The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

Michael crouched between two parked cars, trying to figure out what he might do. Running the dozen blocks home felt impossible without clothes. There were no empty houses nearby. “Asshole Adela,” he mumbled, though when he’d gotten out of the water and saw she’d left with his clothes, he’d found it almost funny. He rubbed his goose-pimpled legs that, in their German weeks, had thickened from biking and pushing his dolly up hills. A car passed. Michael’s crouch deepened. But as he blew into his fists, he remembered a place from his notebook map that was only a block away. Michael moved his hands to his crotch and ran.

  He and Udo had returned to Lübeck earlier that day, where the same nurse told him the tests came back fine. On the train home Michael had cried, not for sadness or relief, but because he’d had too much to hold. Udo placed a hand on his leg and said, “I told you you’d be okay,” though he hadn’t said that exactly, but with the steady quiet with which he listened, the careful way he’d wrapped his wrist, Michael had sensed as much. Sensed also that, had things gone the other way, Udo would have taken care of him.

  Michael counted houses as he passed them, six left, then four, then one. He hid behind a shrub, trying to catch his breath. The dim house in front of him came into focus. In the months that followed, he would think back on Adela taking his dolly and his clothes, would watch his sister and Udo studying at their kitchen table, and hate her. For the clothes, but also the blankness she’d offer up when he made a joke or came home late or talked about a person from their American days. As fall fell into winter and Maxi would accept or reject Michael with mean indifference, it all would come to seem like Adela’s doing. He’d start referring to her as the Asshole, mumbling that during a winter storm when Maxi turned him down, or on the night when Michael stared at her for minutes and she wouldn’t look up at him. “A is for asshole,” he’d said, the meanness he saw in her flattening everything else he’d once known and felt about her. If she hadn’t thrown his dolly into the river, Michael would never have gotten naked to go in after it. If she hadn’t ignored him when he told her that taking his clothes was a shit thing, he might have forgiven her.

  But that night, what his sister had done felt like a gift. And as Michael moved closer to that house and saw Maxi’s opened window, good feeling turned to helium.

  Michael climbed through the window. His wrist barely ached anymore. Getting close to sleeping Maxi, he turned shy. He thought to grab clothes from the floor, to dress and leave the way he’d come in.

  But Maxi stirred. Opening his eyes, he bolted to sitting.

  “Oh,” Maxi said, voice full of happy recognition. “You.”

  In that dim room, Michael could see Maxi’s ribs in rows, his dick moving toward hard. Maxi patted his mattress. He gave Michael a sleepy smile.

  “Here,” Maxi said, sliding over to make room for him.

  7

  The house felt foreign without furniture. There were walls where Beate remembered windows, rooms she had no recollection of. And it was giant. Looking for the toilet, she found another bedroom. She stumbled on the pantry and whispered, “This place just keeps going.” On their second night in Kritzhagen, jet lag putting her children to bed early, Beate was stuck awake. She started to clean, but it grew dark. So she walked. She passed the slurping bay, hoping it might speak to her. Skirted gulls gathered at trash cans and a waterside park in the midst of renaming. A sign for the People’s Garden leaned against a wall, the new one unimaginatively titled WATER VIEW. Beate got to a puddle and wanted to step into it. She wanted to recognize something.

  Walking again four nights later, Beate became convinced she was close to the sea. With each turn she felt certain she’d stumble onto sand, but found houses instead, then a long, lit-up building that looked like a prison. Two police officers smoked outside it. They nodded as she slowed. What was meant to be a fountain sat empty apart from a hedge of trash collecting there.

  “What’s this building?” Beate asked.

  “Train station,” an officer answered.

  Beate remembered the station they’d left from decades before as large, with arching windows.

  The officers lit more cigarettes. Beate wanted one. Even more, she wanted to be back in their tiny apartment in Glens Falls, the Hudson’s cool scent slipping through the window as she smoked and waited for Paul to come home. As awful as Paul sometimes was, he’d made decisions. The roiling in her gut she’d felt when they’d first arrived at their house returned. The building in front of her was a single story, its doors girded in bars.

