by Chamber Four
“You translated the gantry catalogue, isn’t it?” Hühne said. He spoke English with a smooth accent.
“Das habe ich, ja,” Joseph answered, wondering if he’d made any kind of mistake in his German.
“We have a new project in need of the highest-quality translation, and I’d like us to work on it together, you and me,” he went on, speaking German now.
Herr Halsa went so far as to clear his throat, but Joseph heard the softness in it, a touching womanliness that would mean to Herr Doktor Hühne, if he happened to hear, that Halsa intended nothing peremptory. On the contrary, it brimmed with comic lightness, the kind of mild rebuke that one might direct towards an old woman, perhaps a receptionist who had chosen this inopportune moment to dust the plants.
Joseph nodded with grave interest—he enjoyed being important; who doesn’t?—and stood up to match Herr Doktor Hühne’s height, making certain in his American way to advance this relationship by allowing his arm to bump a few times against Herr Doktor Hühne’s while they reviewed the as-yet-unreleased German prospectus for a new overhead-railcar system.
Herr Halsa appeared briefly at his door, then pulled back. Joseph saw his image there, the faintest double exposure, wearing the fine Italian jacket that usually hung behind the door.
Once Herr Doktor Hühne returned to Halsa’s office, where the German salesmen were now gathered around the conference table, Herr Halsa grew expansive and host-like. At these times his bearing made Joseph proudest to have this unexpected opportunity, which had come up almost by accident six months before, to be the translator here instead of a mere secretarial temp. Joseph sat off to the side, his favorite fountain pen poised for note-taking. The Americans on staff were excluded from these meetings for the simple reason that the conversations were conducted in German, and for the complex reason that the Americans were American.
Not much happened during the meeting in terms of company business. But several important psychological or interpersonal things took place, and Joseph marveled at how curious they were, and how lucky he was to be here to witness these intimate workings of an executive office—without having to suffer from any very significant attachment to the questions being discussed. First, the railcar system went unmentioned. Joseph felt fairly deep loyalty on this point and scratched out a reminder to tell Herr Halsa about the project as soon as the überboss left. Second, he noticed the obvious: the disappointment that caused Herr Halsa’s eyes to shift nervously just ten minutes into the meeting, after the anecdotes and jokes and hellos. Charismatic Herr Doktor Hühne began to ask questions and guide the conversation—no guest-playing for him—and it became only too obvious that the written agenda would go unfollowed. Herr Doktor Hühne would have no chance to see, though tomorrow was another day, how tightly his next-in-command ran this important subsidiary.
Joseph, meantime, was smiling and nodding. He couldn’t understand half of what was being said, the quick Bavarian retorts, the irony-drenched allusions to who knows what. But no matter. Joseph was the company translator and, with that credential, a fully vested German speaker. Even his mother said he wasn’t a very good listener—how could anyone expect one hundred per cent comprehension here, where the salesmen were discussing technical matters foreign to Joseph even in English? Why should he squint or shrug or ask the others to repeat themselves when silence and a few well-timed laughs would carry him through?
Herr Doktor Hühne had worked himself into a bluster over the notion of Handwerk. Joseph took a few disjointed notes, hoping to record this fascinating paradox without scrambling it. No matter how many “machines” assemble our robots, Herr Doktor Hühne seemed to be saying, everything that the factory produces is “handmade.” Hühne was the kind of urbane man you might find in a pale linen suit smoking thin, stinking cigars, so his bluster did not throw him forward on to the points of his elbows, anxious and combative, but took him deeper into the chair, his fingers tepeed and restless and occasionally pressed against his lips. “Customized production, gentlemen,” he said in English.
“Ah, customized production,” Herr Halsa joked. He didn’t switch to English unless he had to. “Kundenspezifische Fertigung. I thought you wanted Reinhold to use handsaws and toilet plungers.”
Herr Halsa leaned back, trying to work himself as low in his chair as Herr Doktor Hühne, but of course it was impossible. Herr Halsa spent too many of his evenings in steakhouses.
