The List

“Jobs,” said Mrs Hartigan at ten.

She said it the way Mr Abernathy said Hanover in the roll: not loud, not soft, one word, to be answered. She was at the counter by the fridge with the green biro and an envelope, the long brown kind that the electricity bill came in, turned over to its blank back, and she was writing on it, and she did not look up.

“Kate. The bathroom. Then the floor.”

“Mum.”

“The bathroom,” said Mrs Hartigan, “then the floor.”

Kate went down the passage with her face set.

“Frederick.” Mrs Hartigan finished writing. She put the cap on the biro. She turned round and held the envelope out to him across the kitchen half, at arm’s length, the way the Private Secretary had held out the boxes, across a line. “Saturday shopping. Dorsey’s, on the avenue. Five minutes, left out of the door, left at the corner, past the shop with the lottery, it’s on the other side. You can’t miss it. It’s yellow.”

He took the envelope.

---

It was a list.

In green biro, in the small square hand, in a column down the back of the electricity bill’s envelope, with a line drawn under every item as if each one had been completed in advance and was only waiting for him to catch up with it.

He read it.

Milk (2, the blue top).

Butter.

Eggs, 12.

Semmerl, 10.

Topfen. Den guten, net den billigen.

Leberwurst, grob.

Speck, 1 lb.

Erdäpfel, 5 lb.

Rotkraut, 1.

Kren.

Senf, den süssen, braunen.

Bratserl, 24. FÜR SONNTAG.

Der Peanutbutter (crunchy).

Das Toiletpaper, 9.

Apples, the sour ones.

Coffee.

He read it again.

Some of it was English. Some of it was very nearly English. Some of it was German that he knew, the German of Solliden and his mother and the hymnal at the chapel at Drottningholm, and some of it was a German he had heard at this table forty-eight times and could follow when it was said to him slowly with a plate in front of him and somebody’s hand pointing at the plate.

And some of it was neither.

Semmerl, he thought, was bread rolls. He had heard it at breakfast. Speck was bacon; Bridget used the word, she had had it from his mother. Erdäpfel he did not know, and then did, because Erde was earth and Äpfel was apples and earth apples were obviously potatoes, and he felt quite pleased with himself about it, briefly. Rotkraut was red something. Red cabbage. Senf was mustard. Bratserl was, he was nearly certain, sausages, because -erl made a thing small and dear and Brat was what you did to a sausage, and because it said FÜR SONNTAG in capitals and underlined, and Sunday was the Bowl, and you ate sausages at the Bowl in Wisconsin the way you ate fish on a Friday.

Topfen he did not know at all.

Kren he did not know at all.

Leberwurst, grob he knew half of.

And der Peanutbutter and das Toiletpaper he understood perfectly, and looked at for a long time, because he had read in the Register that Wisconsindeutsch took English words and gave them German genders by analogy and German capitals automatically, and had thought it was a charming linguistic fact, and had not until this moment understood that it meant that somewhere in the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin a man stood in a supermarket and thought of toilet paper as neuter.

---

“I can take him,” said Kate, from the passage, with a bucket. “I’ll translate.”

“It’s his job,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“He doesn’t know what Kren is.”

“Then he’ll find out,” said Mrs Hartigan. “That’s what a job is.” She held out a second envelope, a white one, smaller, sealed. “Forty pounds. Count the change. Bring the receipt. Don’t let them give you the plastic bags, they’re ten cents, there are bags under the sink.” She looked at him. “And no telephone.”

“No telephone?”

“You’ll ring Kate. Or Theo. Or the Navy.” Mrs Hartigan held out her hand, flat, palm up. “Shopping is a job you do with a list and your head. Not with your telephone and somebody else’s.”

He looked at her hand.

Then he took his telephone out of his pocket, the black one with the crack across its corner from the step on the bluff at Santa Monica, and put it in her palm. She put it on top of the fridge, beside the biscuit tin, without looking at it, the way she put the post.

“Bags,” she said, “under the sink.”

---

There were bags under the sink. Cotton ones, folded, three of them, with the name of a supermarket in Milwaukee printed on them and the name of a church fête on the third. He took two.

He put on his coat.

At the door, putting on his shoes, he stopped, and looked at the hook behind the door where Mr Hartigan’s jacket had hung, and beside it, on a second hook, a hat. A wool hat, dark green, with a bobble on it, and on the front, sewn on, a small patch in green and gold with a G on it.

“Theo’s,” said Kate, from the passage, with the bucket. “Take it. It’s raining.”

He looked at the G.

“I can’t wear that.”

“It’s a hat,” said Kate. “It’s raining. Nobody can see a hat in the rain.” She looked at him with an expression he could not read. “Unless you think wearing a hat counts. Under the treaty.”

He put the hat back on its hook.

He went out bareheaded, onto the landing, past the kitchen chair with the wobble that was still standing against the wall by the door with nobody on it, and down the fifty-six steps.

---

Kimura was on the street.

She was standing by the car at the corner, opposite the door of the block, in a dark raincoat with the collar up, eating something out of a paper bag, and when he came out of the door she did not move or look at him, she went on eating, and looked at the depot gates.

