The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “Addo,” Udo said. “To add and join.”

  “Fama.”

  “Talk, report, rumor,” Udo mumbled.

  “Paro,” Adela said.

  Udo’s eyelids fell to half-mast. “I didn’t bring you here so we could study.”

  “You said you wanted to work on Latin today.”

  “I know what I said,” Udo answered, lifting his glass to drain it.

  Adela peeled an old newspaper off the floor. Bosnia and Jeffrey Dahmer vied for attention. As a breeze blew through the window, Udo stayed quiet on his side of the imagined sofa. He’d lugged her food on his back. Rested his head on her lap when he was sad or confused, or when he wanted her to see that he was smiling at something she’d done for him.

  Udo pulled one of her toes. It cracked and he moved to another. She fought the urge to unfold her other foot, to offer also her fingers.

  Perhaps this was romance, though parsing out one strong feeling from another felt like trying to separate ingredients from a finished recipe.

  They studied on the bike ride home. Continued through dinner—omelets Udo made while Mutti was off with Josef and Michael was, as usual, missing. It turned late. They studied on Adela’s bed, listening as the front door opened and Mutti and Josef came inside. Adela would have been meaner about Josef but understood the strangeness her mother must have felt with Liesl and Dad getting married within weeks of each other. Josef left twenty minutes later. He walked down the front path with his shirt hastily put on.

  “Untucked,” Adela said.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” Udo answered.

  “Why not?” Adela croaked. She imagined he was talking about kissing her. But he meant his exams, she realized, adding, “Of course you can.”

  “Heinz said I could work for him,” Udo said.

  “You don’t want to be an electrician.”

  He lay down. His heat and largeness crowded her bed.

  “Maybe I do,” he said. “At university, I’ll be alone.”

  “You wouldn’t be alone.”

  “You’ll be in my suitcase?” he asked, and his smile appeared. Adela imagined the two of them at university together, passing books back and forth, downing coffee to stay awake.

  “In your suitcase,” Adela said, but Udo had fallen asleep.

  She woke up a few hours later, in the earliest lip of morning, Udo still asleep next to her. His stomach pushed her toward the wall. Adela moved against him. An erection filled his pants. Like the rest of him, it was considerable. And even as she stayed nervous, as it felt strange and good, Adela still couldn’t figure out if this was what she hoped for. Udo breathed in subterranean hums. She pressed against him, her throat tight when she swallowed. Adela used the wall behind her for leverage.

  “What are you doing?” Udo asked, and opened his eyes.

  “We fell asleep,” Adela answered, sliding toward the wall. Udo shifted so his hardness wasn’t visible, then walked out of her room. Adela wanted to follow, wanted also to pretend nothing had happened.

  A minute later, there was noise in the hall. Michael coming home. It was four in the morning.

  “The middle of the night,” she said, moving to her doorway.

  “Hi,” Michael answered. He wore a pair of checkered pants he’d found at a sale in a church basement and a tank top that showed off his swimming shoulders.

  “You thought I was Udo?” he asked.

  “I didn’t think anything.”

  “It’s always the quiet ones,” Michael went on. “Like John Wilkes Booth and Jodie Foster.”

  “Hinckley.”

  “You’re Jodie Foster,” he answered, and went on about his sleepless nights after seeing The Silence of the Lambs. How the villain’s skin dress reminded him of the experiments Adela used to read to him about where Mengele sewed twins together. She and Michael were no longer mistaken for twins. Michael stayed short while she’d grown tall. And every few days his face served as a gallery for a new kind of facial hair. As they stood in the hall, he went on about the genuine terror that movie had saddled him with, how slamming doors and dark windows turned him uneasy for days.

  “Maybe instead of worrying about a movie, you shouldn’t be out at all hours,” she said. “All these skinheads.”

  “Good night,” Michael answered.

  * * *

  The day before the wedding, Adela brought more sandwiches to the camp. Seeing Miri, she snapped out of her self-pity, though she couldn’t shake Miri’s impression of Udo, his retreat after. Also his comment about her age, which made Adela feel like a liar. Miri talked to people at each tent. Adela grew impatient, tried also to squelch that feeling. Tried also not to think about the fact that when she’d woken up that morning, Udo had been nowhere to be found.

