She felt many things, like the dread of her second year of American high school, though there was also a relief in the return of classes. Moving through halls at school where people shouted to one another trumped the boredom of summer, when she slept late and got up only to lie on her bedroom floor, each free day a rocket ship she couldn’t consider how to build.
“I think,” Beate said—she crumbled the last of her egg onto her bread—“that they were frightening. That we can call them children now. But at the time…”
Beate waited for her father to ask her to finish the sentence. Instead, he looked at a book that sat open on his lap. Mutti started to clean up though they were still eating. The food on Vati’s fork wiggled, his tongue egg-yellow. Mutti looked at the picture on the wall she’d described as handsome, no one saying it wasn’t handsomeness it gave off, but something infirm.
* * *
After two years in Cologne, Beate’s father had announced that they were moving to Edinburgh.
“It will be better there,” he said, adding, “Germany’s too much of what it’s always been.”
Vati usually demanded precision in people’s answers. When Beate said she didn’t feel like doing something, he forced her to connect dots. It’s because I am tired, and I’m tired because I stayed up late last night listening to records, and I stayed up listening to records because other girls in my class talk of them as if they’re religion, which many people think they need. But telling her of their move, he spoke in speculation.
In Cologne, the strangeness Beate had first cultivated evolved into invisibility. She could sit through entire days of school, only speaking when she answered, “Here,” during attendance. So when Vati mentioned Edinburgh, Beate thought to complain, then to ask what better meant, finally deciding that at least there would be new places for her to see.
And it had been better. People there found her foreignness winning, telling her she looked like an actress she’d never heard of, behaving as if she’d done something extraordinary when she used the past tense properly or realized without being told that she was in the wrong classroom. Within weeks she had a best friend (one of the many Marys in her class), even a boyfriend—Duncan—who was tall and kind and doted on her with an attention she sometimes loved, sometimes found smothering. Their romance had begun when he’d offered to help her with her English, continuing in forgotten library stacks where he unbuttoned her blouse and encouraged her to move her mouth across his penis. In the winter of that year, they’d graduated to sex. With her growing skills in and excitement about that activity, and the English she suddenly excelled in, Edinburgh felt to her like something of a miracle.
Then one evening in spring, Beate just back from the library, her father stood over her at their kitchen table, dropped an atlas in front of her, and told her to locate Minnesota. Her mouth was chapped from so much of Duncan’s.
“That place sounds like that movie we watched on television,” Beate said. “Brigadoon.” She thought of the men’s kilts lifting as they danced, also Duncan pressed against her an hour before.
“Not like Brigadoon at all,” Vati answered.
In the atlas, Beate found Minnesota, finger tracing the Mississippi’s hard turns.
“We’re moving there,” Vati answered, then said he was late for a meeting.
Beate stayed at the kitchen table. Her stomach began to ache. She mumbled names of cities on the map in front of her, sure she’d mispronounced them. Mutti, who’d turned strange and quiet in Edinburgh—forgetting to make dinner and hanging laundry on any surface she could find—was taking a bath. Beate knocked on the bathroom door. Silence and a soapy water smell. She knocked again, said her mother’s name. Not a splash to indicate a lifted arm, not anything. Beate opened the door to find Mutti lying in the tub, a washcloth over her eyes.
“You’ve come to see an old lady in the bath?” Mutti asked.
Her breasts were large. Beate wondered how she’d come from this woman. Mutti kept her hands on the washcloth, hands in Cologne that were always picking things up in the dead woman’s apartment. Hands that, on the day before they’d left Kritzhagen, had gone into Beate’s room to decide what she’d take and leave behind.
“We’re moving to Minnesota,” Beate said.
“There are thousands of lakes there,” Mutti answered.
“I don’t know that I want to go there,” Beate said.
Mutti sat up. She pulled the washcloth from her eyes, glaring at Beate with what might have been contempt or fear. Beate refused to look away. Mutti pushed up her knees, then pulled her head under the water’s surface. She was under for ten seconds, fifteen. Beate watched the water, part of her hoping Mutti wouldn’t come up, part of her getting ready to reach in and exhume her mother. But then Mutti splashed to the surface, bringing with her a slosh of sound, water slapping over the edge of the tub and onto the floor, where it soaked Beate’s feet. Mutti began washing her hair as if alone in the room. She lifted an arm to clean its underside. Scrubbed her neck and her breasts, eyes glued on the wall in front of her. Beate opened the door and left her mother alone.
* * *
For that first day of her second year of Minnesota high school, Beate wore a brown skirt she’d sewn and grown too tall for. It rose over her knees. The year before, girls had been removed from class for skirt length. No one noticed Beate’s violation now. Part of her hoped to be called out, if only because she wanted her outfit to seem willful rather than the product of slender means. But as the principal passed her he probably remembered Beate in this skirt the year before, this girl the same except for the extension of her limbs. Getting to history, the teacher asked about her accent. When she answered, “Germany,” he asked, “What part?” in clunky German.
“All over,” Beate said.
The teacher was handsome in a stringy way. He slouched and had a pointed, regal nose. Chalk dust clouded the room.
