American Subsidiary

On occasional weekend nights, with little notice, everyone at the company was invited to a German hall for drinks and music and laughing repetitions of the chicken dance. Herr Halsa would wrap his arm around every shoulder he came to and lift his beer Krug in a toast. What? You have no beer? He’d hesitate just long enough to show he regretted spending the company’s money, then raise his finger to signal for another. By Monday, no one dared to remind or even to thank him.

Without exception, he returned from the gym with his face the deepest red, as if he were holding his breath through a heart attack. But in exchange, he was calm. His hair, as usual, remained wet, and he rubbed at it with the same towel that had started the day, bending his neck left and right, arching his back, and moving in other cat-like ways that would have seemed impossible an hour before. Joseph envied him his midday showers.

Then that was it for a while. Halsa retreated behind the closed door of his office and drew the shades of his tall, narrow windows – presumably so that others, instead of watching him eat an apple, might mistake this for his most productive hour. He would emerge afterwards, either confirmed in his good opinion of the day or reminded of some fresh inconvenience that needed a scapegoat.

Today, by the magic of endorphins, he was confirmed – his arms behind his back showed it immediately – and he took his flat expression from desk to desk and watched his employees’ computer screens over their shoulders, occasionally nodding at what was for him the mystery of how things appeared and disappeared, moved, grew, changed and scrolled on the various monitors. Witnessing the growth of a letter on screen might have occupied him for hours if he hadn’t realized, perhaps more acutely than anyone, that this rapt staring resembled ignorance.

‘Come in here. Come in, come in,’ Herr Halsa called from his office. Joseph had no idea who he was talking to. With the door open Joseph had a view into the room, but Herr Halsa was looking down at the things on his desk, reordering them according to some new, afternoon priority – name plate, lamp, telephone, pen stand. And Joseph could not see as far as Herr Halsa could along the hallway formed by the cubicle walls. Maybe someone was standing there: a petitioner. What’s more, the boss was speaking not in German but in English. ‘This is something you need to finish for the end of the day, so we must sit together. Quickly I think. Joe!’

Joseph hurried into the office with a notebook, two pens and some papers he’d finished the day before but not yet presented to Herr Halsa. ‘Excuse me, I—’

‘We’re ready to send out a letter just now and offer this very good job. Inventory manager for the new production area,’ Herr Halsa added, as if he’d forgotten that Joseph had sat in on every one of the interviews. The new ‘production area’ was an assembly room where this new employee would take robotic cranes out of their boxes, count the screws, assemble everything, test the completed system, then transfer it to a flatbed truck for shipment to the customer’s plant. Joseph’s attempt at a job description had muddled everything, though – no one asked if he’d ever written one before – so that several applicants showed up expecting to run an automated inventory system and a couple of others wanted a division reporting to them. But no matter. His influence held. After each interview, Herr Halsa would ask Joseph what the man (he couldn’t help it that no women had been included) had meant by this and that, and very often what Herr Halsa wanted to know had nothing to do with the delta between languages at all.

The American salesmen liked to say that Peter Halsa was aptly named. He had risen beyond his competence and didn’t know what to do with his time: the Peter Principle. Had anyone dared to repeat this to Herr Halsa, he would have said that he didn’t need to understand his job – it was Joseph’s responsibility to explain it to him.

Joseph sat while Herr Halsa paced, and here came a tremendous mistake that changed the course of the day. Even after five p.m., Joseph would resist thinking he’d made a mistake. But it was a mistake, and he knew it was a mistake, because a competent employee reads his boss’s signs and does not transgress against the boss’s most deeply held expectations.

Joseph believed he knew exactly what they’d be doing. They’d be writing to the candidate far more experienced than the others. And because it was a beautiful day and the sun was making use of each passing car’s windshield to launch itself at the office walls, where long, overlapping triangles played across motivational posters framed in gold and black, Joseph nodded, looked Herr Halsa in the eye – calm Herr Halsa, for whom Herr Doktor Hühne’s visit had been sweated out in the gym – and said, ‘I’m happy to help.’

At first, nothing happened. And nothing seemed likely to happen. Why would it? Perhaps no one – least of all Joseph – would have expected anything to come of such innocuous or even friendly words on such a life-affirming day, where beyond the recirculating air of this boxy metal building the trillionth generation of bumblebees was unfurling from its hidden combs.

Herr Halsa smoothed a résumé like an angry mother pressing a shirt. ‘This is the one we’re hiring. Fred Wagner,’ he said, still speaking in English.