  “Where is the other train station?” Beate asked, and tried to breathe in the cop’s smoke, to remember some dumb thing her mother used to say about the earth being the earth no matter its particulars. A bus barreled past; its single passenger stared at nothing. She wanted to ask where everyone was. To tell the officers she had children she couldn’t take care of.

  “There’s just one train station,” the officer said.

  He and his partner got into their car and rolled up its windows.

  * * *

  Beate had been relieved when Paul moved out. She’d warmed with mean triumph when she told him she and the children chose Germany and he looked as if his family moving thousands of miles away were a punishment he deserved. But a week before they were scheduled to leave, he showed up with Chinese. He spilled food on his lap, laughed as he dabbed his pants with a napkin. The children watched him with polite worry. Then he told them that he’d decided to move to his sister’s in California. Beate ate quickly. She felt what she later that night recognized as rage. Rage that this man who’d ruined so much had a second chance. Livid that he saw their move and copied, as if leaning over her shoulder to steal test answers. That anger mixed with other thoughts—divorced friends of his sister’s who’d only see Paul’s handsome fitness, who’d listen to his story of the job he’d lost and nod fiercely as if he were the victim. Now Paul was in a place with electricity and neighbors when what Beate had thought would be a glorious return felt like squatting.

  She was mumbling to herself about Paul—so lost in it that she couldn’t have said if she were speaking German or English—when a car crawled up next to her. The driver rolled down his window and asked if he knew her. Like everything in this place, he was ugly and strange. A Freddy Quinn song played on his radio. Beate wanted to tell him that her husband had copied her, though she wasn’t sure if husband was still her word to claim. She was in a city where she recognized nothing, without a job or a single friend. The reality of this left her dizzy.

  “Hello?” the man said. “No German? Don’t tell me you’re one of those Turks.”

  His chuckles drowned out the car’s wheels across the pavement. Fingers of heat climbed Beate’s neck.

  “No, thanks,” she said.

  “You don’t even know me!” he answered.

  “I thought you recognized me,” Beate said.

  His face relented as if she’d scored an impressive point.

  On his radio, Quinn sang, “Boy, never go to sea again, don't ever go again.” She’d always hated Quinn. Girls in her seventh-grade class had teared up as he’d spouted out one trite line after another, reminding Beate that, despite her efforts against it, her parents had turned her into a snob.

  Beate turned a corner; the car followed.

  “Can I at least give you a ride?” the man said.

  “I can’t hear you,” Beate answered.

  He laughed with delight. Beate smacked the hood of his car.

  “Hey, now!” he said, and she smacked it again.

  They passed a pharmacy with a single bulb burning between its aisles. Beate felt terrified, also angry with Paul, who’d led her to this place, this man, this street.

  A sign for a basement bar glowed, and Beate slipped inside.

  A handful of old men sat at the bar. The bartender cleaned a glass and had a graying pompadour. Beate ordered a schnapps, drank it in one swallow. The bartender poured her another. Beams ribbed the bar’s ceiling.

  “Th
is place been around awhile?” Beate asked, an inkling rising in her that she’d been here or someplace similar with her father, the two of them slurping mussels from a black bowl.

  The bartender nodded. One patron appeared to be on the verge of sleep. Another scribbled on some paper.

  “It’s usually this empty?” Beate asked.

  “Off and on,” the bartender answered, as the door opened, and the Quinn fan sauntered inside.

  “I haven’t been here in ages,” he said, sitting next to Beate and ordering a beer.

  She thought of her children at home, how she’d snuck out like some wily teen. Just take them, she could write to Paul, sure he’d write back that his sister only had one guest room, which he’d already laid claim to.

  “You know her?” the bartender asked.

  “No,” Beate said.

  “He’s bothering you?”