  Afterward, they went to their usual café. Miri walked in with her, though she’d waited outside before. At the counter, Miri held up two fingers, said, “Coffee,” and pulled coins from her pocket. She spread them onto the counter. The clerk smiled and said, “That’s not enough.” Miri slid the coins closer. Adela took out money of her own, but Miri shook her head. She shoved her coins farther forward until the clerk relented. Adela thanked him. Miri took her coffee so quickly that some of it spilled down her hand. Walking out of the café, she mumbled to herself. When Adela tried to catch up, Miri walked faster.

  “Miri,” Adela said.

  “Miri,” Miri mimicked, and threw her mostly full coffee into a trash can.

  Back at the camp, the skinheads from a few days before were outside again, with reinforcements. A half dozen of them stood there, wearing looks of feline meanness. They whispered, flicked cigarette butts in their direction. Miri slipped into a nearby tent, returning with two cast-iron pans. She smacked them together. The sound was deafening. The skinheads turned fast and looked afraid. Miri slammed the pans again. Another bang, and the skinheads shouted, the noise Miri made too loud for their words to register. Miri’s arms began to shake. Adela took the pans from her, which were heavy. She admired her friend’s strength, wondered if Miri had had a job back East that involved manual labor. Adela slammed the pans together, once, again. When her arms began to mutiny, Miri took them back. The skinheads winced. They shouted, but Miri smiled and kept clanking until the young men gave up and left. Miri’s face bloomed with pleased relief.

  “Heavy,” Adela said.

  Miri put her hand on Adela’s forearm and Miri as Adela wanted her to be returned. Miri with her warmth. Miri repeating foreign words. The way she’d made fun of Udo turned small, entertainment mistaken for meanness.

  Miri pointed to the pans. Adela named them. Miri took them back into the camp that in the last few days had grown even more crowded, tents crammed into spaces so narrow only a single person could sleep in them. A month before, this field had been full of weeds.

  Adela biked home fast, until all she could hold on to was the burning in her lungs, the traffic she wove through.

  * * *

  Udo wasn’t home. Michael was, though.

  “There’s a message for you on the machine. Maria from the County,” he said.

  In Dad’s earliest mentions of Maria, he’d written that she worked for the county. For Michael, this detail became her moniker.

  Adela played the message.

  “That woman sounds like a cartoon,” Michael said.

  “Did you hear the message?” Adela asked.

  Maria said hello to both of them. She asked about Michael’s plans.

  “I told her no already,” Michael said.

  He and Tobias had gotten jobs at a beach stand selling T-shirts and cheap sunglasses. Michael preferred that to Maria and Dad’s promises of San Francisco and the cliffs of Big Sur. So when Dad, then Maria, asked if he was coming, Michael answered no.

  “Maybe you need to tell her no again,” Adela said, and asked if he’d seen Udo.

  “Not home,” Michael answered. He turned up the radio.

  Glasses for the wedding gleamed on the
table. Adela tried to imagine where Udo might have gone. She’d pressed against him the night before because it was something to try, because she hoped to understand what she felt for him, also if—when he pulled on her toes or clamped her earlobe between his fingers—he was trying to figure something out, too.

  * * *

  Tobias made the face Michael loved. It went from tired and bored to—with a shifting of his eyes—what Michael could only describe as sex. Tobias sipped, and more sex appeared. They lay in a park next to Tobias’s grandparents’ house—both of whom were infirm and loose with their prescriptions—which Michael had nicknamed the Pharmacy. A nearby playground clacked in the wind. Tobias had just turned seventeen. He acted as if the year between him and Michael were a shark-filled ocean.

  “What are you hatching?” Michael asked.

