Schmidt’s Radio

Schmidt’s Radio

by Harry Buschman

Schmidt stood like a man planted in the middle of 110th Street. He took note of the softness of the hot asphalt under his feet and squinted up at the fourth floor window of his apartment. It was shut tight. “Good,” he mumbled to himself. If anybody was up there the window would be open. It was a stifling August afternoon––97 degrees on the thermometer in the corner drug store on 110th Street, and it would be well over 100 in his apartment. There was nothing but the wood framed cockloft and the uninsulated black tar roof above him.

Working in the mattress spring factory had been no bed of roses either, and if he had any sense, he would turn around and walk over to the Shamrock Bar, have a beer or two and wait there until the sun went down. By nine or ten o’clock the roof would cool down and the heat would be bearable. But he reminded himself that if he had any sense he wouldn’t be standing here in the first place, and besides, he couldn’t wait to get up there and turn on his radio.

He was a disheveled man, and from a passing glance it was impossible to tell if he wore a beard or needed a shave. A closer look would reveal that he hadn’t had a haircut for some time. And if you looked down you would see his run down shoes and the frayed cuffs of his jeans. “Yes,” you would decide, “He’s not an elderly, eccentric Ph.D after all, he’s just a tramp looking for a place to eat his bucket of fried chicken.

Schmidt shifted the hot container of Kentucky Fried Chicken to his other hand and opened the lobby door. The blended cooking smells of the three families who lived there smothered him like a musty blanket. There were three families in the tenement; Irish, Italian and Polish. The harmony of aromas was a symphonic orchestration of cooking, moldy upholstery and winter clothes in dark closets. As he climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, each nationality achieved a certain temporary ascendancy until, on the next flight, another took over. The smell of cabbage from the O’Connor family on the first floor, the peppery smell of oregano and sour cheese from the Greco clan on the second, and last, the smell of fish from the Weinstein’s.

Schmidt never noticed his own peculiar smell, he was only sensitive to the smell of other people on the floors below him. There were times, however, when he opened the door to his apartment and thought, “someone’s been here,” only to realize it must have been his laundry piled high in the bathroom, or maybe food that had been in the refrigerator too long. Like many men who live alone, he wasn’t aware of his own bad habits.

It was a little stronger tonight. Maybe it was a combination of the heat and Friday. Everybody came home on Friday––it was the night when every Jew was a king. Schmidt was no scientist, but he knew the symphony of cooking smells would work their way through his apartment and eventually leave by way of the fire door to the roof. It wouldn’t be so bad if somebody invited him down for dinner once in a while. But things were tough these days. Hard enough feeding your own family without asking a stranger to come in and take part of it away from you.

Schmidt didn’t need company anyway, he had his radio.

It was a beauty, a Philco, Model 90, and he would never forget the day he bought it in Montgomery Ward. The man said he could get Philadelphia and Cleveland on it if he hung a wire out the window. When Schmidt brought it home and plugged it in, he discovered it was a lot better than that. It was back in 1935 and when he turned it on the first night he heard a broadcast from Germany––Hitler had just restored universal military service. The man in Montgomery Ward never told him he would hear Hitler in Germany. Oh, it was from Germany all right, it wasn’t some American news station. Hitler was shouting, and Schmidt could understand almost every word Hitler said. German was his second tongue, a language he learned from his father, a sour faced shoemaker from the Upper West Side. “It is the language of our country,” his father told him. “Some day it will be the language of this country too.”

The radio was an heirloom by now, they didn’t make vacuum tubes any more and they had to be scavenged from old radio sets. He could probably sell it as a museum piece.

The strange thing about it was it still reported the news of the world the way the world was when Montgomery Ward sold it to him back in the thirties. It took a lot of shaking, and sometimes Schmidt would have to hit it in the back with the flat of his hand. It took forever to warm up, but when it did, all the familiar voices came back and Schmidt would sit and listen to the voices all over again.

On a hot night like this he would get angry, he would talk back to Hitler. He would shout a warning to stiff-assed Neville Chamberlain to take a stand and stop the madman before the situation got out of hand. He would advise Franklin Delano Roosevelt to get ready––“PREPARE, while you still have time!”

Schmidt suspected there was something supernatural about the old Philco. After all, he was drafted in 1941, and he put four years of his life into World War II. He knew the war was over and the world was unsuccessful in its second attempt to exterminate itself, but he chose to live a double life. His days were spent in the present and his nights in the past––he accepted it with German stoicism, an obedience to a recollection of time, and for more than sixty years he kept the secret of his radio to himself.

He would often shout at his radio, shake his fist and call Hitler names––names his shoemaker father taught him. He thought there might be a chance Hitler would hear him: after all, it was a magic radio... perhaps those crazy men at the other end; Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Roosevelt––they might hear him. Maybe there was a chance he could stop the madness, rewrite history, and save the ten million lives that were lost in World War II.

Then again, maybe not!

The conundrum plagued Schmidt. During the day he read the words of today’s leaders in the newspaper, and though he never believed a word of them, Schmidt could tell they had learned nothing from the words of the past. “Don’t you ever learn, for God’s sake?” He mumbled to himself all day.

On this Friday night as he climbed his way upstairs to the fourth floor of his apartment, the sixty year old seed of discontent that stuck in his craw suddenly germinated. Maybe it was the heat of this particular August afternoon, but he felt it was more than that. In short... he had enough of the world. He was fed up! and if anybody came out of the O’Connors or the Grecos or the Weinsteins to say, “Good evening, Schmidt.” He would have told him to go fuck himself.

Schmidt stood at his front door and reached in his pocket for his key. He could hear voices inside...

He opened the door slowly thinking somebody might be in there waiting for him... but no, it was the radio. Chamberlain’s voice. An ultimatum! Hitler must stop his invasion of Poland instantly! Ha! Ridiculous! It was too late for ultimatums. Did that old gray headed fool with the skinny umbrella think Hitler was going to stop his giant Wehrmacht machine and go home to Germany? “No, old man! You had your chance three years ago. It might have worked then––but not now. This war machine of Herr Paperhanger is on the march!”

He walked to the radio, his crazy radio that aired the news of sixty years ago. It didn’t need him any more, it was turning itself on now. It didn’t care if he was there to listen or not.

Enough of that God damned war! He lifted the radio off the table and the plug pulled out of the wall, but the radio continued with the melancholy and familiar story of September 3, 1939. The day the end began. He carried the radio to the window and opened it with his free hand. Without thinking, he threw it into the street below. It continued to play until it hit the sidewalk.

In the sudden silence he heard The voice of old man Weinstein downstairs. He was at the head of the family’s seder table––he couldn’t understand a word of it, but it was good to hear it anyway

“I know it’s Friday, old man ... pray, pray out loud. Pray for us too, we never learned your prayers.”

But he seemed to remember one in German from a long time ago. He walked to the kitchen and opened the window looking out at the junk filled yard. He turned and sat at the kitchen table and took the cover off the container of Kentucky Fried Chicken. His father used to stand stiffly at the table and pray before he ate... he mumbled when he prayed as if he didn’t want anyone but God to hear. But when he was finished, he would always raise his head and shout...

“Im Namen des Vaters und des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes––Amen.” Then he would turn to the family and stare at them as though they were strangers.

Those were the only words Schmidt could remember.