The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

“Michael thinks it’s funny,” Udo answered.

  “My brother finds strange things funny.”

  “Your brother is right here,” Michael said.

  An older girl at school once told Michael about Udo’s drunken eccentricities—at one party singing “We Are the World” to anyone who’d listen, at another sitting in a corner where he lined up empty beer bottles and ignored everyone.

  Udo staggered up the stairs. Halfway up, he stopped.

  “You gonna make it?” Michael asked.

  “Are you gonna make it?” Udo answered. His left foot hung in the air, like those giant horses from beer commercials, their hooves bulky furniture.

  “He’s like a lumberjack,” Emil said.

  “Michael thinks he looks like a cow from a children’s book,” Adela answered.

  “That’s sweet,” Emil said.

  Michael wanted to stick his fingers hard and fast up Emil’s nose.

  Gum stuck to the bottom of Udo’s shoe. Outside, the dancers moved in a routine that involved clapping on cue. A shimmy and a lean. A toe pointed forward.

  Mutti announced that it was time for the cake. The crowd funneled into the living room, and Udo made it all the way up the stairs.

  “I can’t believe you’re the mother,” Emil said, and Mutti blushed again.

  Sitting on the stairs, Emil and Tobias shared a piece of cake. Their fork went into one mouth, then the other.

  “Give us a minute, Flöhchen?” Tobias asked.

  “Little flea,” Emil said, in a tone that made Michael’s sweet nuisance plain.

  “Please,” Tobias said, he and Emil walking up the stairs before Michael answered. They got to Michael’s room and closed the door.

  Then Udo was back. In his five-minute reprieve, his stumbling was replaced with an impish lightness. He wrapped a giant arm around Michael’s shoulder, held a bottle of whiskey above him as if it were a torch.

  “You like that nickname they call you?” Udo asked.

  “It’s just Tobias, really.”

  “Blachh,” Udo answered.

  Liesl placed cake on Heinz’s tongue. The room was warm and smelled of candles.

  “Your mother is married,” Michael said.

  Udo answered with an exaggerated shrug.

  “You happy?” Michael asked. He shrugged again.

  “You want to get out of here?” Udo said.

  “What about all this?” Michael answered, hand spanning the crowd like a game show hostess.

  “All this, that, and the other,” Udo said, and walked out the front door. Michael looked back to see if anyone noticed. But they were too busy eating or dancing or having sex in a bed Michael had never had sex in, taking what for a time had been his alone.

  * * *

  When Heinz told Liesl it was time to go, she acted like he was spoiling the party rather than doing what she’d planned. Guests stood in the driveway, ready to wave goodbye as the couple climbed into a taxi.

  “It’s all gone too fast,” Liesl said. She cried as she hugged Beate.

  “You’re crazy, cousin.”

  “We’re crazy together,” Liesl answered.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow!”

  Liesl answered that tomorrow seemed far away. She made a joke that she was drunk, though she’d nursed the same glass of champagne all night. Two years ago it had been her and Udo in a tiny apartment. She had Heinz now, barraged with contracts, and a house they’d bought for nothing and gutted so the inside was like new. Liesl had come over one day with a catalog full of dishwashers and refrigerators. She’d seemed terrified of them, her greatest worry in marrying Heinz that the dishwasher would clean things too well. They hugged again and Beate saw the next day turn far away, too, the taxi taking her cousin to a different hemisphere. Liesl’s chest pushed against Beate. Her breath hit Beate’s ear. The wedding was over and her house would have to be put back together, the coming days brutally the same.

  “Come now!” Heinz said. The guests laughed, sadness sold as comedy.

  He and Liesl climbed into the taxi, and the band left. Someone found a boom box—one of Michael’s endless spoils—and tuned it to a sixties station. Josef spun Beate awkwardly, gleefully, and she pulled him in close. Adela watched with crossed arms. A breeze shook the lights in the trees and a distant siren bleated.

  “The toolshed,” Josef said, his hand on Beate’s back.

  “It’s just back there,” she answered.

  “I know.”

  “I mean, there are people here.”