He crossed the road to the car.

“Sergeant.”

“Sir.” Kimura did not take her eyes off the depot gates. She had been on the detail since he was thirteen and graded everything she saw out of ten, silently, and occasionally aloud. “You’re going out.”

“Shopping. It’s a job.”

“I know it’s a job,” said Kimura. “Castellanos briefed me at four this morning. He said if he comes out with bags, it’s Dorsey’s, and you are not to carry anything.” She folded the top of her paper bag over. “I’ll be behind you. Fifteen yards. I’m on the street, sir. The street’s mine. It’s not upstairs.” She looked at him for the first time. “That’s in the treaty. I read the copy.”

“There’s a copy?”

“Theo photographed it on Wednesday night and sent it to Castellanos,” said Kimura, “and Castellanos sent it to everybody. It’s on the detail’s board at the Palace. Somebody’s given it a frame.” She put the paper bag in her pocket. “Bareheaded in February. Three out of ten.”

“It’s raining.”

“I know it’s raining. That’s why it’s three.”

---

He went left out of the door, and left at the corner, past the shop with the hand-written sign about the lottery in the window, in the thin February rain, with two cotton bags from a supermarket in Milwaukee folded in one hand and the list in his other coat pocket, and fifteen yards behind him, on the other side of the street, not looking at him, Kimura.

The avenue was wider than the street, with more traffic, and buses, red and cream, one of which might have been Mr Hartigan’s, though it was not; and a launderette with its door open and the warm smell of it coming out into the rain; and a shop that sold telephones; and a barber’s with a man in the chair and the barber standing back to look at him; and a church on the corner, brick, with a board outside it that said ALL WELCOME in white letters and a time; and on the other side of the road, as Mrs Hartigan had said, yellow, unmissable, a supermarket.

DORSEY’S, it said, in large red letters on a yellow sign. FRESH. LOCAL. SINCE 1961.

He crossed at the lights.

Nobody looked at him. He was a tall boy of sixteen in a school coat, bareheaded, wet, with two bags in his hand, crossing an avenue in the north-east of the capital on a Saturday morning in February. There were a great many of those.

The doors opened on their own. He went in.

---

It was warm inside, and bright, and loud. Music was playing from somewhere in the ceiling, a song he half knew, a woman singing about a car. There were people everywhere, with trolleys and baskets and children, and a smell of bread and floor cleaner and oranges, and somewhere at the back a voice on a loudspeaker saying something about a special on frozen peas.

He stood inside the doors and took the list out of his pocket.

He had been in a shop before. He had been in a great many shops. He had been in the chemist on the avenue near Ellicott on Thursday to buy a toothbrush. He had been in the shops on the pier at Santa Monica with Theo, and in a bookshop in London that his mother liked, and once, at eleven, in a department store on the Axis on a Saturday at Christmas with his mother, who had wanted him to see one, so that he would know what one was.

He had never done the shopping.

There was a difference. He understood it now, standing inside the doors of Dorsey’s with the list in his hand and a trolley in front of him that somebody had left there. In a shop you looked for a thing you wanted and bought it. Doing the shopping was finding sixteen things that somebody else wanted, in a building you did not know, in the order the building had put them in and not the order on the list, in two languages, and paying for them with forty pounds in an envelope, and counting the change.

He took a basket. Then he looked at the list again, and at the size of Das Toiletpaper, 9, and Erdäpfel, 5 lb, and put the basket back and took the trolley.

The trolley had a wheel that went its own way.

He pushed it into the first aisle.

---

Milk was easy. Milk was milk; the blue top was the blue top. Butter was butter. Eggs were in a box, twelve, and he opened the box to check that none of them were broken, because Bridget did that, and one was, and he swapped it for another box, and felt that he was getting the hang of things.

Apples. The sour ones. There were eleven kinds of apple, in crates, with their names on cards. None of the cards said sour. He stood in front of them for some time. Then he picked up one of each kind, and smelled it, which was what Bridget did with apples at the market on the river, and chose the one that smelled most like the inside of a cold room, and took eight.

Coffee was a wall. A whole wall of coffee. He stood in front of it. Mrs Hartigan’s coffee, the coffee she had put in front of him at twenty to seven without asking, had come out of a red tin with a picture of a windmill on it. He looked for a red tin with a windmill on it. There was one, at the very bottom, on the left. He took it, and felt again that he was getting the hang of things.

Then he came to the end of the aisle, and turned the trolley with the wheel that went its own way, and found himself in front of a long refrigerated counter that ran the whole length of the back of the shop, under a sign that said DELI, with a woman behind it in a white hat, and in the glass cases between them, on trays, in rows, more kinds of sausage and cheese and cold meat than he had ever seen in one place in his life.

He looked at the list.

Topfen. Den guten, net den billigen.

Leberwurst, grob.

Speck, 1 lb.

Kren.

Bratserl, 24. FÜR SONNTAG.

He looked at the counter.

He looked at the list again.

Fifteen yards behind him, at the end of the cereal aisle, Kimura picked up a box of something, and read the side of it, with deep attention, and did not look at him at all.

“Next,” said the woman in the white hat.