The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “I’m divorced, too,” Liesl said. “I’m not saying you failed.”

  “I’m not divorced,” Beate answered, hanging on to the technicality of the papers she hadn’t sent back.

  “But he’s here?” Liesl asked.

  Beate answered California. Liesl sat up and attempted some sort of hula.

  “I’m just saying you’re divorced,” Liesl answered. “Like me. Cousins divorced together.”

  “You’ll have to meet my children sometime,” Beate said.

  “Who do you think let me in?”

  They’d opened the door, told Liesl that their mother was asleep, though morning was probably over. The way her children saw her crystallized, though Beate couldn’t think how to otherwise proceed. Liesl’s nails shone like a new car.

  “So you’ve met them,” Beate said.

  “Yes. And their German,” Liesl answered. Beate waited for a comment about how Michael butchered the umlaut. “They hardly have accents. Let’s make coffee.”

  In the living room, Adela read one of her endless inventory of books. Michael fiddled with curtains he may have found, or that may have been left by the people who’d lived there before.

  “You’ve met my cousin,” Beate said.

  “Tante Liesl,” Adela answered.

  Liesl took a cigarette from her purse, pointing to it with raised eyebrows.

  “You may smoke in here,” Beate said.

  “I was asking if you wanted one,” Liesl answered.

  Michael moved into their language of shifting eyebrows. Adela pulled a thread from her sweater.

  “You do a lot with your face,” Liesl said. Smoke from her cigarette snuck toward the window.

  “Yes, I’ll have one,” Beate answered.

  Liesl’s son arrived with lunch. He was giant. When he spoke, Beate recognized his voice as something she’d heard most mornings through the floorboards.

  They moved to the table Michael had procured, though Adela chose the floor. Liesl smoked while the rest of them ate. She talked about how the old folks’ home where she worked was filling up now that they were Western and people wanted to use the bedroom they’d “stored Oma in for all the shoes they’re going to buy.”

  “A lot of shoes,” Michael said.

  “I like your hair,” Liesl answered.

  He’d buzzed the sides. The top a sea of waves and reconsiderations.

  “I’m trying something.” He smiled.

  “He’s always trying something,” Adela answered from the floor.

  “If there’s no struggle, no progress,” Beate said.

  “Yes,” Michael answered. “That.”

  Beate wanted to be back in her sleeping bag. For day to fast-forward to evening.

  “He found clippers on one of his searches,” Adela added.

  “Searches of what?” Liesl asked.

  “He goes into some of the houses here.”

  “The empty ones,” Michael interjected.

  “How do you think we got this table?” Adela said. “These plates?”

  “We can get you new plates,” Liesl added.

  “With what money?” Beate asked.

  “Wasn’t your parents’ money returned to you? The money the GDR held after you—what was it—pretended to be someone else and snuck out?”

  “There is some money, yes,” Beate said.

  Paul had recently sent a check, too. Beate thought of ripping it to pieces as she’d seen people do in movies. But each time she’d seen that performance of outrage she thought the same thing: Take the money, stupid. The thought of Paul’s money left her feeling better, then worse, then tired.

  “I thought my father talked to your mother,” Beate said.

  “My mother thought our phone was tapped,” Liesl answered. “But these houses. You just walk in?”

  “We need a lot of things,” Michael said.

  “No, we don’t,” Adela answered.

  “You are sleeping on the floor.” This came from Liesl.

  Heat padded Beate’s face. She sat on a chair Michael had found. Drank from a glass that had appeared in their cabinets. There are no jobs, her letter went on, though most days she was too disheartened to even look at the listings. The one time she’d called about a job the man who’d answered told her that if there was a job there he wanted to know about it, too, so he could apply.

  Liesl thanked Beate for lunch, though Udo brought the food. Beate went to lie down. She wished it were eight hours later so she could wander to the bar, where Willy was always cleaning glasses, where Ernst Träger either answered her questions in detail or ignored her.

