The Pegnitz Junction

by Mavis Gallant

  As they shuffled along the corridor Herbert told Christine that he had folded and sealed his imaginary letter of protest about the train and was mailing it in his head to papers in Frankfurt, Hamburg, West Berlin, Munich, and Bonn; to three picture magazines, a trade journal, an engineering review, a powerful newsweekly and a famous TV commentator – but not to any part of the opposition press. He wanted to throw rocks at official bungling, but the same rocks must not strike the elected government. His letter mentioned high-handedness, lives disrupted without thought or care, blind obedience to obsolete orders, pig-headed officials, buck-passing, locked toilets, shortage of drinking water, absence of someone responsible, danger to health, indifference to others. Among the victims he mentioned a small child, an old woman, a visiting foreigner who would be left with a poor impression, a pregnant American, and a tall girl who wore nothing but size-eleven sandals and a short linen frock, who was travelling almost naked, in fact.

  Hand in hand, perhaps wanting to avoid further instructions, Christine and little Bert made for the barbed wire they had been told to avoid. They walked along a sandy road that was strewn with candy wrappers, cigarette butts, bottle caps, and bent straws, like any sightseers’ road anywhere. Little Bert’s hand felt as soft as the sand underfoot and as grubby as the rubbish on it. His natural surroundings were rust, wires, rain-washed warnings, sweet melting foods.

  “Your father is getting you something to drink,” she said, though he had not complained of thirst or of anything, and seemed content with promises. She showed him frontier posts looped with rusted wire like birthday ribbons. “You can die of tetanus if you catch your hand on it,” she said. They stood on a height of land from which she could see two little villages flanking a smoking factory and a few scattered farmhouses with their windows boarded up on one side. No one in those houses could lean on the sill and observe little Bert, or Christine, or the barefooted old woman cutting grass for rabbits right to the first strands of rust, or a couple moving along at a crouch because they were hunting for mushrooms. Stern cautions against doing this had been nailed here and there, but people were used to these by now.

  Little Bert began to play at hopping off the path. “You may step off one side, but not the other,” she warned him. He no more questioned this than he had the meaning of tetanus. He appeared to have an inborn knowledge of what the frontier was about.

  He was bored, however. “What are you looking at?” he said, with a return of his Paris whine. Being small he could not see farther than the first barrier. She counted off for him a fence, a tract of low scrub, fence again, scrub, more fence, deep-ditch trap, fence, trap again probably, fences clean and bright in the sun as they moved farther east. Shading her eyes, she found herself looking at a man in uniform who was looking at her through field glasses. He looked at her and at little Bert, who was tugging her hand and wailing, “Let’s walk.”

  The child’s bratty voice made another man turn; he was a civilian with a scarred hairline, strolling along the sandy road too with his hands behind his back. He seemed to measure everything he gazed on – seemed to estimate, memorize, and add to a sum of previous knowledge. He knew about the smoking factory on the other side and about its parasite villages; he remembered when there had been the rumour, years ago, that the factory, with its technicians and engineers, was to be dismantled and moved. No one had told him so: he was too little then to be trusted. He knew something had frightened the adults; he could read their mute predictions. All bicycles had been confiscated, even the children’s. He had walked up the main street to the top of his village, which was shabby and countrylike. You could still find milk and an egg sometimes if you were not an informer. There he saw Marie sitting on a wheelbarrow, with her hair cut like a boy’s (lice were rampant), blond and ragged; she was eating bread – or rather, sucking on a wide crust spread with boiled rhubarb. Bare dirty feet, eyes in the distance, dreamy: he thought later that he had seen clouds on her eyes, like clouds on a clean sky. But perhaps all that her eyes had reflected was stupidity. She swung her feet, which did not reach the ground because of the tilt of the barrow. The geese Marie was there to watch watched Sigi approaching with pure blue eyes outlined in orange that could have been drawn with a wax crayon, so thick was the tracing and the colour so true. The geese looked at him with one eye at a time, the way the Ancient Egyptians looked at people. His mother caught up with him before he could say anything final to Marie, either “I love you” or “Goodbye.” He had been told not to play with Marie and to keep away from that part of the village – he had been told again only this morning. His mother was looking for milk. She hid the canister in a basket, under a napkin camouflaged with the wild sorrel and plantain they ate as vegetables now.

