Translation week 10: Fair Version
When Gesine Cresspahl arrived in this city in the spring of 1961 it was only supposed to be for two years. The porter had placed the child on top of his trolley and was pushing it with great gusto through the French ocean liner’s scruffy terminal building; the child put both hands behind her back when he stretched his hands out towards her and took his hat off.
Marie was almost four years old. After six days at sea she had lost the courage to hope that in the new country she would see the Rhine, her Kindergarten in Düsseldorf or her grandmother. Gesine still thought of Marie as ‘the child’; the child could hardly put up much resistance against her. She was concerned that this move could be scuppered by the child, who, sullen and intimidated, peered out from under her white cloche hat at the murky haze of West 48 th Street.
She had twenty days in total to find an appartment and on every one of those days the child rejected New York. The hotel found a German-speaking nanny for her, a strait-laced elderly woman from the Black Forest in a pitch-black dress covered in frills and rows of buttons who could sing Uhland’s songs in a reedy soprano. However, this emigrant had retained more of her dialect than the High German spoken in Freudenstadt 25 years ago; the child didn’t answer her when spoken to. The child wandered through the city with Gesine, never letting go of her hand, pressed up tightly next to her on buses and in the subway, vigilant to the point of suspicion, and only in the early afternoons would she allow herself to slide into sleep, lulled by the monotonous motions of travel. She hung her head whenever Gesine read aloud to her the apartments for rent listed in the New York Times property section: she didn’t care for the elevators with their bellboys, or air-conditioning – all she would ask about was ships. Gesine was relieved whenever the child enquired, after several days observation,

why some people here had dark skin, or why old women from the Black Forest were Jewish; most conversations were mute, and took place through meaningful looks and thoughts:
Would you not just quit, for my sake?
Just give me two years. Then we’ll go to West Germany for as long as you like.
So you’re thinking of quitting then.