* * *
Mutti soon joined their apartment’s infirmary. She walked slowly, spent each day in her bathrobe. Their illness disgusted Beate, though she knew this disgust was unkind. She wandered after school or napped in far corners of the library and dreaded the moment when she opened the door and her parents looked up from their spot on the sofa with expressions of curious fear.
* * *
When her parents had fallen asleep, Beate knocked on the young man’s door. He answered fast. Something with drums spun on his record player.
“You’re needing more wine?” he asked.
“Hello,” she answered, unsure of why she’d come. Her parents had breathed loudly in their sleep, not snoring exactly, but one gasp followed by another.
“Because it feels strange to buy wine for children,” he added.
“I’m fifteen,” she said, though her thirteenth birthday was a month away.
One of his eyes drifted in a different direction. Patches of stubble spread across the man’s jaw, though his cheeks were girlish. His fingers on the doorknob could move to her face, her belt’s shining buckle. A rivet of crackling sounded between one song and another.
“I just wanted to thank you,” Beate said. “I don’t think I thanked you then. It was something I’d needed.”
He nodded and said he was heading out.
“It’s late,” she said.
“I’m not a schoolboy,” he answered.
Beate waited until his footsteps echoed on the stairs before following him. She kept her distance through their suburban neighborhood. They passed a restaurant closing up, a jewelry store with an obese cat in its window. The young man moved with stiff-shouldered purpose. His steps kept time, as if following the drums of a song.
They came to a park girls in school talked about. Homos supposedly met there, did this and that together behind trees. Her neighbor moved into the park. Beate followed. His loud shoes quieted. She slipped past trees, hoping to see him and some other man engaged in something she could only partly imagine. She sat on a dark bench but heard nothing but wind, the gossipy back-and-forth of branches. A different man moved through a streetlamp’s puddle. He was handsome. His shirt’s top buttons were open, though it was cold out. There was something magic in his exposed throat, his perfect sphere of hair. He moved into the dark and closer to the bench she sat on, slowing just in front of it. She could feel his lean, smell his cologne. “Oh,” he said, as Beate came into focus. “Oh,” he repeated. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I can be where I want,” Beate answered, surprised by her audacity.
“Yes,” he said. “But it’s not safe.”
She’d been by herself for days. Gotten up on time each morning and gotten herself wine. Now she sat in a park where men did things to one another, probably the safest place in the world for her. Her neighbor emerged from under a distant streetlamp, not handsome like the man in front of her. His mouth was the wrong shape, his eyes too close and small. She felt the same ache she’d had at the hospital when Mutti held her hand.
“Not safe,” the man repeated.
“You’re waiting for him,” she answered, and eyed her neighbor.
“Am I?” the man asked.
“Him or me,” Beate said. The handsome man stepped toward her neighbor, a repayment for the wine. Beate stayed sitting in the dark. She wished she could tell her neighbor that she’d followed him, that she’d gone into that park and hadn’t felt afraid, that this beautiful man had only noticed him at her suggestion. Beate grew excited to see her neighbor in the hall again. She might ask about the record he always listened to. And he’d look at his hands—hands that had touched the handsome man’s face and tight jeans—before he invited her inside to listen to it.
* * *
Beate slipped into the apartment. Vati lay awake on the sofa.
“Your heart?” she asked.
“I was going to the bathroom,” he answered. “And needed a break.”
“Breaks are good,” Beate said. “I just needed to get some air.”
“Lufthunger,” Vati answered.
“I know it’s late.”
“Beate.”
“I know you think it’s a bad idea.”
“Beate Sigrid,” her father said.
She waited for him to list dangers she hadn’t considered. Vati’s pajama pants lifted to his albino knees.
“I need help standing up,” her father answered.
Beate helped him, felt the bones in his hand against hers.
