Homeland Page 5

  “Oh, no, I’ve longed to see it.”

  “I’m talking about living there, permanently. Could you do that?”

  “I think so. I would try with all my might to be happy. To please my uncle—”

  “You must go. There really isn’t any choice. I’ll write Josef, and we will begin immediately saving every pfennig to purchase your ticket. I’ve already investigated the price from Hamburg. Approximately a hundred five Deutschmarks for steerage passage on a decent ship. That’s roughly—hmm—twenty-four dollars American.”

  “A hundred and five Deutschmarks! That’s a fortune, Aunt Lotte.”

  “Yes, it is for poor people like us. It will take us a while to save what we need now. Months, perhaps a year.”

  “I’ll work hard to help save the fare,” Pauli promised. “I’ll work extra whenever I can.”

  “Then perhaps we’ll have the price sooner than we think. However long it takes, we’ll use the time to good advantage. I’ll teach you all the English that I can.”

  “What about American, can you teach me that?”

  Lotte laughed heartily. “Oh, Pauli. American speech is English. Well, no, not quite, it’s cheekier. More jokes. More slang. It’s like English with pepper in it.”

  “Is it decided, then?”

  “Yes, Pauli. It’s decided. America will be fine, you’ll see. It will be just fine.”

  He closed his eyes, shivering as a picture flashed into his head. New York Harbor; the lady of Liberty with her light upraised. She seemed to be signaling, beckoning, just to him.

  The reply to her letter came late in the autumn. It was written in a fine neat hand, in proper German, on thick creamy paper with elegant engraved script across the top of the sheet. JOS. CROWN, MICHIGAN AVENUE, CHICAGO, USA. Above this was an embossed crown of gold.

  Dearest sister—

  How splendid to hear from you once again. I hope your health is excellent. We are fine, and prospering. In response to your question, yes, I enthusiastically endorse the idea that Pauli come to us if it is no longer feasible for him to stay with you. Please do send him as soon as convenient. You said you hoped it would be possible by the spring or summer of next year, and we will now share that hope. Whenever he arrives, Ilsa and I and our children will welcome him to America, and attend diligently to his needs, education, and settlement in a new country. I am confident he will not be disappointed with what he finds in America, and I also trust he will not be disappointed in his new home.

  Yours with affection,

  Joseph

  On a spring day in the following year, 1892, Pauli took a horse tram out through the western suburb of Charlottenburg to the end of the line. From there he walked along the Spree, nearly all the way to Spandau.

  He heard voices from the special camp before he saw it. Several plainly designed wooden cottages surrounded a large meadow where listless figures moved to and fro in the sun, or sat limply in white-painted wooden chairs. Pauli’s mood turned dark at the sight of so many sad, helpless boys and girls, some of them hideous cases, with slack mouths, blank eyes, or enormous swollen heads.

  In a swath of sunshine near a cottage, Pauli found Tonio. His friend was white as dough, and his poor distended forehead looked larger than Pauli remembered. Tonio sat tilted back in one of the heavy summer chairs. He didn’t lift his head, just rolled it to one side when he heard the visitor. He smiled.

  “Hello, Pauli.”

  “Hello, Tonio. How are you?”

  “Oh, just fine. It’s good of you to come all the way out here.”

  “I think it will be my last visit. I’m leaving soon. For America, to live with my Uncle Josef.”

  “Yes, I know. My father told me when he came on Sunday. It’s a wonderful chance for you.”

  Pauli held out a paper bag. “I brought you something.”

  “What?” Tonio tried to sit up straighter but couldn’t, and fell back. From the sack he took a twist of baked bread sparkling with salt crystals. “Kringeln. My favorite.” He bit off the end and chewed. A shining line of drool ran from the corner of his mouth.

  “Tonio, is this place—I mean—how do you feel about it? It seems cruel to weed out children and keep them hidden away.”

  “Oh, the sisters treat us very well. The doctors are kind. They tell us we’re doing good for society—that it’s important to keep everyone at his or her own level, so others aren’t impeded. It’s the new German way.”