  Sigi left Marie still pensive, still occupied with her bread-crust. He walked with his hand in his mother’s. His mother said, “Did the Marie ask you any questions?” But Marie hardly ever spoke. His mother said that minding geese was too big a job for a little child; a long prison sentence was the punishment now for misappropriation of domestic fowl.

  He was prepared for the end, perhaps the end of everything living, and he knew that endings were in blood. He decided to take to his execution Peoples of the World, a schoolprize of his father’s, which was in perfect condition; his father never smudged or creased anything he owned and washed his hands before taking down a book. In this book were the Ancient Egyptians looking with one eye at a time precisely like Marie’s geese. He closed his eyes so that his last memory would be of Marie.

  “Why are you walking with your eyes shut?” asked his mother.

  “I’m pretending to be blind.”

  “God will strike you blind if you play such wicked games.” Normally she would have gone on to say exactly why God would want to do a thing like that. Her abrupt silence was part of the end of everything.

  When she woke him up that night and dressed him (he could dress himself) she was still tongue-tied, and when he asked something she put her hand on his mouth.

  “Tape it?” said his father, of Sigi’s mouth. She shook her head. “God help us if you don’t keep it shut, Sigi,” said his father, bringing Him into it again. After he was dressed they gave him a glass of milk and told him to drink all of it. But they could not wait for him to finish drinking and when he was only halfway through his father removed the glass. His parents wore heavy coats and carried knapsacks. Sigi took Peoples of the World from under his pillow.

  “No, you will need both hands,” his father said. He pinched Sigi’s arm, like the witch testing Hansel, and asked, “Will he be warm enough?”

  The signs of the end of the world were being dressed in the night, the milky glass left on the table, and his mother’s silence. She did not even ask why he had taken Peoples of the World to bed. Much later he fell asleep again. His father was carrying him, and woke him suddenly by setting him on his feet in a ploughed field. Unable to move, paralyzed, he heard a strange man cursing him, and suddenly his mother cried from another corner of darkness, “Run!” So he plunged at a crouch between ropes of barbed wire as if he had been trained for this all his life. The man cursing him for his slowness grabbed Sigi and dragged him face down. He looked up to see who it was and left a piece of his scalp on a wire. No matter how he combed his hair ever after the scar reappeared.

  They went to live in Essen. He hated the food, school, traffic, accents, streets. No grass, no air to breathe. He would say to himself, “When I turn this corner, Marie will be here.” Years later somebody sent a long letter with news of the village. Part of it was, “As for the Marie, she is so fat and stupid she falls off her bicycle.”

  “Some of them have bicycles,” was all Sigi’s father gleaned from this important letter.

  His mother had kept a newspaper account of their adventure. He knew there had been just the three of them besides the unseen man who had cursed him, but the paper said they had been thirty-seven, the technical staff of the small lens factory and their wives and children.<
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  He walked just in front of Christine and little Bert, holding a hand to his head because of the scar – a bad habit. He suddenly turned and came back so that they seemed to be walking towards a meeting point. She saw that he knew she knew everything; the expression on his face was one of infinite sorrow.

  What are you doing here? she tried to ask as they nearly met. Why spend a vacation in a dead landscape? Why aren’t you with all those others in Majorca and Bulgaria? Why bother to look? The houses are shuttered on one side. No one sees you except a policeman with field glasses. Marie wouldn’t look even if she remembered you. Wouldn’t, couldn’t – she has forgotten how. Her face turns the other way now. Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now you might be forever, give or take a few conversions and lapses from faith. Besides, she said, as they silently passed each other, you know this was not the place. It must have been to the north.