* * *
The next morning, Beate overslept. And as she rushed out of the apartment—brow sweaty, a stale roll in her mouth—Beate passed the neighbor in the hall. He had on the same outfit from the night before. Forgetting that she was late, Beate slowed down and smiled. She even tried to lift her eyebrows as she’d imagined her neighbor and the handsome man had, to show each other that they were interested. To her shifting eyebrows, Beate added a nod. Her neighbor walked past her without saying good morning.
10
1992
For a year and a half, Kritzhagen had been a place where riding bikes at night was nothing, school benign apart from its regular adolescent theatrics. Then Markus Bergmann shaved his head, and people looked at him with embarrassed fear. Michael—always on the lookout for new ways to malign his hair—noticed it. Beate, too. Coming back from late shifts, she saw neo-Nazis clustered on corners, streetlamps shining across their razor-burned scalps. Watched them skulk off the bus to shout out foul nonsense or unfurl steaming arcs of piss onto the sidewalk. Then one night they went for Beate.
She was on the bus, reading a magazine Frau Liebling had given her. Frau Liebling was one of Beate’s favorite residents. She told her dirty jokes and flagged articles she thought Beate would like. This one profiled a fashion designer whose dresses looked like feed bags, a reminder of the things she’d sewn as a child. Beate was trying to remember what happened to those dresses when two skinheads slipped onto the bus and sat behind her. Passengers stared into their laps or out windows.
“You a nurse, nursie?” the closer of the two asked. He fingered a sleeve of her scrubs.
“I work at a nursing home,” Beate answered.
“An ass-wiper, then,” he said. His friend grinned. Beate imagined Michael at their mercy. The young man let go of her sleeve.
The bus turned toward the university and she saw them shifting, hoped they were leaving, and leaving her alone. They only rearranged themselves. Beate wanted to cry for the stupid hope she’d grabbed on to. The bus pulled to a fast stop, passengers swaying with the helpless unison of seaweed.
“You wipe any asses today, ass-wiper?” the first asked.
“Can you smell it on your fingers?” the other added.
Beate wanted to be home, to see that Michael was there, too.
At Lindenpark one person got off, three entered. It was nearing midnight. A man wore a uniform that implied something with cleaning. A woman in a flowered jacket sat at the front. She spoke to the driver, who nodded to her via the rearview mirror.
Just as Beate’s fear reached a manageable level, one of the neos squeezed her knee. She tried to ignore it, but his hand lifted higher.
“Excuse me,” Beate said.
Others on the bus looked back, then away. She felt shamed and angry, ready to yell at her fellow passengers until they did something. Instead she stood.
“This is my stop,” Beate lied.
The neo’s arm blocked her for a moment before he let her pass. As she walked toward the back door, they stood. She could smell their sour denim, the mints they sucked on. The doors exhaled open and Beate stepped outside. The neos followed her.
She looked for a rock she might hurl. Across the street was an apartment building. Dark windows checkered its façade, like the view from the place in Cologne where she’d once stayed. Beate wondered if anyone had thought of Frau Eggers in years, wondered, too, if she’d have the luxury of turning these young men into a st
ory. She touched the bus’s brightly painted side, walked forward as the back door closed. There wasn’t a rock in sight, only broken branches and some crows cawing at one another. Beate dumb and done for, thinking of the shame the other passengers would feel when they heard on the news what had happened to her. This led her, somehow, to Paul, who was about to get remarried, which allowed her to again blame him for everything. One of the young men coughed. She thought of his wet, red throat. They whispered, and Beate conjured their fusty breath. Twigs snapped under their boots; Beate’s shoulders jerked toward her ears. The bus half-stepped back before lurching ahead and Beate banged on its front door. It opened and she climbed back on. Passengers looked out windows. She felt indignant until she realized she would have done the same thing.
* * *
Getting home, she found Udo reading at the kitchen table.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
“Greek myths,” he answered.
Cleaned dishes dried on the counter. A barely opened window let in a breeze. Her daughter doted on Udo, though Beate didn’t understand why.