  “No,” the man answered.

  Two stools down, the scribbler smiled at Beate’s unwanted company.

  “Hans,” he said, “tell your father it’s been too long. That I’ll call him soon.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Hans said.

  “He’s well?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good,” the old man said. “So you don’t know this woman?”

  “I don’t,” Hans answered. He took another sip, nodded, and left. Rain that had threatened all night tapped against the bar’s window.

  “What day is it?” Beate asked.

  The bartender chuckled; the scribbler blew out his lips like a horse. It felt good to hear laughter, to be awake with others in a place she might have been to with her father, though she only remembered it’d been in a basement, that there might have been tablecloths.

  “I’ve just moved back,” she said in defense.

  When the men asked from where and she answered, “USA,” they laughed louder. The bartender poured her another drink.

  “Are you from Hollywood?” one asked.

  “Maybe a cowboy?” said another.

  “That’s her horse parked outside.”

  Rain rattled the window. The old men were dressed up but ragged.

  “That will have to be my last drink,” Beate said.

  “You came alone? From the USA, I mean,” another man asked.

  “I lived here when I was young. I’ve come back for my parents’ house. With my children.”

  The droopy-faced man appeared surprised at this. The scribbler answered that Kritzhagen wasn’t Bosnia. The schnapps burned as it traveled down Beate’s throat.

  “No,” Droopy answered. “It’s nice that not everyone’s leaving.”

  Finishing her drink and standing up, Beate realized she didn’t have any money.

  “Willy,” she said, using the name she’d heard one of the patrons call him. “May I call you Willy?”

  “That’s my name,” the bartender answered, his pompadour a piece of art. She said his name, hadn’t said any names apart from her children’s in weeks. No one had come, as she’d imagined, to see how she was settling in. No one there remembered her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I seem to have. I came in because of—”

  “Hans Vogel,” Droopy added.

  “I wasn’t thinking. I was walking. I know this sounds like some line—”

  “Pay next time,” Willy said.

  Beate’s drink was gone, but she didn’t move. She hadn’t had a drink since moving here and felt it loosen her shoulders. The droopy-faced man asked where she lived. Beate recited her address, feeling like a child.

  “I don’t live far from there,” he answered. “We can walk together.”

  “You’ll be great protection,” another patron joked.

  “That would be lovely,” Beate said, and she and this old man, Rudi, left.

  A car rumbled past. Streetlamps glowed against the puddles. Getting to her house, Rudi told her he knew it for some reason he couldn’t now remember.

  They said good night and Rudi walked in the direction they’d just come from. She was about to call out to him when he said, “I don’t live far.” He waved and she waved and it seemed neither of them wanted to stop waving first. And though this place stayed unfamiliar, she grew hopeful that if she kept walking, looking, something she passed a dozen times would catch, opening doors that looked like walls, trees rewinding to decades before when they were new and delicate, with leaves she could count on her fingers. She would get to a place and remember something she’d felt there—confusion, or a joy so strong it made her stomach ache. Beate stood in the driveway until Rudi disappeared. She walked across their lawn, hoping Michael soon found something to mow it with.

  But as she stepped into the house, as she looked at her watch and saw that it was close to one in the morning, shame wiped those possibilities clean. Beate stared at the staircase. Michael might slide down it and ask where she’d been. Even worse, Adela. In her best moments, Beate appreciated her daughter’s intelligence. In others, Adela carried Paul’s sense of knowing better. She stood in the dark house, filled with furniture from god knows where. With each stair she took, she waited to be found out. Beate’s heart raced and she wondered if it was normal to be afraid of one’s children, to get to a new place and feel as young as she’d been when she’d left it. She got to the landing; it felt like a victory. She slipped into her sleeping bag and set her alarm, though when it sounded hours later, she smacked it off, stared at the ceiling, and decided that sleep was her best way to take care.

