Hausfrau

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

  Archie corrected her. “And responded to it.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “You’re not sad?”

  This time it was Anna’s turn. “Irrelevant,” she lied. She shifted in bed. Neither spoke for a minute or two. “What do you like about me?”

  Archie laughed. “So it’s that kind of talk we’re having, eh?” Anna shook her head and Archie softened. “You’re complicated. You can’t be cracked.”

  Like a safe. Except I’m not. “Thanks. I guess.”

  “You’re welcome.” They settled onto their backs, each looking up at the ceiling. “Why’d you say yes?”

  Now it was Anna’s turn to laugh. “What else would I have said?”

  THE INTERREGIO PULLED INTO the station at Frick at 10:56. It was an eight-minute wait before the S-Bahn to Mumpf passed through. The Benzes herded out of the car, descended beneath the station to change platforms, and then huddled around an empty bench while they waited for their connection. The barometric pressure had dropped. The weather was changing. Everyone felt weary and it wasn’t even lunchtime.

  A month before, a mass grave of dinosaur bones was unearthed in Frick. An amateur paleontologist found them. He discovered over one hundred entirely intact skeletons. Fossils of plateosauri two hundred million years old. Some days, Anna envied the dinosaurs their extinction. A comet did not veer from its trajectory. A beautiful disaster that was fated to happen did.

  The eight minutes passed quickly and by five past eleven the Benzes were on the S-Bahn headed directly to Mumpf.

  THE HAND-ART SHOP WAS filled with pretty colors and soft yarns and everything smelled like lavender and cinnamon, cardamom and mace. Lovely, Anna thought. And it was. Lovely and soothing. Tranquilizing. She spent forty minutes in the shop, picking up skeins of exotic wool and touching each of them longingly to her cheek before returning them to their shelves, all beneath the magnanimous gaze of the shop mistress. The tactile experience consoled her and the dread that had blackened Anna’s mood began to lift. In the end, she chose skeins of hand painted silk, of alpaca, and of cashmere—luxury threads she knew Ursula would adore but never purchase for herself. Anna left the knitting shop gratified that, for once, Ursula would be exactly pleased with what Anna offered her.

  She could take the number 33 bus directly to the Hauptbahnhof; that was Anna’s plan. The bus stop is on the eastern end of Neumarkt. So when she left the knitting shop Anna bore a stiff, immediate right. But she was laden with packages and she wasn’t paying attention to where she was going and she’d pulled her winter hat right down to her eyes. Therefore, Anna did not notice the man standing in the middle of the sidewalk, whose own face was buried in the crease of a Zürich city map. And he, so absorbed by the two-dimensional zigzaggery of cross streets on the thin, unwieldy paper, did not see Anna bearing down upon him.

  Synchronicity often masquerades as coincidence. As right-place-right-time-ness. As an and-then-suddenly kind of incident. In this case, it was a combination of all three that when balled together knotted themselves into a cliché as saccharine as a kitten in a floppy yellow bow. The trite expectedness of it was one of the proofs Anna clung to for ballast in the aftermath. See? How could it not have been true? Things like that don’t only happen in movies.

  She hadn’t been paying attention.

  She hadn’t been paying attention and she ran into the man.

  “Eggscusi!” Anna apologized immediately, using one of the few Swiss words she knew. The man steadied himself and waved her apology gently away. It was a simple, charming gesture. Then he, too, apologized, but in English and then he laughed a nervous laugh, and asked Anna in terrible German whether she knew where the Lindenhof was and if so, would she show him on the map? He was black-haired and pale-skinned and six inches taller than she. The map he tried to fold refused to be refolded. He shivered in the mist wearing only a light car coat the color of ash. A left front tooth was slightly chipped and he had a mole at the outer corner of his eye, also on the left side. Anna noticed these things. She pegged his accent as midwestern by its even phonetic keel. There was an upsurge in Anna’s heart.

  Is it possible to fall in love over a single look? Anna couldn’t say. But at the behest of a glance tossed casually down upon her, she was made witness, victim, and slave to the culmination of all her mythologies. And every heretofore moment in her life, the ones that mattered and the ones that only seemed to matter, had added up to the sum of this intense instant, this instant alone. In the short, sharp span of a single heartbeat, she knew that nothing she’d ever said or done, and nothing she would ever say or do again, would carry even half the tragedy of this.

