I asked my German teacher to add half an hour to each lesson. It seemed more urgent than ever that I learn thelanguage. His room was cold. He wore foul weather gear and seemed gradually to be piling furniture against thewindows.
We sat facing each other in the gloom. I did wonderfully well with vocabulary and rules of grammar. I could havepassed a written test easily, made top grades. But I continued to have trouble pronouncing the words. Dunlop did notseem to mind. He enunciated for me over and over, scintillas of dry spit flying toward my face.
We advanced to three lessons a week. He seemed to shed his distracted manner, to become slightly more engaged.
Furniture, newspapers, cardboard boxes, sheets of polyethylene continued to accumulate against the walls andwindows—items scavenged from ravines. He stared into my mouth as I did my exercises in pronunciation. Once hereached in with his right hand to adjust my tongue. It was a strange and terrible moment, an act of haunting intimacy.
No one had ever handled my tongue before.
German shepherds still patrolled the town, accompanied by men in Mylex suits. We welcomed the dogs, got used tothem, fed and petted them, but did not adjust well to the sight of costumed men with padded boots, hoses attached totheir masks. We associated these outfits with the source of our trouble and fear.
At dinner Denise said, "Why can't they dress in normal clothes?""This is what they wear on duty," Babette said. "It doesn't mean we're in danger. The dogs have sniffed out only afew traces of toxic material on the edge of town.""That's what we're supposed to believe," Heinrich said. "If they released the true findings, there'd be billions ofdollars in law suits. Not to mention demonstrations, panic, violence and social disorder."He seemed to take pleasure in the prospect. Babette said, "That's a little extreme, isn't it?""What's extreme, what I said or what would happen?""Both. There's no reason to think the results aren't true as published.""Do you really believe that?" he said.
"Why shouldn't I believe it?""Industry would collapse if the true results of any of these investigations were released.""What investigations?""The ones that are going on all over the country."'That's the point," she said. "Every day on the news there's another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks,arsenic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn'tthe definition of a serious event based on the fact that it's not an everyday occurrence?"The two girls looked at Heinrich, anticipating a surgically deft rejoinder.
"Forget these spills," he said. "These spills are nothing."This wasn't the direction any of us had expected him to take. Babette watched him carefully. He cut a lettuce leaf onhis salad plate into two equal pieces.
"I wouldn't say they were nothing," she said cautiously. "They're small everyday seepages. They're controllable. Butthey're not nothing. We have to watch them.""The sooner we forget these spills, the sooner we can come to grips with the real issue.""What's the real issue?" I said.
He spoke with his mouth full of lettuce and cucumber.
"The real issue is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day. Your radio, your TV, your microwave oven, yourpower lines just outside the door, your radar speed-trap on the highway. For years they told us these low dosesweren't dangerous.""And now?" Babette said.
We watched him use his spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. Hepoured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and otherimperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
"This is the big new worry," he said. "Forget spills, fallouts, leakages. It's the things right around you in your ownhouse that'll get you soo............