The Honeyed Peace (5 page)

'I am going to write a history of the Postal System,' Heinrich said. 'It is very interesting. There is, naturally, Diocletian and his system of messengers, but it was not until the twelfth century that a true commercial postal system was established by the Hanseatic towns of northern Germany. I shall include the postal system of the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, but that was limited. I shall carry the history to modern times, to the organization of the Universal Postal System in 1878 at Berne. It is very interesting. Also there is nothing so beautiful as stamps.'

'Oh,' Luther said, and Erna sighed. 'Well,' Luther said, 'I don't hardly think that'll be a best-seller.'

They sat in silence, and Heinrich looked at his salad plate and felt hurried, hurried. What were they rushing ahead to? There were years for talk and thoughts and work and plans. Why were they so crowded in here together and so full of anxiety to be getting things done?

'Well,' Luther said again, 'we better figure out about how you're going to live and everything, Heinrich.'

'But I am going to live here,' Heinrich said, 'and do my work and we shall all be very well together, and there is nothing to worry about.'

Erna looked at Luther. She started to say something and stopped. Luther was smiling, had been smiling all along: the smiles of a salesman, who is trained not to offend the customers.

'Heinrich, you see, the thing is money. We'll have to figure out some way for you to earn money, I guess. And so you can have a place of your own and everything.'

Heinrich had not heard the last sentence. 'I do not need money,' he said with dignity. 'Four hundred dollars remains.'

'Four hundred dollars won't get you very far.' Luther's smile was giving out.

'It will last for more than a year,' Heinrich said. He was beginning to resent this meddling in his business. 'It lasts longer than that in Tübingen, and there also I had rent to pay.'

'You'll have to earn money,' Erna said, and hit the table so that the glasses jumped. Heinrich looked at her, disapprovingly.

'We'll talk about it tomorrow,' Luther said. 'Tell us about the Nazis. Did they beat you up much?'

'Beat me up?'

'Hit you, take a whip to you, or anything ...?'

'But no, surely not.'

Luther looked at Erna accusingly, remembering, after Heinrich's letter came, how Erna had said: 'He was afraid to write anything, I bet; I bet those awful Nazis have been beating him up or something.'

'I have gone away from my country,' Heinrich said, 'because there is no truth left in it. The Nazis are making everything, even history, into lies. And because of Heine.' He was silent. He found he could not speak of it now. Far away. Tübingen itself had grown into a dream, a town lying in the sun. A quiet town, left behind him in space and time, something to remember with love as the years went by and he could forget a little about Heine.

'Heine,' Luther said, thinking: Ah, that was a friend of his, and the Nazis beat him up or killed him, and old Heinrich got scared.

'Heine was a great man,' Heinrich said, talking to himself. 'He was a great man, and he understood how beautiful German is to write with, and he understood how beautiful the world is, all the world, and flowers and women. People will know about Germany always because there were men like Heine born there. But the Nazis say he is a Jew, so he is not a poet.' Heinrich's voice was trembling now, and Erna twisted her napkin, embarrassed, thinking to herself that a man who cried was the worst thing there was, and crying for no reason anyhow.

'Let's go to bed,' Erna said. 'Oh, for God's sake, let's go to bed.'

She folded her napkin and got up and began to take dishes from the dinette to the kitchenette.

In the daytime Heinrich sat about the house and mourned his books - which were in the cellar in the unopened trunks - and got in Erna's way. She kept the house badly now, because Heinrich was always there and she could not move, and besides what was the use? No matter how often she tidied up the living-room, it was a mess again in no time. Heinrich left papers lying on the floor, spilled cigar ash, rumpled the pillows, pulled the curtains open to look out the window, and left them crooked and parted. She had nothing to say to him, and it infuriated her whenever he talked. Always talking about stamps, as if anybody cared about stamps, as if people - in fact — didn't
hate
stamps.

