What's In A Name (3 page)

“From the war?” he asked.

“No,” the old man answered. “My job. My legs were broken on my job.”

“Where did you work?”

“The shipyards,” the old man answered. “The Brooklyn shipyards.”

“What was your job?”

“I loaded cargo.”

“And something fell on you?” Altman asked.

“A big crate,” the old man said. “Of guns. It was marked ‘Steel Rods,' but the crate was full of guns. Hundreds of guns. Cartons of ammunition, too.”

“Going where?”

“Palestine.”

“Ah, yes,” Altman said. “So much trouble there.”

They reached the corner, where they were stopped by the traffic signal.

“I told the shipyard master,” the old man continued, “and some people came and they took the guns away.” He shrugged. “I'm sure they just sent them in another crate.”

“Have you found other guns?”

The old man looked up and smiled softly. “They are always going there,” he added. “To the Jews.”

Altman nodded. He was well versed in the region's current troubles. After all, they'd been going on for over fifty years, and there was no solution in sight. Each year brought more conflict, a struggle that he suspected would never find resolution.

The light turned and the two of them moved forward, Altman at a pace far slower that he would normally have taken, the man limping along beside him. He could not imagine living such a life, and this made it all the more important for him to give this poor chap a decent dinner and some kindly conversation.

They reached the restaurant a few minutes later. Everyone knew Altman and made a great fuss over him, something that clearly impressed the old man.

“I'm a regular,” Altman explained demurely.

“It's nice to be noticed,” the old man said.

To live so unheralded a life seemed infinitely sad to Altman, never to be appreciated, never to be spoken to with respect or honored in any way. There is a sorrow in smallness, he decided, a pain that goes with being just another bit of microscopic plankton in a sea of green. He knew better than to give any hint of his pity, however, and so he cheerfully opened the menu though he, as well as the entire staff, knew exactly what he'd order.

Once he'd ordered it, he handed the waiter the menu.

“And what about you?” he said to his guest.

The enormous menu lowered to reveal a face veiled in perplexity.

“I don't know,” the old man said, then looked again, and after a moment ordered what Altman recognized was the single cheapest item available.

“Only a split pea soup?” he asked. “That's all you want?”

The old man nodded.

“All right, then,” Altman said to the waiter, “A split pea soup for my good friend here.”

When the soup came it was clear to Altman that the old fellow was hungry. Perhaps he should have guessed as much from the slightness of his frame, the loose hang of his skin. He had seen hunger before and so he found it odd, and perhaps even a bit disturbing, that the plenty of his years in America had caused him to forget the ghostly look of it, the sallow cheeks, the hollow eyes, the way the old man couldn't keep from taking two bites at a time of the bread that came with the soup, quickly wiping his mouth, then taking two more.
Fressen
was the German word for it: to eat like an animal.

“You were right,” the old man said. “The food here is good.”

Altman nodded. “They have great wiener schnitzel, too,” he said, “and I sometimes have a Reuben sandwich. My doctor tells me that I shouldn't have pastrami, but I like it, and at a certain age, what's the point of being strict with oneself? We all end up dead in the end, isn't that so?”

“Yes, we all end up dead,” the old man agreed. He sipped from his spoon, a loud slurp after which he seemed to see himself in Altman's eyes, see himself as hungry, and because of his hunger, pathetic. Slowly, he returned the spoon to the bowl and with a slow, sad movement, drew an errant wave of white hair back and away from his forehead. “We all end up dead in the end, yes,” he repeated, “and after that, we cannot make amends.”

“Amends for what?” Altman asked.

“As I said before, for our crimes,” the old man answered.

Altman glanced at the package that now rested beside him in the booth they'd taken by the window and wondered if it was confessional. There had been such want after the Great War that he'd heard tales of murder, even of cannibalism. Could it be that this poor soul had…?

No, Altman told himself, you are being melodramatic. Still, the very presence of the man's manuscript worked like a question mark in his soul, a door he could not stop himself from cautiously prying open.

“It's a manuscript, isn't it?” he asked with a nod toward the package.

The old man nodded.

“Is it… about you?”

The old man nodded again, clearly disinclined to discuss it further, so that Altman decided to go in a different direction.

“It was hard to make your way after the war, yes?” he asked.

“Very hard,” the old man said. He looked at Altman with a curious passion, one laced with what seemed a host of old angers. “It was terrible, what was done to us.”

“Yes, terrible,” Altman said. “Truly terrible. We were treated as monsters, a people who could commit any atrocity. They had made up these stories of the Hun. The British mostly, but the Americans, too. And the French. Terrible, terrible lies.”

“All of them lies,” the old man said in a kind of snarl that both surprised and alarmed Altman with its barely contained fury. “The land of Beethoven. The land of Goethe.” He seemed overwhelmed with ire. “Killing babies. That's what they said in their lies. Killing women and old people. That is what they said we did.”

“Exactly,” Altman said. “Things no civilized people would do.”

The old man looked away, his attention once again drawn to the world beyond the window. He seemed to be working very hard not to explode. Then, after a moment, his gaze drifted back to Altman. “Your uncle was an English teacher,” he said. “At the
Realschule.
I was in his class.”

“Really?”

“He was a very good teacher,” the old man said.

Altman sat back slightly. “I'm quite sorry to say so, but I still can't quite recall you from those days.”

“You were younger,” the old man said. “I had to leave the
Realschule
the same year that you came to it.”

“So, we were never actually classmates?”

The old man shook his head. “My name would mean nothing to you,” he said. “I saw you at school. That is all. In the playground or the hallway. Sometimes walking with your uncle.” His smile was thin, but not without warmth. “I admired you. Everyone said you were very smart. In math. In English.” With a trembling hand he reached for the spoon, then drew back, as if afraid of humiliating himself again. “In everything.” He glanced again toward the window, lingered a moment, then returned his attention to Altman. “I am seventy-nine,” he said.