“Let’s leave American work to the Americans,” the highest-grossing salesman said.
Herr Hühne laughed. “Yes, Handwerk in the manner of watchmakers, not plumbers.”
Joseph pulled at his upper lip and immediately read his own gesture. It was hardly-to-be-restrained pride. These men could tell their jokes about “American work,” their rather offensive jokes in which “American” replaced what must have been “Turk” back home, and altogether forget that Joseph was, in some ways—well, in every way—an American.
He liked to maneuver towards near-paradoxes, to insinuate himself into scenes that most could never hope to be part of.
* * * *
At lunchtime, when the meeting broke up—Herr Doktor Hühne abruptly rose, declaring his hunger—the line of salesmen, and among them Herr Halsa, strolled towards the building’s front door in twos and threes behind the visiting executive, who was a personal friend of the family that owned the company. Herr Doktor Hühne had walked ahead with the highest-grossing salesman, a curly-topped redhead far thinner than the rest and willing to make any kind of joke, transgress in any way, even to the point of yanking Hühne’s tie, beeping like the Roadrunner, and calling the regent Dingsbums.
Joseph, too, proceeded to the front door. But this was where his deficiency cut him off. He could ride all of the other rides, but here at last he came upon a minimum height for the Tilt-a-Whirl, the requirement of actual Germanness, which he missed by a finger or two. It was his secret goal to grow into it, to convince Halsa next year or the year after, by silent competence—it would take just once to change the expectation permanently—and then he could board one of the cars departing for an inner-sanctum lunch.
Along behind the Automationsabteilung, as the only American invited to the restaurant, the sales rep Jack Wilson paddled out. He’d been talking all this while to Ted and Alan and the other non-German speakers in the hobbing area. Maybe he’d even done the rounds of the service department, the warehouse that occupied the back two-thirds of the building and marked the hunting grounds of the only birds lower than Americans in this peculiar aviary: the Bauern, Helmut Schall and his staff of Bavarian farmers who’d never had their moles removed. Joseph liked them, in fact they were some of the best men in the company, but the defensive jokes about their moles and so on—Herr Halsa’s repertoire—any employee would have found funny, and Joseph felt justified in leaning back from his note-taking and giving a full-on laugh. Just the same, as he directed a quick salute to the sales rep Wilson, a slightly pleasant superciliousness washed over him, a feeling of gratitude to the fate that had given him cafes and saved him from the America of sports bars and chewing tobacco. Why shouldn’t he enjoy some of the privileges conferred on him here and consider himself every bit as superior as the true Germans felt?
Joseph watched through the kitchen window and, like a basketball player who could dribble without looking, engineered a second iced tea blind. It did make sense, despite a tensing in his shoulders, that this man, Jack Wilson, would go to the restaurant. He was the one scheduled to escort Herr Doktor Hühne to the customer’s plant that afternoon. Wilson and Hühne would tour the No. 3 Engine Plant in Cleveland, which had accepted the very first proposal that Joseph had written—an eleven-million-dollar project, the German factory’s largest yet. And Herr Halsa was right to consider Hühne’s impression of things. The previous executive vice-president had been recalled for capitulating too quickly to the American way of doing business—particularly by replacing German components with much cheaper substitutes.
In inviting
Wilson to lunch there was no awkwardness, because Wilson did not work for the company. He was a kind of mercenary who agreed to play golf on the company’s behalf exclusively and get drunk on the company’s behalf exclusively and frequently with people who might or might not have purchasing clout at whatever plant Wilson had led the Germans to target. He was a go-between. A middleman. The aesthetics of the thing were less germane than the logic: it made sense for Wilson to liaise over popcorn shrimp. Nevertheless, when Alan Freedman walked into the lunch room, his hair full and proud, unlike all the monk-topped Germans, Joseph couldn’t resist saying something conspiratorial.
“Look at Wilson out there laughing. Do you think he’s drunk?”