  That might be, but Pauli didn’t like it. If this was how Germans treated other Germans, it wasn’t for him, and he was glad to be leaving. Tonio’s mistreatment reminded him in a strange way of Rhukov’s comments about the German army, its lust to make war.

  Five minutes later he said his farewells and hugged Tonio, who wept. Pauli couldn’t walk fast enough to get away from the sad camp in the middle of the sunny pine forest.

  In his tiny room, he took down the cards, photographs, and mementos.

  He piled them neatly inside the old wardrobe, which was empty now save for the box holding the toy village. He kept four items back. One was the paper flag of the revolution—red, gold, and black. The second was the globe from Wertheim’s. The third was the ruined camera; though it was useless, he felt it was important that he take it.

  The last item had become a very special talisman. It was the stereoscope card of the lady Liberty standing beyond the bow of the ship. Soon he’d see that same sight with his own eyes.

  Carefully he put the card and the paper flag and the globe and the ruined Kodak into his traveling grip, which Aunt Lotte had bought secondhand. He laid them one by one on top of a few clothes wrapped around an English grammar and phrase book he’d been studying for months. It was called Englisch für Reisende. English for travelers.

  About to leave the tiny room for the last time, he turned back. He opened the wardrobe again. Took out the souvenir postcard picturing Kaiser Wilhelm II stiffly posed with Her Majesty and their children. He thought a moment, then made up his mind. He tore the card in half and tossed the pieces on the bed.

  It seemed a very bold, courageous thing to do; the right thing for someone going to a new homeland, a real home, at last.

  He spoke then, in clumsy halting English. It was practice, and perhaps even a bit of a prayer.

  “America. Chicago. Hello, Uncle Josef. I am your nephew Pauli.”

  4

  Charlotte

  IN THE STEAM AND bedlam of the Zoo Bahnhof, they said goodbye.

  How young and strong he looked. How full of hope and purpose, standing there with clear eyes and his clothing in its customary disarray. His third-class rail ticket to Hamburg hung out of his breast pocket. Another pocket bulged with an apple she’d provided, and some hard candies. He’d combed his brown hair but it was all blown again. He looked so young; he had no idea of the snares of woe and mischance the world would set for him. Nor would she tell him.

  Still, he might do better than she had, given the sponsorship of her rich brother in Chicago, and the promise of a young country unencumbered by musty old ideas. Now that Pauli was leaving she brimmed with love for him; fully as much love as she felt for her lost daughter, Christine. Somehow, in spite of her failings, she’d managed to care for the boy responsibly. It comforted her, and partially relieved the guilt she felt because she’d failed with her own child.

  She’d hardly slept all night, worrying about Pauli. She’d heard of evil men who preyed on immigrants on both sides of the ocean. There were rumors of smallpox and cholera in Hamburg.

  The spear of pain in her bosom was sharp this morning. It had taken all her will to rise up from bed, perform her meager toilet, wash her hair with a henna rinse she could ill afford, then dress herself in her best outfit, a cloth suit with silk braid and a bonnet of lace trimmed with artificial pink roses, very French in design, but ten years out of date. Some deep, nearly unfathomable impulse had driven her to search through bureau drawers until she found her rosary, from the days of her marriage. This she
put into her reticule. Finally she donned her cape of dark green loden. There seemed a melancholy suitability to the heavy fabric that resisted water so well. Pauli asked her why she wore the cape when the weather was warm. She shushed him, rather sharply.

  Speaking above the clangor of the station, she said, “I want you to do well in your new homeland, Pauli. You take with you all of the good characteristics of Germans. We Germans are a fine and ancient people, you know. Very diligent, smart, efficient. But we love life. We sing, we hike, we write great music and poetry.” Despite her pain, her gray cheeks that no amount of rouging could hide, she felt uncharacteristically sentimental and forgiving.

  “However, you’re going to be an American, and you must be a good one, never forgetting you have changed your old country for a new one. It’s an excellent time to leave Berlin. Frankly, I’m suspicious of the military clique. In my estimation, they harbor dangerous ideas. I don’t believe America has that kind of warrior caste, but if she does, be wary. Above all, guard your money and don’t lose the letter your Uncle Josef sent.”

