“But,” Mr Jakob repeated, coming over to Karl on stiff legs, “that means I’m your Uncle Jakob and you’re my dear nephew. I suspected it from the very start!” he said to the captain, before putting his arms around Karl and kissing him, while Karl silently let it happen.
“What’s your name?” Karl asked after being released, speaking very politely but not feeling at all moved, and trying to predict what the consequences of this new development might be for the stoker. For the time being, there seemed no reason to believe that Schubal would be able to turn it to his advantage.
“Try to understand how lucky you are, young man,” said the captain, who thought that Karl’s question had wounded the dignity of Mr Jakob, who’d gone over to the window, evidently so that the others wouldn’t see the emotion on his face, which he was dabbing with a handkerchief. “The man who’s just told you he’s your uncle is Senator Edward Jakob. From now on, a glittering career awaits you, presumably quite in contrast with what you’d been expecting. Try to grasp that as well as you can right now, and get a hold of yourself!”
“I really do have an Uncle Jakob in America,” said Karl to the captain, “but if I’ve understood correctly, Jakob is the senator’s surname.”
“That’s right,” the captain said, and waited for him to go on.
“Well, my Uncle Jakob, who’s my mother’s brother, it’s only his Christian name that’s Jakob, and his surname must obviously be the same as my mother’s, whose maiden name is Bendelmayer.”
“Gentlemen!” cried the senator, coming back very cheerfully from his restorative break by the window, and referring to what Karl had just explained. All of them, with the exception of the port officials, burst out laughing, some seeming genuinely touched, others more inscrutably.
‘What I said wasn’t that ridiculous,’ Karl thought to himself.
“Gentlemen,” repeated the senator, “without your meaning to, or my meaning you to, you are witnessing a little family scene, and I feel I owe you some explanation for it, since, I believe, only the captain”—this mention elicited an exchange of bows—“knows the full story.”
‘Now I’ve really got to pay attention to every word,’ Karl said to himself and, looking over his shoulder, he was happy to see that the figure of the stoker was coming back to life.
“For all the long years of my American sojourn—the word sojourn isn’t actually quite right for someone who’s an American citizen, as I am with every part of my soul—but for all these long years I’ve been living entirely estranged from my European family, for reasons that are firstly not relevant here, and secondly would be too distressing to relate. In fact, I’ve already begun to dread the time when I will have to explain it to my dear nephew, a task that will make it impossible not to say some frank words about his parents and their friends.”
‘He’s my uncle, no doubt about it,’ Karl said to himself, and listened. ‘He must have just changed his name.’
“My dear nephew’s parents have—let’s call this thing what it is—simply got rid of him, the way you put a cat outside when it annoys you. I certainly don’t want to play down what my nephew did to elicit that punishment, but his misdemeanour is such that just describing it excuses him.”
‘I’d like to hear that,’ thought Karl, ‘but I don’t want him to tell it to everyone. And aside from that, he can’t know anything about it. How could he?’
“What happened,” continued his uncle, leaning his weight onto the bamboo cane and rocking back and forth a little, which removed some of the unnecessary solemnity that this subject would otherwise have certainly taken on, “what happened is that he was seduced by a serving maid, Johanna Brummer, a woman of around thirty-five. It’s not my intention to embarrass my nephew with the word ‘seduce’, but it’s hard to find another that fits.”
Karl, who had moved to stand quite close to his uncle, turned around at that moment to read the effect of the story on the faces of those present. Nobody laughed, all of them listened patiently and seriously. After all, you don’t laugh about the nephew of a senator just like that. If anything, you would have thought that the stoker was smiling very faintly at Karl, which was both gratifying as a new sign of life and excusable in him because, when they’d been together in his cabin, Karl had tried to keep secret this thing that was now being made so public.
“Then this Brummer,” his uncle continued, “had a child by my nephew, a healthy boy, baptized with the name Jakob, doubtless as a reference to myself, who must have made a strong impression on the girl in what I’m sure were merely passing mentions by my nephew. And a good thing too, I say. Because since his parents wanted to avoid maintenance payments or whatever other aspects of the scandal would have touched them—I must emphasize that I’m not familiar with either the laws over there or his parents’ general circumstances—but since they wanted to avoid maintenance payments and a scandal, they had their son, my dear nephew, shipped off to America with an irresponsible lack of material provisions, as you can see, meaning that, had it not been for one of the miracles that can apparently still happen in America, the boy would have immediately met his death in some New York back alley, except that the serving girl wrote me a letter which, after many detours, arrived in my possession yesterday, telling me the whole story as well as providing a description of my nephew and—very sensibly—the name of this ship. If I wanted to entertain you, gentlemen, I could just read out some choice passages from that letter”—he pulled two enormous, closely handwritten sheets of paper from his pocket and waved them around. “I’ve no doubt you would find it affecting, since it’s written with a certain amount of quite crude but well-meaning guile, and with a great deal of love for the father of her child. But it’s neither my purpose to entertain you more than is necessary to explain what you’re witnessing, nor, in this moment of welcome, to run the risk of injuring any feelings that my nephew may still have for her, especially as, if he likes, he can read the letter for his own information in the privacy of the room that’s already been prepared for him.”
Karl, however, didn’t have any feelings for that girl. Amid the confusion of an ever more distant past, she was sitting in her kitchen with one elbow propped on the dresser. She looked at him when he came into the kitchen now and then to fetch a glass of water for his father or to run an errand for his mother. Sometimes she was writing a letter from her cramped position next to the dresser, and would draw her inspiration from Karl’s face. Sometimes she covered her eyes with one hand and then nothing he said could reach her. Sometimes she got onto her knees in her narrow little room next to the kitchen and prayed to a wooden cross; Karl would watch her shyly through the crack of the door as he went in and out. Sometimes she raced around the kitchen and, if Karl got in her way, she’d flinch backwards, cackling like a witch. Sometimes she closed the door to the kitchen after Karl had come in and held on to the handle until he asked to be let out. Sometimes she brought him things that he didn’t even want and silently pressed them into his hands. But once she said “Karl” and, amid sighs and grimaces, led him—still astonished by being addressed in this unexpected way—to her room, and locked the door. She flung her arms around his neck tight enough to choke him and, although she asked him to undress her, she actually undressed him and laid him on her bed as though from now on she would keep him all to herself and caress and care for him until the end of the world. “Karl, oh my Karl!” she cried as if she’d just seen him and was reassuring herself that she had him, while he couldn’t see a thing and felt ill at ease among the mass of warm bedclothes that she seemed to have heaped up for his sake. Then she lay down next to him and wanted to hear some kind of secrets, but he couldn’t think of anything and she got cross, whether joking or for real, shook him, listened to his heart, offered her breast for him to listen to, pressed her naked stomach against his body, sent her hand searching between his legs so horribly that Karl shook his head and neck free of the pillows, then thrust her stomach against him several times—it seemed as if she’d become a part of him and perhaps for that reason he was gripped by a terrible helplessness. In tears, and after many tender goodnights on her part, he’d finally got back to his own bed. That was all it had been and somehow his uncle was turning it into this whole big story. And it seemed the cook had been thinking of him and had written to tell his uncle he was coming. That was very good of her and he would be sure to make it up to her some day.