“Because I know people,” Liesl added. “And the place you’ve been hanging out.”
Beate felt a door close, a train leave without her.
“I have a job there.”
“Haircuts!” Liesl said.
Liesl used to sleep next to Beate when she babysat, her snoring filling the room. She made Beate perform prank calls and mocked her for what she didn’t know.
“A bar like that,” Liesl said.
They passed the train station Beate still didn’t remember. In the backseat, Michael looked like he wanted to disappear.
“Leonie Felber told me you cut her grandfather’s hair,” Udo said. “Said it took years off.”
They turned, and Liesl’s blinker kept ticking.
“Cutting their hair,” Liesl scoffed.
“Just old men,” Beate answered.
“Why are you cutting hair?” Adela asked.
“A Stasi bar,” Liesl went on. “The city’s Stasi bar. Tell me you didn’t know that.”
The same men every night. Awake, as Beate was awake. The window was cool on her forehead. The blinker kept going. Beate couldn’t believe Liesl didn’t hear it.
“I didn’t know that,” Beate said.
In the backseat, Adela moved through a slideshow of Paul’s sanctimonious expressions. Beate hadn’t known. She wanted to say it again, but Adela wouldn’t believe her. Or she’d see it as proof of Beate’s indifference to anything beyond the perimeter of her own suffering.
Adela’s knees pressed into Beate’s seat. A small, shining stud glittered in her nose. Beate wondered if it was new, worried it wasn’t, that she hadn’t properly looked at her daughter in weeks. Adela’s knees jabbed again.
“You want to call me an asshole?” Beate asked her.
“Would that make you feel better?” Adela said. Raindrops jeweled the windows.
“I want you to say what you want to say,” Beate answered, though her daughter’s blame would have at least been a distraction.
Liesl turned on the radio. Madonna went on about praying. Michael had gotten a tape of hers years before and sung at the top of his lungs about all the ways he was a virgin. “Of course you’re a virgin,” Paul had snapped, and Michael stayed in his room for the rest of the day. Now he’d been picked up by the police. Beate had left Herr Baum lopsided.
“I forgot that Michael’s using your old last name,” Liesl said.
“That’s stupid,” Adela answered.
“Better than your new last name,” Michael said.
“What’s that?” Udo asked. His arm hung out the window. Beate imagined his knuckles on the pavement.
“Goebbels.”
Adela screamed. Liesl stopped the car. When it was clear Adela was through, Liesl started driving again. Beate asked why the police had called Liesl.
“I told them to,” Adela answered. “They called our house first.”
Liesl switched to the topic of new positions at the Pflegeheim where she worked. Told them about a supervisor she’d bring Beate to meet in the morning. “Working where I work,” Liesl said.
“I thought jobs were unicorns here,” Beate answered.
Liesl put a finger on her forehead, unicorn-style.
Their house seemed even larger spotlighted in Liesl’s headlights. Michael slunk out, his back sheaved in muscle. He moved callously, his hallmarks of remorse and humiliation missing.
“Michael,” Beate said. He kept walking.
“Stop,” she said, and grabbed his wrist.
Michael pulled free, his expression so un-Michael-like, she grabbed for him again. He squinted in the headlights. He pulled away with so much force her nails left scratches on his hand.
“When I say stop,” she said.
Michael held his chest high with a pride she’d always wanted him to feel. But the police had taken him. He’d thrown up in their car. She pictured him in the cruiser, cradling sick in his shirt as if it were a kitten.
“We’ll talk in the morning,” Beate said.
Adela, in her room, had turned on the stereo Udo had gotten for her. The N-word bounded from under her door, though Beate had learned that this word was unspeakable, as Hitler had been when she was a child. Beate leaned up the stairs to tell Adela it was late. But on one side of their house was rubble, the other an old man without electricity, who didn’t seem concerned about getting it back.
“Good night,” Beate said to no one.
