American Subsidiary

At lunchtime, when the meeting broke up – Herr Doktor Hühne abruptly rose, declaring his hunger – the line of salesmen, and among them Herr Halsa, strolled towards the building’s front door in twos and threes behind the visiting executive, who was a personal friend of the family that owned the company. Herr Doktor Hühne had walked ahead with the highest-grossing salesman, a curly-topped redhead far thinner than the rest and willing to make any kind of joke, transgress in any way, even to the point of yanking Hühne’s tie, beeping like the Roadrunner, and calling the regent Dingsbums.

Joseph, too, proceeded to the front door. But this was where his deficiency cut him off. He could ride all of the other rides, but here at last he came upon a minimum height for the Tilt-a-Whirl, the requirement of actual Germanness, which he missed by a finger or two. It was his secret goal to grow into it, to convince Halsa next year or the year after, by silent competence – it would take just once to change the expectation permanently – and then he could board one of the cars departing for an inner-sanctum lunch.

Along behind the Automationsabteilung, as the only American invited to the restaurant, the sales rep Jack Wilson paddled out. He’d been talking all this while to Ted and Alan and the other non-German speakers in the hobbing area. Maybe he’d even done the rounds of the service department, the warehouse that occupied the back two-thirds of the building and marked the hunting grounds of the only birds lower than Americans in this peculiar aviary: the Bauern, Helmut Schall and his staff of Bavarian farmers who’d never had their moles removed. Joseph liked them, in fact they were some of the best men in the company, but the defensive jokes about their moles and so on – Herr Halsa’s repertoire – any employee would have found funny, and Joseph felt justified in leaning back from his note-taking and giving a full-on laugh. Just the same, as he directed a quick salute to the sales rep Wilson, a slightly pleasant superciliousness washed over him, a feeling of gratitude to the fate that had given him cafes and saved him from the America of sports bars and chewing tobacco. Why shouldn’t he enjoy some of the privileges conferred on him here and consider himself every bit as superior as the true Germans felt?

Joseph watched through the kitchen window and, like a basketball player who could dribble without looking, engineered a second iced tea blind. It did make sense, despite a tensing in his shoulders, that this man, Jack Wilson, would go to the restaurant. He was the one scheduled to escort Herr Doktor Hühne to the customer’s plant that afternoon. Wilson and Hühne would tour the No. 3 Engine Plant in Cleveland, which had accepted the very first proposal that Joseph had written – an eleven-million-dollar project, the German factory’s largest yet. And Herr Halsa was right to consider Hühne’s impression of things. The previous executive vice-president had been recalled for capitulating too quickly to the American way of doing business – particularly by replacing German components with much cheaper substitutes.

In inviting Wilson to lunch there was no awkwardness, because Wilson did not work for the company. He was a kind of mercenary who agreed to play golf on the company’s behalf exclusively and get drunk on the company’s behalf exclusively and frequently with people who might or might not have purchasing clout at whatever plant Wilson had led the Germans to target. He was a go-between. A middleman. The aesthetics of the thing were less germane than the logic: it made sense for Wilson to liaise over popcorn shrimp. Nevertheless, when Alan Freedman walked into the lunch room, his hair full and proud, unlike all the monk-topped Germans, Joseph couldn’t resist saying something conspiratorial.

‘Look at Wilson out there laughing. Do you think he’s drunk?’

Wilson soft-shoed into his son’s minivan, the star of his own silent movie.

Freedman was forever in good spirits – he was a man of the highest, proudest, most natural spirits Joseph had ever known – and he pulled a Sam’s Choice lemon-lime soda from the refrigerator along with his brown sack of lunch, and laughed with a gentle calm that put Wilson’s bluster to shame. ‘He deserves to be happy, no? A million and a half for the Cleveland plant, I’d be handing out tulips and Swiss chocolates.’

The pulp of Joseph’s lemon went on spinning in his glass even after he’d stopped stirring, the swirls of dissolved sugar warping and turning like heatwaves coming up from a car. He often felt blessed by small things and now, with the young sun glinting off windshields and beckoning him outside with his lunch, he felt deeply fortunate to have this packet of sugar in his hand, to be already rolling the torn-off piece of it between his fingers, to be here in this job, a translator instead of a temp, twenty dollars an hour instead of eight-fifty.

A million and a half.

‘And – do you get commissions when you sell?’ he asked, expecting the worst. Every one of them must have been making too much money to care about anything. He was halfway back to his cubicle – a little-used door next to Herr Halsa’s office led to the lawn behind the building – and Freedman was about to disappear into the gear-hobbing maze.

‘Nope. I guess commissions are an American thing,’ Freedman said wistfully. He was still smiling. He was almost laughing, and his hands were plunged so far into his pockets that his elbows were straight. Joseph thought he’d like to have him as an older brother or confidant who could advise on all the stages to come. ‘It makes me think I should go out on my own. But damn, a drought’s a drought when you’re repping, and it doesn’t matter how many daughters you have in school.’

What, Joseph asked himself as he sat on the cool May grass and looked out over the pond, is a million and a half dollars but an abstraction on a beautiful day like this, with a fresh iced tea, an egg salad sandwich with big pebbly capers, a slightly crunchy pear? The pond was a fire reservoir, man-made according to some code that required a certain-sized body of water for every so-and-so many feet of manufacturing space: the neighbouring company made baseballs, softballs, soccer balls, basketballs, volleyballs, all of inexpensive design and quality, for the use of small children. But even if their pond was square and covered across half its surface with algae, the jets that aerated the other half caught the light magnificently, scattering it like chips of glass, and the tiny green circles that undulated on the near side resembled stitches in a beautiful knitted shawl that the pond wore garishly in the sunlight. Joseph thought of his wife of less than a year, back in their apartment, studying by the window; his parents gardening five hundred miles away; his grandparents outside too, no doubt, mowing their tiny lawns just to walk under this magnificent sun.

When Joseph was back inside, Herr Doktor Hühne returned to pick up his briefcase, which he’d left in the middle of Herr Halsa’s empty desk.

‘Why didn’t you join us for lunch?’ he asked in German. ‘That was unexpected. We arrived at the restaurant and I looked around myself, wanting to ask you a question, and what’s this? He doesn’t eat?’

Hühne left again with Wilson and the top-grossing salesman, and an hour passed by in welcome silence. Joseph worked steadily, with his usual dedication, no one but Roswitha interrupting. She sprayed Herr Halsa’s window, his silk plants, his brass lamp, wiped and rubbed, a water spritzer in one hand, an ammonia bottle in the other, wiping, rubbing and spraying, holding the plant handkerchief between her cheek and shoulder and a roll of paper towel under her wing.

‘I’m saying nothing, I’m saying nothing,’ she said. ‘Keep on with your work.’ She spoke in heavily accented English and switched to German only when someone spoke in German to her. She was eighty or so, extremely short, with grey skirts that wrapped not far below her breasts. ‘He keeps you busy too, I know that. With his whims,’ she whispered, and shushed herself.

Joseph liked having a mercurial boss. Mercurial was a good word for him. He was pleased to have thought of it.

When Herr Halsa returned, it was clear where he’d gone after lunch – to the gym, as he often did. The advantages of a workout, not just for Herr Halsa’s health but for the whole organization’s well-being, so far outweighed any cause for criticism that Joseph wondered at his own momentary derision, the thought skittering into his head that these workouts seemed to follow on occasions of secret, carefully hidden stress. Who else was privy to Herr Halsa’s fears and thoughts? Aside maybe from Frau Halsa and a few personal friends, no one but Joseph could have guessed at what was happening in the boss’s mind.