  “Somewhere, please,” Josef whispered. Beate took his hand and they moved up the back stairs.

  “Two staircases,” he said. “I didn’t even know.”

  “This house,” Beate answered, as if it had always felt like her greatest piece of luck.

  In her room, Josef kissed Beate’s shoulder. Just before he curled down her bra, he asked if it was all right. Beate nodded. His hand moved across the outside, then inside of her knee. Then came a knock, Adela saying, “Mutti?” Beate threw a pillow over her face. “Mutti, I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll be down soon,” she said.

  Josef’s fingers moved between her legs.

  “Something’s happening with the immigrants,” Adela went on. “Refugees. Something bad.”

  “I’ll be down,” Beate answered. “Just a minute.”

  “The skinheads,” Adela said. Beate remembered the young men who’d followed her off the bus and looked meanly amused when she’d hopped back on.

  “They’re outside the camp,” Adela added.

  Beate removed Josef’s hand. She pulled down her dress and opened the door.

  “I need to go there,” Adela said.

  “I don’t know that that’s a good idea,” Beate answered.

  Adela moved her lips, though no sound came out. In the yard, a Rolling Stones song played. Beate’s underwear was somewhere on the floor.

  “I need you to go with me,” Adela said.

  Beate wanted to take her daughter’s hand, but sensed it would be too much. She’d held Beate’s arm that evening, sat next to her during dinner, and asked who this or that person was, if she was supposed to say hello to them.

  * * *

  The crowd of skinheads was larger than any Beate had seen before. A dozen first, then four times as many. Their pockets bulged with rocks, their laughs sharp and loud. Just before Adela and Beate got to the camp, a skinhead stepped in their way.

  “You’re dressed up,” he said.

  Adela and Beate were still in their wedding outfits, everyone else in jeans and leather. Skinheads stood in the street, ringing the camp. Observers filled the far sidewalk, lining its edge as if in preparation for a parade. More shaved heads moved into the street. Some held sticks. Some smoked. They ignored cars that tried to pass, standing directly in their headlights and flicking cigarette butts at their windshields. In the camp, a Roma popped up from behind a tent. Comments firecrackered about rodents in human clothes, new breeds of syphilis. As Adela tried to step forward, the neo stopped her. “You go there,” he said, pointing to the sidewalk where the spectators stood. Adela wouldn’t move.

  Just over the skinhead’s shoulder, Roma held boards as weapons. The place stank, like the Port Authority in July, where Beate and her children had once waited for a bus while a man in plastic-bag shoes mumbled things about Jesus and the mayor.

  “Where are the police?” Beate whispered to Adela.

  “They never do anything,” Adela answered.

  “You go there,” the skinhead repeated. When they didn’t move, he sniffed Beate’s neck.

  “Don’t,” Beate said.

  His scalp shone like waxed fruit. It would have been easy to lift something, to smash it. Police sat in their cruisers a block away, waiting for something to happen.

  “Adela,” Beate said. “Why are we here?”

  Her daughter’s look told her to quit being stupid. In the camp just beyond them, flashlights blinked off and on in Morse code.
A car tried to drive down the street, retreating when skinheads lifted their sticks toward the driver. Adela tried again to take a step forward. The skinhead blocked her.

  Then a rock flew. Another. Beate pulled Adela back just before one landed where they’d stood. Skinheads pushed past them, closing in on the camp. Shouts grew to a wall. A Roma ran out, was hit with a sailing stone. Blood covered a neo’s forehead. One of the camp’s tents waved with flames.

  Beate dragged her daughter back into the crowd of spectators, watching as shaved heads and winging shoulders made it to the tents. Beate tried to put an arm around her, but Adela resisted. Beate felt hurt, then chastened by the violence in front of them that her daughter had seen coming with the inevitable result of a recipe. Another tent caught fire; a sandstorm of smoke followed. Refugees ran, some stumbling as rocks reached them. A few spectators joined the skinheads. They wore street clothes, their hair short and long. A young immigrant moved between the remaining tents.

  “Do you know him?” Beate asked.

