American Subsidiary

One spring morning – it was early May, and sunlight had just reached the ivy at his shoulder – Joseph Stone leaped up at his boss’s call, then slowly, so as not to remind himself of Pavlov’s dog, tucked his chair back under the shelf that held his keyboard.

He did not have far to go: three steps, four at most, took him from his cubicle to Peter Halsa’s pale, wood door.

‘Entschuldigung?’ he asked, pronouncing the German word slackly, as any American would. ‘Excuse me?’

Herr Halsa was drying the inside of his ear with a white hand towel. This was nothing strange. It had seemed unusual at first, months ago, but then Joseph had asked himself why certain behaviours should be off-limits at work, especially to the boss. He tugged at his nose, waiting for Herr Halsa’s answer.

He felt only mildly ridiculous thinking of his boss as Herr Halsa. Everyone else was required to use formal German address, and it seemed right, though he’d explicitly been asked to call him Peter, that Joseph not call too much attention to what was already unpleasantly obvious: the gratifying fact that his boss relied on him utterly.

Herr Halsa lifted his head, looked up – he was now drying the nape of his neck, having apparently rushed from home with his head still wet – and grunted in a German way that pleased Joseph, because it meant again that Joseph worked at a German company, among Germans, who might at any time release deep, Bavarian grunts.

‘Nothing, no, you can return to your work. I was just saying good morning. Good morning.’ Herr Halsa nodded, still rubbing his hair with his head aslant, and closed the office door. He preferred to give orders in his own good time, when he’d chanced across things that needed doing, and in the meantime he expected his employees to stay busy on their own.

Joseph returned to what he’d been doing. He was typing up another proposal for robots that would replace human workers in an engine factory.

No one else in the building, only Joseph Stone, could say that his cubicle opened on to the boss’s door. The other cubicles, their short walls panelled in grey carpeting, were strung together to form two separate mazes, each of which closed in on itself and had a single entrance at the printers and copy machine, not far from the kitchen door. Herr Halsa’s office took up the corner diagonally opposite.

To the gear-hobbing maze belonged seasoned American salesmen who were unable to sell machines, though not for want of escorting potential buyers to golf courses and strip clubs. For whatever reason, probably some sort of native laxness, the Americans were unsuccessful – and with them one German who was so good at selling gantries that he’d been transferred to raise the Amerikaner out of their slump, and had instead fallen into one himself. To the gantry maze belonged newcomers who had not sold anything before their arrival from Germany. They were young and hungry and German and knew how to browbeat their former colleagues at the Automationsfabrik to give them extremely large discounts. Why shouldn’t the parent division sell its robots at a loss if it meant gaining a toehold in the prestigious American car market? These good Kerle had rubbed elbows in company showers with the very men they now called on for favours. The Americans in gear hobbing had visited Germany too, but only to try the Wiener schnitzel and spend a few days in seminar rooms.

Joe Stone was the exception. He was American and the company hadn’t even sent him to Europe yet, but his was the cubicle that opened like a secret on to the boss’s door. Despite various drawbacks, the arrangement suited him well. He preferred to be visible to no one, and at midday Herr Halsa would close his door and tighten the slats on the narrow shade covering the long, tall window beside it and (Joseph was fairly sure) nap. Herr Halsa idolized the chief of the Volkswagen company, and the chief of Volkswagen held as his guiding principle that nothing must remain on his desk overnight. So, to ensure that nothing violated this adopted dictum, Herr Halsa forbade everyone from putting papers or objects on his desk during the day also. Which left him with extraordinarily little to do.

Herr Halsa opened his door with the fresh snap of someone about to take the air and disappeared into the matrix of grey-walled cubicles. Joseph pasted another block of boilerplate just where it belonged, then plucked the lemon out of his iced tea to resqueeze it. The rind of a lemon, with its regular dimples and high yellow complexion, cheered him so extraordinarily that he plucked and resqueezed several times as he drank each glass. The sun warmed his back, the sky had receded higher than ever, it was an uncontainably beautiful day.

The silence broke.