Herr Halsa respected his translator, Joseph knew that. He felt the boss’s admiration every day. There was the unusual latitude that Herr Halsa afforded him, and one day, when Joseph was off sick, Halsa had moved him into that cubicle by the door – the other Americans he pushed to the periphery and spied on. Of all the employees in the American subsidiary, German and English, Joseph Stone was the only person allowed to keep a real plant. All other plants were required to be silk or plastic. So when Herr Halsa tickled a file into his hand and sat down with a tired sigh, Joseph at some level did not hear the words he had just spoken. Frederick Lebeaux Wagner? Herr Halsa pronounced the name ‘Vagna’, the German way – though the underqualified good ol’ boy with bobbing eyebrows and a love of dirty jokes was as American as Joseph himself.

Halsa placed his hand on Joseph’s shoulder, then patted it. He leaned forward with whatever he had to say. ‘Do you know why Hühne is a doctor?’ he asked. Joseph couldn’t get over how unusual this was: Herr Halsa speaking English to him in private. ‘Hühne’s a doctor because the owner’s son, the old man’s son, who went to Gymnasium with Hans, has a younger brother who became – chancellor, is it? – at the University Köpfingen. But a chancellor at the University Köpfingen doesn’t give away free doctorates so easily, without work, so they arranged it in this way, that Hans Hühne, who couldn’t rise so high on the technical side without a doctor’s degree, would take his doctorate in insects, in bugs, and the university would confirm, yes, he’s a doctor, with no diploma printed. He’s a specialist in the dung beetle with his shit degree. I have only a certificate, but Doktor Schwanz Hühne has not even that much.’ His face, which had cooled off since the gym, veered back towards plum as he spoke.

Joseph laughed because he thought Herr Halsa expected and even demanded a laugh from him – a good, strong, close-lipped laugh that said, Wow, is that true? I won’t ever tell anyone. But on the table in front of him, Halsa’s folder named the wrong man for inventory manager, very clearly and prejudicially wrong.

‘What about Gary Jackson? For this job,’ he said, tapping on the file. ‘The applicant who did the same job before.’ Also the applicant Joseph had recommended. Herr Halsa had nodded, and the other person in the room had nodded, and Joseph had in fact written the offer letter already, and it was in his hand here, behind the other papers for which he’d already, while Herr Halsa was talking about the shit doctorate, gotten his trusting signature, and he’d been planning to go up front after this meeting and drop it in the mail.

‘Gary Jackson?’ Herr Halsa said. ‘The black one? I didn’t know you wore white make-up to work.’

‘You said on the phone with the lawyer that you need more minorities.’

‘Do not refer to private conversations between me and my lawyer,’ Halsa said, abruptly switching to German. ‘You’re in the room to explain his meaning when I’m lost in garbagey lawyer words. You’re not supposed to remember any of it.’

‘I’m just trying to help.’

Herr Halsa leaned in and pushed his chest hard against the table. He was speaking English again. ‘I don’t ask for your help,’ he said, looking into Joseph’s eyes but pressing his thumb against the table’s high shine. ‘I don’t need your help ever, do you understand? I pay you!’

A truck flashed a stutter of sunlight across the posters again.

Joseph tried to think how to react like a German. Most of his German friends would have quit. The good, decent, strong-willed Germans would have argued, then quit. But what about the businessy Germans? The Nieten in Nadelstreifen, idiots in pinstripes? Or come to think of it, this bitter subversive feeling most closely matched his friend who drafted all the factory drawings here, that’s who he felt most like. It was maybe pure American bitterness that welled up and spat a calculating line back at Herr Halsa in Joseph’s most cordial tone of voice: something that would stab the boss without giving him grounds for firing.

‘Herr Doktor Hühne just wants me to translate a new catalogue.’

This manoeuvre, once he’d completed it, did seem German to him – after all, his American friend, the draughtsman, had lived in Darmstadt for fifteen years. And Peter Halsa proved more adept at it.

‘You’re not the company translator waiting for everyone’s work,’ he said. ‘You take your jobs from me. If anyone needs your time, tell them to ask first, they can knock on my door. But I won’t give up my secretary’s time for everybody’s pet project.’