  “Who’s hatching anything?” Tobias answered with fey confidence. He wore one of the many T-shirts he’d kept from childhood. Its logo, for a spring festival, stretched across his chest; its hoisted hem showed off his belly button. Michael could have written sonnets about that belly button—trailed with hair, moving from narrow to crooked as Tobias shifted. “But now that you mention it,” Tobias said. He took Michael’s hand to pull himself up, sat on Michael’s bike while Michael pedaled. “Pronto,” Tobias said. As they sped down one street then the next, Michael tried thinking about sex just enough to heat with pleasure, not so much that he turned hard. It felt like balancing on a fence’s beam. They moved in an obvious direction, though Tobias, in his evasion, turned it into a game. “Look serious,” Tobias said, as they stopped and strolled into the university library. Its façade was stacked. Its windows tall. Now that the wall was gone, Westerners had started flocking to Universität Kritzhagen. With that, according to Tobias, came a delicious variety of Western gays. His latest crush was named Emil. “He wants to be an architect,” Tobias told Michael for the fifth time as they tackled the library’s steps. “We have some lovely architecture, he says, here in our shit-ball city.”

  “Just to be clear,” Michael answered. “You are not architecture.”

  “Flöhchen,” Tobias said. “Come.” Flöhchen—little flea—was his favorite nickname for Michael.

  Once inside the library, they separated to search out his crush, though Tobias had only told Michael that Emil had sandy hair and always wore button-downs. Michael found two candidates. When he showed them to Tobias, he looked annoyed, then amused. A woman at a neighboring table shushed them.

  Tobias’s other university flings had moved fast toward sex. But Emil—his interest in ideas something Tobias found quaintly novel—barely looked at him the few times they’d spoken. He’d seemed startled when Tobias rested a hand on his arm. Tobias picked up a book on Dutch painting, then left it on a table. “Never fear, Flöhchen,” he went on. They were shushed again. “Never fear,” Tobias whispered. He told Michael of a party they’d go to that night, where Emil would surely be.

  “How do you know?” Michael asked.

  “It’s in his building.”

  “How do you know where he—”

  “Shh.”

  “Where he lives?” Michael whispered.

  Tobias tapped his temple. Michael hopped on his bike and headed home. He passed a handful of skinheads. Their shaved scalps bunched like knuckles.

  “Hey,” one of them said. “Hey!”

  Though none of them seemed to have bikes or a car, Michael made his way home on a series of backyard paths. People in houses watched television. A woman listlessly peeled potatoes. Getting closer to home, he thought of the party they’d go to. Tobias would make Michael go with him everywhere, searching Michael’s pockets for cigarettes and whispering to him until Emil appeared and Michael would go home, the luck of the previous hour gone. But Tobias would find him a day or two later, so full of stories that he’d tell only Michael. And as Michael listened, as they laughed at some stupid thing, Tobias would lean on his shoulder.

  “Ah, Flöhchen,” he’d say, over and over.

  * * *

  Michael had met Tobias in his second month of Realschule. He’d been at a party at Lena’s—her dad had recently moved out and gotten a girlfriend in Lübeck, leaving his place perpetually available—when Tobias walked up to him and said: “The rumor is that you’re American.”

  Tobias’s face was alight with lovely angles. His lips a red knot. A city of beer cans filled the coffee table behind him.

  “I’ve heard that rumor, too,” Michael said.

  Lena sidled over. Tobias placed a hand on her breast as if touching a shoulder. Lena offered the same nonchalance. The two of them stared until Lena cackled and Tobias put his hands up in defeat. His shirt lifted, showing a sunrise of pubic hair.

  “Tobias likes to make sure he’s still schwul,” Lena said.

  “I even tried touching her Muschi once,” Tobias answered.

  “You did not.”

  Tobias started in on a story about a university boy he’d made out with in the bathroom of a pizza shop, how they’d groped one another against giant cans of tomato sauce. “He also chewed on my nipples,” Tobias said. “Want to see?” Lena flicked his ear.

  “The second and third rumor is that you’re Udo Behm’s cousin. Also schwul,” Tobias said.

  “When we were little boys,” Tobias went on before Michael could answer, “Udo and I were best friends. I fell from a tree and he carried me three blocks until he found someone to drive us to the hospital.” Tobias looked genuinely moved. “We even used to go skinny-dipping together,” he said, sly smile returning.