  “We have to do something,” Adela shouted.

  “The police are coming now.”

  Adela tried to step forward, but Beate grabbed her arm.

  “Mutti,” Adela hissed.

  “No,” Beate answered.

  She held Adela in place with the other spectators, the neos turning the street in front of them into a battleground. Some threw rocks while others lobbed Molotov cocktails toward the tents, which burst into flames. The thickening smoke singed Beate’s eyes. The neos shouted and threw. Adela pulled again, trying to free herself from her mother’s hold.

  “Fucking German Lady,” Adela hissed. Beate held on to her more tightly.

  Then Beate saw them. Among the hundred or so young men squeezing closer to the camp, some neo-Nazis, others having joined in for one foul reason or another, was Udo. Michael just behind him. A rock flew from Udo’s hand. In the thickening haze, Beate couldn’t see where it landed. He pulled another from his pocket, unfazed by the sirens or the spectators beginning to boo. Each time a rock landed near him, Michael covered his head. When he finally let go of the one he’d been holding, he dropped it at his feet. He looked mortified. Beate tried to figure out why he didn’t leave. She shouted his name. Michael looked up with the confused fear of his younger version, afraid of dark halls and public bathrooms and the tree that used to tap his window. A neo next to him lunged at an immigrant who’d tried to make a break for it. A rock landed by Michael’s feet. He covered his head in delayed response. Beate shouted his name again. He looked around, glancing at his wrist for a watch that wasn’t there. Then he ran. In a few steps, the smoke had swallowed him. “Michael,” Beate shouted, so distracted by his escape that she didn’t see the rock Udo threw until it skimmed an immigrant’s forehead. The man crouched down. Udo launched another one, which sailed into his target’s abdomen. A third rock unfurled from his fingers. But before it reached the man, a young woman ran in its path, shielding herself with a frying pan. Adela yanked herself free from her mother’s hold and ran toward Udo. The girl did the same. Udo was looking for something else to throw just as Adela drew close to him, just as the girl lifted her pan, swinging it with the same angry athleticism with which she’d stopped the rock, though this time it crashed into Udo’s nose.

  * * *

  Adela pushed past skinheads being pressed to the pavement by police officers, crouching to protect herself from rocks hurtling through the air. She heard screams in foreign languages, covered her mouth with her hand to stave off the smoke’s choking taste. Getting to Udo, she watched blood gush from his nose. And though Adela winced at the sight of it, there was a relief, too, that Miri had stopped him. Dazed and grimacing, Udo tried and failed to swat at the pan. A rock smacked his stomach, another hit his shoulder. Udo slipped onto his knees. When he waved a hand in the air, his palm was crimson. Miri lifted the pan again.

  “Miri,” Adela said, standing between her and injured Udo. Miri tried to step around her. A skinhead ran close to them, was yanked back by a police officer.

  As Adela repeated her name and put a hand on the girl’s forearm, Miri hit her with a withering look. Of course you’re protecting him, it said. You’re the one who showed him where we were. Miri’s pan stayed in the air. Udo crouched, hissing with anger or pain. Miri moved the pan farther back, face red from flashing sirens. You or him. You and him. The same to me.

  Udo stumbled to standing. You or him, Miri’s eyebrows repeated. And as Udo reached for the pan, Adela stepped out of Miri’s way.

  Udo’s arm took the brunt of the second blow and he hissed out terrible words: bitch and garbage picker and terrorist. Words Miri didn’t understand. Words that might have been meant for both of them.

  Two officers rushed toward them.

  “She was only defending herself,” Adela shouted, but the officers dove on top of Udo, who, as he lay on the pavement, turned his head to the side and threw up.

  A third officer appeared and tried to pry the pan from Miri.

  “She needs that,” Adela said.

  Adela felt Udo’s eyes on her. She tried to stare at the burning camp, but the pull of his look won out, anything angry in him suddenly doused by fear. Adela didn’t want his camaraderie or the blindness with which she’d moved when Udo had said the camp wasn’t safe, when Michael told a story he’d surely invented about a gypsy leaving the grocery store with a loaf of bread in his pants. A puddle of sick sat next to Udo. His forehead was bloody. He stared at Adela with the scared regret of a scolded dog.

