“Well, then tell me, where is the pay-off?”
“Over there you get back what you put in. No more, no less. It doesn’t matter your age, your heritage, your religion, often not even your education.”
“How is that different?”
“C’mon, buddy, look around you? The guys on the golden throne here are ‘von’ this and ‘zu’ that – as if blue blood equals managerial skill.”
“There are a few, I’ll admit. But not enough to void career advancement for us ordinary souls.”
Horst had his pitch carefully laid out.
“Then what about the army of guys just below them. Early middle-age with years to go to pension.”
“What about them?”
I didn’t see it coming.
“You mean you haven’t noticed that every second one is either a ‘Master’ of this or a ‘PhD’ of that? The professionals pushing out the privileged on their way up the creaky ladder.”
“Well, that’ll open up some room for us.”
I had recovered partially at least.
“Sure, if you wanna hang around in your present job for the next ten years…”
And so the banter had gone back and forth during Horst’s ten day return to the city. With every passing day, the appeal of leaving home, perhaps for many years to come, had grown on me. I had felt smothered in my parent’s tiny apartment without my own room. The steady physical presence of both parents, the ridiculous curfews, the total lack of privacy. Other than being the son of Hedi and Walter, I knew little about myself.
Horst’s words kept ringing in my ears.
When I told my parents that I was leaving in a few weeks, their lack of total surprise was unexpected. Sure, mother cried and there was some resistance from my father. But nothing I couldn’t handle. After all, the employment contract was only for a year and the company had offered a return airline ticket. Same terms Horst had started out with a year earlier with them. Except now he had decided to stay in Canada, a fact I didn’t mention to my parents.
Ontario - 1960
I had come straight off the plane to Dunville, eighty kilometers west of Toronto, to do administrative and sales work for Hans Peters, a burly and egregious fellow-German from Hamburg. Horst had told me about Peters' factory on the outskirts of Hamburg making foam bathing accessories. Now he was setting up a branch plant in Canada, for which he needed qualified help. The place had been an Aylmer vegetable cannery. I was given a hundred bucks a week, the return plane ticket and an abandoned corner office inside the dilapidated factory to sleep in. A half a dozen workers were stamping out bathroom mats, sponges and toys. Gunther, the Bavarian production manager, a mild-mannered type with an easy smile in his mid-thirties, had shown me the ropes. Not that there was much to the process.
“And this is Vera, my kid sister,” he informed me one day.
We had walked along the waist-high conveyor belt checking an overdue order for an irate variety store owner at the other end of the phone. Vera was a few inches taller, slim, but not skinny, her oval face framed by long black hair, sort of attractive, but hardly pretty.
“Hello Vera, nice to meet you,” was all I could remember telling her.
A couple of weeks later we had made out awkwardly, I more so than she, on the single metal-frame contraption masquerading for a bed in the abandoned corner office. Almost twenty-one then, I never had sex with anyone before. The ‘early-stage-exploration’ with Ursula on the living room sofa in Hamburg the year before had been brought to a screeching halt, when my parents returned unexpectedly from a trip. Thankfully, they had been civil, especially with the girl. I even got to drive her home. Thunder and lightning broke upon my return to the apartment.
“Come with me,” my father had demanded.
With that he strutted off to the four by four foot prison cell that housed a toilet, small sink, soap dish and towel holder. Our family shared the front door and this toilet with the old couple, Mr. and Mrs.Thode, who had their separate living room entrance down the hall.
“Did you have anything to do with these?”
I forced my eyes upon the strange objects floating in the toilet bowl. They looked like plastic, transparent sausage casings.
“No, father, absolutely not. Never seen them before – what are they?”
My father returned my puzzled look.
“Maybe you’re telling the truth son, I sure hope so.”
The following morning, visibly relieved, my father reported that Frau Thode had thrown a bunch of fish bladders into the toilet and promised not to do it again. I had finished with Vera what had remained undone with Ursula. After that, I had lost interest in her. And then had felt awkward toward Gunther, who never spoke to me about his sister again.
Horst had booked a few orders from some of the local stores and production was increasing. I was beginning to manage the adjustment that came with starting the first job in a foreign country in a foreign language. Life for two German guys in their early twenties seemed peachy enough. What with Friday night boxing bouts on TV at the boss’s house, Oktoberfest backyard parties with free sausages and beer, a chartered bus taking plant and office staff to soft ball pitches as the fringe benefits. Until the day, when Peters offered us one of the used Cadillacs in lieu of back wages and commissions.
It turned out that making foam bath and shower accessories was a mere foil for kiting cheques between Germany and Canada in ever increasing amounts. The way the scheme would work, is that Peters would write a cheque drawn on the German bank covered from a Canadian account at the Royal Bank – and vice-a-versa. Except that the gap between account balance and cheques presented would continue to grow, lines of credits stretched and well exceeded, until the Hamburg bank smelled a rat. The jovially naive imp at the small-town RBC bank branch in Dunville meanwhile was still eagerly accepting stories about huge orders from Woolworths being just around the corner.
We should have seen it coming. At least Horst, who had worked for Peters the entire previous year. And though I probed, I could never get a straight answer, whether I might have been lured over under false pretense. And with that came the first small crack in our close friendship.
Inevitable bankruptcy of the company followed a few weeks later. Our belongings hardly made a dent inside the cavernous trunk of the well-used Caddy, when we steered our prized possession toward the bright lights of Toronto. There we rented the basement apartment of Izzy Borisnevsky’s house on Danbury Road, just north of Eglington and Bathurst, only a few blocks from cow pasture country back then. Romanian immigrants, Izzy and his wife Anna, had a booth at the Kensington market, peddling housewares and used clothing. Seventy hour work weeks and frugal living had helped them come a long way since leaving the old country just a few years earlier. Their only child, Roman, was a few years younger than Horst and myself; they treated both of us more like extended family. I remembered my profound astonishment the day I saw the tattooed numbers on Izzy’s forearm.
We had found menial jobs shortly after arriving in the city. Both of us had applied at a German freight forwarding company, which had just opened its first overseas branch. One job was available for which we both appeared equally qualified.
“This is a very hard choice for me, gentlemen.”
I could still remember the confused look on Dieter Moeller’s face. The local branch manager had pulled out two drinking straws from his desk drawer, snipped a piece from one of them and made us each draw one. I had drawn the shorter one. Making incisive decisions certainly had not been Herr Moeller’s forte. Instead, I found work at a large German maker of construction