New Voices: “The Nightwatchman” by Franz Jørgen Neumann

November 11, 2024

Jakub is the eponymous nightwatchman at a conference center far from home in Franz Jørgen Neumann’s new story. After his first evening patrol, Jakub finds a woman in his cottage and becomes entangled in a routine that had been established by the previous nightwatchman, Casmir. Like that, it seems his life is cleaved in two: There’s his life back home in Poland, where his wife and stepson are dependent on his income. And then there’s his life as the nightwatchman, where no one knows about his other life. There’s a dreamlike quality to “The Nightwatchman,” where more and more every day, Jakub becomes like Casmir.

 

Jakub enters the nightwatchman’s cottage after his first evening patrol and hears a woman laughing behind his bedroom door. He hangs his coat slowly. Another of Øystein’s pranks, no doubt. The conference center’s groundskeeper has joked he’s going to find Jakub a woman. Though young, Jakub isn’t inexperienced. He has a wife and stepson back in Poland, a fact he hasn’t shared with anyone at the center. He doesn’t want to be pitied as the desperate immigrant who goes abroad to find work, or be judged for having left his young wife and son behind with his parents.

Jakub knocks on the bedroom door. “Hello? Who’s there?”

“You mean you have others?” the voice says, and laughs again.

Jakub opens the door and finds a woman in his bed. Blonde-gray hair frames the only thing she seems to be wearing: a pair of Groucho glasses with the prominent nose, eyebrows, and mustache. He closes the door quickly.

“You’re not Casmir,” the woman says through the door.

“I’m Jakub, the nightwatchman.”

“Casmir is the nightwatchman.”

“I’m his replacement.”

“Was he fired?”

Jakub doesn’t know what to say.

“So he was finally fired.”

“One of the housekeepers told me he drowned. I’m sorry.”

He waits for the woman to say something. When she doesn’t, he sits on the sofa, moving the spy novel he was reading before his last patrol. The woman emerges fully dressed and without the Groucho glasses. She sits beside him on the sofa. She doesn’t look like she’s going to cry.

“I’ll miss him,” she says.

“You were close.”

“I met him at a work conference here a few years ago. I didn’t know he was the nightwatchman. Since then we’ve had this routine. I stop here every few months on my way to visit my mother. It’s a two-day drive. Casmir and I catch up, then I drive on the next morning.” The woman lights a cigarette. “At least he wasn’t fired,” she says, and grunts. “But drowned? That’s awful. Poor Casmir.”

Jakub pulls an ashtray from a drawer in the kitchenette. He hid it from himself so he wouldn’t be tempted to smoke. Even cigarette money is money he sends home. He places the ashtray on the table. The sofa is small and he is close enough to see the individual particles of smoke.

“I’m Lena,” the woman says, extending her hand. “You’re Polish, too, like Casmir?”

He nods. He hopes she’ll offer him a cigarette or a puff, but she doesn’t.

“I’m still hungry,” she says when she’s done, as though the cigarette were a meal.

“I’m sorry, but the kitchen closed hours ago.”

“Not for the nightwatchman.”

Jakub follows her to the top of the hill where the conference center’s main building sits. The manor house of a former farming estate, the building holds thirty guest rooms, meeting areas, a cafeteria, and the kitchen. Lena knows where the kitchen’s light switch is, where to find an oversized box of Corn Flakes, a tub of honey, bowls, spoons, milk. He sits across from her at a square table by the window as she divvies out the cereal. Between them sits a pad of writing paper and a ballpoint pen with the logo of the conference center. She dabs the pad with a sleeve to soak up a drop of milk. Someone has written yesterday’s date and Kjære Mor—Dear Mother— across the top of the page, but nothing else.

“Where did he drown?” she asks after they’ve finished eating.

“I don’t know,” Jakub says, though he does. The older housekeeper told him it was in the lake near the paper mill. Casmir had the day off. He was probably messing about on the logs and too drunk to swim, the housekeeper said. Jakub doesn’t tell Lena any of this.