“This is the part where you ask how I know German,” the teacher answered, his delivery careful, construction correct.
“I figured you were native,” she said; he laughed a little too loudly.
“It is nice to meet you, Beate,” he said. “Mr. McDowell here.”
Outside the window, the Mississippi flatly shone.
Mr. McDowell began with something about the Far East, sometimes stuttering with excitement. A hope that school might be different this year left her listening, leaning in, though a crush on a teacher was a distraction, not something she could build on.
“You’re German?” a girl next to her asked.
Beate nodded.
“Cool,” the girl said. “I’m Karen.”
At lunch, Karen introduced Beate to her two best friends, who also found Beate’s Germanness winning. The four of them smoked outside before afternoon classes. Beate told them her German story, lingering, as her father had in the article, on the defection, speaking truthfully about what had been scary, exaggerating the length of time they’d been questioned. These girls even found Beate’s outfit cool, which felt like a trick, or plainness confused with sophistication. They asked her to meet them after school, where they told her about the art teacher who was queer and hilarious. One of the other girls—Samantha, who went by Sam—told a story about her uncle in New York City who was also a queer and didn’t come home for holidays but sent great presents.
“Do other people know you defected?” Christine asked.
“Our history teacher,” Beate answered, “knows that I am defective.”
The girls laughed at the dumb joke Beate had held on to since Edinburgh, when she’d read that word in A Tale of Two Cities and had to ask Duncan what it meant. He’d smiled at her pronunciation and kissed her.
“He’s also defective,” Karen said, going into a mean, inaccurate impression of Mr. McDowell’s stutter.
* * *
Two weeks later, Beate came home to a flurry of excitement. Mutti moved in and out of her and Vati’s bedroom. She lifted ties into a patch of sunligh
t and squinted at them. Vati sat on their couch holding a folder.
“What’s wrong with her?” Beate asked.
“Why would something be wrong?” he answered.
Mutti reappeared with shirts.
“She’s taking out half your closet.”
“Your mother is excited.”
“Are you going to tell me? Why?”
“Yes,” Vati said, snapping out of his geriatric daze. “The interview on Friday.”
“What interview?”
“We talked about it at dinner.”
Beate wanted to be in her room, to read her history book piled with too many facts. Her father went on about the Minneapolis television station that had seen the article and wanted to interview them, making it clear that she would be part of it. Classmates might see Beate on TV, towering over her old parents. How are you so tall while they’re so tiny? she imagined the reporter asking. My mother was tall, Mutti would answer. Why did you decide on Minnesota? he might ask next. Vati could say, I was tired of smelling the sea. And the next day, students would pass her and make sniffing noises. You smell that? they’d whisper. It’s the sea.
Beate turned up the radio and left her shoes in the middle of the room. She didn’t want to be on the news. Didn’t want her classmates to wonder if she lived with her grandparents. She peeled an apple, left its skin the floor.
“Please stop,” her father said.
“What?”
“You’re angry because you don’t like it here.”
“I don’t want to be on the news,” she blurted out.
“You’re embarrassed of your accent?”
That was part of it. Even more, she felt like a prop. And people would see her parents—Eastern in everything but location—who until then had dutifully avoided school functions. Her foot traced the apple’s peel. Vati creaked onto the couch.
“I’m trying to take care,” he said.
Vati put a hand on her forehead, as if checking her temperature, though it was supposed to say things about affection and safekeeping. Beate nodded. She hoped he’d leave her alone. And he did, after eyeing the peel she’d left on the floor.
* * *
Mr. McDowell lingered over Beate’s desk. It was the first cold day, and everyone showed off new sweaters. Beate wore the cardigan she always wore. Her legs ached from walking to school in the cold. Mr. McDowell wore a belt that was too long and knotted at its end. He dropped the failed quiz in front of her.
“You didn’t study for this,” he said. Karen and Sam and Christine looked up from the notes they were taking.
“I’d forgotten,” she answered, in German.
“I announced it. You were to write it down.”
Beate hadn’t forgotten, but couldn’t read the textbook without falling asleep. It was her go-to on nights when the stomper upstairs stomped late. Still, Mr. McDowell’s kindness mattered. She came close to crying and lifted her hands in a dismissive flutter. Her friends looked to her, then their notes. After class, Christine called him an asshole.
“You failed, too?” Beate asked, and her friends eyed the cigarette they passed back and forth.
“He didn’t need to announce it in front of the class,” Christine said.
“Or he could have told me in his terrible German,” Beate answered. She performed an impression of Mr. McDowell as a German robot until her friends were laughing and their cigarette was done and they went back in through the door they’d propped open.