Wilson soft-shoed into his son’s minivan, the star of his own silent movie.
Freedman was forever in good spirits—he was a man of the highest, proudest, most natural spirits Joseph had ever known—and he pulled a Sam’s Choice lemon-lime soda from the refrigerator along with his brown sack of lunch, and laughed with a gentle calm that put Wilson’s bluster to shame. “He deserves to be happy, no? A million and a half for the Cleveland plant, I’d be handing out tulips and Swiss chocolates.”
The pulp of Joseph’s lemon went on spinning in his glass even after he’d stopped stirring, the swirls of dissolved sugar warping and turning like heat waves coming up from a car. He often felt blessed by small things and now, with the young sun glinting off windshields and beckoning him outside with his lunch, he felt deeply fortunate to have this packet of sugar in his hand, to be already rolling the torn-off piece of it between his fingers, to be here in this job, a translator instead of a temp, twenty dollars an hour instead of eight-fifty.
A million and a half.
“And—do you get commissions when you sell?” he asked, expecting the worst. Every one of them must have been making too much money to care about anything. He was halfway back to his cubicle—a little-used door next to Herr Halsa’s office led to the lawn behind the building—and Freedman was about to disappear into the gear-hobbing maze.
“Nope. I guess commissions are an American thing,” Freedman said wistfully. He was still smiling. He was almost laughing, and his hands were plunged so far into his pockets that his elbows were straight. Joseph thought he’d like to have him as an older brother or confidant who could advise on all the stages to come. “It makes me think I should go out on my own. But damn, a drought’s a drought when you’re repping, and it doesn’t matter how many daughters you have in school.”
What, Joseph asked himself as he sat on the cool May grass and looked out over the pond, is a million and a half dollars but an abstraction on a beautiful day like this, with a fresh iced tea, an egg salad sandwich with big pebbly capers, a slightly crunchy pear? The pond was a fire reservoir, man-made according to some code that required a certain-sized body of water for every so-and-so many feet of manufacturing space: the neighboring company made baseballs, softballs, soccer balls, basketballs, volleyballs, all of inexpensive design and quality, for the use of small children. But even if their pond was square and covered across half its surface with algae, the jets that aerated the other half caught the light magnificently, scattering it like chips of glass, and the tiny green circles that undulated on the near side resembled stitches in a beautiful knitted shawl that the pond wore garishly in the sunlight. Joseph thought of his wife of less than a year, back in their apartment, studying by the window; his parents gardening five hundred miles away; his grandparents outside too, no doubt, mowing their tiny lawns just to walk under this magnificent sun.
When Joseph was back inside, Herr Doktor Hühne returned to pick up his briefcase, which he’d left in the middle of Herr Halsa’s empty desk.
“Why didn’t you join us for lunch?” he asked in German. “That was unexpected. We arrived at the restaurant and I looked around myself, wanting to ask you a question, and what’s this? He doesn’t eat?”
Hühne left again with Wilson and the top-grossing salesman, and an hour passed by in welcome silence. Joseph worked steadily, with his usual dedication, no one but Roswitha interrupting. She sprayed Herr Halsa’s window, his silk plants, his brass lamp, wiped and rubbed, a water spritzer in one hand, an ammonia bottle in the other, wiping, rubbing and spraying, holding the plant handkerchief between her cheek and shoulder and a roll of paper towel under her wing.
“I’m saying nothing, I’m saying nothing,” she said. “Keep on with your work.” She spoke in heavily accented English and switched to German only when someone spoke in German to her. She was eighty or so, extremely short, with grey skirts that wrapped not far below her breasts. “He keeps you busy too, I know that. With his whims,” she whispered, and shushed herself.
Joseph liked having a mercurial boss. Mercurial was a good word for him. He was pleased to have thought of it.