“I have a favor to ask you,” she said, and he nodded. “I need you to pick me up from work tomorrow night. It’s late.”
Udo nodded again.
“Do you know anything about Heracles?” he asked.
“I think he rearranged a river,” Beate answered. “He was good, too, until he was really bad.”
“What’s really bad?”
“I think he killed his family.”
The next night, Udo waited for Beate outside of the Pflegeheim. They rode the bus home together, which was empty.
* * *
The vacant lot, according to Udo, had once housed a fancy apartment building. But by the time he’d gotten to know it, its windows were boarded up. Whole shoulders of cornice fell off. A legend was that a hunk of it had dropped onto an old woman’s head so that, when she came to, she remembered only children’s songs and slang for bathroom activities.
“That place,” Udo had told Adela. “Beautiful and scary all at once.”
“There must be a German word for that,” Adela answered, listing their favorite compound nouns—Weltschmerz and Schattenparker. Kummerspeck. Udo smiled. “Both beautiful and scary,” he said, and came up with a new word for them to use.
When he was a child, Udo continued, the building burned down. People assumed the fire had been the government’s doing, that they’d hated how Western it looked, or had thrown a dissident inside whom they were eager to see disappear. Crabgrass replaced rooms. Rubble was pushed to the sides or carted away.
The lot that remained was open on three sides. Until a few weeks before, boys had played soccer there. Standing in front of it now, Adela couldn’t picture those boys, couldn’t imagine how this half a block had once been a building that Udo said was “ten stories tall, or what felt like ten stories.” All she could consider was the immigrants it suddenly housed, ones who’d poured into their city now that East was West and wedded to the West’s rules. With Eastern Europe crumbling, refugees arrived in Kritzhagen. Also Adela’s new friend Miri, with whom she could only communicate via gestures and lifted eyebrows.
* * *
Adela had been biking past the lot a week before when an immigrant somewhere close to her age was suddenly in front of her, large-toothed and Cleopatra-eyed. She wore blindingly white sneakers. “Knock, knock,” the girl said, in English. Her voice was deep, and Adela wondered if she wasn’t a teenager, but a small woman. She stared at Adela, who for a moment got stuck on things Liesl had said about the immigrants “stealing from anyone they could bamboozle.” Shrugging off Liesl’s voice, Adela pulled over.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
“Knock, knock,” the girl repeated, again until the k and n came apart. “Ka-nock,” the girl said. “Ka-nock.”
When Adela asked if she spoke English, the girl laughed. Her laugh was throaty and low, her teeth the motley yellow of a corncob.
Behind her, wind rippled across the dozens of tents fashioned from sheets and tarps. Smells of cooking and gasoline vied for attention.
“Are you hungry?” Adela asked.
“Hungry?” the girl mimicked. Her neck was thin, her jaw hard-carved. Adela fished in her bag for the apple she often kept there, but found nothing.
“Stay,” Adela said, in German and English. The girl suddenly looked afraid. Adela smiled and the girl smiled back. “Stay,” Adela singsonged.
Sweat splintered across her hairline as she biked the six blocks home. In the kitchen, she found bread and cheese and made a sandwich. That felt inadequate, so she slapped together more. Adela wrapped the sandwiches up, slid them into her rucksack, and biked back as fast as she’d traveled home. The girl sat on a corner of the sidewalk, retying her shoes.
“Knock, knock,” Adela said, and felt stupid. She took a sandwich from her bag and handed it to the girl, who pulled its foil back with the prurient self-consciousness of a striptease. The girl, perhaps small woman, took a bite, then another, the last one still balled up on her tongue.
Adela had recently read about these immigrants in the paper. With communism’s collapse in the Balkans, war and ethnic cleansing swept in. So people left, Germany or Austria their sudden promised land. They arrived in rust-ringed cars, roofs sagging with mattresses and other belongings. Kritzhagen’s unwanted apartments turned stuffed. Some immigrants found empty houses, too, and Michael hummed a pop song about gypsies whenever Adela brought them up. Now they resorted to camping in this empty lot, using duct tape to repair holes in their makeshift tents.