  * * *

  Two hours later, Liesl returned with a delivery van in tow. “I have a friend,” she said, “who works in furniture.”

  Deliverymen slid a sofa into the living room. Michael commented on its beigeness. Mattresses came next; their white filled the doorframe like prairie snow.

  “What do I owe you?” Beate asked.

  “It’s my welcome-home gift,” Liesl answered. “Welcome home!” she ta-da’d. “Udo. It needs to be a little to the left.”

  Udo moved the sofa a little to the left. Adela sat on it and started reading.

  Beate looked at the room for the first time in days. Over a broken windowpane, someone had taped a square of cardboard. A garish rug sat centered on the floor and a series of mousetraps lined its baseboards. Liesl moved to the door. Without her, they might have been sleeping on the floor forever.

  “Why haven’t you visited until now?” Beate asked.

  Liesl appeared annoyed, appeared also to enjoy her annoyance.

  “I only knew you’d returned because of a friend of a friend with a job at the housing department. She’d recognized your name on a folder.”

  After they’d defected, Beate’s and Liesl’s families had cut off contact, though she wasn’t clear why. Part of Beate had forgotten about Liesl, though as her cousin stood in the living room, Beate couldn’t understand how she’d gone on so long without her. Adela thanked Liesl for the furniture. Liesl touched her and Adela didn’t even seem to mind. This bothered Beate the most—the easiness Adela suddenly projected. The sofa she curled up on after her residency on the floor.

  Liesl announced that they had to go, and hooked arms with Udo. As she watched them walk down the driveway, Beate felt all the loveliness and difficulty of raising children alone. She wanted Liesl back. Wanted her to talk until the boredom of it lulled Beate to sleep, to remember the feel of boredom, its taste. Liesl and Udo climbed into her car. Beate slipped into her room, where a mattress now sat, along with a chair and lamp Michael had left there.

  Beate hung out of her window. Michael and Adela talked to Liesl in the driveway.

  “Come for dinner sometime,” Beate called.

  Both of her children found this invitation amusing. At least they were united in feeling for a change.

  * * *

  The next night Beate stayed in. Michael fell asleep before the sun set. Adela came into the kitchen, where Beate was eating toast, and said, “Toast isn’t dinner.” Later, both children asleep, she cleaned the cushions on the chairs Michael had gotten. As she scrubbed, images of Paul with some mystery woman taunted her. Paul’s hand on her arm. His scruff scratching her neck. When the woman asked about his divorce, he’d tell stories about his nervous ex, downplaying his own anger which was toughest for Beate because she couldn’t catch its rhythms. There were weeks when he smiled at everything and joked about his clumsy thoughtlessness. Then one morning she’d lean close and he’d say she’d woken him up “with the leaning.” She’d be at work and he’d call, insisting she hadn’t told him she had a shift. And though she remembered telling him, she apologized. Even when he was terrible, when she felt her own anger well up, her defense turned to a slippery path, Beate stumbling, Paul looking down at her. Perhaps she’d tricked him with pregnancy, as he sometimes suggested, though when she’d said she was open to abortion he’d answered no. Perhaps her shy fear, or
the way she opened her eyes too wide when he told her difficult things, made it impossible for Paul to tell her the truth. Perhaps what she thought of as truth was another of her excuses.

  A trap snapped, a mouse, newly dead, in its clutches. Beate scrubbed another cushion, sewed up a tear.

  When she lay down, her sleeping bag on the mattress felt like a coffin. It began to rain, and Beate opened the window. She leaned forward until rain pummeled the back of her neck. She tiptoed down the stairs and paced the living room as she’d done when she’d tried to soothe her infant children. Michael had once come home terrified when he’d heard something at school about spontaneous combustion. Adela had rattled off reasons he wouldn’t explode at the table, or in his room, or while sitting on the toilet. But as Beate paced, his worry felt right. She finally fell asleep when the sun began to rise. And Paul infested her dreams. She woke up not remembering anything in particular but knowing he’d been there.