  Trainmen blew their whistles and began shutting doors to the carriages. The actual farewell was hasty, a mere exchange of hugs and breathless goodbyes. She saw him into the third-class carriage, jammed there between a nun and a worn little man who might have been a junior clerk. With a ringing of the bell, a grind of great iron wheels, a hissing of jets of steam, the locomotive pulled the train and Pauli away from her forever.

  When she left the huge station she discovered rain falling. Warm summer rain.

  At a box marked with the horn of the postal service she dropped her letter into the slot. A letter for her daughter Christine, whom she’d abandoned. “For her own good”—that was the lie she’d told herself, so she could put the girl into service, go off and live her own life selfishly. She hadn’t corresponded with Christine for years. It was time. The only address for her was the household in Ulm. She prayed that if her daughter had moved on, they would know where to send the letter.

  She walked to Unter den Linden and took a turn along it, under the dripping trees. In a café she chose for its modestly priced Speisekarte posted at the door, she spent the very last of her money. Her light supper consisted of wursts, black rye bread, hard-boiled eggs, a glass of delicate Mosel wine followed by three glasses of Weissbier, the strong “white beer” millions of Germans still preferred over lager. She needed alcohol tonight, for courage.

  As the light waned, she walked to the Schlossplatz and paused to admire the heroic statue of the Great Elector. She strolled on the bridge over the Spree. Evening was settling on Berlin, muting some of the clangor, some of the ugliness. The rain had become an intermittent shower, hardly heavy enough to dampen her; quite pleasant actually.

  Lotte leaned against the railing with her eyes fixed on the rain-dappled river. Reflections rippled and gleamed invitingly.

  She slipped her hand into her reticule, found the rosary. The feel of the beads was comforting. She silently begged forgiveness for what she planned to do. Her faith in God had not suddenly been restored, but it was always well to play every card, in case one was a trump.

  She thought of the train hurtling through the night toward Hamburg. Thank heaven her brother Josef in Chicago had responded favorably to the idea she proposed in her letter. Not that it was so surprising, really; Josef was always generous, besides being smart and rich. As for that shit Gerhard in Aalen, he could burn in hell, provided there really was such a place.

  She took pleasure in having set Pauli’s feet on a better road. He was young, clever, didn’t give up easily; perhaps he would indeed find a better home than the mean and shabby one she’d provided, and from there would follow his new road to a happy end.

  As for herself—well, she didn’t feel so bad with wine and Weissbier in her. She felt composed, in fact, leaning against the wrought-iron rail and watching the lighted ripples on the Spree. She took out the rosary and held it.

  She drew a deep breath, realizing like a delighted child that the Spree was her friend; the Spree was welcoming; the Spree held the answer to all of life’s problems.

  “Godspeed, Pauli,” she whispered to the night.

  Part Two

  Steerage

  1892

  I marched away to the ocean’s shore—

  I trusted myself to the waves,

  Not yet was my spirit broken,

  Nor yet lay I in hateful chains,

  Strength remained to save myself.

  America welcomes me!

  I shall stay in the faraway land.

  1855

  Poem by JACOB GROSS, a German immigrant

  5

  Pauli

  “CHANGE YOUR MARKS FOR dollars. Best rates. You need dollars on the ship, boy. How about it?”

  Pauli looked up from his grammar and phrase book. He was tired and tense and uncomfortable. He’d been sitting on the packing box, amid six or seven hundred other travelers, since early morning. The angle of the light threw the steamship’s great shadow on the pier, dark as a funeral drape. He hoped it wasn’t an omen.

  The wind blowing along the Elbe into the harbor basin was hot and damp. The day was more like August than late spring. The river smelled incredibly foul. Pauli had seen human waste floating in it. Like everyone else on the pier, he was fretful because boarding had been delayed. He was nervous about rumors of contagious disease in the city. For three days and two nights he’d been penned up in the shipping line’s filthy emigrant barracks. It wasn’t a rumor but a fact that there was cholera in Russia. Pauli had been one of the last German emigrants to arrive by regular train. Special sealed trains were bringing them into Hamburg now.