* * *
Liesl picked Beate up early. In the Pflegeheim’s parking lot, she scuffed out her cigarette, checked her makeup in a mirror.
“I don’t deserve you,” Beate said. Maybe Liesl had told the police that Michael had just moved here. That his mother was unwell. That there was a doctor she would call.
“Tra-la-la,” Liesl answered.
Beate waited in a small office. A woman entered wearing an elaborately knotted scarf. She always wore scarves, according to Liesl, who said, “She can be a bitch, too.”
“Beate Sullivan,” the woman said.
“Haas,” Beate answered, deciding at that moment to follow Michael’s lead.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m sorry,” Beate answered.
“We’re both sorry.” They smiled.
“I’m recently divorced. I don’t know how much Liesl told you.”
“Your cousin is something,” the woman answered. Beate gave her a circumspect smile. “So you’re Beate Haas, then.”
As Beate confirmed this, the woman’s face changed. “Beate Haas who lived on Parkstraße?”
“I live there now,” Beate said. “Again.”
“It’s Karin Brandt!” the woman said.
Her hug was strong. Beate leaned into it with a relief she hadn’t expected. She closed her eyes to keep from crying at the messes she made and would keep making. Karin’s shoulder was bony. She wore strong perfume. Beate had no idea who she was.
“You haven’t changed!” Karin said, and told her how she’d come to school one morning and Beate wasn’t there. She’d thought nothing of it until a few days later when all signs of her had been removed from the classroom. “We even went to your house. Me and Dagmar and Gerhild.” Beate remembered none of those names. She thought of the American show Candid Camera that her mother had loved, this woman who taught political poetry laughing at sight gags and confounded expressions.
“And you’re divorced,” Karin said, and Beate watched her hastily borne marriage disintegrate, along with the youth she and Paul had leaned too heavily on. Paul supervised a team that mowed lawns, according to his one letter Beate read, with a truck to manage and mowers to load it with.
Karin told Beate that a former classmate was pregnant, that Stefan Kuhn, whom Beate was relieved to remember, had turned into a wild homosexual and gotten sick and died before his twenty-fifth birthday. Beate remembered Stefan and a handful of girls in fierce jump-rope competitions. Stefan bounced with glued-kneed precision; the girls jumped and held down their skirts at the same time.
“I can’t believe you’re back,” Karin said, and clasped her hands.
Beate gave in to this reunion’s excitement.
A few leaves on the tree outside had started to yellow. They’d only been in Kritzhagen a few months, though it felt endless. As Karin smiled and said that, barring anything unexpected, the job was hers, she walked Beate into the lobby, telling her that this building had once been a school. Beate pretended a job would fix things.
“We still find old textbooks as walls are torn down,” Karin said.
“My daughter would love that.”
“You have a daughter,” Karin answered, with a smile that made it clear she didn’t have one, or if she did, the girl was nothing like Adela. Karin touched Beate’s arm. Beate decided to remember her, even if it wasn’t true.
* * *
“I got a job,” Beate said as she walked in the front door. Adela sat on the sofa, underlining fiercely. Michael was curled into a wingback. Both her children wore Wa
lkmans. Beate thought to lie down, but made coffee instead. A few minutes later, Michael appeared in the kitchen, his headphones a necklace. Through them, a female singer oohed.
“Mutti,” he said. “You know I’d be happy to have you cut my hair sometime.”
Beate touched the side of his head, which he’d recently buzzed short. Tried moving her fingers through the top, which was long and pasted together with some sort of product.
“You do have a lot of hair,” she answered.
“I do,” Michael said. “And it might need cutting.”
With almost no time passing, he’d forgiven her for going out each night. For the birthday she’d forgotten, the gift she’d been too embarrassed to give him in person. She was relieved that he’d returned to her; also wished he’d stayed angry until she made it her work to apologize. He was too easy, she thought. He moved with a new confidence that terrified her. “Confidence,” Adela had said a week before, hoping that hearing the word would lead her to feel the feeling.
