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directly parodied at one point). It also resonates with suggestions of the
transport of the victims to the Nazi death camps. The countryside she pass–
es looks scorched, the consequence, it is said, of a "holocaust," and the train
is rerouted because of the threat of further fire. The conductor prohibits
the windows from being opened; the toilets are locked. The train reaches
a junction at a barbed wire frontier where Christine is separated from
Herbert and forced to wait in a crowd of women dressed in uniform cloth–
ing and grouped by their foreign nationalities-Polish, French, Greek,
Russian, Dutch-while a pregnant young German woman, also on her
way home, pretends unsuccessfully, that she is an American. The German
passengers-obnoxious schoolgirls, a middle aged woman who incessantly
stuffs herself with food from a hamper, even Herbert, with his timorous
respect for rule and order-are caricatures of national personality unmiti–
gated by such specimens of "the new antiauthori tarian army" as
"Dietchen Klingebiel, who later became a failed priest; Ferdinandchen
Mickefett, who was to open the first chic drugstore at Wuppertal; Peter
Sutitt, arrested for doping racehorses in Ireland; and Fritz Foster, who was
sent to Mrica to count giraffes for the Uruted Nations and became a mer–
cenary." Gallant's narrative-dislocated, fragmented and pieced as though
by scissors and paste-is a postmodern assembly which juxtaposes, like a
crazy quilt, Christine's present and past and, even more radically, makes use
of the thought-stream of others. By some sort of New Age transmission
she seems to hear the silent thoughts of the lady with the hamper-her
story of forty-seven years in America, her unquenchable anti-Semitism
(Germany could have won if a plan had been carried out to put Jews into
German attics, the Allies would not have dropped their bombs. Roosevelt
was really a Dutch Jew named Rosenfeldt). No one seems able to make
sense of the unmentionable past which a tour leader on the train is heard
to refer to as "the Adolph time ... a sad time for art in this country."
Narrative is mutilated or helpless. Even the story Christine tells little Bert
about his bath sponge, which he calls Bruno, never concludes.
"The Pregnitz Junction" is, probably, the most ambitious-and the
most problematic-story Gallant has written. William Pritchard believes
that it is an extreme example of her refusal to make connections or come
to concl usions. "This is the Palace of Art, and Mavis Gallant is perilously
close to residing there in a novella which in the long run feels too clever,
too oblique, too arty for its own moral and human good," he has observed.
This almost persuades me except that Gallant's vision of disconnection and
failed memory is itself a bitter, moral vision of a fractured world, a culture
collapsed. Willi, in "Ernst in Civilian Clothes," is "waiting for the lucid,
the wide-awake, and above all the rational person who will come out of
the past and say with authority, 'this was true', and 'this was not.'"
