The Pegnitz Junction

by Mavis Gallant

  Like Bibi, I had no friends; I had no family, except Julius. I was not from Cologne but from Dortmund. Anyone who had ever known me or loved me had been killed in one period of seven weeks. I was a year or two older than Bibi – about twenty-four. I was not as pretty as my daughter is now, though my wedding picture shows me with soft chestnut hair. In the picture I look as though someone had just scolded me. I was nervous in those days and easily startled. I worried about gas escaping, burglars at the windows, and bicycles ridden by drunken criminals; I was also afraid of being thought too stupid for Julius and unworthy of being his wife.

  I can still see us in our kitchen, under the faintest of light bulbs, with three plates of soup on the table and a plate for Heidi, the poodle, on the floor. Heidi had belonged to Julius’s parents. “Four old survivors,” said Julius, though Heidi was old and we three were young.

  Julius was made a captain and we took our first holiday. We went to Rome. I remember a long train journey during which we ate hard-boiled-egg sandwiches and slept in our clothes. The shops dazzled me; I wanted to buy presents for dozens of people, but I had only Bibi. I chose a marble darning egg and a pair of sandals that were the wrong size. I had thought of her feet as enormous, but to my surprise they were narrow and fine. She could not take two steps in the new sandals without sliding. She kept the shoes as a souvenir. Julius found them in her trunk, wrapped in white tissue paper, after she died.

  A change in Bibi’s status came at about that time. Julius had wangled an excellent scholarship for her. With that, and the money she earned at Possner, Bibi could afford an apartment. She said she was happy as she was, but Julius wanted Possner employees to live decently. Also, she roomed with a family of refugees, and Julius did not want her to waste her mental energies talking about the tides of history. I can truthfully say that Julius has never discussed historical change. Do leaves speak? Are mountains asked to have an opinion? Bibi still resisted, saying there was no such thing as a flat in Cologne; but Julius found one. He personally moved her to her new quarters – one room, gas ring, and sink. Just about what she was leaving, except that now she lived alone. I don’t know how the room was furnished – Bibi never invited me to see it. She still came to us for three weekly evenings of housework, still ate her bread and soup and put the money we paid her aside. We were astonished at the size of her savings account when we saw her bankbook years later.

  Julius was not so much concerned with Bibi as with Possner. When he helped other people it was because he was helping the firm. His life was his work; his faith was in Possner’s future. I believed in Julius. In one of the books belonging to him – the books that gave me so much trouble on winter afternoons – I read that belief, like love, could not be taken by storm. I knew that Julius lied sometimes, but so do all divinities. Divinities invented convenient fables and they appeared in strange disguises, but they were never mistaken. I believed, because he said it, that we would not live among ashes forever, and that he would give me a new, beautiful house. Because he vouched for Bibi’s genius I had to believe in it too. It was my duty to imagine Bibi ten years from now with a Nobel Prize for chemistry. This was another Bibi, tall and gracious and speaking pure German. She had stopped singing tunes from The Merry Wives of Windsor in such an annoying way, she no longer sat like an elephant or laughed with her mouth wide open or held bread on the palm of her hand to spread it with margarine.

  If, in this refined and comfortable future, I corrected Bibi’s manners it was a sign that the postwar social amnesty could not go on. In fact, the rules of difference were restored long before the symphony orchestras were full strength, the prisoners were home, the schools were rebuilt. Seeing where Bibi was going, I began wondering where she had started out. Her name, Beate Brüning, was honest and plain. She hinted that once she had not lived like other people and had missed some of her schooling on that account. Why? Had she been ill, or delinquent? Was she, as well as Silesian, slightly foreign? Sometimes male ancestors had been careless about the women they married. Perhaps Bibi had been unable to give a good account of herself. My textbook of elementary biology in high school explained about the pure and the impure, beginning with plant life. Here was the picture of an upright, splendid, native plant, and next to it the photograph of a spindly thing that never bloomed and that was in some way an alien flower. Bibi’s round face, her calm eyes, her expression of sweetness and anxiety to please spoke of nothing but peasant sanity; still, she was different; she was “other.” She never mentioned her family or said how they had died. I could only guess that they must have vanished in the normal way of a recent period – killed at the front, or lost without trace in the east, or burned alive in air raids. Who were the Brünings? Was she ashamed of them? Were they Socialists, radicals, troublemakers, black-marketeers, prostitutes, wife-beaters, informers, Witnesses of Jehovah? After she died no one came forward to claim her bank account, though Julius was scrupulous about advertising. Whoever the Brünings were, Bibi was their survivor, and she was as pure as the rest of us in the sense that she was alone, swept clean of friends and childhood myths and of childhood itself. But someone, at some time, must have existed and must have called her Bibi. A diminutive is not a thing you invent for yourself.

