They were taken unawares when a man, speaking in the thick accent of a stage German, responded over the security speaker at the entrance and then greeted them in the dark hall. “I am Hedwig’s husband, Franz,” he told them, pronouncing the name “Hettvig.” “It is werry obliching of you to come.” He, too, sensed something strange about the occasion, its awkward reaching-out.
Tea, it developed, was not offered, though cookies, sprinkled with red and green sugar in honor of the Christmas season, had been set out, along with some miniature fruit tarts still in their pleated wax-paper cups from the deli. Franz urged a beer, an imported Löwenbräu, upon Ed, and for Andrea, who did not drink alcohol or smoke or eat meat or fish—“nothing with a face” was her creed—he found a Coke in the back of the refrigerator. She did not drink caffeinated soft drinks, either, Ed knew, but with a docility that broke his heart she accepted this desperate offering from her host. Franz was plump but energetic, with thinning blond hair combed straight back on his skull; his scalp was dewy, and his shirt damp, as if in silent comment upon the overheated airlessness of this rented apartment.
In her husband’s presence, an invisible burden seemed to slip from Frau Mueller. She became passive and betranced, sipping an amber drink that Franz quickly replenished when the ice cubes settled to the bottom. She seemed pleased to have the conversation focus on Franz. He was a photographer—weddings, graduations, bar and bat mitzvahs. “To the Orientals especially,” Franz explained, “the photographer is more important than the minister. He iss the minister, in practical fact. He iss the Gott who says, ‘Let sare be light,’ and this passink event iss made—Was ist ‘ewig,’ Liebchen?”
“Eternal,” Frau Mueller supplied, out of her smiling, drifting state.
The living room was configured like a basement: steps led up to a floor above, and the triangular space beneath the stairs was filled with stacks of magazines. Ed, who had taken the easy chair nearest the stairs, slowly saw that most of the saved magazines were Playboys and Penthouses and Hustlers. On his second Löwenbräu Ed felt empowered to remark upon this unusual domestic archive. His zealous host hopped up and placed a few in his hands, urging him to flip through. The glossy pages reminded Ed of a rose-grower’s catalogue, so many vivid shades of pink and red, with the occasional purple and mauve of a black woman. Franz explained, “They use mirrors, to focus light upon”—he hesitated, glancing toward Andrea—“chust that spot.”
Ed, too, glanced at Andrea, and was startled by the angelic beauty of her face, blankly gazing elsewhere in serene ignorance that the men were discussing mirrors focused on vaginas. She was a silverpoint beauty, all outline, transparent to the radiance beneath things: the sudden contrast, perhaps, with the dirty girls of Penthouse, their spread legs and forced leers, created the impression. She was so good, so abstemious that Ed saw, sinkingly, she could never be his. This glimpse of truth persisted when most of the details of the slightly mad tea party had faded.
The Muellers wanted, it seemed, to talk about themselves. Of this couple, the man was the natural teacher, the natural sharer and salesman. Franz had been a young soldier in the Wehrmacht, and had ingratiated himself with the two great armies that had defeated his own. As a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union, he had learned enough Russian to make himself useful and win favored treatment in a harsh environment. Then, repatriated to the Western zone, he had learned the American version of English. He had acquired skills, photography being only one of them. Weekdays, he worked at MIT, as a lab technician. Hedwig and he had come to the United States nearly ten years ago, already linked by marriage.
If they ever described how they had met, or what dream had brought them to the United States, Ed, mellow on Löwenbräu, let it slip through his mind.
As her third tea-colored drink dwindled before her, Hedwig’s languid passivity warmed into lax confidingness. She called Franz by a nickname—“Affe,” and he responded with “Affenkind.” Monkey and baby monkey. She shocked Ed by referring, out of the blue, to Franz’s “cute little heinie.” The word “heinie” was one Ed had not heard since his childhood, and American women in the Seventies still kept to themselves any interest in men’s derrières—the words “bum” and “butt” and “ass” were saved for, if ever, intimacy. He reasoned that the two Germans, childless, in strange and formerly hostile territory, would make much of their sexual bond. But here among the four of them it was as if, in their eagerness to achieve closeness, the couple were using sex as a stalking horse for darker confidences. These were real Germans, Ed told himself—the people his brother had fought against, not the “Dutch” who had come to this country to be farmers or brewers, and not the Jewish Germans who had come here to flee Hitler. These Germans had stayed where they were, and fought. They had fought hard.