  ANNA STARED OUT THE window on the train from Frick to Mumpf.

  I wish I’d never met the man.

  7

  A SECRET’S SAFEST HIDING PLACE IS IN THE OPEN. ATTEMPT A middling effort at keeping a cucumber-cool demeanor, and no matter the secret, everyone will accept you for who you appear to be. Consider the Nazi who flees to South America and lives out his life in quiet compliance, his remaining days steady and blameless. Mornings he wakes, he rises, he walks out into the open day. He mails letters, rides the bus, buys pears at a market. He eats lunch in an open-air café. He takes his coffee black and always reads the sports scores first. When a pretty girl passes, he tips his hat.

  No one knows that seventy years ago his jackboot cracked a Warsaw rabbi’s ribs or that he seized the watch fob that he wears from the rattletrap hands of a Romany horse groom just inside Treblinka’s gates.

  So say nothing. Don’t flinch. Act your part. No matter your secret. Atrocious or banal, unfathomable or mundane. It’s a method for the Aufseher and the adulteress alike. If you don’t advertise, you needn’t hide.

  And just like that, your big, black lies grow small and white.

  “DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING of alchemy, Anna?”

  “The belief that base metal can be turned into gold?”

  Doktor Messerli nodded. “Yes. In medieval Europe there were men who believed in this possibility. They spent their entire lives in experiment. Of course they did not succeed. But the premise of their work became the foundation for other scientific studies. Chemistry, mostly.”

  “Oh.”

  “Jung studied alchemy from a philosopher’s point of view. He compared it to analysis. A person achieves individuation through a similar process. She transforms the dark matter of the unconscious into consciousness. The soul’s gold. If you will.” Anna had stopped listening when she said “chemistry.”

  DAVID WAITED FOR THE Benzes on the platform. He cheek-kissed both Ursula and Anna (once, twice, three times as is the custom), gave Bruno a firm, jostling handshake, summarily mussed the boys’ hair, and took Polly Jean from Bruno’s arms, fussing briefly but immodestly over the baby before handing her off to Anna. Then they all slid into the car for the very short ride to David and Daniela’s house. It was a tight fit. Victor sat on Bruno’s knee, Charles on Ursula’s. They would travel only a kilometer and a half; David promised to steer the car with caution.

  Daniela and David had lived together since Daniela was nineteen. David was in his mid-forties then, old enough to have been Daniela’s father and still married to the mother of his children at the time their relationship began. But the common-law marriage of David and Daniela had endured now for two decades. They seemed to be doing something right.

  David was a crumpled, beige man with thick gray hair who was rarely seen without a calabash pipe between his lips. Anna liked David. Like Ursula he had been an educator; for more than thirty years he taught middle school social studies. David was gentle, agreeable, and possessed a pliable carriage not typically found in the Swiss. This made sense: he wasn’t. David was French.

  In less than five minutes, the car arrived at David and Daniela’s house.

  THE MAN WAS LOOKING for the Lindenhof. The Lindenhof is Zürich’s oldest quarter, the site of what was once an ancient Roman customs post. Now a park, most days (even b
ad-weather ones such as the very day in question) find the Lindenhof crowded with old men playing garden chess with toddler-sized Schachfiguren upon chessboards painted on the ground, and tourists enjoying the view. Zürich’s entire Altstadt is visible from the lookout on the square.

  When Anna answered in English an unmitigated relief drained the tension from his face.

  “Oh Jesus, you speak English. Thank God. My German’s no good.”

  Anna’s smile was sweet and amused. “That’s obvious.”

  He smiled back at her. “I’ve been working up courage to ask for directions.”

  Anna returned his returned smile.

  So began the affair between Anna Benz and Stephen Nicodemus.