  Of course, my life was not composed of these long speculations, but of sub-themes, common questions and answers. One day new information about Julius came into my hands. As I stood on a chair to fetch a pair of bedsheets down from the high shelf of a cupboard, a folded blanket and an old jacket belonging to him came slipping down on top of me. I clutched at the edge of the shelf to steady myself and had under my fingers someone’s diary. Still standing on the chair, I let the diary fall open. I read how Julius and an unknown girl – the writer of the diary – had pushed the girl’s bed close to a window one sunny winter afternoon. “No one could see us,” the girl felt obliged to note, as if she were writing for some other person. A bombed wall outlined in snow was their only neighbour. The sky was winter blue.

  Now I am free was my first thought, but what did I mean? I wanted to live with Julius, not without him. I did not know what I meant.

  I remembered the new, beautiful house he had promised, with the clock from Holland, the wallpaper from France, the swimming-pool tiles from Italy. I sat down and read the diary through.

  On the girl’s birthday Julius took her to a restaurant, but friends “connected with him professionally” came in. After twisting and turning and trying to hide his face, Julius sent her to the ladies’ room with instructions to wait there for five minutes and then go home without stopping to speak to him. “What a bad ending for an evening that began with such promise,” the diarist remarked. Did she live in Cologne? “Two nights,” she recorded, or “one afternoon,” or “one and one-half hours,” followed by “did everything,” then “everything,” then finally just the initial of the word, as if she herself were no longer surprised or enchanted. One dull lonely weekend when she had not seen Julius for days, she wrote, “The sun is shining on all the rooftops and filling every heart with gladness while I Over the rooftops the sun shines but I My heart is sad though the sun is filling every heart …”

  “Helga, are you all right?”

  Here was Bibi breaking in – anxious, good, and extremely comic. Her accent would have made even tragedy seem hilarious, I thought then. I began to laugh, and blurted out, “Julius has always had other women, but now he leaves their belongings where I can find them.” Bibi’s look of shock was on my behalf. “… always had women,” I repeated. “I said I didn’t mind.” The truth was that each time had nearly killed me. Also, the girls were poor things, sometimes barely literate. Looking down at the diary on my lap I thought, Well, at least this one can spell, and I am his wife, and he treats me with consideration, and he has promised me a house.

  “Oh, Helga,” Bibi cried, kneeling and clutching my hands, “you have always been kind to me.” She muttered something else. I made her repeat it. “I don’t understand; I don’t keep tha
t sort of a diary” was what Bibi had said.

  So in the same hour I found out about Bibi and Julius too. Here was my situation: I was pregnant, and I should not have been standing on a chair to begin with. I was ill. I had such violent spasms sometimes that Julius would ask if I was trying to vomit the baby. I had absolutely no one but Julius, and nowhere to go. Moreover, as I have said, I did not want to live without him. As for Bibi, when I was feeling at my most wretched she was the only person the smell of whose skin and hair did not turn my stomach. I could not stand the scent of soap, or cologne, or food cooking, or milk, or smoke, or other people. Bibi looked after me. Once she said shyly, “I know, I know that mixture of hunger and nausea, when all you long for is good white bread.” I remember sweating and trembling and thinking that it was she, it was Bibi, who was the good white bread. I never hated Bibi. I may have pitied her. I knew a little about Julius and I had a fear of explosions. I could have said to Julius, “I know about Bibi and you.” What next? Bibi then departs and Julius and I are alone. He knows I know, which means we live in ruins and ashes forever. All I could feel was Bibi’s utter misery; I saw her stricken face, her rough hands, and then I began to cry too, and we two – we two grown-up war orphans – dried each other’s tears. I am quite certain Bibi never knew I had understood.

