Amerika (19 page)

Only on three occasions during Karl's one-and-a-half-month stay in Ramses had he spent more than a few hours in Therese's room. It was of course smaller than any of the head cook's rooms; her few possessions were piled up around the window; but from his experiences in the dormitory Karl knew just how important it was to have a relatively quiet room of one's own, and although he never said so explicitly, Therese nevertheless noticed that he did like her room. She kept no secrets from him, and after her visit that first evening, it was hardly conceivable that she had any left to keep. She was an illegitimate child; her father was a foreman on a construction crew and had brought the mother and child over from Pomerania, but as if he had thereby done his duty, or as if he had expected to find someone other than the worn-out woman with the weak child whom he met on the landing dock soon after their arrival, he had emigrated to Canada without ever giving any real explanation, and the wife and child he left behind never received a letter or any other news from him, but this was scarcely surprising, for somewhere in the teeming districts on New York's East Side they were irretrievably lost.

On one occasion Therese—Karl stood beside her, looking down at the street—spoke of her mother's death. She described how on a winter's evening—she must have been about five years old at the time—her mother and she had hurried through the streets looking for a place to sleep, each with her own bundle. And how at first her mother had led her by the hand, for a snowstorm was blowing and it wasn't easy to move forward, until her hand grew limp and then, without even glancing behind her, she let go of Therese, who then had to struggle to hold on to her mother's dress. Therese often stumbled and even fell down, but her mother seemed as if in a craze and did not stop. And then those snowstorms blowing across the long, straight New York streets! Karl had not yet experienced a New York winter. When you walk into the wind and it turns in a circle, you cannot open your eyes; the wind continually rubs the snow into your face, you walk on without getting any farther, the situation becomes very desperate. Of course, a child does have an advantage over adults; it can run under the wind and take pleasure in everything. And so even then Therese could not understand her mother and was absolutely convinced that if she had responded more sensibly to her mother that evening—she was still such a small child at the time—her mother wouldn't have had to endure such a miserable death. She had been out of work for two days; there wasn't even the smallest coin left in their pockets, they had spent all day outdoors without a bite and carried only useless rags in their bundles, which they dared not throw away, maybe out of superstition. Her mother had been promised work on a construction site, starting the following morning, but as she had sought to explain to Therese all day, she feared she couldn't seize the opportunity, for she felt dead tired; to the consternation of passersby, she had coughed up a great deal of blood along the way and merely wanted to get into the warmth somewhere and have a good rest. But on that particular evening it was impossible to find such a place. Even in those places where the custodian did not turn them away from the entrance, where one could at least have recuperated from the weather a little, they hurried on through the narrow icy corridors, climbed through the upper stories, went in a circle around the narrow terraces of the courtyards, knocked randomly on doors, at times not daring to approach anyone, at others asking everyone who came along, and once or twice her mother crouched breathlessly on the steps of a quiet staircase, drew over Therese, who almost fought with her, and kissed her, pressing painfully against her lips. On finding out afterward that those were her last kisses, one cannot quite understand how—even if one was only a little mite—one could have been so blind as not to grasp this. In some rooms that they passed the doors had been pushed open to let out the suffocating air, and amid the smoky haze filling the rooms, as though from a fire, one saw entering through the doorway a single isolated figure who indicated, either through his silence or through a few words, that they could not possibly be accommodated in that particular room. In hindsight Therese believed that it was only for the first couple of hours that her mother had made a serious effort to find a place, for she had probably not approached anyone else after midnight, even though she rushed on until dawn, taking only a few breaks and even though there is always life stirring in those buildings where the gates and the apartment doors are never shut and you run into people every step you take. Of course they made rapid progress, not by running but by exerting themselves to the utmost, and in reality they may have been only crawling along. Therese did not know how many buildings they had entered between midnight and five o'clock in the morning, whether it was twenty, or two, or perhaps only a single one. While the corridors of these buildings are cleverly designed to optimize the use of space, they also make it hard to find one's way; how often must they have passed through those same corridors! Therese did have a dim memory of their going out through the front gate of a building that they had endlessly searched; she also believed that on reaching the street, they turned around at once and rushed back into the same building. For a child this was a source of incomprehensible torment; being dragged along, sometimes with her mother holding her, sometimes holding on to her herself, without ever hearing a consoling word, and the only explanation she could come up with—due to her limited reasoning powers at the time—was that her mother wanted to run away and abandon her. So even when her mother took her by one hand, with her other she still clasped her mother's skirt for safety's sake, howling at intervals. She wanted to avoid being left behind among the people stomping up the stairs in front of them, those not yet visible who were approaching around a bend in the staircase, and those who were arguing in the corridor in front of a door and throwing one another into the room. Drunks wandered through the building singing in muffled tones, and the mother and Therese fortunately managed to slip through groups that were slowly closing ranks. Of course, late that night, when people were no longer so alert and no one would have insisted on everything being handled correctly, they could certainly have pushed their way into one of those dormitories rented out by entrepreneurs, but Therese did not understand this and her mother no longer wanted to take a rest. On a beautiful winter morning the two of them leaned against the wall of a house and may even have slept, or perhaps simply gazed about them through wide-open eyes. It became evident that Therese had lost her bundle, and her mother went through the motions of slapping her for her inattentiveness, but Therese could neither hear nor feel the slightest blow. They continued on through the increasingly busy streets; her mother kept close to the wall, they crossed a bridge where her mother brushed the top of the balustrade with one hand and finally reached the construction site—Therese had simply accepted this at the time, but she could not understand it now—at which her mother had been asked to show up that morning. She did not tell Therese whether she should wait there or leave, and Therese took this as a command to wait, since it corresponded most closely to what she herself wished to do. So she sat down on a pile of bricks and watched as her mother undid her bundle, took out a colorful rag, and used it to tie up the scarf she had worn all night. So great was Therese's weariness that it never even crossed her mind that she might be able to help her mother. Without reporting at the construction hut, as was customary, and without asking anyone, her mother climbed up a ladder as if she already knew which tasks she had been assigned. Therese found this surprising, for the female laborers were generally only put to work down below, slaking lime, passing bricks, and carrying out other such simple tasks. She therefore thought that her mother intended to do better-paying work that day and smiled up at her drowsily. The building was not yet that high, scarcely extending beyond the ground floor, even though one could already see the tall scaffolding rods, which had not yet been tied to the boards, rise up into the blue sky. On reaching the top, her mother nimbly bypassed the bricklayers, who were laying one brick on top of the other and inexplicably failed to challenge her, stretched out her delicate hand carefully so as to be able to hold on to a wooden partition that served as a kind of railing, while in her drowsiness below Therese was astonished by her mother's nimbleness and believed that her mother had cast another friendly glance at her. But just then her mother reached a pile of bricks where the railing and probably even the gangway itself came to an end, but she ignored this and headed toward the pile of bricks, whereupon her nimbleness seemed to desert her; she knocked over the pile of bricks, fell over it and down into the depths. A large number of bricks came rolling down after her, and finally after quite a while a heavy board somewhere worked itself loose and crashed down upon her. Therese's last memory of her mother was of her lying there in her checkered skirt, still from Pomerania, of the board lying upon her and almost covering her, of people running over from every direction, and of some man or other up on the building shouting down in anger.