  Then Miri started shouting. She pointed to Udo, barking out a stream of glottal words. Her voice grew so loud that one of the officers stepped between them.

  The man Udo had hit, Miri’s father, perhaps, said something. Miri turned, nodded, and walked to him. At the edge of the camp, the last of the refugees began to run. Miri and the man joined them, their shoulders rounded in preparation for whatever came next, their footfalls rain on a roof.

  A fire truck arrived and began spraying down the camp. A man moved close to the tents to take pictures of its hissing remains.

  As Udo stared at Adela, asking for help he didn’t deserve, she realized, despite the last two years she’d treated him as a life jacket, that she hated him.

  Udo repeated her name. When she ignored him, he followed it up with, “Good cousin.” Adela shook her head. The police pulled Udo toward their car and his voice turned urgent. And as Udo began to pull against the officers’ grip, Adela said, “No,” not even sure what she was saying no to.

  Adela didn’t know then that she’d never see Udo again, that when she called Dad in the morning he’d stop her halfway through her story to say he’d change her ticket so that she’d come in a day rather than a week. Once in California, the awfulness of Kritzhagen turned obvious, became the story everyone told at Dad and Maria’s wedding. A great-uncle told her she was brave. When he said that, Adela remembered Udo’s bleeding face, how she moved out of the way so Miri could continue to injure him. She thought also of coming down for dinner the day after Liesl’s wedding, greeted by Michael’s scowl. “You were there with him,” Adela had said. But Michael only shook his head as if she were an idiot, as if what Adela had just said to him were something she’d invented.

  “You were,” she’d repeated, and went upstairs to pack. When her suitcase turned full, Adela found boxes in the attic and filled them with the rest of the clothes, leaving nothing in her dresser or closet for her brother to find or bury. On the top of each box she wrote Dad’s address, labeling the side of one Fall, another Winter, though she’d heard California didn’t have proper seasons, that it never got cold there at all.

  PART TWO

  12

  1971

  Beate’s father tried to look serious in photos, but in this one his mouth wasn’t quite closed. Strings of hair were pasted to his head; his tie a shade crooked. Even more it was his eyes. They weren’t looking at the camera, or at anything. Beate invented the article’s alternative
title—“Man with Dementia Found Wandering in Winona”—cruelty and truth twinning, as they often did. Mutti bought a cheap frame and slid the article inside. They’d been living in Minnesota just over a year. In his first semester Vati had taught philosophy, though the friend of a friend who’d gotten him the job had either lied or not known about her father’s English, saying it was solid rather than rudimentary. His lectures were carefully written, though in translation Vati’s ideas wended into murky waters. Even when he made sense, his accent was thick. And he switched to German without realizing, one bold, annoyed student making it her job to say: “You’re doing it again. With the language.” For the rest of the semester a translator was hired and the class addressed their questions to him. Now Vati taught beginning German. He balked at his students’ incompetence, though he seemed resignedly pleased that they knew nothing while he knew everything.

  A reporter from a Minneapolis paper heard of their defection and interviewed him just as the hysteria over communism was reignited by Vietnam. The article landed on the Sunday paper’s front page. Beate hated the title—“The Brave Professor”—but most of all, the photo. At dinner, Beate sat so she didn’t have to look at the copy hanging on the wall.

  “What you said, about the soldiers who questioned us, how you felt for them though they were keeping us from what we wanted,” Mutti said. “That was quite moving.” Mutti had been with him during this interview, but spoke as if she’d just read it. They ate hard-boiled eggs for dinner. Someone walked back and forth in the apartment above them.

  “They were frightening, I thought,” Beate said.

  Her father cut into his egg. Its sulfur smell rose.

  “They were children,” Mutti said.

  “With guns,” Beate answered.

  “Beate,” her father chided.

  “What did I say?”

  “It’s how you said it.”

  “How I said it?”

  “Are you repeating my words because you don’t understand them? Or are you angry?”