  All around him on the long pier, the steerage passengers sat or lay or wandered, crowded together just as they had been in the barracks and would be again on board ship. America was attracting not only Germans but Austrians and Romanians, Russians and Poles, and plenty of Jews from those countries. The hopeful travelers were a shabby lot. They spoke a variety of strange and incomprehensible languages, including one, vaguely like German, which Pauli guessed to be Yiddish. They had packed their worldly goods in knapsacks and old valises, wicker baskets and feather pillows tied with rope. Some of them looked pleasant, others disagreeable. The latter included a pair of young Germans, big and blond, who talked loudly, stared openly at women’s bodies, and punched and roughhoused each other like playful dogs.

  The man who’d spoken to Pauli leaned closer. “Come on, how much do you want to exchange?”

  The man looked respectable until you noticed his soiled collar and worn coat cuffs. Pauli remembered the booths below a big sign in the company’s drab and drafty ticket hall, BANK WECHSEL UND PASSAGE GESCHÄFT. This man was no banker.

  “Nothing,” Pauli said. “They only take marks on the ships. I asked.”

  “Smart boy,” someone nearby called to him. “Give him your money, you can kiss it goodbye.”

  Someone laughed. The man spit on the pier and walked off quickly.

  All at once Pauli felt utterly homesick. He had an impulse to jump up and race for the Hauptbahnhof, abandoning this foolish dream of America. Visions of his room in Müllerstrasse filled his head. In memory it didn’t seem so bad. At least it was warm and cozy—

  Stop, that’s nonsense.

  He wished he could rid himself of the bitter medicinal reek of his clothes. The shipping line was strictly enforcing its medical quarantine for steerage passengers. After a cursory examination on his day of arrival, he and everyone else had been fumigated with a noxious spray: hair, armpits, groin—everywhere. They were then reassembled and led to the company barracks, where they slept on the floor in similar, segregated rooms.

  Besides smelling bad, he was famished. He’d had nothing but an apple since getting up; the core was in his pocket, forgotten. The food in the barracks consisted of tea and bread in the morning, tea and bread and bad-tasting sausage at noon, tea and bread at night. The emigrants had to pay for each
serving; Pauli ate but once a day. He was eager for a regular meal on the ship. The food was advertised as excellent and plentiful.

  He tried to resume his study. It wasn’t easy. English was a damnably hard language. Although there were plenty of words similar to German—Keller and cellar, Wein and wine, Lilie and lily, among hundreds—English had too many words that sounded alike but were spelled differently. You threw a ball but passed through a doorway. After the number one came two, but you spoke to someone. Too was another word for also. Maddening.

  There was no du, no familiar form of address for family and friends. Most confusing of all, English grammar shoved the verb somewhere in the middle of a sentence, not at the end, where a verb properly belonged. How would he ever learn it, let alone speak it?

  With a sigh he closed the book. He wasn’t learning fast enough. But he was learning other lessons; unpleasant ones.

  When he’d stepped from the train, he expected the Hamburgers to be friendly and eager to help their countrymen who were setting out to create new lives for themselves. Altogether wrong. The Hamburgers pretended to friendliness, all the while looking for ways to deceive and take advantage of the travelers.

  Pauli met one such fellow in the exercise yard—a greasy Neulander, a “New World man.” These were fast talkers he’d been warned about by a passenger on his train. A Neulander acted as agent for a shipping line or an employer overseas. Most of the breed had never set foot in America.

  The Neulander shoved a gaudy pamphlet in Pauli’s hand. The cover featured a crude painting of the Statue of Liberty, made of gold and glowing with a golden halo. Behind it the artist had depicted tall buildings, each crowned with a giant diamond.

  “Got your ticket, youngster?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have a job waiting for you? If not, in Baltimore, I can offer—” The Neulander clenched his teeth when he saw Pauli’s reaction. “What the hell’s the joke?”

  “This.” Pauli waved the pamphlet. “Do you think I’m from the sticks? I’m from Berlin.”