  * * *

  As the Scribbler sketched Beate’s hand on her beer, an old, amused-looking man turned to her and said: “I’m still a handsome one, yes?” and moved his stool closer.

  The old man’s eyebrows froze halfway up his forehead. Everyone else in the bar stayed quiet.

  “You might fancy going to dinner with me,” he added.

  Beate thought of the car that had chased her there, its wheels on the pavement.

  “You’re too old for me,” she answered. “And you need a haircut.”

  “Okay, then. Cut my hair.”

  Rudi laughed, cheeks round with beer. “Shut up, Rudi,” the man said. His name was Nils. “Willy, hand me those scissors.”

  “I never said I’d cut your hair,” Beate said.

  “Listen to the lady,” Willy added.

  “I’m asking you,” Nils said.

  The men looked at her. If she seemed too eager, they might find her dubious. If she said no, they might decide she was too different from them. Beate wanted to keep coming there, to join in their collective remembering. The Scribbler held his beer in midair. The scissors sat on the bar. As Beate picked them up, Nils’s grin spread to outlandish proportions.

  “Beate,” Rudi said. None of them had used her name before.

  “Willy,” she asked, “don’t imagine you have a comb back there?”

  He didn’t, though an observer offered his. Nils wore a lascivious smirk.

  “Remember I’m holding something sharp,” Beate said.

  “A tool and a weapon,” another man added.

  Beate started in back. The scissors caught as she worked to close them, and she worried she’d started something she couldn’t finish. Beate pulled out a cord of curls. They clumped like damp grass and smelled unclean. On the radio, an old song played about getting love and losing love and the sea. She teased out pieces, sped up until she lopped one too short and chided herself to go slow, which reminded her of a poem she’d read in high school. “Slow,” it had warned. “Slow!” it demanded.

  Breath whistled in and out of Nils’s nose. She didn’t want to go to dinner with him, but as hair tickled her hands, the idea of being taken to dinner awakened in her a forgotten hopefulness. The back of his head turned tidy. She moved to the sides, checking for evenness as she’d seen hairdressers do. Nils’s forehead was rutted with wrinkles.

  “Close your eyes,” she said, and moved to the front.

  Beate combed hard, a reminder that a haircut didn’t make him younger or her interested. He let out an ooph as the comb snagged. Dander dotted its tines. Hair once wily fell into place, and Beate warmed with competence. Bottles glowed in the scissors’ blades.

  “Now you look like the respectable drunk you are,” she said.

  Nils went to the bar’s back mirror and smiled with surprise.

  “Just so you know,” Beate said, “I’m not cleaning this up.”

  Nils swept up his hair. Everyone else went back to not talking.

  * * *

  On her next visit, Lars Berger asked if she could cut his, too. Though she was relieved, Beate enacted reluctant surprise. She cut Lars’s hair, and as she did, he told her about his daughter who’d moved to the West.

  “I hardly hear from her now,” he said.

  “Too busy being Western,” Beate answered. “Going to the cinema five times a day.”

  He asked about her parents; Beate told him they’d passed. She pressed a clump of hair off his neck with her thumb. “But they were old. When they had me.”

  “And you had your children young,” he answered.

  When Mutti had asked Beate why she was keeping the baby who turned out to be Michael, she didn’t tell her mother that there was a greed she felt for Paul she’d rarely felt for anything, a greed that left her nodding when he’d said she should keep it, a greed that might have been her youth, mistaking what felt good for a place with sturdy walls and a basement.

  “Maybe you and your daughter will be close again,” Beate said.

  Herr Berger’s face told her she was sweet for saying what wasn’t true. He bought her a drink. Beate was thinking of heading out when Max Kellner asked shyly if she might cut his as well. She agreed, cutting hair a communion she hadn’t expected. Her hands turned wildness to order. She heard them breathing; her fingers lingered on their necks and collars. When she finished, Max slid fifteen marks into her hand.

  “Is this my job now?” she joked.

  “Aren’t you looking for a job?” an old man asked, cranky, then smiling wide in crankiness’s reprieve.