“I'm seventy-five,” Altman said. “But there really isn't much difference at our age, is there? We're just two old men, you and I.”

The old man smiled but something in his eyes remained mirthless, so that he seemed to drift in a sea of bad memories, perhaps nightmarish ones. He had no doubt sought refuge in America as so many had done through the decades, Altman thought. But clearly, he'd found something considerably less than the Promised Land. Life was unfair, that was the long and the short of it, Altman decided. He remembered a Latin phrase his father had taught him, something written by Horace:
Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur: You need but change the name and this story is about you.
How true, he thought now as he briefly recalled his own journey out of the whirlwind.

The old man seemed almost to read Altman's thoughts, or at least divine the direction of them.

“I could not make my way after the war,” he said. “It was chaos, and everywhere a new trouble. I am sure you recall those times.”

“Vividly, I'm afraid.”

The old man's eyes grew cold. “It is dangerous to humiliate a people. A people can be like a cornered animal.”

Altman nodded. “That is true. And so they look for a hero, which is what I was speaking about tonight. A great leader. But a hero can't change the history of a nation.”

The old man nodded. “We were looking for such a person,” he said. “It is true that we were looking. But you are right as you said in your talk. It would not have mattered. It is the great forces that matter, not one person.” He smiled.

“So smart, Herr Altman, to know such things.”

Altman tried not to react to such flattery.

“I'm not a Marxist,” he said, “but Marx was right about one thing. It is great forces that determine great events. A man is carried on the stream of history. He cannot direct that stream or change its course.”

“This is true,” the old man said. He smiled, but it was a dark smile, laced with something that seemed to teeter on the edge of bitterness. “As a young man, I had great hopes for myself,” he said in the sad tone of a small, insignificant man admitting to having once had some great dream for himself.

It was a tone that touched Altman's heart with such force that he reached out and patted the old man's hand.

“Of course,” he said. “We all have such hopes in our youth.”

“But from your talk I have learned that nothing—not a man or a book or anything else—can change history,” the old man said. “Little things change little things, that is all. Like those Bavarian boys. Someone whispered into someone's ear, or maybe sent a cable, and it was over for them.” He looked at Altman tensely. “They were small, and a small thing took them away.”

Altman again felt uncomfortably in the old man's sites.

“And a bully at school can only change the one he bullies,” the old man added.

“History is nothing but the accumulation of such things,” Altman said with complete confidence. “It is made by millions of small actions by small people who are themselves responding to great forces.”

The old man was clearly not inclined to dispute the point with which he'd already expressed agreement, and so, as a matter of simple politeness, Altman changed the subject.

“So, after you left the
Realschule
in Linz, what did you do?” he asked.

The old man shrugged. “Nothing until I got older. And then I only changed my name.”

Altman was relieved that the old man had now drawn his fingers away from the package and seemed quite abruptly to be a different track entirely. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

“Because I hated my father,” the old man answered. “I had always hated him, but I was like other boys, I felt I should respect him, obey him. You know how we Germans are. We obey. It is what we do best.”

“So it must have been hard for you, changing your name,” Altman said. “I mean, to be so disrespectful of one's father.”

“Very hard,” the old man said. “It is not easy to deny your father, even when your father is a cruel man.”

“So, you took a different name?” Altman asked.

“Yes,” the old man said. “I took my grandmother's name. She was very kind, very warm. I wanted the name of someone kind and warm.” He seemed to drift back to that distant time. “I wanted this name to comfort me because things had not gone well for me. I had no home. Living on scraps. Living in rags. It is terrible not to know when you will eat again, when you will wash again. It is terrible and you can go mad. Perhaps I went a little mad.”

“After the war we all felt as if we no longer had a home,” Altman said. “Everything was shattered.”

“Did you go mad?” the old man asked bluntly.

“No,” Altman said.

“Were you poor?”

“No, not poor.”

“Your father helped you?”

“Yes,” Altman answered, and felt weakened by that answer, pampered by that answer. Not just luckier than this old man, but unfairly, and thus grotesquely so. “Yes, he helped me.”

“How did he help you?”

“He helped me get to America,” Altman answered.

“How did he do that?”

“Well, there was something left after the war,” Altman told him cautiously. “Some… money.”

“But German money was worthless after the war.”

Even more cautiously, Altman said, “There was other money.”

“Other money?”

“Pounds,” Altman said. “Francs. Dollars.”

“The victor's money,” the old man said. “Your father had a lot of that?”

“Some,” Altman admitted. “Enough.”

“Enough for you to leave Germany and come here, to America?”

Altman nodded.

The old man peered at him for a long time before he spoke again. “I could not leave Germany,” he said. “Except for a little while, in Austria.”

“Well, we thought of Austria as Germany, didn't we?” Altman asked. “The Pan-Germanic peoples. At least that was what the slogans said.”

The old man nodded. “I remember the slogans.”

“Austria,” Altman whispered softly, now caught up in the history of his own life. “My father had business there. I was thinking of being in this business, but I wasn't cut out for it.” He felt a tense chuckle break from him. “I was always more the scholarly type. I wanted to teach at the university, to write books.” He shrugged. “But more than anything, I wanted to collect them. Especially German books.”

“The call of the Fatherland,” the old man whispered.

He was staring into the empty bowl of his soup, his gaze curiously intense, as if he were reading a lost future there.

“The call of the Fatherland,” Altman repeated. “That's quite well put.” He smiled. “Perhaps you should have been a writer.”