Free The Pegnitz Junction by Mavis Gallant Page A

better?”
    The stranger edged away, went over to an old man standing by himself on the station platform and began to speak urgently in a low voice. The old man came up to his shoulder. He had not a tooth in his mouth, not a hair on his head, and was about the age and the size of the night porter in their Paris hotel. He was dressed in clean tennis shoes without laces, old army trousers, and a worn regional jacket over an open shirt. He rocked heel to toe as he listened, then said loudly to whatever it was the scarred man had asked, “I wouldn’t know. I don’t know any names around here. I’m a refugee too.”
    “His feelings are hurt,” said Christine, as the stranger drifted away. “Look at the way he hangs his head. I’m sure he was asking a direction. Now, why did you answer that way?” she asked the old man. “I’m sure you are not a refugee at all. What didn’t you like about the poor creature?”
    “He’s not from around here,” said the old man. “He’s from somewhere else, and that’s enough for me.”
    “And you,” she said to Herbert. “What didn’t you like about him? Such a harmless lonely person.”
    He tightened his hold on her arm. “I saw the way he was watching you. Don’t you know a policeman when you see one?”
    She looked again, but the man had crossed the tracks and vanished. Anything he might have wanted to let her know was damped out by a stronger current; their companion with the WINES OF GERMANY shopping bag could not be far away.
On a hot day like today every plant on a grave can wither. Family spies on his side of the family inspect the grave, waiting for a leaf to fall or a flower to droop. But usually I’m right there with the watering can. He was fussy about the grave, often spoke of how he wanted it
.
    “There isn’t a restaurant,” said Herbert, again in French. “It’s hard on little Bert. Only a newsstand. I think on a day like today one might allow a comic book. Do you agree?”
    But she was not the child’s mother: she would not be drawn.
    Herbert’s answer to her silence was to march into the waiting room and across to a newsstand. She knew that by making an issue over something unimportant she had simply proved once again that wilful obstinacy was part and parcel of a slow-moving nature. She suffered from its effects as much asHerbert did. Holding little Bert, she trailed along behind him, thinking that she would show her affection for Herbert now by being particularly nice to little Bert.
    Herbert waited for the curator of the local museum to be served before choosing the mildest of the comic books on display. The curator walked off, reading the local paper as he walked. A ferocious war of opinion took up three of its pages. Was it about the barbed wire? About the careless rerouting of trains that had stranded dozens of passengers in this lamentable, godforsaken, Prussian-looking town? No, it was about an exhibition of photographs Dr. Ischias had commissioned and sponsored for his new museum – an edifice so bold in conception and structure that it was known throughout the region as “the teacup with mumps.” Dr. Ischias was used to Philistine aggression; indeed, he secretly felt that his job depended to some extent upon the frequency and stridency of the attacks. But it seemed to him now that some of the letters in today’s paper might have been written a good fifty years in the past. This time he was accused not just of taking the public for dimwits, but also of sapping morals and contributing to the artistic decline of a race.
    “Once again” (he now read, walking out of the waiting room, holding the paper to his nose) “art has not known how to toe the mark or draw the line. Can filth be art? If so, let us do without it. Let us do without the photographer in question and his archangel, the curator with the funny name.”
    Well … that was unpleasant. Perhaps the show had been a mistake. It happened that the photographer in question had