Beate poured herself a coffee, one for Michael, too. Cats on the garden wall hissed at one another. Michael and Beate looked outside where their apples were red and ready to pick. Once in in a while, one of them took a sip, or shifted in their seat, both of them knowing that her cutting his hair wasn’t what either of them wanted.
9
1969
Though the heart attack was minor, Vati didn’t seem relieved. He lay in a Cologne hospital and grumbled at the ceiling. When a doctor told him he was lucky, Vati answered that only idiots fell for luck and asked about the man’s credentials. Outside, wet winter trees swayed. Beate buttoned up the cardigan she’d thrown on in the middle of the night when her father had come to her door and whispered, “I think I might be dying.” In the cab to the hospital, he’d pointed to an upcoming block. “See that?” he asked. “I’ll be dead by then.”
But he’d lived.
Beate sat at his bedside, flipping through a magazine. A nurse walked in wearing squeaking shoes.
“Feeling better?” she asked.
“Better than what?” Vati answered, and bit his bottom lip.
Beate’s blushing heated her ears.
“Your grandfather is lively,” the nurse said later, as Vati took an openmouthed nap.
“My father.”
“Oh,” the nurse answered. “And where’s your mother?”
“Room 272.” The nurse pulled the blanket toward Vati’s chin. In sleep, his face turned mean. “She had an operation three days before.”
“So both of your parents?”
“Two parents in one hospital,” Beate said. “Like a word problem.” She had to dig a finger into her thigh to keep from laughing. She wore a dress she’d sewn, but hadn’t had time for socks. Her feet stuck to the insides of her loafers.
Toward the end of their first year in Cologne, Mutti started to experience pain that left her leaning against park benches and sucking down handfuls of antacids. Finally—when Vati was at work, Beate at school—a neighbor found her lying on their building’s stairs and took her to the hospital, where they discovered she needed a radical hysterectomy. “Radical,” Beate had murmured until her father told her she was too old to talk to herself, though he did it all the time. Two nights later it was his turn. He woke Beate in the middle of the night: “My heart,” he said, hair weedy and wild. “It’s going crazy.”
Beate spent half the day with her father. She switched to her mother in the afternoon. Later, a nurse showed her an empty room she could sleep in. Its window looked onto an air shaft. A pole to hold an intravenous drip sat next to the bed. Beate slept in bursts. She woke up sure it was morning, though the clock climbed toward midnight. The air shaft outside gave off a column of steam.
The next morning a different nurse woke her. “Why are you in street clothes?” she asked. “Where’s your ID bracelet? How am I to know what’s wrong with you?” She left a hospital gown, and Beate thought to play along, to pretend she had one of the sicknesses she’d learned about in biology—cystic fibrosis or color blindness. But she slipped down a back staircase instead, into an employee parking lot. She passed a clutch of cafeteria workers in hairnets. They smoked and drank coffees. It was six in the morning.
* * *
She forged a note from Vati explaining her absence: My wife and I have been hospitalized for different reasons.
“Differently sick?” the secretary at school asked.
“Heart problems and lady problems,” Beate answered.
The woman’s face tightened. She touched her nose with a pencil’s eraser. When she asked whom Beate was staying with, she answered, “A friend in my building.”
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“Dagmar von Grimmelshausen.”
The secretary’s eyebrows lifted.
“A friend but grown up,” Beate said, and pictured the neighbor who’d brought Mutti to the hospital, a war widow whose adult son lived in England. Her apartment was a shrine to this boy, now man. His bedroom intact; his most recent correspondences patchworked her table.
The secretary asked her to bring the neighbor’s phone number the next day, though Beate could sense that this woman wanted to abdicate responsibility. She went to class and even raised her hand in geometry, which she’d studied in the East already. “The first is scalene, the second congruent,” she said. Beate grew excited to go home that night alone.