Luther came home later and left usually right after supper, saying there was an Odd Fellows' meeting or he had to do extra work at the store or he was going over to Charlie's and talk with the boys. Their friends had stopped coming in, evenings, to play a little game of poker, or just drink a highball or two and gossip and listen to the radio, because Heinrich was there - and he made them sad and uneasy. An accusation had grown up in silence between Erna and Luther. Luther had thought of himself as giving shelter (briefly) to a hero, and all he had on his hands was an old fool, a lazy old fool who wouldn't work, and splashed so much water around the bathroom you had to wade in and mop up after him, and ate his food slowly, slowly (oh, God, why won't he swallow it?), making awful, slow, crunching sounds. And when he talked — stamps. ...

Heinrich went to the movies, in the afternoons, by himself, wanting darkness and wanting to be alone. But the air worried him, it was too hot and not real air, and his legs got cramped. The figures moving over the screen hurt his eyes, and the music was agony to him. He used to go and sit in the art museum, not looking at the pictures much, but just sitting in a large room where he could be quiet. He counted his money in his mind, and saw that it was melting away. And he could not work on his book, and the days were longer than all the winters he had spent in Tübingen.

Then one evening Luther came home drunk. It was not very serious; it was a cold, cloudy day, and he had been bored at the store and the thought of Heinrich, at home, bored him more, so he went out with two friends and drank gin quickly and got drunk. It was more than Erna could bear and she screamed at him, in fury and in terror, thinking: Is he going to come home every day now like 'this? Heinrich appeared from the bedroom and wondered what it was all about. When he saw that Luther was drunk, he said, in disgust, 'Shame.' Erna turned from her husband, stood with her hands on her hips, white in the face and beyond caring, and told Heinrich; that Luther had never been drunk before Heinrich left Germany on account of a fool poet, and Heinrich's stamps were enough to drive anybody to drink, and they couldn't live like decent people because Heinrich was there all the time, in the way, messy and tiresome and ... and ...

Heinrich said nothing. He got his hat, wrapped the skinny scarf about his neck, tugged on the great black coat, and went out into the street. He walked by himself for hours, and ate somewhere, not I noticing what food he had asked for. He came back, when the house: was quiet, and went quietly to bed. The next morning, with dignity, he said that he was leaving: he would find a room for himself. He thanked them.

Luther and Erna made polite if somewhat muted sounds but they let him go, only asking that he leave his address. He would not have done this, but it was necessary to get his trunks from Erna's basement to his new home, and he needed help. So Erna arranged for the trunks to be sent and she went to see him. It was an ugly room in a boarding-house which smelled of shoe polish and escaping gas; and cabbage. The wallpaper in Heinrich's room was blotched and swollen in places with damp, and the fixtures on his washbowl were rusty. The bed had heavy lumps in it, and the upholstery of the chairs was without colour or design, grey from use. It was altogether a grey room, looking out on to a dingy back yard and a narrow alley, and no sun came into it. Heinrich put the busts of Beethoven and Goethe on a shaky card table, where they did not belong, but it had become necessary for him to see them, and have them close to him for protection. Erna spoke to Luther about that room and said: 'We must find him work; he'll be going on relief next.'

Luther had a friend whose uncle owned a secondhand bookstore. Finally, after many visits and many lies, saying that Heinrich was a distinguished professor from Tübingen whom the Nazis had deported, Heinrich was given work. He was to earn ten dollars a week and catalogue books and give advice on what books Mr Schmidt should stock, and he was to dust them and sell them if he could, and do anything else Mr Schmidt thought of. Mr Schmidt wondered if he could ask Heinrich to wash the windows, which were very dirty (and that would have saved Mr Schmidt one dollar), but he decided against it because Heinrich was too clumsy.

For a month Heinrich worked. He dropped books always; and he was so awkward with a ladder that Mr Schmidt could not trust him to put things away on high shelves. His cataloguing was neat and exact but slow. If a customer came in, with fifteen minutes to spare at the lunch hour, Heinrich would painstakingly launch into the history of any book the customer looked at, the life of the author, the reasons for writing the book. There was rarely time left to buy anything, after that. Every once in a while, when the store was empty, Heinrich would try to talk to Mr Schmidt about his own book, about the postal system and how interesting it was and how amazingly it had developed: you could trace the whole growth of civilization through the postal system. And he would describe certain stamps. Mr Schmidt stayed in his office more and more, separated from Heinrich by a glass door. At nights, Heinrich's room was cold. He tried to work with a quilt about his shoulders, but that hampered his writing arm. The light was poor for reading, and his eyes burned in his head. He could hear the other boarders, quarrelling or snoring or brushing their teeth.