Late in their little party, the early-December night tightening cozily around them, Hedwig announced, with a smile rather broader than her usual wary one, “I was a Hitler bitch.” She meant that she had been, in her teens, with millions of others, a member of the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Maidens. The matter had arisen from her description, fascinating to the Americans—Ed had been a boy during the war, and Andrea was not yet born—of the Führer’s voice over the radio. “It was terrible,” Hedwig said, picking her words with especial care, shutting her eyes as if to hear it again, “but exciting. A shrieking like an angry husband with his wife. He loves her, but she must shape up. Both of you know, of course, how in a German sentence the verb of a compound form must come at the end of a sentence, however lengthy; he was excused from that. Hitler was exempted from grammar. It was a mark of how far above us he was.”
And Ed saw on her face a flicker of grammatical doubt, as she rechecked the last sentence in her head and could find nothing wrong with it, odd as it had sounded in her ears.
Two other shared occasions, on the scant social ground where Ed and Andrea and Franz and Hedwig met, remained, decades later, in Ed’s spotty memory.
First, there was a bitterly cold January night in which the two couples and another, Luke and Susan, had gone out to eat together. Luke and Susan were hardly a couple, since Luke, a weedy slight youth with a pained squint, was generally assumed to be gay. He had come along as Susan’s guest. In the class, where dwindled enrollment encouraged an even looser informality, Hedwig, digressing from the lesson on weil, um zu, and damit, had expressed a desire for more authentic Cantonese cuisine than the “mongrelized”—she pronounced the English word deliberately, in apparent ignorance of its bad historical connotations—fare offered as Chinese food. Susan, a large-framed, exuberant brunette given to sweeping pronouncements, had responded that she knew just the place, an unbelievably tiny family restaurant in Chinatown. It was agreed that after the next lesson—lessons occurred in the late afternoon, the students emerging from oppressive brightness into the January dark—Franz would pick the five of them up in his car, which turned out to be an early-Sixties Buick, proudly maintained. The Americans, climbing in, giggled at its largeness, its inner swaths of soft velour, reminiscent of their parents’ more naïve, expansive America. Chinatown proved too cramped and crowded for the spacious car, and Franz finally took a chancy spot at a corner of Beach Street, his front bumper and knobby chrome grille nearly protruding into traffic.
The meal, deftly served in a smoky, clattering congestion by what seemed a pack of children in slippers, fell short of Susan’s expectations, but no one else complained. The Tsingtao beer tickled Franz’s palate, and he insisted, against feeble objections from his impecunious crew, on picking up the check. When, however, overfed and overheated and talking too loud, they all went back out into the freezing January night, the spot on Beach Street where Franz’s car had been parked was empty. The nostalgic big Buick was gone.
Ed, at heart a country boy, assumed the worst: the car had been stolen; the loss was total and irremediable. If he were by himself, he could simply walk back to the South End, and he resentfully pictured the long trek, by taxi
or the T, that he must endure to return Andrea to her Cambridge widow’s house. The others, more city-smart, took a less dire view of the disappearance. Franz and Luke agreed that the car, illegally parked, had been towed by the police, and a call, from an imperfectly vandalized pay phone, with Luke doing the talking, confirmed that this was the case. The car was being held captive at the great fenced-in impoundment lot beyond the Berkeley Street overpass of the Massachusetts Turnpike, to be released upon payment of fine and fees. The Muellers offered to say good night on Beach Street right then and take a taxi to ransom their automobile, but the Americans would not hear of it. There were too many for a cab, so all walked together, their cheeks on fire with the cold, the mile to the dismal civic site.
Susan, in white earmuffs and a long striped scarf wound around her neck, led the parade. Her dark hair gleamed beneath the streetlights. Broken glass glittered all around. Andrea, it seemed to Ed, glowed in a religious rapture; the physical challenge of the trudge through the litter and the desolate urban margins of the Turnpike, with a group goal of redeeming a lost thing, spoke to her ascetic, coöperative spirit. As their brave parade moved through the blasted cityscape, its rubble and battered playground fencing and hard-frozen puddles, Ed kept thinking of bombed Berlin, and of cities Berlin had bombed, and of the black-and-white wartime movies that had communicated to his childhood an illicit exhilaration.