“There’s no one at the front desk,” Jakub says, “but I could check you in, if you’re staying the night. We’re not full.”

She takes her empty bowl and nests it in his. “I always slept at Casmir’s on my way to my mother’s.”

“Yes.”

“You’re the nightwatchman now.”

“Yes.”

“So you don’t really need your bed until morning.”

“No.”

“Good,” she says.

He supposes it’s decided. Lena begins writing on the pad.

Dear Mother, I’m in love with the cook.
Dear Mother, I’ve eloped.
Dear Mother, I’m pregnant.
Dear Mother, The cook has left me.
Dear Mother, I’m broke.
Dear Mother, I’m coming home.

After Lena heads back to the nightwatchman’s cottage, Jakub washes the bowls and silverware and puts away the milk, honey, and Corn Flakes. He tears off the sheet on the writing pad. He takes his time returning to the nightwatchman’s cottage. The town glitters below on the shore of the night-blue lake that stretches southeast. Far in the distance is Sweden, then the Baltic Sea, then Poland and home where his wife and son and parents are all asleep. One more year of this, two at most, and he will have sent enough money home for a down payment on an apartment.

The bedroom door is closed when he returns. He takes off his coat and sits. Knowing that Lena is asleep in the other room gives the cottage a pleasant, domestic quality. He picks up the spy novel and finds where he left off. He makes several more rounds of the conference center before morning, then signs the logbook at the check-in desk, omitting Lena’s arrival. He finishes the spy novel and begins another book while waiting for her to rise. By seven he is desperate for sleep. He knocks, knocks again, then opens the door. The bed is made. The pair of Groucho glasses sit on the nightstand. She must have left during his last round. He climbs into bed and can smell the scent of the departed woman for a moment, then not at all.

He wakes in the late afternoon, a couple of hours before the staff dinner meeting. He bicycles into town and checks out more novels from the English section of the library. He rides along the shore and stops when the air turns sulfurous near the paper mill. The last time he was here, logs were floating off the shale shore. They must have been pulled in and pulped. The lake is nearly still, the water clear and shallow. He can see young fish swimming in schools. Drowning seems impossible.

A couple of nights later, returning from one of his patrols, Jakub is surprised to see Lena again, sitting on his sofa.

“What happened to the TV?” she says. “Casmir had a big color Sony.”

Jakub recalls that Øystein has a color Sony in his quarters, the set as large as an oven.

“I don’t have one,” he says.

“Have you checked the storage room?”

She leads him to the basement of the main building. There are folding cots, cardboard boxes filled with thin bars of wrapped soap, a row of old dismantled sinks—and several TVs, small black and white models, the antenna speckled with rust. They set one up in his room, but the power cord is too short for it to sit where the previous TV had been. They each take an end of the sofa and lift it so it faces the TV’s new location. Moving the sofa reveals a bunker of pornographic magazines stacked neatly up against the wall.

Lena gasps. “Jakub!” Then she laughs. “Relax. I know they’re not yours. Casmir said he read them for the articles.”

Jakub moves the heavy stack to the bedroom, out of sight, then sits beside Lena on the sofa. The domestic channel has signed off for the night, but they catch the last half of a grainy broadcast from Sweden. King Kong. Lena falls asleep in minutes. He wishes he could be like Kong and pluck her up gently and carry her to the bedroom. When he returns from his next round, the TV is off and Lena is asleep in his bed. He pulls the door all the way closed and quietly releases the handle, then boils water for coffee.

The first snow arrives that October. He and Øystein play cards after dinner most nights after watching the news on Øystein’s large color TV. There’s never any news from Poland. Jakub earns a little on the side making deliveries for Øystein; the groundskeeper has a sill in the utility shed that only he has a key to. Jakub doesn’t send this extra money back to Poland. Instead, he buys himself a pair of boots and a warmer coat from the Salvation Army store.