  Herbert had never seen such a hideous station or such a squalid town – so he said now, catching up to them. Prussian taste, he said, and all Napoleon’s fault. By what right did Napoleon turn us over to the Prussians, he wanted to know? En quel honneur? He sounded as though he might write a letter to the newspapers complaining about Napoleon. He had discovered something curious, he went on: a coffeehouse on stilts. Part of its attraction, other than a trio of musicians (fiddle, accordion, xylophone) was the view it afforded of the ditches and mantraps over there. From the coffeehouse veranda you could even see a man in uniform looking through field glasses. “You don’t see that often,” said Herbert, but he meant the orchestra. He continued in French, for he did not want little Bert to hear: the veranda on stilts was full of guest workers talking Turkish, Croatian and North African dialects. Though needed for the economy, the guest workers had brought with them new strains of tuberculosis, syphilis, and amebic complaints that resisted antibiotics. Everyone knew this, but the government was hushing it up. Herbert had proof, in fact, but he would not make it public, for he did not wish to favour the opposition. But here was what he was getting at – Herbert did not want little Bert, young and vulnerable, to drink out of the same glasses as foreign disease-bearers. On the other hand, he must not breathe the slightest whiff of racial animosity. Therefore would Christine please engage the child’s attention until they had passed the coffeehouse?

  They were moving back slowly, she holding little Bert’s hand, and he not fretting to be nearer his father, quite happy with her. Presently they found they were four abreast with the scarred stranger, all walking at the same pace. It would have seemed awkward to have drawn back or hurried ahead. Just as, shyly silent, they came level with the coffeehouse, the stranger spoke up: “That place is always packed with foreigners.”

  “What place?” said little Bert at once.

  “Do you object to them?” said Herbert, in his most pleasant tone of voice.

  “I don’t know much about them. I never travel. My father was in Montenegro. The partisans gave him a bad time. I think I wasn’t born yet. I’m not sure of the year. Forty-three?”

  “I hope they gave him a bad time,” said Herbert, who always said such things with a smile. People who did not know him had to think again, wondering what they had heard. No one knew how to deal with Herbert’s ambiguities. “I hope they gave him a very bad time.”

  Could I have heard this? the scarred man seemed to appeal to Christine.

  Suit yourself, she seemed to answer. I wasn’t born either.

  “Now the children of the partisans come here as guest workers,” said Herbert, still smiling. “And we all drink coffee together. What could be better?”

  The stranger edged away, went over to an old man standing by himself on the station platform and began to speak urgently in a low voice. The old man came up to his shoulder. He had not a tooth in his mouth, not a hair on his head, and was about the age and the size of the night porter in their Paris hotel. He was dressed in clean tennis shoes without laces, old army trousers, and a worn regional jacket over an open shirt. He rocked heel to toe as he listened, then said loudly to whatever it was the scarred man had asked, “I wouldn’t know. I don’t know any names around here. I’m a refugee too.”

  “His feelings are hurt,” said Christine, as the stranger drifted away. “Look at the way he hangs his head. I’m sure he was asking a direction. Now, why did you answer that way?” she asked the old man. “I’m sure you are not a refugee at all. What didn’t you like about the poor creature?”

  “He’s not from around here,” said the old man. “He’s from somewhere else, and that’s enough for me.”

  “And you,” she said to Herbert. “What didn’t you like about him? Such a harmless lonely person.”

  He tightened his hold on her arm. “I saw the way he was watching you. Don’t you know a policeman when you see one?”

  She looked again, but the man had crossed the tracks and vanished. Anything he might have wanted to let her know was damped out by a stronger current; their companion with the WINES OF GERMANY shopping bag could not be far away. On a hot day like today every plant on a grave can wither. Family spies on his side of the family inspect the grave, waiting for a leaf to fall or a flower to droop. But usually I’m right there with the watering can. He was fussy about the grave, often spoke of how he wanted it.

  “There isn’t a restaurant,” said Herbert, again in French. “It’s hard on little Bert. Only a newsstand. I think on a day like today one might allow a comic book. Do you agree?”

  But she was not the child’s mother: she would not be drawn.