  “First off,” Anna said, taking the map from his hands and turning it around, “you’ve got it upside down. The Lindenhof’s on the other side of the river.” A mild, embarrassed expression spread across Stephen’s face. Anna examined him closely. He was and wasn’t attractive at the same time. But it wasn’t his looks Anna fell immediately in love with (if one could have called it love and two years after the fact, Anna was no longer sure it ever was). It was his voice. It was a steady, low, solid voice with a gentle immediacy to it. He spoke with an intimate and confidential baritone. There was a fleshy texture to his words. Anna gave directions to the Lindenhof as slowly as she could. She wanted to draw the encounter out as long as possible before the thread of it snapped. So she leaned into the space of him, and breathed the air of him, tapped her hand and arched her back under the gaze of him, gestures she would find herself repeating sooner than either of them knew, and while dressed in fewer clothes. Anna fished a pen and a receipt from her purse, and wrote down the tram stops he wanted, the transfers he’d need to make. Anna handed him the paper and for a few awkward seconds the two of them stood cold and shivering and, though fully dressed, strangely naked before each other, not knowing what next—if anything—to say. They spoke in tandem:

  “I guess I should get home.”

  “Would you like to grab a coffee?”

  They shared an uncomfortable laugh and the inept silence returned once more. But not all will is free. Anna broke the self-conscious lull.

  Oh yes, she said. Let’s.

  DAVID LED THEM THROUGH the house and then to the back patio where the other guests had gathered. Ursula put Daniela’s gift on the dining room table, and Anna draped her purse and Polly’s diaper bag over the back of a chair and followed David and Bruno outside. Ursula paused in the kitchen, not immediately joining the group.

  Daniela and her friends sat upon benches flanking a large mahogany picnic table, itself shaded by an equally enormous umbrella. Everyone drank European beer—Feldschlösschen, Hürlimann, Eichhof—and almost everyone smoked European cigarettes—Parisienne, Davidoff, Gitanes. A radio was tuned to a Basel rock station. Daniela sat near the center of the table. She was telling a story. Anna couldn’t make out the details, but Daniela’s modulation suggested a ribald tale. Daniela waved her arms as she spoke, a half-empty beer glass in her left hand and in her right, the tail of a red feather boa one of her friends brought for her to wear. She interrupted the story with her own laughter. She was sincere in her present amusement, merry and gay. For a jealous moment Anna begrudged her this happiness. Anna hiked Polly farther up her hip and pulled her own sweater closed as if to protect herself from the sting of a joy she did not know. Bruno broke into his sister’s story to give her a birthday kiss. She set aside her beer, rose, and greeted the family. She seemed genuinely glad they had come.

  “Anna,” she began in English equally as grammatical but more heavily accented than her brother’s, “I am very happy to see you. You look so pretty. Polly is so big!” She liberated Polly Jean from Anna’s arms. Daniela loved her niece and would hold her the rest of the afternoon if Anna allowed it. Daniela worked in Basel for a fair trade organization. She was kind, thoughtful, funny, earnest, easy to like and all around, a very admirable person. Had Anna known her in any other context, perhaps they’d have been girlfriends. But she didn’t, and they weren’t. They were sisters-in-law. They were friendly. But they were not precisely friends.

  Daniela turned back toward her other guests, who nodded and waved politely at Anna. Anna looked around. Bruno had abandoned her for beer and Victor and Charles had run off to the barn, preferring the company of Rudi, David’s decade-old Saint Bernard, over the company of adults.

  With Polly in Daniela’s arms, Anna didn’t know what to do with her hands. She felt ill at ease, like a dateless girl at a school dance. She moved to join Bruno but he was already locked into conversation with another party guest, a man whom Anna had met before, but whose name she couldn’t recall. He was blond and muscular and only an inch or two taller than Anna. When he noticed Anna he widened the circle and invited her with an open hand to join. He interrupted Bruno mid-sentence, pointed to his beer, and raised his brow. “Willst du?” That’s what it sounded like he said. He was speaking Swiss. Did Anna want?

  Nice, so very nice to be asked.

  Anna stepped a little closer while shaking her head no. She wasn’t a beer drinker. The blond man nodded and smiled, then motioned Bruno to continue.

  ANNA LED STEPHEN TO a nearby bistro, the Kantorei. They sat in creaky wooden chairs, the legs of which were uneven and annoying. Anna ordered a brandy and Stephen asked for a beer. And then they began to talk. Stephen was a scientist on a short-term sabbatical from MIT with an appointment at the ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. It is one of the world’s top schools. Einstein was a graduate. Apart from the banks and businesses of Zürich’s financial industry, the ETH is the city’s most prestigious institution. Stephen had sublet an apartment in Wipkingen, a quarter on the city’s north side, and the namesake of the district’s train station. Stephen was, Anna learned, a thermochemist. A pyrologist. He studied combustion. Stephen was an expert on fire.