It had grown late by the time Therese finished her story. She had spoken at great length, which was not generally her habit, and it was precisely when she came to the insignificant parts, such as the description of the scaffolding rods rising into the sky one by one, that she had to stop, tears welling up in her eyes. Now, ten years later, she knew every little thing that had happened back then, and since the last memory that she had of her mother alive was of her lying on the half-finished ground floor above and since it was never possible for her to convey that sight clearly enough to her friend once she had finished telling her story, she wanted to go back to that incident, but instead she faltered, laid her face in her hands, and fell silent.

However, there were also merrier occasions in Therese's room. On his first visit Karl had seen a manual for business correspondence lying about and had requested and borrowed it. At the same time they agreed that Karl should complete the exercises in the book and hand them to Therese; she had already studied the book as much as was required for her minor duties. Karl then spent entire nights lying awake in his dormitory bed, his ears stuffed with cotton wool, trying out every conceivable position for the sake of diversion as he read the book and with a fountain pen jotted down the exercises in a little notebook—a present from the head cook to thank him for having devised and neatly carried out a large inventory that had turned out to be very practical. Whenever he was disturbed by the other youths, he usually managed to turn the situation around by asking them continually for tips about the English language until they grew tired and left him in peace. Often he marveled at how the other youths were completely reconciled to their present situation; they could not even sense how temporary it was—no lift boys older than twenty years of age were permitted—failed to recognize the necessity of making a decision about their future profession, and in spite of the example set by Karl, read only detective stories that got passed around from bed to bed in dirty tatters.

During their meetings Therese corrected Karl's work in an excessively meticulous fashion; contentious opinions were exchanged. Karl invoked his great New York professor as a witness, but she was as little impressed with him as with the lift boys' notions of grammar. She would take the fountain pen from his hand and cross out the passage that she considered erroneous, but though no authority greater than Therese would usually ever lay eyes on such questionable passages, for the sake of accuracy Karl would insist on crossing out Therese's cross-outs. The head cook would occasionally join them, though she always sided with Therese, which of course proved nothing, since Therese was after all her secretary. Still, she brought about a general reconciliation, for tea was made, pastries fetched, and Karl was asked to talk about Europe, though his observations were frequently interrupted by the head cook, who often asked questions and expressed astonishment, making Karl realize how many changes from the bottom up had occurred within a relatively short period and how much else had completely changed in his absence and was still changing continually.

Karl must have been in Ramses about a month when Renell said in passing one evening that a man called Delamarche had approached him and asked about Karl. Having no reason to conceal anything from the man, he had truthfully told him that Karl was a lift boy but that owing to the head cook's patronage, he had good prospects of obtaining positions of a very different sort. Karl noticed the careful treatment Renell had received at the hands of Delamarche, who had even invited him to share a meal that evening. “I no longer have any dealings with Delamarche,” said Karl. “You too should be wary of him!” “I should?” said Renell, straightening up, and then he rushed off. He was the most delicate youth in the hotel, and according to a rumor circulating among the other waiters, the source of which was impossible to track down, he had been showered with kisses in his lift by an elegant lady, a longtime hotel resident. Anyone familiar with that rumor would have been amused to see that self-assured lady, whose outward appearance give no indication whatsoever of the possibility of such conduct, walk by with her light gait, delicate veils, and tightly corseted waist. She lived on the first floor, for which a lift other than Renell's was designated, but when the other youths happened to be busy, one could not prevent such guests from entering a different lift. And so every now and then this lady rode in Karl and Renell's lift and indeed always exclusively when Renell was on duty. This may have simply been a coincidence, but no one believed it, and the departure of the lift ferrying them upstairs always gave rise to such barely suppressed unrest along the entire row of lift boys that there were even times when one of the head waiters had been obliged to intervene. In any case a change had come over Renell, whether due to the lady or to the rumors that had begun to circulate; he had become vastly more self-assured and now left all of the cleaning to Karl, who awaited a chance to raise the issue with him; he no longer came to the dormitory. No one else had so completely abandoned the community of lift boys, for generally they stuck together, at least with regard to service-related issues, and had an organization of their own, which was recognized by the hotel management.