When Herbert said “and that’s the scar,” he always lent emphasis to his words by turning the pages of his paper and taking a gulp of coffee. Then I was allowed to press the next scar, sometimes once, sometimes twice.
“Oh, that one! It don’t amount to much. That was two years ago when the torpedo boat flotilla from Pillau tied up here. Christ, the way they swaggered around, playing the sailor boy and driving the little chickadees nuts. How Schwiemel ever got into the Navy is a mystery to me. He was from Dresden, try to get that through your head, Oskar my boy, from Dresden. But you don’t know, you don’t even suspect what it means for a sailor to come from Dresden.”
Herbert’s thoughts were lingering much too long for my liking in the fair city on the Elbe. To lure them back to Neufahrwasser, I once again pressed the scar which in his opinion didn’t amount to much.
“ Well, as I was saying. He was a signalman second class on a torpedo boat. Talked big. He thought he’d start up with a quiet kind of Scotsman what his tub was in drydock. Starts talking about Chamberlain, umbrellas and such. I advised him, very quietly the way I do, to stow that kind of talk, especially cause the Scotsman didn’t understand a word and was just painting pictures with schnaps on the table top. So I tell him to leave the guy alone, you’re not home now, I tell him, you’re a guest of the League of Nations. At this point, the torpedo fritz calls me a ‘pocketbook German’, he says it in Saxon what’s more. Quick I bop him one or two, and that calms him down. Half an hour later, I’m bending down to pick up a coin that had rolled under the table and I can’t see ‘cause it’s dark under the table, so the Saxon pulls out his pickpick and sticks it into me.”
Laughing, Herbert turned over the pages of the Neueste Nachrichten, added “And that’s the scar,” pushed the newspaper over to the grumbling Mother Truczinski, and prepared to get up. Quickly, before Herbert could leave for the can—he was pulling himself up by the table edge and I could see from the look on his face where he was headed for—I pressed a black and violet scar that was as wide as a skat card is long. You could still see where the stitches had been.
“Herbert’s got to go, boy. I’ll tell you afterwards.” But I pressed again and began to fuss and play the three-year-old, that always helped.
“All right, just to keep you quiet. But I’ll make it short.” Herbert sat down again. “That was on Christmas, 1930. There was nothing doing in the port. The longshoremen were hanging around the streetcorners, betting who could spit farthest. After midnight Mass—we’d just finished mixing the punch—the Swedes and Finns came pouring out of the Seamen’s Church across the street. I saw they were up to no good, I’m standing in the doorway, looking at those pious faces, wondering why they’re playing that way with their anchor buttons. And already she breaks loose: long are the knives and short is the night. Oh, well, Finns and Swedes always did have it in for each other. By why Herbert Truczinski should get mixed up with those characters, God only knows. He must have a screw loose, because when something’s going on, Herbert’s sure to be in on it. Well, that’s the moment I pick to go outside. Starbusch sees me and shouts: ‘Herbert, watch out!’ But I had my good deed to do. My idea was to save the pastor, poor little fellow, he’d just come down from Malmo fresh out of the seminary, and this was his first Christmas with Finns and Swedes in the same church. So my idea is to take him under my wing and see to it that he gets home with a whole skin. I just had my hand on his coat when I feel something cold in my back and Happy New Year I say to myself though it was only Christmas Eve. When I come to, I’m lying on the bar, and my good red blood is running into the beer glasses free of charge, and Starbusch is there with his Red Cross medicine kit, trying to give me so-called first aid.”
“What,” said Mother Truczinski, furiously pulling her knitting needle out of her bun, “makes you interested in a pastor all of a sudden when you haven’t set foot in a church since you was little?”
Herbert waved away her disapproval and, trailing his shirt and braces after him, repaired to the can. His gait was somber and somber was the voice in which he said: “And that’s the scar.” He walked as if he wished once and for all to get away from that church and the knife battles connected with it, as though the can were the place where a man is, becomes, or remains a freethinker.
A few weeks later I found Herbert speechless and in no mood to have his scars questioned. He seemed dispirited, but he hadn’t the usual bandage on his back. Actually I found him lying back down on the living-room couch, rather than nursing his wounds in his bed, and yet he seemed seriously hurt. I heard him sigh, appealing to God, Marx, and Engels and cursing them in the same breath. Now and then he would shake his fist in the air, and then let it fall on his chest; a moment later his other fist would join in, and he would pound his chest like a Catholic crying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Herbert had knocked a Latvian sea captain dead. The court acquitted him—he had struck, a frequent occurrence in his trade, in self-defense. But despite his acquittal the Latvian remained a dead Latvian and weighed on his mind like a ton of bricks, although he was said to have been a frail little man, afflicted with a stomach ailment to boot.
Herbert didn’t go back to work. He had given notice. Starbusch, his boss, came to see him a number of times. He would sit by Herbert’s couch or with Mother Truczinski at the kitchen table. From his briefcase he would produce a bottle of Stobbe’s 100 proof gin for Herbert and for Mother Truczinski half a pound of unroasted real coffee from the Free Port. He was always either trying to persuade Herbert to come back to work or trying to persuade Mother Truczinski to persuade her son. But Herbert was adamant—he didn’t want to be a waiter any more, and certainly not in Neufahrwasser across the street from the Seamen’s Church.
Actually he didn’t want to be a waiter altogether, for to be a waiter means having knives stuck into you and to have knives stuck into you means knocking a Latvian sea captain dead one fine day, just because you’re trying to keep him at a distance, trying to prevent a Latvian knife from adding a Latvian scar to all the Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Free-City, and German scars on Herbert Truczinski’s lengthwise and crosswise belabored back.
“I’d sooner go to work for the customs than be a waiter any more in Neufahrwasser,” said Herbert. But he didn’t go to work for the customs.
Niobe
In ‘38 the customs duties were raised and the borders between Poland and the Free City were temporarily closed. My grandmother was unable to take the narrow-gauge railway to the market in Langfuhr and had to close her stand. She was left sitting on her eggs so to speak, though with little desire to hatch them. In the port the herring stank to high heaven, the goods piled up, and statesmen met and came to an agreement. Meanwhile my friend Herbert lay on the couch, unemployed and divided against himself, mulling over his troubles.
And yet the customs service offered wages and bread. It offered green uniforms and a border that was worth guarding. Herbert didn’t go to the customs and he didn’t want to be a waiter anymore; he only wanted to lie on the couch and mull.
But a man must work. And not only Mother Truczinski was of that opinion. Although she resisted Starbusch’s pleas that she persuade Herbert to go back to waiting on tables in Neufahrwasser, she definitely wanted to get Herbert off that couch. He himself was soon sick of the two-room flat, his mulling had become purely superficial, and he began one fine day to look through the Help Wanted ads in the Neueste Nachrichten and reluctantly, in the Nazi paper, the Vorposten.