‘I don’t care if the file is on your hard drive!’ Herr Halsa cried. He was straining to yell as loudly as possible, no doubt to make an example for everyone in the building. ‘I expect to see it in the next ten minutes, or your job will appear in tomorrow’s classifieds!’

Whatever else one could say – such as ‘Joseph Stone was badly paid’ or ‘Joe Stone the PhD was out of place here’ – he did not forget to enjoy the small pleasures of his job.

Joseph held up his cutting and pasting and listened. He heard, of course, the soft scrapings made by the German receptionist, Roswitha, as she wiped each office plant’s leaves with a handkerchief. But the dust-up seemed to be over.

It was no fault of the boss’s that he knew nothing about computers. He’d never been shown how to use one, and his book learning, which pre-dated the era of workplace computers, was more in the nature of a technical apprenticeship.

Joseph considered the factory layout the company was proposing this time, but the German sales engineers, as they were called, knew plenty that he could not assess. It was a small marvel that the gantries could carry engine blocks not only high over the aisles but also through the women’s room. Joseph’s friend the mechanical draughtsman, an American, took great pleasure in formalizing the Germans’ mistakes. ‘I do exactly what I’m asked to,’ he said. He liked to be challenged so he could repeat it.

‘You might get a bigger raise if you—’

‘I do exactly what I’m asked to.’

A few minutes later, the American salesman Alan Freedman – his name was spelled wrong according to Herr Halsa, who thought it should be Friedmann – ambled into the boss’s office with his naked, silver hard drive and the large, sideburned service manager, Helmut Schall, who waved a screwdriver as he explained in German that he’d removed the hard drive at Freedman’s insistence. Naturally anyone in Herr Halsa’s position who had once been a service mechanic would hesitate before spending too much work time in the presence of a man who might, just by his rough familiarity, remind people where the boss had started out, so, pulling his suit jacket from the back of his chair, Herr Halsa excused Alan Freedman – ‘All right, all right, go back to your phone calls!’ – and closed the door on his friend Helmut Schall.

Joseph could easily sympathize with the boss on this occasion, for Herr Halsa’s duke, his overlord, the very stylish Herr Doktor Hühne, who might as well have come from Berlin between the wars rather than any part of coarse gemütlich Bavaria, was scheduled to enter in the middle of this scene and, after half an hour, exit with nearly every German speaker to a gala welcoming lunch. Following this, Herr Doktor Hühne, without Joseph’s boss, was to call on customers in the afternoon. Herr Halsa had spent days revising a very smart, thoroughgoing agenda for the kick-off meeting.

When Hans Hühne arrived, he shook the beefy hand of his prime underling in the United States, Herr Halsa – who had in the meantime calmed himself and reopened his office for the grand arrival – accepted Roswitha’s requisite offer of Kaffee, and promptly left the office to shake Joseph’s hand and enter into private negotiations.

Joseph felt courted. Here was perhaps the most stylish suit-wearing man he had ever met – Herr Doktor Hans Friedrich Hühne crossed his legs even while standing, and turned his head gently to the side, not with any hint of arrogance but nevertheless with the suggestion of a long cigarette holder and a thin black tie – and, very consciously no doubt, he chose to address Joseph before anyone else. At this formal moment, the occasion of receiving a well-regarded superior who has just disembarked from a transatlantic flight, Peter Halsa could not very well emerge from his office. Herr Doktor Hühne had chosen to leave it and would return in his own time. But Herr Halsa clattered about – chairs, his empty outbox – to express impatience to Joseph in a language that Herr Doktor Hühne would not recognize.

‘You translated the gantry catalogue, isn’t it?’ Hühne said. He spoke English with a smooth accent.

‘Das habe ich, ja,’ Joseph answered, wondering if he’d made any kind of mistake in his German.

‘We have a new project in need of the highest-quality translation, and I’d like us to work on it together, you and me,’ he went on, speaking German now.

Herr Halsa went so far as to clear his throat, but Joseph heard the softness in it, a touching womanliness that would mean to Herr Doktor Hühne, if he happened to hear, that Halsa intended nothing peremptory. On the contrary, it brimmed with comic lightness, the kind of mild rebuke that one might direct towards an old woman, perhaps a receptionist who had chosen this inopportune moment to dust the plants.