* * *
Beate lay in bed that night unable to fall asleep. The robot voice had been mean. She wanted to blame this meanness on the defection, though the truth of it snagged on the fact that she was a coward. At two in the morning she smoked a cigarette out her window. Winona was a graveyard. Streetlamps turned parked cars an anemic yellow. She imagined Mr. McDowell on top of her, his hands on her waist, her breasts. Then she heard movement. One of her parents was up. Footsteps shushed across the carpet, stopping outside her room. “Coward,” she whispered, in English, working to keep the w from veering into a v. She missed Edinburgh, with its miracle feeling that stuck to her each time she figured out a new word or sexual position. Apart from new friends in history class, people in Winona ignored her. Even her lab partner, with his shiny forehead and smell of boiled potatoes, saw only a girl who slowed him down. Perhaps it was the way her voice sounded. Or because she could rarely detect sarcasm in English, which made her seem dumb, or like a child. Perhaps Edinburgh had been the exception when she’d imagined it as a signal of something that had started and would continue.
* * *
Mutti moved the couch in front of the window and borrowed a neighbor’s vacuum. The news reporter arrived with a two-person crew. Mutti stared at the footprints they left in the carpeting.
“We are thinking the sofa would be a nice place for talking,” Mutti said, in her best English. The crew chose the kitchen. “Best for the light,” the cameraman said, though Beate wondered if crowding the three of them in front of their cheap cabinets jazzed up their story. The camera was turned on and the interview began. Beate stood between her parents.
“Why did you decide to leave East Germany?” the reporter asked.
Beate remembered the young soldiers who’d interviewed them, Vati’s voice thin as he’d answered their questions.
“We go from there. It was bad to be,” her father began. “The DDR—or GDR, you say—was a difficult problem for academic life.”
His wedding ring clinked against the counter. For the newspaper interview, Beate realized, his translator had been in tow.
“Okay?” the reporter went on. “During the war, were you a soldier?”
“Too old for the war. I am living there always.”
“In the article you discussed”—the reporter flipped through his notes—“the punitive nature of the government, particularly as a professor.”
“Yes,” he answered. “I teach philosophy. And in that we have questions of things.”
The reporter smiled without showing teeth. From where she stood, Beate could see Vati’s unwell photo in its plastic frame.
“Tell me and I’ll say,” Beate whispered.
Her father winced out a smile.
“With the government controlling more and more, about thought in particular,” he began in German, “it became a difficult place to think and express what one thinks. That, and the thought of our daughter having to grow up in such a place. It made it necessary for us to act.”
Beate translated. Her father talked some more. When he spouted out the word intimidation, she fudged its English counterpart. Vati talked with confident animation. Mutti interjected and Beate translated for her, too.
“Why Minnesota?” the reporter asked. Her father smiled into the camera.
“We were invited. By the university. The generosity of people here,” he said, and paused. “We have felt welcomed. After so many years where we only felt afraid.”
Beate worked to get his pause right, his inflection. Worked to believe that this awful apartment and the flatness and weather there were things she savored. Finishing the interview, her father held her elbow, then went to lie down. Mutti returned the neighbor’s vacuum.
* * *
At school the next day, Beate walked into history and Mr. McDowell lit up. “You were on the news,” he said. “You’d make an excellent translator.”
“I suppose.”
“Would you?” he asked, switching to German. “Talk to the class about your experiences?”
Relieved to be back in his good graces, Beate agreed. The class settled, and Mr. McDowell began. “Who saw your classmate on the news last night?” A dozen hands lifted. These people had seen her bare-bones kitchen, her parents, storybook-old. Walking to the front of the room, Beate was sure she’d faint. She wanted to make it quick. But Mr. McDowell gave her his twitchy smile and she thought of everything she could say about the soldiers, the skin puckering under Vati’s eyes.
“We had fake passports
,” she began.
“Like spies?” someone asked.
“I guess. For a few hours I had a different name.”
Mr. McDowell was rapt, the class, too. There was nothing like trauma survived to let others remember for a while that their boredom was a luxury. “We had to get off a train. We were sent to a room with soldiers.”
“How many?”
“Four,” she lied. “They asked us questions.”
“What sort of questions?”
“They wanted to see if they could catch us in a lie.”
“And did they?”
“I’m here, right?” she said. The class nodded.
But her friends in the back row appeared uninterested. She’d told them this story already. The three of them had held on to it as if it were singular and precious—like old coins or virginity. Now Beate turned it into anyone’s for the taking. She stumbled, especially when Christine, who hoped to move to New York, wrote something in her notebook and showed it to Karen. Beate thought of the letters Duncan had sent even after she stopped writing back, also the months in Cologne when she’d been obsessed with Frau Eggers, until they moved to another apartment and Beate forgot her, too. Sam nodded to Christine, and Beate grew sure they’d discovered that she considered loyalty no more than what was happening in the southern hemisphere. But Mr. McDowell looked pleased. Beate focused on him. She understood then how her father couldn’t pass up the way attention made him matter. Understood why he’d agreed to an interview in a language he’d been undone by.
* * *
Later that night, as her parents talked of the phone calls they’d gotten, the fruit basket the philosophy department sent, Beate pressed down pellets of rice with her fork. Her parents passed ineptitude off as its opposite. They ignored her until she was needed. She remembered Liesl telling her that she was an accident, marked by the trauma and scarring of a crash landing.
“I have a question,” Beate asked.
The Recent East Page 17
