The Norwegian looked at each card seriously, turned it over, examined the stamp, read the woman’s name and address, and tilted the card at an angle to read the message. The messages were aslant, consisted of a few words only, and ended in exclamation marks. He read aloud, “ ‘Very nice friendly people here!’ ”

  The woman was smiling, handing the cards around, but her mind was elsewhere. We never took the citizenship so we never voted. Were never interested in voting. During more than forty years we would only have voted four times anyway. Would have voted:

  In 1932 – for Repeal.

  In 1936 – against government interference and wild spending. Against a Second Term.

  In 1940 – against wild utterances and attempts to drag the USA into the conflict on the wrong side. The President of the USA at that time was a Dutch Jew, his father a diamond cutter from Rotterdam, stole the Russian Imperial jewels after the Bolshevik revolution, had to emigrate to avoid capture and prison sentence. Within ten years they were running the whole country. Had every important public figure tied up – Walter Winchell, everybody. Their real name was Roszenfeldt.

  In 1944 – against a Fourth Term. My cousin had a picture, it looked like a postcard, that showed the President behind bars. Caption said, “Fourth Term Hell!!!!!! I’m in for Life!!!!!”

  Apart from those four times we would never have voted.

  “We are on an electric line again,” Herbert told little Bert, who could not have had the faintest idea what this meant. The child looked wilted with heat. Their conductor had opened all the windows – there seemed to be no further news about fires – but nothing could move the leaden air.

  “I want it all in order,” Herbert said to Christine. “I really do intend to write a letter. Most of the toilets are still locked – true? There isn’t a drop of drinking water. The first vendor had no ice and no paper cups. The second had nothing but powdered coffee. The third had nothing at all. All three were indifferent.”

  “True,” said the woman, answering in place of Christine. She took off her black shoes and put her feet on top of them as if they were pillows.

  The conductor returned to check their seat reservations for the third or fourth time. “This is only a flag stop,” he said, as their train slowed. To make it easier for him, those who were in the wrong places – Christine, the Norwegian, and little Bert – moved to where they were supposed to be. The train was now inching along past a level crossing, then gave a great groan and stopped, blocking the crossroad. The barriers must have been down for some time because a long line of traffic had formed, and some of the drivers, perspiring and scarlet, had got out to yell protests and shake their fists. The sight of grown people making fools of themselves was new to little Bert, or perhaps the comic side of it struck him for the first time; he laughed until he was breathless and had to be thumped on the back. The woman in the corner kept an apple between her teeth while she looked in her purse for the ticket. Her eyes were stretched, her mouth strained, but there was no room on the table now, not even for an apple. As for the three men – Herbert, the conductor, and the Norwegian – something about the scene on the road had set them off dreaming; the look on their faces was identical. Christine could not quite put a name to it.

  The woman found her ticket and got rid of the apple.

  My husband said that if the President got in for a Fourth Term he would jump in deep water. That was an expression they used for suicide where he came from, because they had a world-famous trout stream. Not deep, though. Where he came from everybody was too poor to buy rope, so they said the thing about jumping. That was all the saying amounted to.

  To be truthful, said Christine to herself, all three of them seem to be thinking of rape. She wondered if the victim could be the pregnant young woman – a girl really, not as old as Christine – who was running along beside the tracks, making straight for the first-class carriage. Probably not; she was unmistakably an American army wife, and you could have counted on one hand the American wives raped by German men. There existed, in fact, a mutual antipathy, which was not the case when the sexes were reversed. But – here Christine imitated Herbert explaining something – we are not going to explore the attraction between German girls, famous for their docility, and American men, perhaps unjustly celebrated for theirs. We are going to learn something more about Herbert.

  Christine suddenly wondered if her lips had moved – if it was plain to anyone that her mind was speaking. At that second she noticed a fair, rosy, curly, simpering, stupid-looking child, whose bald and puffy papa kept punching the crossing barrier. Julchen Knopp was her name. Her skirt, as short as a tutu, revealed rows of ruffled lace running across her fat bottom.