The episode was one of unequalled solidarity and spontaneous fun with the Germans. Franz had paid for their feast in cash, in those days before credit cards became universal tender, and found himself lacking the dollars that the heavy-lidded, implacable police clerk demanded from within his fortified and snugly heated shack. The others quickly made up the sum, raising their American voices as if to hide Franz’s accent. The cop did not like the accent, or Franz’s toadying manner, acquired in the postwar ruins. The cop suspected that his leg was being pulled; he was used to sullen hostility, not a cluster of tow-truck victims happily gabbling. The German students clambered into the liberated vintage sedan like schoolmates on an educational outing that has gone slightly, hilariously awry.
Second, there was the spring party, the end of German lessons. It took place not in the Muellers’ dank ground-floor Kenmore Square apartment but in a new, more spacious one, on a fourth floor, in Boston, near the Massachusetts College of Art and, across the trolley tracks, dangerous Mission Hill. Out here, beyond the Museum of Fine Arts, the city had a rakish low-rent feeling, a bohemian swagger. The festivity was ambitious; all the students from both terms had been invited, with their significant others, plus associates in the photography studio where Franz worked and various other strays the Germans had rounded up. In this ungainly gathering Franz gamely bustled back and forth, transporting beers and other beverages, an adroit, cheerfully sweating factotum, while Hedwig seemed paralyzed and dazed by the extent of her hospitality.
A number of the female students had brought hors d’oeuvres—raw vegetables with a hummus dip, tepid cheese puffs—but as the hours went by these morsels evaporated, as did the initial abundance of good will and polite conversation. A table by the big bay window had been set with paper plates and napkins and cutlery, but where was the food? Frau Professor sat in a thronelike ladder-back chair while her guests circulated with less and less energy, and it came to Ed that he had no business being here, among these young and would-be young, these part-time students and half-baked culture workers. Spring was the liveliest time for real estate in Peterborough, and his lawn and garden would need tending. Andrea came up to him with her version of the same feeling. She had finally disengaged herself from an elegant black photographer’s assistant, in torn jeans and a purple dashiki, who kept blowing some sort of smoke into her face. She was uncharacteristically querulous. “I’m starving. What’s happening?” she said.
“Ask Hedwig.”
“That would be rude, wouldn’t it? We’re guests. We take what comes.” Ed heard in this the implication that he, too, in his city sojourn, had taken what came.
He stuck to the immediate topic. “But nothing is coming. Forthcoming.”
“She doesn’t move,” Andrea plaintively agreed.
Over Andrea’s shoulder Ed saw Frau Mueller still in her chair, smiling even though no one was talking to her, and it came to him that she was stoned. If not stoned on a controlled substance, then on a cumulative dose of being German, a Hitler bitch in a foreign land where the subjunctive was withering away and everything was mongrelized. America had worn her down. Or Hitler had left her, in a way slow to emerge, disabled. In a corner of the room, Franz, sweating, was on the telephone. What seemed another hour later, a Hispanic deliveryman came through the door bearing a baby-sized bundle wrapped in butcher paper. Hedwig made a helpless welcoming gesture by raising one arm and called, “Franz!” It was, rumors ran through the sagging party, a pork roast, and Franz was now placing it in the oven. Andrea said to Ed, “It’ll take till midnight. Meat disgusts me. I want to go home.”
“Me, too, Liebchen.” Ed had had one too many Löwenbräus.
“Would it be too rude to leave?”
“I don’t think it’ll be noticed.”
“Should we say good-bye to the Muellers?”
“No. It’ll hurt their feelings. Anyway, this whole party is a good-bye. Verstehen Sie?”
She looked up at him with her childlike face, her chalky eyes wide and her lower lip retracted beneath the upper, and understood. “Ja,” Andrea said. He sensed she was trying not to cry, but he lacked the energy to put his arms around her. The trouble with Andrea was that she made no resistance. There was not enough to push against. She had been a silver-point outline.