A customer came into the store, in a hurry. She had deep lines alongside her nose and her voice rose, sharp and scratchy, asking for a book. Her husband was sick at home in bed and she thought she'd bring him a novel to read. Heinrich found a somewhat torn-up copy of
The Magic Mountain.

'It is by Thomas Mann,' he said. 'Thomas Mann is one of the greatest of the new German writers, and this is a very fine book, perhaps his best.'

'Oh, I don't want anything by a German,' the woman said.

Heinrich looked at her in amazement.

'But why, Madam?'

'Oh, I don't know,' the woman said crossly. 'I never have thought much of the Germans since the war. I wouldn't want to buy any of their old books.'

'Madam,' Heinrich said, his voice cold and loud with anger, 'Madam, you are a fool.'

The woman put her hand up to her face as if he had struck her, made a furious crying sound, and rushed from the shop. Mr Schmidt fired Heinrich; he was grateful for that woman. He paid Heinrich an extra five dollars, out of relief to see him go.

Heinrich walked straight to Erna's house. He wanted Erna and Luther to know that he had done as any intelligent, decent man would do, and that he had not lost his job for base reasons. It was the first job he had ever had, and his honour must be clear.

Luther and Erna listened in silence to Heinrich's story. When he had finished, Luther said to him, not angrily, but finally, 'Heinrich, I'm through with you. You just don't fit anywhere. I had a hell of a time getting you that job, and it's none of your damn business what a customer thinks. If we were all as choosy as you, we'd starve. You can just go out and run your own life. We can't do anything more for you. You just don't fit in America, Heinrich, that's all there is to it.'

The stairs up to his room seemed narrower than before, and darker. He turned on the dim light, and peered about him, looking for Beethoven and Goethe and trying to feel safe here, with these known faces. His mind was stupid with fear. You don't fit in America. But where could he go; what country was left; where was there peace and sunlight and a library to work in? Where could a man live, and be at home? He knew how much money he had - only two hundred dollars left now. He had lost his job. How would he find another; where should he go; to whom should he speak? What could he say to recommend himself? I am Heinrich Fleddermann from Tübingen and I am fifty-six now and tired. He had not even written a book, not one book, after all the years of learning truths to make a book with. He had not explained how beautiful stamps were, little coloured squares of paper to carry ideas and plans and inventions and greetings around the world. There was no air in the room, only the thick smell of the hallway and the cold. He stood under the light and shivered and thought to himself: I have come too far away. Suddenly he thought, for the first time, I am an exile, I am a man who belongs nowhere, and I have grown old without noticing it, but now it is too late.

He sat on the edge of his bed and waited, thinking: It will be tomorrow soon and perhaps I shall know what to do then. Heinrich Fleddermann, Heinrich Fleddermann, he kept saying, as if to prove that he was alive and at least belonged to himself. Finally he said it aloud. He heard his voice, a little later, coming from some other place, weak and uncertain, mouthing his name. So he tried saying it bravely. That was better. 'Now,' he said aloud, 'I shall run my own life.'

But it was not so easy, after you'd said that. It was good to have decided it, but then what? He rose and looked out into the darkness and faintly he saw an ashpit and a worn-out tree. I will go away, Heinrich thought. I will go to a little town where the streets are cobbled or just dirt, and I can breathe, and there is sun. I will live in a house where there are not other people moving all the time. Two hundred dollars will be more in a little town. And when that is gone, I will get work. I will work in the fields or give German lessons. Or I will die.

He knew he could never find Tübingen lying in the sun again; because it was another sun, another Tübingen, something he had lost when history changed and he became old. There was nothing to go back to, and who knew the future? Perhaps he would write his book and perhaps not. But he could live for a while, as he wanted, in a small town with cobbled streets or dirt on the roads, where the days were long but not heavy and confusing. He could read and dream and feel the sun on his face, walking in the afternoons.