His wife writes to complain that his mother won’t stop nagging her about her posture; that his father has lost his job; that the boy has a tooth growing from the roof of his mouth, from the very center; and that her boss, the one who had a heart attack, is back and meaner than ever. There isn’t enough money, she writes, the common refrain. She’s had to dip into the apartment savings three months in a row. Jakub writes back and says that it’s too soon to ask for a raise, and that he will call her on Christmas Eve.

His remove from his family causes them to drop from his mind for days. The last time he called home, speaking for only a couple of minutes because of the cost, his wife and parents sounded like strangers. It felt as though he’d dialed the wrong number and was listening to some other family’s problems.

Jakub falls into a new habit. When he wakes, shortly before dinner, he reaches over to Casmir’s giant pile of porno magazines and has his fill. At the staff dinners he feels depraved. He, a man with a wife and son.

Though October’s snows melt away, Jakub needs to keep the wood stove burning to stay warm. He helps Øystein in the woods that border the property, felling a few additional trees for future firewood. He tells Øystein about the magazines Casmir hid under the sofa. Does he want them?

Øystein laughs and gives the chainsaw a growl. “Who do you think gave those to Casmir, eh?” he shouts, then continues walking along the length of a downed tree, severing its limbs.

“Busty women are only good to look at,” Øystein says in the quiet afterwards. “I like breasts I can hold in my hands.” He says this with confidence, as though he has exhaustively sampled to arrive at what suits him.

Jakub can’t remember the size of his wife’s breasts or whether he’s ever held them in the manner Øystein illustrates now, his pale hands freed from dirty gloves and cupping the air, almost like he’s praying.

Øystein pays Jakub for his help with a bundle of wood from last season. Jakub considers using the magazines as kindling, but it feels too much like cremation. The magazines are in Danish, Dutch, and German. He understands enough to know that they describe a different world from the one he finds himself in. People do what they like, chasing after pleasure in lives that are light and humorous. He knows this is fiction and that none of the escapades are real. But the photos—they are very real. Even if it’s all for the photographer and readers, it’s not all for the photographer and readers. That’s the part he can’t quite square up, where the real expressions end and the deception begins, and specifically, what he has any right to envy.

When new snow stays put and deepens, Jakub buys a pair of used cross-country skis, poles, and boots with his moonshine money. He asks the girls at the front desk if they would consider teaching him to ski. They politely decline, but one of the housekeepers volunteers, the young one with blonde hair cut in a bob around wide-set eyes, a snub nose and a broad smile. She’s stocky, with farm-built strength, but when she moves ahead of him on the groomed and lit ski track, there are parts of her that make him think of Øystein taking off his gloves and holding out his hands. He manages fine on flat ground, but the housekeeper laughs herself silly at his inability to climb even the smallest incline. He blames the lack of wax on his skis. He slides backwards and into a tree and she laughs so hard she pees herself and abandons him in the deep snow.

Christmas nears and the manor is busy hosting holiday parties. There’s no time for skiing. Jakub helps guests get their cars started in the cold, assists Øystein with the shoveling, and deals with the drunks in the evening, calling them taxis which have to come up the back way because the icy road down into town is too slippery to climb.

During one of these nights, Jakub returns to his quarters and finds Lena setting up a little Christmas tree on the side table. Something about the tree, the sparkling garland, the small heart-shaped paper baskets hanging from the branches—this woman doing him a kindness and smiling at him—it makes him well up.

God Jul!” she says, and gives him a hug, like they’re old friends. She’s done something with her hair, braided it in back. She pulls a box from her bag and holds it out to him. “It’s only chocolates,” she says.

“Thank you. But I don’t have anything for you. I didn’t know you were coming.”

She takes him by the hand and pulls him into the bedroom where he discovers that people do live those lives from the porno magazines, or something like it. He learns of the fun that two people who are not in love—who barely even know each other—can have, the fearlessness with which they can demand and offer one another pleasure. When Jakub returns from his second round of the manor grounds, they do it again, new things. He can still feel the thickness of Lena’s braided hair in his hand as he heads out on his third patrol. Lena wakes from her sleep when he returns and goes back down there under the covers. She laughs and crosses her legs behind his head, the rough balls of her feet dragging up his back. Her feet push him away at the shoulders before he gets started.