Joseph nodded with grave interest – he enjoyed being important; who doesn’t? – and stood up to match Herr Doktor Hühne’s height, making certain in his American way to advance this relationship by allowing his arm to bump a few times against Herr Doktor Hühne’s while they reviewed the as-yet-unreleased German prospectus for a new overhead-railcar system.

Herr Halsa appeared briefly at his door, then pulled back. Joseph saw his image there, the faintest double exposure, wearing the fine Italian jacket that usually hung behind the door.

Once Herr Doktor Hühne returned to Halsa’s office, where the German salesmen were now gathered around the conference table, Herr Halsa grew expansive and host-like. At these times his bearing made Joseph proudest to have this unexpected opportunity, which had come up almost by accident six months before, to be the translator here instead of a mere secretarial temp. Joseph sat off to the side, his favourite fountain pen poised for note-taking. The Americans on staff were excluded from these meetings for the simple reason that the conversations were conducted in German, and for the complex reason that the Americans were American.

Not much happened during the meeting in terms of company business. But several important psychological or interpersonal things took place, and Joseph marvelled at how curious they were, and how lucky he was to be here to witness these intimate workings of an executive office – without having to suffer from any very significant attachment to the questions being discussed. First, the railcar system went unmentioned. Joseph felt fairly deep loyalty on this point and scratched out a reminder to tell Herr Halsa about the project as soon as the überboss left. Second, he noticed the obvious: the disappointment that caused Herr Halsa’s eyes to shift nervously just ten minutes into the meeting, after the anecdotes and jokes and hellos. Charismatic Herr Doktor Hühne began to ask questions and guide the conversation – no guest-playing for him – and it became only too obvious that the written agenda would go unfollowed. Herr Doktor Hühne would have no chance to see, though tomorrow was another day, how tightly his next-in-command ran this important subsidiary.

Joseph, meantime, was smiling and nodding. He couldn’t understand half of what was being said, the quick Bavarian retorts, the irony-drenched allusions to who knows what. But no matter. Joseph was the company translator and, with that credential, a fully vested German speaker. Even his mother said he wasn’t a very good listener – how could anyone expect one hundred per cent comprehension here, where the salesmen were discussing technical matters foreign to Joseph even in English? Why should he squint or shrug or ask the others to repeat themselves when silence and a few well-timed laughs would carry him through?

Herr Doktor Hühne had worked himself into a bluster over the notion of Handwerk. Joseph took a few disjointed notes, hoping to record this fascinating paradox without scrambling it. No matter how many ‘machines’ assemble our robots, Herr Doktor Hühne seemed to be saying, everything that the factory produces is ‘handmade’. Hühne was the kind of urbane man you might find in a pale linen suit smoking thin, stinking cigars, so his bluster did not throw him forward on to the points of his elbows, anxious and combative, but took him deeper into the chair, his fingers tepeed and restless and occasionally pressed against his lips. ‘Customized production, gentlemen,’ he said in English.

‘Ah, customized production,’ Herr Halsa joked. He didn’t switch to English unless he had to. ‘Kundenspezifische Fertigung. I thought you wanted Reinhold to use handsaws and toilet plungers.’

Herr Halsa leaned back, trying to work himself as low in his chair as Herr Doktor Hühne, but of course it was impossible. Herr Halsa spent too many of his evenings in steakhouses.

‘Let’s leave American work to the Americans,’ the highest-grossing salesman said.

Herr Hühne laughed. ‘Yes, Handwerk in the manner of watchmakers, not plumbers.’

Joseph pulled at his upper lip and immediately read his own gesture. It was hardly-to-be-restrained pride. These men could tell their jokes about ‘American work’, their rather offensive jokes in which ‘American’ replaced what must have been ‘Turk’ back home, and altogether forget that Joseph was, in some ways – well, in every way – an American.

He liked to manoeuvre towards near-paradoxes, to insinuate himself into scenes that most could never hope to be part of.