  It was Bibi who saw me into the clinic where Roma was born. Julius was in Belgium. I asked Bibi to send him a telegram concerning the baby’s name. “I want Roma because that was where she was conceived,” I told her. “Don’t put conceived in the telegram. Julius will understand.”

  She nodded and said something in her ridiculous accent and went out the door. In a sense I never saw her again; I mean that this was the last I saw of a certain young, good-hearted Bibi. Julius came back before receiving the telegram; perhaps she hadn’t sent it. It was two days before I remembered to ask about Bibi, and another before she was found. She had taken gardénal. She was alive, but she had been in a long, untended coma. The flesh on her legs had begun to alter, and she had to stay for a long time in the hospital – the hospital where Roma was born – after her skin-graft operations. That was why she wore thick stockings forever after, even in summer.

  No one told me, at first. Julius made up a story. He said Bibi had met a young engineer and had run away with him. It sounded unlike her, but it was also unlike him to be so inventive, so I thought it must be true. I sat up against a starched pillowcase Bibi had brought me from home, and I invited Julius to admire Roma’s hands and feet. He said that Bibi’s lover was named Wolfgang, and we laughed and thought of Bibi on her wedding night saying, “Wolfgang, you swine!”

  All Bibi was ever able to explain to me later was that somewhere between my room and the front door of the hospital she had asked God to strike her with lightning. She stood still and counted up to ten; ten seconds was the limit she gave Him to prove He could hear. Nothing happened. She saw a rubbery begonia on a windowsill; an aide pushing along a trolley of tea mugs; a father and two children waiting on a bench with the patience of the ignorant. She could not recall whether or not she had ever sent the telegram. She next remembered being at home, in the room Julius had insisted would be in keeping with her new position, and that there she had taken gardénal. The gardénal was in the form of large flat tablets, like salt pills. She said she had “always” had them, even in her refugee camp. For someone who had access to every sort of modern poison at Possner, she had chosen an old-fashioned, feminine way of death. She broke up the tablets patiently, one after the other, sitting on the edge of her bed. She was obliged to swallow so much water that she began to be sick on it, and finally she heated a little milk on the gas ring. The milk probably saved her.

  She had imagined dying would be like a slow anesthetic; she thought death could be inhaled, like fresh air. But it was a black cloak being blown down on one, she told me – like a cape slipping off a hook and falling in soft folds over your hands and face.

  By the time Bibi was well enough to tell me these things, Julius had forgotten her, and had all but forgotten me. He was in love with no one but Roma, a baby ten days old, named for a holiday. This was a quiet love affair that gave us all a period of relative peace. I don’t believe he visited Bibi once, though he paid for her private room, the skin-graft operations, and her long convalescence. Bibi begged to be put in a ward, for being alone made her feel miserable, but Julius refused. She finally came home to us, because I needed someone; my health had broken down. I had fits of crying so prolonged that my eyelids became allergic to daylight and I had to spend hours lying down in the dark. Bibi worked part time at Possner, looked after Roma, ran the house, and saw that I was allowed to recover very, very slowly.

  Julius was now a major, and we moved into the first of our new, beautiful homes. We had a room for Bibi, next to Roma’s. She kept that room for ten years and never once made a change in it. She would not admit any furniture except a bed, a wardrobe, a small bookcase that served as her night table, and a lamp. She did not correspond with anyone. Her books, concerned with one subject, were called Tetrahedron Letters, The Chemistry of Steroids, Steroid Reactions, and so on. I tried to read her thesis but I could not take in “… washed repeatedly in a solution of bicarbonate of soda, then in distilled water, and dried on sulphate of sodium. After evaporation, a residue of 8.78 …” I discovered that she kept a journal, but it told me nothing. “Monday – Conversation with Arab student in canteen. Interesting.” “Tuesday – Funtumia latifolia is a tree in Western Africa. Flowers white. Wood white. Used for matches, fruit crates.” “Wednesday – Heidi dead.” “Thursday – Roma draws Papa, Mama, Aunt Bibi, self, a tombstone for Heidi. Accept drawing as gift.” “Friday – Menses.” “Saturday – Allied Powers forbid demonstration against rearmament.” “Sunday – Visit kennel. New puppy for Roma. Roma undecided.” This was Bibi’s journal in a typical week.