  As Beate moved in and out of sleep, she heard doors close, louder sounds when Michael brought home what turned out to be two large chairs. When she got up and saw them, she was overcome by their stink. Beate considered cleaning the cushions’ covers, but the washing machine the previous residents had left behind required electricity. She walked into the kitchen. Adela sat on its floor, reading. When Beate asked how she was, her daughter asked what she knew about one of the Wilhelms, looked unsurprised when her mother answered, “Not much, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ve never understood saying ‘I’m afraid’ like that,” Adela answered.

  Though it was a common expression, it felt like Beate’s wrong to right.

  “I don’t know,” Beate said.

  “I’m afraid,” Adela answered, and went upstairs.

  * * *

  There were eight men in the bar the next night, including a man Beate could only remember as the Scribbler.

  “You’re back,” he said.

  She sat next to him. On a napkin, he began a sketch of her face.

  A painting on the bar’s far wall showed a sailboat knifed by waves. She asked about it. Men answered with stories about a time when water meant escape. When swimming too far out meant the Volksmarine dragged you back in again.

  Willy took Beate’s glass and refilled it, though it was still half full. The men talked in shorthand about a place they’d known, jobs that vanished from one day to the next. Sometimes they told stories about their children who’d moved to Hamburg or Munich. Or they reminisced about a person who’d gone to the West as if they’d passed from living to dead, or maybe the other way around.

  * * *

  Though Beate did her best to ignore it, the knocking on her bedroom door continued. She lay on the floor and pulled her sleeping bag to her chin. “An emergency?” she asked, half hoping an emergency meant someone would find children left to their own devices, a mother who couldn’t stop sleeping on the floor, and ask, Where is the father? She asked herself the same question when Michael and his dolly rumbled into the driveway. When her children whipped down the street on bikes she’d never seen before. In their weeks in this place, Beate had expected to wake up one morning and feel ready to be here, to walk into stores to buy things, chatting with salespeople about prices or the weather. But each night after the bar she lay staring at the ceiling. And each morning when she planned to wake up, sleep pulled her back under.

  A final knock, and Beate’s bedroom door opened. A woman stood in its frame. She
was stout in a way men admired. Her short hair haloed in blond. Something in her posture seemed familiar, but Beate no longer trusted what she did and didn’t recognize.

  “Beate Sigrid,” the woman said, smiling a familiar smile. It was her cousin. When Beate had left at age twelve, Liesl had been sixteen. The room felt large on top of her.

  “Liesl Katarina,” Beate answered. Tears raced down Liesl’s face, which was pretty, despite its primer of makeup.

  “Sleeping during the day,” Liesl said.

  Her voice had deepened since adolescence. She reeked of cigarettes. Beate added standing up to greet her cousin to the list of things she should’ve done.

  Liesl moved to the floor and hugged Beate, which in their prone position felt both labored and intimate. Liesl’s face was inches away. Her breasts pressed against Beate’s shoulder.

  “You’re on the floor,” Liesl said.

  “I don’t mind it,” Beate answered.

  “Your children don’t mind it?”

  Pieces of Liesl resurfaced—her easy indignation, commands in the guise of suggestion.

  The letter to Paul that Beate had been working on lay under her pillow.

  “I have an old boyfriend who can get you mattresses,” Liesl said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “The American husband knows you’re sleeping on the floor?”

  “I don’t know what he knows,” Beate answered.

  In the letter, Beate wound around the idea that taking the children had been a mistake. She didn’t have Paul’s certainty, didn’t come up with solutions that made sense to other people. When their son had been born and naming him felt like a test she hadn’t studied for, he’d smiled and said, “Michael,” as if it were the easiest thing. The letter crinkled under Beate’s shoulder. I am not feeling as I expected to feel here, it began. Little problems arise and it’s like something is stuck in my throat. As she lay there, Beate decided to replace that line with the more benign: Here, it is difficult in ways I hadn’t imagined. Her cousin’s chest crept up Beate’s shoulder. The towel she used as a curtain flapped in the wind.