  In the difficult months following the affair, Anna had ample time to consider the symbolic implications of Stephen’s work and the effect the man had had on her. Anna’s conclusions were these: That fire is beautifully cruel. That fusion occurs only at a specific heat. That blood, in fact, can boil. That the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. That a heart will burn. And burn and burn and burn. That an ordinary flame’s hottest point cannot always be seen.

  DOKTOR MESSERLI OPENED A book and pointed to a series of related drawings depicting a couple making love in a fountain. In the first they’re rained upon. In the next their bodies have fused together and the pair—now singular—rise. “The result of a union of opposites. King and queen lie down in a mercurial bath. They face each other’s naked truths. The psychosexual union is a symbol of coming to consciousness.”

  Anna offered her a quizzical look. “What’s this got to do with me?”

  “Schau. The being dies and takes the body with it. But it returns. Transcendence has been achieved, but at a cost. The cost is death.”

  “Symbolic death?”

  “Of course.”

  ANNA STOOD TO THE side and watched her husband interact with his friends. It was strange seeing him like this, chummy and familiar, relaxed among old pals. Twenty years sloughed off him almost instantly. She imagined him a young rake, a scamp with a quirky smile knocking back a beer, his hands darting through the air as he told a story, recounted a soccer match, talked about a girl. That was Bruno at twenty-four. Anna would have been eighteen. Had they met twenty years ago, each would have scared the other off. Anna with her needy solitudes, Bruno with the confidence radiating from the very posture his body seemed to be recalling just then in Daniela’s backyard.

  Bruno downed the last swallow of his beer and turned to the blond man and asked if he wanted another. He called him Karl. Karl nodded, Jo gärn. As Bruno brushed by Anna he bent his head to hers and asked her. His eyes were kinder than they were twenty minutes earlier. It’s the beer, Anna thought. Bruno’s eyes always soften
ed when he started to drink. Water, please. Bruno nodded, winked, then marched off to grab drinks for all of them.

  He’d called the blond man Karl. Anna remembered now. He was Karl Trötzmüller, a childhood friend of Bruno and Daniela. Anna was embarrassed she hadn’t recalled his name right away. He’d been to the house a dozen times. She blamed her absentmindedness on the weather.

  “How are you, Anna? It is kind to talk to you. You see very pretty.” Karl spoke a very strange and extremely slipshod English. By “kind” he meant “nice,” and by “see” he intended “look.” Both were odd mistakes to make, but Karl was odd to begin with. Seemingly benign but without a doubt peculiar. Even his name was a little off the mark. It’s got too many umlauts, Bruno once snarked. It sounds made up. It’s not Swiss. Umlauts aside, Bruno was right: it wasn’t particularly Swiss. But it was Karl’s. And it suited him.

  Anna considered her clothes. She wore a rust-colored autumn dress styled in an A-line pattern, ribbed yellow tights, and black Mary Janes. Anna preferred the feel of dresses on her body. Slacks and jeans were too confining. Swiss women, Anna noticed, were not dress wearers, choosing more often the practicality of pants. Tomorrow, this dress would return to the closet until spring. As it was, the weather was cold enough that Anna had to complete the look with the only sweater she could lay her hands to as they rushed out of the house, a rough red cardigan. It ruined an otherwise stylish outfit. “I look like a Thanksgiving centerpiece,” Anna said to Karl, who laughed and made a hedging motion with his hands. “Well, I do not understand about that,” he offered, confusing “understand” with “know.” “We have not Thanksgiving in d’Schweez,” Karl said, using the native pronunciation of Switzerland’s name. He, too, wore an outlaw grin and stood in a near-reprobate stance, his hands in his pockets, his feet squarely planted, and his hips thrust forward like a come-on. Is this a come-on? Anna wondered. Is he looking me up and down? Yes, Karl eyed her as they spoke. But that’s what people do, they look at each other when they talk, Anna reminded herself. Not everyone’s as haphazardly moral as you.