When Herr Halsa returned, it was clear where he’d gone after lunch—to the gym, as he often did. The advantages of a workout, not just for Herr Halsa’s health but for the whole organization’s well-being, so far outweighed any cause for criticism that Joseph wondered at his own momentary derision, the thought skittering into his head that these workouts seemed to follow on occasions of secret, carefully hidden stress. Who else was privy to Herr Halsa’s fears and thoughts? Aside maybe from Frau Halsa and a few personal friends, no one but Joseph could have guessed at what was happening in the boss’s mind.
* * * *
On occasional weekend nights, with little notice, everyone at the company was invited to a German hall for drinks and music and laughing repetitions of the chicken dance. Herr Halsa would wrap his arm around every shoulder he came to and lift his beer Krug in a toast. What? You have no beer? He’d hesitate just long enough to show he regretted spending the company’s money, then raise his finger to signal for another. By Monday, no one dared to remind or even to thank him.
Without exception, he returned from the gym with his face the deepest red, as if he were holding his breath through a heart attack. But in exchange, he was calm. His hair, as usual, remained wet, and he rubbed at it with the same towel that had started the day, bending his neck left and right, arching his back, and moving in other cat-like ways that would have seemed impossible an hour before. Joseph envied him his midday showers.
Then that was it for a while. Halsa retreated behind the closed door of his office and drew the shades of his tall, narrow windows—presumably so that others, instead of watching him eat an apple, might mistake this for his most productive hour. He would emerge afterwards, either confirmed in his good opinion of the day or reminded of some fresh inconvenience that needed a scapegoat.
Today, by the magic of endorphins, he was confirmed—his arms behind his back showed it immediately—and he took his flat expression from desk to desk and watched his employees’ computer screens over their shoulders, occasionally nodding at what was for him the mystery of how things appeared and disappeared, moved, grew, changed and scrolled on the various monitors. Witnessing the growth of a letter on screen might have occupied him for hours if he hadn’t realized, perhaps more acutely than anyone, that this rapt staring resembled ignorance.
“Come in here. Come in, come in,” Herr Halsa called from his office. Joseph had no idea who he was talking to. With the door open Joseph had a view into the room, but Herr Halsa was looking down at the things on his desk, reordering them according to some new, afternoon priority—name plate, lamp, telephone, pen stand. And Joseph could not see as far as Herr Halsa could along the hallway formed by the cubicle walls. Maybe someone was standing there: a petitioner. What’s more, the boss was speaking not in German but in English. “This is something you need to finish for the end of the day, so we must sit together. Quickly I think. Joe!”
Joseph hurried into the office with a notebook, two pens and some papers he’d finished the day before but not yet presented to Herr Halsa. “Excuse me, I—”
“We’re ready to send out a letter just now and offer this very good job. Inventory manager for th
e new production area,” Herr Halsa added, as if he’d forgotten that Joseph had sat in on every one of the interviews. The new “production area” was an assembly room where this new employee would take robotic cranes out of their boxes, count the screws, assemble everything, test the completed system, then transfer it to a flatbed truck for shipment to the customer’s plant. Joseph’s attempt at a job description had muddled everything, though—no one asked if he’d ever written one before—so that several applicants showed up expecting to run an automated inventory system and a couple of others wanted a division reporting to them. But no matter. His influence held. After each interview, Herr Halsa would ask Joseph what the man (he couldn’t help it that no women had been included) had meant by this and that, and very often what Herr Halsa wanted to know had nothing to do with the delta between languages at all.
The American salesmen liked to say that Peter Halsa was aptly named. He had risen beyond his competence and didn’t know what to do with his time: the Peter Principle. Had anyone dared to repeat this to Herr Halsa, he would have said that he didn’t need to understand his job—it was Joseph’s responsibility to explain it to him.
Joseph sat while Herr Halsa paced, and here came a tremendous mistake that changed the course of the day. Even after five p.m., Joseph would resist thinking he’d made a mistake. But it was a mistake, and he knew it was a mistake, because a competent employee reads his boss’s signs and does not transgress against the boss’s most deeply held expectations.