  They brought up the heiress Carol Ann American style – the parents were chauffeur and maid. The mother couldn’t be chauffeur because she never learned to drive. My husband was crazy about Carol Ann. He called her Shirley Temple. I called her Shirley Bimbo, but not to her face.

  At some distance from the smirking Julchen, agape with admiration but not daring to speak, stood four future conscripts of the new anti-authoritarian army: they were Dietchen Klingebiel, who later became a failed priest; Ferdinandchen Mickefett, who was to open the first chic drugstore at Wuppertal; Peter Sutitt, arrested for doping racehorses in Ireland; and Fritz Förster, who was sent to Africa to count giraffes for the United Nations and became a mercenary.

  What she had just seen now was the decline of the next generation. What could prevent it? A new broom? A strong hand? The example of China? There was no limit to mediocrity, even today: the conductor had lied too easily; this was nothing like a flag stop. They had been standing still for at least seven minutes. Punctilious Herbert was far too besotted with Julchen Knopp to notice or protest. She felt an urgent need to make him pay for this, and tried to recall what it was he had said he hated most, along with the smell of food in railway compartments. As soon as they were moving again and the conductor had left off staring and gone away, she turned to the Norwegian and said, “Do please show us your yoga breathing method, and do let us hear you sing.”

  “Some people imagine that yoga is a joke,” said the Norwegian. “Some others don’t care about singing.” Nevertheless he seemed willing to perform for Herbert and little Bert and the insatiable passenger in the corner. He shut the door, which instantly made the compartment a furnace, sat down where little Bert should have been, pinched his nostrils between thumb and forefinger and produced the puffing bullfrog sounds Christine had already heard. He let
his nose go and said in a normal voice, “I sing in five languages. First, a Finnish folk song, the title of which means ‘Do Not Leave,’ or ‘Stay,’ or ‘Do Not Depart.’ “ He looked at Herbert. Perhaps he knew that Herbert had been teasing Christine, calling the Norwegian “your bearded cavalier.”

  The Norwegian pulled out the drop leaf at his end of the window and beat a rhythm upon it. His eyes all but vanished as he sang. His mouth was like a fish. As for Herbert, he suddenly resembled little Bert – eyes circled and tired, skin over the temples like tissue paper. She thought that he must be exhausted by the heat and by his worry over the child, and she remembered that although he hated the smell of food he had not said a word about it. The singing was tiring, finally; it filled the compartment and seemed to leave everyone short of breath. She got up and crossed to Herbert’s side, and he, with the Norwegian’s eyes fixed upon him, began stroking her arm with his fingertips, kissing her ear – things he never did in public and certainly not in front of little Bert. She sat quite still until the voice fell silent.

  The woman in the corner and little Bert applauded for a long time. Herbert said, “Well. Thank you very much. That was generous of you. Yes, I think that was generous …”

  Having said what he thought, Herbert got up and left abruptly, but nobody minded. All of them, except for the woman, departed regularly in search of a drink, a conductor, or an unlocked washroom. Little Bert curled up with his face to the wall and began to breathe slowly and deeply. The Norwegian, still in little Bert’s seat, tucked his head in the corner. His hands relaxed; his mouth came open. His breathing was louder and slower than the child’s. From the corner facing his came First the block around us got Catholic then it got black. That’s the way it usually goes. I can tell you when it got Catholic – around the time of Lend-Lease. We remained in the neighbourhood because there was a Lutheran school for the child. Good school. Some Germans, some Swiss, Swedes, Norwegians, Alsatians, the odd Protestant Pole from Silesia – Rose of Sharon was one. Seven other girls were called Carol Ann – most popular name. Later Carol Ann threw the school up to us, said it was ghetto, said she had to go to speech classes at the age of twenty to learn to pronounce “th.” Much good did “th” do our little society queen – first husband a bigamist, second a rent collector. Th. Th. Th.