  Bibi had no sense of beauty. It was impossible to make her room attractive or interesting, and I avoided showing it to strangers. She never left a towel or a toothbrush in the bathroom she and Roma shared. I sometimes wondered if she had been raised in an orphanage, where every other bed held a potential thief. All her life she used only the smallest amount of water. At first, when she washed dishes I could never persuade her to rinse them. Water was something to be rationed, but I never learned why. She could keep a cake of soap or a tube of toothpaste for months. She wanted to live owning nothing, using nothing. On the other hand, once an object had come into her hands, and if she did not give it away immediately, to be parted from it later on was anguish. Sometimes I took her handbag and dumped it upside down. I would get rid of the broken comb, the thumbed mirror, the pencil stubs, and replace all this rubbish with something clean and new. But she was miserable until everything became old, cracked, and “hers” again. Most refugees talked too much. Bibi said too little, and that in disturbing fragments. Drink went straight to her head. At our parties I looked out for her, and when I saw the bad signs – her eyes pressed to slits, her head thrown back, a trusting smile – I would take her glass away. Once, during a dinner party, her voice floated over the rest of the talk: “Some adolescents, under difficult circumstances, were instructed in algebra and physics by distinguished professors. A gypsy girl named Angela, who had been in a concentration camp, was taught to read and write by a woman doctor of philosophy whose husband had been shot in the cellar of a prison in Moscow in 1941.”

  After that, I came to a quiet agreement with Julius that Bibi be given nothing to drink except when we were alone. I could not expect Julius’s guests to abandon their own homes and their own television to hear nothing but disjointed anecdotes. This was the year when every television network celebrated the anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Roma sat on a low stool with her elbows on her knees and saw everything. We now had a fifth person in the family, a young man from Possner named Michael. Julius had brought him in. Michael must already have decided to marry Julius’s daughter if only he could remai
n important to Julius while Roma was growing up. I noticed that he thought Aunt Bibi was also someone who had to be pleased. In a way, Michael was a new kind of Bibi. The firm intended to send him to an advanced course in business management, just as Bibi had been sent to the university.

  Michael was trying to take the political temper of the house. He would stand up and sit down and seem alternately interested in Roma’s television program and wretchedly uneasy. He wondered if he would bother the three older people by too much attention to the screen, or lose Roma forever by not showing enough interest. Roma was so young then that Michael, at twenty-two, must have seemed like a parent. Bibi sat reading a speech Julius was to make at a congress where English would be the working language. From time to time she glanced at the screen, then went on making corrections with a green pencil. Her English was better than Julius’s, but he said it was too perfect. Afterward he would alter half the changes she had made, saying, “It may be good English, but nobody talks that way.” The look on Bibi’s face as she glanced at the screen seemed to me overly patient, as though “the children,” as she called Roma and Michael, were in above their heads. What does it matter now, she seemed to be telling herself. As for me, I went about my business. I never interfered with Roma, and certainly never with Julius in the room. As I watched the program, my allegiances shifted back and forth. Sometimes I hated the men and women who had done something in my name, and sometimes I hated the victims – yes, passionately. It is not normal conversation to talk about old deaths. No matter what was shown on television, no matter what we had to reconsider or see in a new light, my house was large and I had no servant except for an Italian half the day. Even with Bibi helping after work in the evenings, the house was too much for me. I saw that Roma’s myths might include misery and sadness, but my myths were bombed, vanished, and whatever remained had to be cleaned and polished and kept bright. At times like these, Bibi seemed to know more than I did. She seemed so lofty, so superior, with her knowledge of hardship, that I wanted to scream at her, “Damn you, Bibi, I saw my mother running, running out of a burning house with her hair on fire. Her hands and face were like black paper when she died.” Then the program came to an end and Julius stood before the screen lecturing Michael. He said, “A mission in life – a goal. Without an ideal, life is nothing.” He stood with his hands behind his back. He has never smoked, not even when cigarettes were hard to get and everyone craved them. He is frugal, neat; every other day he eats nothing for dinner but yogurt. He said, “These unfortunate people you have just seen had a mission.” Michael, the future executive, sat worshipping every word that fell from Julius. “Oh, a highly spiritual mission,” said Julius easily. “A goal of a highly – spiritual – nature. That is why they are remembered.” Bibi said (had she been drinking too much?), “Encouraging people to buy synthetic products they don’t really need will be Michael’s mission. Do you think it compares?”