Over the years, word filtered back to him, in New Hampshire, of the two Germans. Andrea wrote him several times at first, assuring him that his decision to return was a wise one—“Your dear uxorious heart never seemed to be in Boston.” Luke and Susan sent annual Christmas cards. They had taken up living together, though they never announced a marriage. Franz and Hedwig, they wrote, had left New England for the Southwest, where they were swallowed up like raindrops in the desert. It was as if they had sought to lose themselves in the American landscape that least resembled damp, crowded, highly engineered Germany.
Word came through, in the Eighties, that they were divorced. Franz had moved to southern California, the capital of camerawork. But he was long out of photography and with his new wife had begun a catering service. Then, Susan’s florid big handwriting confided, her cards to Hedwig were returned by the Tempe post office, and it seemed likely that without Franz to take care of her she had died. But an old photography associate of Franz’s later told Luke, at a wedding in Brattleboro, that it was Franz who had died, of a heart attack. He had survived two armies but not the unhealthy diet in America.
In the late Nineties, Arlene began to agitate for foreign travel, before they became too old and lame a couple to manage it. At the turn of the century, they signed up for a cruise of the Elbe and then, by bus, three days in reunited Berlin. One of their young guides, slim and sharp-featured, with straw-colored hair, reminded Ed of Hedwig, with her wary half-smile and her faintly deranged seriousness. Her name was Greta. At the tour stop in Potsdam, she lectured their group of footsore, aging Americans too lengthily and dogmatically, insisting that Truman and Attlee had been babies in 1945, new to power, and at the mercy of canny Joe Stalin, so that a great chunk of Germany had been stolen and given to Poland. “They were babies,” she repeated. Her English was almost flawless, and so fluent that the group tended to drift toward the other, less opinionated guide. Greta was what Hedwig might have been, had she had a grievance, a sense of having been wronged, instead of the opposite: Greta had grown up under East German Communism, lived by her wits in the capitalist economy fallen upon her, and was ready to fight, without apologies to anyone.
Though Ed listened carefully on all sides of him, on the street and at the opera house and in restaurants, he almost never recognized an expression or a phrase
; it was as if he had never taken German lessons at all, except that a waitress in Wittenberg complimented him, in English, on his pronunciation when he read aloud to her his choices from the menu. “Werry goot German!” she said.
“Why, darling!” Arlene commented dryly beside him, nettled by the unexpected compliment. “I’m impressed.”
“I was not, actually,” he told her, remembering how Andrea with such dear sad expertise would fit her small but wiry and knowing body to his, “much of a student.”
The Road Home
IN HIS RENTED BEIGE NISSAN, in a soft but steady early November rain, David Kern exited from the Pennsylvania Turnpike at a new tollbooth and was shot into an alien, majestic swirl of overpass and underpass. For some alarming seconds, he had no idea where he was; the little village of Morgan’s Forge—an inn, two churches, a feed store—which should have been on his left, had vanished behind a garish stretch of national franchises and retail outlets. The southern half of the county, a woodsy stretch of rural backwardness when, soon after the Second World War, his family, at his mother’s instigation, had bought back the family farm, was now a haven for Philadelphians, who were snapping up the old stone farmhouses for weekend retreats. There were even, he had been told, daily commuters—over an hour each way, but for them it was somehow worth it. For his part, fifty years ago, Kern couldn’t get out of the region fast enough.
He felt lost. Then a rusted, bullet-pierced road sign in the shape of a keystone, naming Route 14, oriented him, and he pressed on the accelerator with a young man’s verve. He knew this road: the gradually rising straightaway, with Morgan’s dam far below on the right; the steep downhill plunge, heralded by a sign advising trucks to shift to a low gear, toward the creek that curled around the roofless shell of the one-room schoolhouse his mother had attended as a child; the crumbling piece of asphalt, an earlier road, where his mother and he on June days used to set up a sign and a kitchen chair and sell strawberries, for forty cents a quart box, to the few cars that stopped; and then the sharp right turn, slowing you more than the car pressing behind you ever expected, onto the stony dirt lane, now macadamized, that led to what had been, for a time, his home.