Without quite knowing how, Joseph retired from Herr Halsa’s office to his own cubicle, where he could at least drink the melted ice at the bottom of his long-finished iced tea. He didn’t buck forward or run. He walked upright, and he remembered squaring the signed papers on the boss’s table in a very casual way before excusing himself. Halsa had already said, too, that there wasn’t enough time to write to Fred Wagner before five and they should do it first thing in the morning. Joseph slipped his signed letter to Gary Johnson into a company envelope, affixed one of the personal stamps he kept in his top drawer and licked the envelope shut, exultant to have the last word. Sooner than face a lawsuit, they’d keep Johnson on – the most qualified man, a balm or salt to their racism, salutary either way.

The afternoon had lengthened the building’s shadow more than halfway to the ball factory, nearly there, where the five o’clock shift had just arrived, bringing with it a fleet of cars vetted and certified to meet the arcane union rules for what it meant to be ‘Made in the USA’.

Herr Halsa was hiring an inventory manager for one reason. He had fired two lawyers and with Joseph’s help retained a third who’d given him the legal opinion that putting in the last few bolts in the production area would allow the company to pitch its robots as ‘Assembled in the USA’. The lawyer before this latest had sent a long description in quotation marks, with his signature below: ‘Final assembly done partially in the United States from some parts manufactured from metals mined and smelted partially in the USA.’ And now, as Joseph squeezed another lemon into a fresh iced tea and breathed in the spray of lemon oil, he felt with decreasing urgency the embarrassment of having helped Herr Halsa turn away from the truth. Herr Halsa didn’t want the truth of anything. He wanted whatever would seem to raise him up, well past his competence.

Meandering past Helmut Schall’s test gantries, which flung an engine block back and forth ten, fifteen, twenty thousand times to prove their stamina, Joseph kept himself safe with an extra-wide margin, in case the many-worlds theory proved to be true and a few random quantums of difference in some conceivable world, leading to a stumble or a careless turn, put him fatally close. Whenever he approached a precipitous edge, or a car passed near enough to unsettle him, he wondered if in some other universe his mother would have cause to grieve now, and the thought of hurting her in that way, somewhere, saddened him.

He didn’t pace for long. The company was paying. But he could feel how little that mattered now. He needed to finish the proposal by tomorrow and despite everything he couldn’t help wanting it to be perfect, down to the indentations and centrings. Thirty pages’ worth. But none of that was the main reason he sat at his desk again, resqueezing his lemon, dusting a few leaves of his ivy plant – a final act of defiance, since Herr Halsa’s ‘permission’ was unspoken and grudging – and pasted in more blocks of pre-written text. These cubicles of words: he’d worried over them, like a boss getting a new job description right, and then, without testing it overmuch, he’d called the cut-and-paste system finished, suitable for all occasions, never to be questioned again. The main reason he dropped his disgust, gave up pacing and returned to his privileged corner was that he was bored.

At five o’clock Herr Halsa came out of his office and Joseph’s pulse quickened. Towards or away? He glanced over: towards, and it was clear that Herr Halsa had forgotten everything, put it all behind him. He was wearing his smart suit jacket, finely tailored – Joseph took particular note of it. And he looked confident now. You couldn’t think about the Peter Principle when Herr Halsa wore that suit jacket. Maybe Joseph should spend some of his paycheque on a hand-tailored suit. He didn’t know what occasion he’d have to wear such a thing, but it seemed the perfect antidote to moulded rubber balls, a factory pond, the grey rugs climbing up the walls of his cubicle.

Herr Halsa laughed. He had a deep, hearty laugh when the day was done. And he told Joseph to go play a little.

Joseph chuckled and nodded. ‘Good advice,’ he said.

‘Das ist kein Ratschlag, das ist ein Befehl,’ Herr Halsa said. ‘It’s not advice. It’s an order.’

Almost drunk now, Joseph gave a casual evening salute. ‘Jawohl. Tschüß!’ he said familiarly. Swatting the envelope against his wrist, back and forth, he watched Herr Halsa swagger away, and noticed with a certain amount of unbecoming pleasure that even as the boss passed a trio of underperforming American salesmen he said nothing to them, lost in his pre-dinner whistling.

That was it. Without considering what was inside, or rather, thinking of it sidelong, as evidence of his importance here, Joseph raised the sealed envelope in a toast and shredded it, along with a few sensitive documents that Herr Halsa didn’t want the others to see. He stood up and, with the last moments of the day – because Herr Halsa had left twenty-five seconds early – he wetted a square of paper towel in his melted ice and wiped the leaves of the ivy until they glowed.