Free The Pegnitz Junction by Mavis Gallant

but the paper said they had been thirty-seven, the technical staff of the small lens factory and their wives and children.
    He walked just in front of Christine and little Bert, holding a hand to his head because of the scar – a bad habit. He suddenly turned and came back so that they seemed to be walking towards a meeting point. She saw that he knew she knew everything; the expression on his face was one of infinite sorrow.
    What are you doing here? she tried to ask as they nearly met. Why spend a vacation in a dead landscape? Why aren’t you with all those others in Majorca and Bulgaria? Why bother to look? The houses are shuttered on one side. No one sees you except a policeman with field glasses. Marie wouldn’t look even if she remembered you. Wouldn’t, couldn’t – she has forgotten how. Her face turns the other way now. Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now you might be forever, give or take a few conversions and lapses from faith. Besides, she said, as they silently passed each other, you know this was not the place. It must have been to the north.
    Herbert had never seen such a hideous station or such a squalid town – so he said now, catching up to them. Prussiantaste, he said, and all Napoleon’s fault. By what right did Napoleon turn us over to the Prussians, he wanted to know?
En quel honneur?
He sounded as though he might write a letter to the newspapers complaining about Napoleon. He had discovered something curious, he went on: a coffeehouse on stilts. Part of its attraction, other than a trio of musicians (fiddle, accordion, xylophone) was the view it afforded of the ditches and mantraps over there. From the coffeehouse veranda you could even see a man in uniform looking through field glasses. “You don’t see that often,” said Herbert, but he meant the orchestra. He continued in French, for he did not want little Bert to hear: the veranda on stilts was full of guest workers talking Turkish, Croatian and North African dialects. Though needed for the economy, the guest workers had brought with them new strains of tuberculosis, syphilis, and amebic complaints that resisted antibiotics. Everyone knew this, but the government was hushing it up. Herbert had proof, in fact, but he would not make it public, for he did not wish to favour the opposition. But here was what he was getting at – Herbert did not want little Bert, young and vulnerable, to drink out of the same glasses as foreign disease-bearers. On the other hand, he must not breathe the slightest whiff of racial animosity. Therefore would Christine please engage the child’s attention until they had passed the coffeehouse?
    They were moving back slowly, she holding little Bert’s hand, and he not fretting to be nearer his father, quite happy with her. Presently they found they were four abreast with the scarred stranger, all walking at the same pace. It would have seemed awkward to have drawn back or hurried ahead. Just as,shyly silent, they came level with the coffeehouse, the stranger spoke up: “That place is always packed with foreigners.”
    “What place?” said little Bert at once.
    “Do you object to them?” said Herbert, in his most pleasant tone of voice.
    “I don’t know much about them. I never travel. My father was in Montenegro. The partisans gave him a bad time. I think I wasn’t born yet. I’m not sure of the year. Forty-three?”
    “I hope they gave him a bad time,” said Herbert, who always said such things with a smile. People who did not know him had to think again, wondering what they had heard. No one knew how to deal with Herbert’s ambiguities. “I hope they gave him a
very
bad time.”
    Could I have heard this? the scarred man seemed to appeal to Christine.
    Suit yourself, she seemed to answer. I wasn’t born either.
    “Now the children of the partisans come here as guest workers,” said Herbert, still smiling. “And we all drink coffee together. What could be