Adela showed the girl her bag crowded with sandwiches. The girl clicked her tongue and put the rucksack onto her shoulders. When she moved into the maze of tents, Adela followed.
The path underfoot was a ribbon of mud. Small fires gave the place a cloudy feeling, though the sun was still out. Voices in tents rose in raspy exasperation. The girl stopped at a tent, took out two sandwiches, and handed them to the people inside. They stared. The girl smiled and talked. And though it was a foreign language, Adela understood that she was offering words of encouragement. The people accepted the sandwiches.
As they moved to the next tent, the girl took Adela’s hand. In school, Adela grew uneasy when one girl sat on another’s lap, or played with someone’s hair. But this girl kept Adela’s hand in her own and it felt natural and kind. They arrived at another tent, handing people sandwiches before they could say yes or no.
When there were no more left, the girl returned the rucksack and hugged Adela. She smelled of the harsh soap found in public restrooms. Adela leaned into the hug, felt the girl’s nubby shoulder.
“I’ll see you soon,” Adela said.
The girl mimicked her. Then, pointing to herself, she said, “Miri.”
“Miri,” Adela repeated, hoping it was her name.
Adela introduced herself. “Dela,” the girl echoed.
Adela rang the bell of her bike as she pedaled away.
At home, she found the mess she’d left in the kitchen. Michael walked into the room, glanced at it, and said, “Look what the boys did,” then did a dance with his fingers.
Later that night, she and Udo studying, as they often did, Adela told him about Miri.
“You went into that camp?” he asked.
“Just some tents,” Adela answered. She pointed to a function she’d completed for trigonometry. Udo nodded that she’d gotten it right.
“The thing is,” Udo said, then stopped. He moved his mouth as if chewing. Looked for his pencil, which sat perched behind his ear.
“What’s the thing?” Adela asked.
“You don’t even know this girl.”
It felt strange that Udo didn’t understand her, when he often knew what Adela was thinking before she said it. She said she was tired. Udo clomped off to his room, which was now next to hers. Lying on her bed, smelling the cigarette he lit, Adela imagined the ground Miri slept on, the rain outside that probably dampened
everything she owned.
* * *
Most mornings now, Adela stopped by the camp. She got up early to make sandwiches, carrying them on her bike along with her books and binders. She stood at the camp’s edge until Miri appeared and said something in whatever her language was.
After the sandwiches were doled out, Adela got coffees that they drank sitting on the lip of the sidewalk. One morning as they sipped—Miri having communicated through a series of shrugs and grimaces that hers needed more sugar—a trio of skinheads passed by. Though Adela had seen them around the city before, with the arrival of the immigrants, their presence grew to an infestation. The three men leaned against a tree just across from them, as if by happenstance. One of them began to climb it and Adela realized that they were perhaps younger than her, though this didn’t provide any comfort.
“You need something?” Adela asked, standing up.
“You’re German?” one of them asked back, and made a sucking sound.
Adela battered them with American curses. The skinheads looked at one another with nervous surprise. One of them stepped closer, but Adela said, “Don’t even talk to me with that shit-licking mouth.” He tried talking even so. “I’m not fucking with you, douchebags,” Adela interrupted, flinging out filth until they left.
“Sheet-licking,” Miri said, mimicking things about fucks and scumbags. Then, looking Adela in the eye, as was her custom, Miri put a hand on Adela’s forearm and said, in English both hesitant and clear, “You are the good.” Adela felt close to crying, though she hated crying. Michael once told her she acted as if it were “puking with your eyes.” Miri squeezed Adela’s forearm, her smile wide and yellow.
“I’m late for school,” Adela said, though she biked to the sea instead and later showed up halfway through physics, where her classmates were constructing pulleys and levers.
The Recent East Page 12