  The singer on the stereo moaned out lyrics.

  “Good song,” Tobias said.

  “From my old country,” Michael answered.

  Tobias stared, and Michael was undone. At home that night he lay in bed thinking about Tobias’s eyes in perpetual, almond amusement. Tobias’s shirt lifting just so.

  When Michael saw him at school a few days later, Tobias had no idea who he was until Michael started speaking English.

  “Miss America!” Tobias said. He pushed peers out of the way for this important person. They gave Tobias put-off, unsurprised stares. After school, Tobias dragged him to the university. He pointed out one handsome man, then the next. “You like that one or that one?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Michael said.

  “If there was a fire and you had to have sex with one of them.”

  “Why a fire?”

  “You’d leave the other to burn.”

  They lay on the university’s lawn. A tree close to them was a wall of gold.

  “I guess I’d take the first one,” Michael said.

  “Good boy,” Tobias answered.

  “You, too?” he asked, but Tobias shook his head.

  Michael wanted to ask what they were doing there, but the afternoon felt like a giant soap bubble. Pop, he thought, but it kept going. He tried to watch drifting clouds, the light as it crept down buildings.

  After that, Michael and Tobias were together all the time. When Tobias found a new uni boy, he disappeared for a while. But just when Michael was sure he’d never see him again, Tobias would resurface, heartbroken and gossipy, and Michael turned grateful. All the waiting for Tobias, Michael’s mood moving between uneasy hope and gloom for several days, cemented something so that Tobias felt like his, though he wasn’t his, only something Michael wanted.

  * * *

  The party was in an art student apartment. Posters stolen from the Berlin U-Bahn lined its walls, its hall a spine of smoke. They drank vodka cut with flat soda water. Someone brought a bottle of lime juice and was treated like the mayor until it ran out. Emil hadn’t appeared.

  “That one likes fisting,” Tobias said, pointing to a man whose T-shirt was dark at the pits.

  “What makes you say—”

  “Watch how he dances.”

  With each drumbeat the man stuck his ass back. Tobias laughed into Michael’s shoulder.

  “That one likes blow jobs
,” Michael said, landing on a man with his mouth open.

  “Ah, Flöhchen,” Tobias answered. “You’re so lovely and innocent.”

  “What?”

  “Relax. It’s our secret.”

  “No secret to tell,” Michael said, remembering Maxi Pad and the bathroom corner, Maxi saying yes or no to him for months before Michael showed up one day and Maxi said, “Finished,” and closed his window. Also the young Pole who’d come to Kritzhagen for family vacation the summer before, he and Michael jerking each other off underwater, or biking to a nature preserve where they’d fucked while bugs bit their asses.

  Theatrical lights blinked red and purple in the living room. Music thrummed, and bodies clustered onto a makeshift dance floor. With his fingers woven between Michael’s, Tobias moved them into the crowd. Shoulders pressed against them, bodies a hive of heat. The music shifted into a new song, its singer wailing, “Give it to me!” Tobias’s hip hit Michael’s. Another layer of drums arrived, the double Dutch of singing and rapping. Tobias’s shirt was held closed by one shining button.

  “Flöhchen!” Tobias howled, and held up a container of pills.

  “From when Oma broke her hip,” Tobias said. “Turns everything to Christmas.”

  He dropped a pill into Michael’s palm. Elbows grazed his ribs. A young man moved behind, then against Tobias. Nothing changed in Tobias’s expression, though he leaned in his direction. The young man wore a button-down. His hair could have been sandy. Michael let the song finish before he slunk off the dance floor. As he walked down the hall, a hand touched his arm. Udo.

  “Cousin,” Michael said. “Where’s Adela?”

  “We aren’t married,” Udo answered.

  “You could get married, though. Join in on Saturday’s ceremony. You and Adela and Liesl and Heinz.”

  Udo squeezed lime into his drink.

  “Where did you find lime?”

  Udo pulled a plastic bag of slices from his pocket. He handed Michael one.

  “Not your first party,” Michael said. “And I’m sorry. For the marriage joke.”