  Max Kellner touched her shoulder with grandfatherly affection, and Beate felt, for the first time since they’d gotten to Kritzhagen, a relief in having returned. She hoped for more hair to cut but had to content herself with small currents of conversation until Rudi told her he was tired and the two of them walked home. He pointed out buildings, asked if she remembered them. “Maybe,” Beate answered. She might remember one day. Might be in the midst of getting on a bus when the landscape in front of her unlocked and she remembered everything.

  8

  Within days there was a list on the chalkboard at the back of the bar. Its title: Hair.

  “Look what you got yourself into,” Willy said.

  Most nights, Beate stayed until after the bar officially closed, cutting as Willy cleaned tables and flipped chairs on top of them. One night she finished with eighty marks and drank too many beers. She walked home alone. Streets she traveled down were a blur. A soreness spread across her neck that she knew would blossom into a headache. In the morning she crept into the kitchen. Michael sat at its table, Adela on a folding chair, reading.

  “You’re awake,” Michael said.

  “Is there aspirin?” she asked.

  Adela read out loud about Kaiser Wilhelm’s secret country getaway with a basement casino.

  Beate’s tongue was so dry that the aspirin crumbled across it, chalky and bitter and awful. She gulped down an entire glass of water. Michael looked at her with amused concern. He was perhaps growing a goatee.

  “She’s not awake,” Adela said, as if Beate weren’t in the room.

  Beate walked upstairs, annoyed, though her daughter hadn’t been wrong. Only when she got to her sleeping bag, when she lay down and felt the ache from the schnapps Herr Träger kept buying for her, did she count forward from their arrival date and realize that the day before had been Michael’s birthday.

  * * *

  Liesl showed up one afternoon with groceries. Also with a woman named Dora who remembered Beate as a child. “Just the same,” Dora kept repeating. Beate had no memory of her.

  “Remember that poem you loved to recite?”

  “Her mother was a poet,” Liesl said.

  “She studied poetry,” Beate answered. Liesl’s shrug suggested that meant the same thing.

  Another morning she called and told Beate she was excited about dinner that night. Beate had been startled when the phone rang. She hadn’t realized they’d gotten one and wanted to ask Liesl if she’d been the one
who’d had it turned on.

  “What dinner?” Beate asked, though she meant to ask what was exciting about this particular one. After Liesl’s machine-gun cackle faded, she told Beate about the meal Adela and Udo had been planning for days.

  “It was her idea,” Liesl said.

  “Adela’s?”

  “I always forget her name.”

  When Beate asked what the dinner was for, Liesl answered that it was a thank-you. “To me!” she added. “For the sofa and mattresses. When I told the girl I could get you a bigger table, she looked like she would weep.”

  “She’s not really a weeper.”

  “Delilah,” Liesl said.

  “Adela,” Beate corrected.

  And that evening, Udo and Adela brought that new table into the backyard. In the kitchen, they chopped and stirred. “I got those pots,” Michael said as he wandered past, as if pots were his singular invention. Beate put on a dress, told herself that this dinner would be exciting. And now my cousin is here all the time. And her Viking son, she added to the unfinished tome to her husband. She pictured Paul reading it to some woman. Part of Beate was ashamed, part of her wanted to warn the woman that his certainty would feel like a blessing until it didn’t. Liesl arrived with wine. Forks clanked, and birds moved between branches.

  “Udo tells me the divorce is official,” Liesl said. Lipstick marked the rim of her glass.

  “There are papers I have to return,” Beate answered.

  “I returned them,” Adela said. “Was going to the post office anyway.”

  The papers had been in a folder Beate labeled Germany. Her daughter must have been snooping, or trying to find out how to get their phone turned on. Beate wanted to feel relief, to know that relief wouldn’t give way to darker feelings of floating in the sea at night. The earth is the earth is the earth, her mother used to say. Beate had hated it. Now she nodded. Michael let out a noise that might have been a gag.

  “You’re choking?” Liesl asked.