  Herbert’s answer to her silence was to march into the waiting room and across to a newsstand. She knew that by making an issue over something unimportant she had simply proved once again that wilful obstinacy was part and parcel of a slow-moving nature. She suffered from its effects as much as Herbert did. Holding little Bert, she trailed along behind him, thinking that she would show her affection for Herbert now by being particularly nice to little Bert.

  Herbert waited for the curator of the local museum to be served before choosing the mildest of the comic books on display. The curator walked off, reading the local paper as he walked. A ferocious war of opinion took up three of its pages. Was it about the barbed wire? About the careless rerouting of trains that had stranded dozens of passengers in this lamentable, godforsaken, Prussian-looking town? No, it was about an exhibition of photographs Dr. Ischias had commissioned and sponsored for his new museum – an edifice so bold in conception and structure that it was known throughout the region as “the teacup with mumps.” Dr. Ischias was used to Philistine aggression; indeed, he secretly felt that his job depended to some extent upon the frequency and stridency of the attacks. But it seemed to him now that some of the letters in today’s paper might have been written a good fifty years in the past. This time he was accused not just of taking the public for dimwits, but also of sapping morals and contributing to the artistic decline of a race.

  “Once again” (he now read, walking out of the waiting room, holding the paper to his nose) “art has not known how to toe the mark or draw the line. Can filth be art? If so, let us do without it. Let us do without the photographer in question and his archangel, the curator with the funny name.”

  Well … that was unpleasant. Perhaps the show had been a mistake. It happened that the photographer in question had reproduced every inch of a model he said was his wife; in fact, the exhibition was entitled “Marriage.” These pictures had been blown up and cropped so peculiarly that only an abstract, grainy surface remained. As the newspaper had to admit, most adults honestly did not know what the pictures were about. However, most children, with their instinctive innocence, never failed to recognize that this or that form was really part of something else, which they named quite eagerly. And the local paper did not tiptoe round the matter, but asked, in a four-column double head on page two:

  ARE GERMAN WOMEN BABOONS

  AND MUST THEY ALWAYS EXHIBIT THEIR BACKSIDES?

  This wa
s followed up by a cartoon drawing of a creature, a gorilla probably, with his head under the dark hood of an old-fashioned camera on a tripod, about to take the picture of three Graces, or three Rhine maidens, or three stout local matrons who had somehow lost their clothes.

  Now all this was libel – every word, and the drawing too. The curator folded his copy of the paper and began to walk up and down the platform, composing an answer.

  Christine knew that Herbert could have helped him, because he was good at that kind of letter, taking a droll, dry tone, ending with, “Of course I am prepared to withdraw my allegations at any time,” mockingly humble. His letters always drew a deluge of new correspondence, praising and honouring Doctor Engineer Herbert B. But the curator did not know that Doctor Engineer Herbert B. was just behind him; in any case he was not doing badly with his own reply: “A ray of light has just as much chance of penetrating into the thick swamp of the German middle-class mind as …” He clasped and unclasped his hands, the newspaper tucked high under one arm. “The myth of German womanhood, a myth belied every day …” Walking up and down the platform near the sandy road, seen by the man in uniform looking through field glasses. “As for the photographer in question, his international status places him above …” “Only the small-minded could possibly …” “People who never set foot in museums until drawn by the promise of pornography can hardly judge …” “Only children should be allowed into art galleries …” Excellent. That had never been said.

  Meanwhile the photographer had descended from a local train and started to tell a story about grass fires. He was wearing his tartan waistcoat with George-the-Fourth buttons, his cream corduroy jacket from Rome, his cream silk turtleneck sweater, an American peace emblem on a chain, dark-green shorts, Japanese sandals, and, because the sandals pinched, a pair of brown socks. His legs were tanned and covered with blond fur. Although slim and fit, he seemed older than usual. This was on account of his teeth. He had recently acquired two new bridges, upper and lower, which took years off his face but were a torture, so today he had changed back to the earlier set. The dentist had told the photographer’s wife, “His jaw is underdeveloped, like a child’s, difficult to fit.”