“You Poles work too hard. It was only a box of chocolates.”

He goes out on his final round with a warmth that’s impervious to cold. He stays outside and practices cross-country skiing, first a quick slide down the hill, then a hard slog back up. He doesn’t fall anymore. He’s come that far and winter is long yet. As he herringbones up the hill, he sees Lena standing at the window, dressed, sipping at some coffee or tea. It’s almost morning, though it won’t be light for hours. It’s not that she looks old to him—it’s not that which strikes him. It’s how much younger he is. That he has so much life ahead of him to share.

When Lena has left and Jakub is alone again, he doesn’t understand how he has forgotten that he is married—or nearly forgotten. He doesn’t feel like he’s been untrue, not even when he calls home on Christmas Eve. Here there is the manor on the hill and the town and lake below, and he is twenty-four and sleeping with an older woman. That is one life, one person. And then there is Poland, far away, where he has a twenty-two-year-old wife and a young son and is saving for an apartment. Both these men feel real, but also separate—another thing he can’t quite square up.

A week later, as he’s about to head out on his first round of the evening, there’s a knock at his door. It’s the housekeeper who tried to teach him to ski. She gestures for him to come outside. She points, but there’s no need. The northern lights hang against the night sky in vast green curtains and in fainter ribbons of blue and red. He’s never seen anything like it. She smiles at him every time he looks back at her. Right now, right at this very moment, his wife has probably finished putting their son to bed and is writing another letter about the boy’s wayward tooth. His father is out drinking and complaining about politicians, and his mother is watching TV and knitting. None of them there in Poland, no one in the entire world, knows that he has taken the housekeeper to his bed and is giving her the deluxe treatment, expanding her life so it’s as fun and free as the bedroom lives of those people in the magazines, a copy of which she selects and takes with her when she leaves, blushing even as she hides it in her blouse. He goes out on his first patrol feeling like the most generous man alive.

A week later it all ends. Lena has stopped by, tanned and exhausted from two weeks in Athens with her mother. They’re watching TV when the housekeeper walks into his quarters. He doesn’t know why, but he tells her that Lena is his wife, here for a visit. Lena laughs and the housekeeper goes off without a word, her boots crunching quickly on the snow.

Jakub makes his rounds. One guest has an issue with a radiator. Another on the second floor opened a window and can’t get it closed again. He looks out the window and sees a pale yellow sheet of light on the blue snow far below. He has a desire to leap. Lena is asleep when he returns and gone the next morning, the morning he’s fired. For stealing a television, they tell him, for harboring non-paying guests, for using the kitchen stores, for keeping pornography on the grounds and corrupting one of their staff with it. He’s amazed they don’t know about his moonshine deliveries.

Jakub doesn’t want to disappear on Lena like Casmir did. He starts a letter. Dear Lena, he writes, and leaves the rest blank. Their inside joke. Sincerely, Jakub, he writes at the bottom. He puts it on the TV, then stuffs all his belongings into his backpack. He leaves his skis behind and rides his bicycle down the hill, the tires sliding on sheets of ice buried under the snow. The cold picks at him but doesn’t lower the temperature of his shame. When he pulls his scarf from his face, the scent of the paper mill scours his nostrils.

Heading south by train, the border to Poland feels minutes away, not days. As though his village church will soon come into view, a lifetime of trouble waiting for him, like there always was. At each station he yearns to step off the train. GET UP, JAKUB! he commands himself. GET UP! But something in him doesn’t allow it, and he despises this quality. He is one person again, but the wrong person, one who has the burden of commitments the other made.



Franz Jørgen Neumann’s stories have received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared in
The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and Water~Stone Review. His past published work can be read at www.storiesandnovels.com.

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