After visiting each parent in the hospital, both of them the color of boiled fish, Beate got to their apartment and closed the curtains. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror only in underpants. Her breasts, recent arrivals, were small. She put her hands over them and squeezed and thought about the substitute teacher they’d had when Frau Bern had been floored by the flu. At certain moments he’d been trembling and nervous. In others he seemed to see school as Beate did, as both stupid and necessary. He also had lovely forearms. She pinched. The pink of her nipples shifted to red. She stopped and moved through the house mostly naked, eating a hunk of cheese. When it was time to sleep and she was awake, Beate drank wine.
The next night she ate bread and watched television and drank more wine. The phone rang. Beate didn’t answer. When it rang again, she picked up. It was Vati.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“The bathroom,” she lied.
“I had a dream that I was in a basement,” he said.
He breathed as if he’d climbed several flights of stairs.
“Was it frightening?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just woke up and remember being in a basement. Not what it felt like, or why I was there. If I could get out or had to stay in.”
Beate imagined the basement’s damp walls, her father a flailing bug on its floor. Vati so convinced it’d been real that he woke up and called her. Two nights before, he’d been convinced of his death. Each block he got to, he said, “Dead at the next one.”
“I’m not sleepy,” Beate said. “You can call whenever.”
She moved to the bathroom mirror and pulled down her underwear. Through the neighboring wall, Frau Kammer talked to her dog, an animal always dressed up in different bibs and collars.
* * *
Two nights later, when Beate ran out of wine, she stopped a young man in the building who was sometimes pleasant to her. They stood in the stairwell. She asked him to buy her a bottle. He agreed without hesitation and she worried that he’d want to come in when he delivered it. But when he appeared, he showed no interest in coming inside and she turned disappointed, wondering if her worry had been a wish. He walked down the hall, his hair and turtleneck the same color.
* * *
On the fifth night she arrived home late. Mutti had kept her for longer than usual. She was filled with questions about the weather and the state of the apartment. People keep talking of snow, but it stays raining. The apartment looks as you left it. Machines beeped. Mutti’s large breasts drooped under her hospital gown. “I’m doing well in math,�
� Beate said, though there was no evidence that she was doing anything other than fine. Mutti touched her hand. Beate turned sad, though she couldn’t think why. Each night she’d gotten naked and drunk wine and explored drawers. She’d found their fake passports under Mutti’s stockings. Sitting next to her mother, whose chin and neck turned to a single entity, the freedom she’d relished for the last few nights suddenly seemed dangerous. As she let Mutti hold her hand, she imagined what might have happened had the young man wanted to come in, Beate so unsure of herself that she would have said yes without knowing if yes was what she meant. And if the young man had wanted to pinch her breasts as she had the night before, she couldn’t imagine how she would have reacted. Knowing what she wanted turned as sinister as the freedom she had, the notes she’d forged, and the wine she’d drunk, Beate lying to everyone, and no one bothering to check if her stories were true. Her feet ached in her shoes. That ache moved to her stomach, where her heart also seemed to live. Everything in her came together as water wended toward a drain.
* * *
Beate’s father returned home three days later and laid claim to the sofa. From across the room, it looked as if he had no eyelashes.
“Who was it you stayed with?” her father asked.
“A friend,” Beate answered.
“I want to call her family,” he went on. “To thank them.”
Beate had at the ready the name of a girl from school who smelled of old bread. She’d bribe her with kindness. Or she’d give Vati the wrong number.
“I already did,” Beate answered. He seemed satisfied, and she made him tea. He didn’t bring up the fact that he’d called the apartment and she’d answered. Made no mention of the basement dream, the death he’d predicted as they passed the movie theater, then a stationery store. If he pressed her, she’d tell him the truth, that she’d wanted to stay in their apartment. Also that, after nights when it felt good, she turned frightened that she could forge notes and drink too much wine with no one telling her to stop. The kettle boiled. Her father turned on the radio and didn’t bring up her friend again.
The Recent East Page 11
