The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “We just ate,” Adela said.

  Twigs and blades of grass, Beate thought. “Growing boy,” she answered.

  She worried that Peter’s smallness wasn’t a reflection of his father, but a stunting. Beate got rolls from the kitchen. Peter ate two. A confetti of crumbs crowded the floor around him. Adela opened the package of socks and put a pair on. She left the rest on the floor. Turning to shit, Beate thought again. She wished to be back at her office, where she turned any chaos on her desk to order at the end of each day. Peter flicked Cindy’s crate; Adela said nothing. Cindy bounded out of it and up the stairs. For something possibly on the verge of death, she could run like the wind.

  * * *

  After Josef had moved out, Beate found herself living alone for the first time in her life. One night she walked into the smallest guest room, climbed under the bed’s duvet, and fell asleep. When she woke up, the alarm in her actual bedroom sounded mayday. Though late for work, Beate washed her dishes and fluffed the pillows until the house carried the just-tidied quality of a hotel. The next night Beate slept in the guest room again, felt ashamed until she realized that there was no one there to witness it. She turned her alarm to its highest volume and padded down the hall.

  When the house’s comfort turned to a muzzle, she’d sometimes call Liesl, though she and her cousin had less to talk about now that Heinz’s business had mushroomed and Liesl played tennis and went to lectures she called boring, though she liked the rooms they were in and the cucumber in the water. Beate also had friends from work, Ingo in particular, who came over on short notice. They’d sip brandy in the yard while Ingo named all the flowers and weeds. Ingo’s one significant lover had defected in the GDR days, was felled by AIDS shortly after. Ingo spoke of his departure as if he’d just gone to the store. Beate found that to be the most common Eastern trait, time not near or far but carrying the flatness of a single page. After a few drinks, Ingo would say good night with a pat on the back, as if he were humoring her.

  But on other days solitude became something she lusted after. Beate ate alone on the good china. She went into rooms she hadn’t been in for a while—Michael’s former one, which she’d converted into an office. Udo’s, where a soccer poster still hung on the wall. She’d explore closets and read old report cards or magazine clippings she’d kept without remembering why. And Beate would leave for work each morning reluctantly, as one might leave a new lover, walking through the kitchen and living room, the dining room she sometimes ate in by herself.

  * * *

  Beate heard Peter’s voice before she saw him. “Du bist aber eine böse Katze,” he said. Peter spoke to Cindy, his German spreading each day like an unattended rash. Beate was about to say hello when she saw Liesl and Adela in the kitchen. Like Michael, Liesl had avoided visiting since Adela’s return. The last time she’d seen Beate’s daughter was fifteen years before, after the debacle with the immigrants, Adela spouting things about justice that were both difficult and true.

  “Heinz and I went to Japan once,” Liesl said loudly now. “We took mineral baths in these wooden tubs. Heinz was convinced he’d get splinters in his ass!”

  Adela answered that she’d never been to Japan. Beate hoped her daughter had offered condolences to Liesl, who’d slept in Udo’s room for weeks after he’d died.

  “Oma,” Peter said.

  “One minute,” Beate answered.

  “There she is!” Liesl said. “I need to talk to you about Ines.”

  Adela wore baggy jeans that made her thinness more conspicuous. A connect-the-dots of cherry pits sat on the table in front of her.

  “Ines?”

  “Fired three hours ago and already forgotten?” Liesl answered.

  Though Liesl hadn’t worked at the Pflegeheim for over a decade, she knew of everything that happened there, sometimes before Beate. Liesl’s wedding ring was sandwiched between other gold bands.

  “You didn’t have to fire her,” Liesl said.

  “I had no choice,” Beate answered. “Ines called you?”

  “Ines didn’t need to call,” Liesl said. “And it seems like you did have a choice. Yes or no. Stay or leave.”

  Liesl spouted speculation as if fact, treated doubt like a fly to swat at. Being in charge often left Beate uneasy, especially when she over- or underreacted and staff members looked at the floor when they passed her. She’d briefly seen a counselor after she and Josef had split. One day, the woman said to her, “You’re not a joke, you know that, right?” Beate answered that it was like telling the sky it was a different color. In their last visit, the counselor asked Beate why she’d never cried there. Beate saw that as another failing, and thought of the last, awful week before Josef moved out, when one morning he’d put down his coffee and said: “It’s amazing how you’ve fooled people.” But tears wouldn’t come. She paid the counselor and waited until midnight to leave a message to say she wouldn’t be coming back.

  “Is there a phone chain?” Beate asked. “What else do people report to you about me?”

  “You had a choice,” Liesl answered.

  “The complaint was reported to my boss.”

  Adela sipped a glass of water. The swallow slid down her beanpole neck. Liesl touched Beate’s arm, and it felt good to be touched. The night after Udo’s body floated onto the shore, Liesl had slept in Beate’s bed with her. Beate had woken to Liesl where Josef had once slept, her face bruised with mascara.

  Beate sometimes felt a failure for not finding a confidante other than Liesl. But every time she thought to ask for her spare keys back, Beate couldn’t think of anyone else she’d want to discover her body if she died in her sleep. Liesl poured each of them a whiskey. She held the bottle up to Adela, who declined.

  “That’s my girl,” Liesl said as Beate held the glass to her lips.

  “I’m not a girl,” Beate answered, as she always did.

  “You’ve become a grown woman,” Liesl said to Adela.

  Adela startled and examined her hands. Beate wanted her to eat something. Wanted to understand why she’d come back.

  “Your boy,” Liesl went on. “He looks like the father.”

  “Vater is father,” Peter said as he moved into the kitchen.

  “You’ve never seen Taro,” Adela answered.

  “In pictures,” Liesl said. “Fahzuh.”

  Cindy flew into the room. Peter waved, and the cat—surprised or annoyed, or because she could—clawed him and bounded up the stairs.

  Adela ran to Peter and wrapped his injured hand in her T-shirt, showing off her stomach with the same hard angles as her face. Liesl’s eyebrows rose. Blood besmirched Adela’s shirt.

  “Cats have AIDS,” Liesl said, as if it were as universal as their tails and their disinterest.

  “The cat has no AIDS,” Beate answered. “She’s just old.”

  Liesl shot Beate a look: This girl has always been too much, in a different way than I am too much. A nurse in the slums. AIDS and prostitutes and orphans. Both cousins downed what was left in their glasses.

  “Cindy,” Peter said, as if the rest of them had forgotten the animal’s name.

  “Do you have anything to clean his scratches?” Adela asked.

  In the bathroom, Beate found bandages right away, but relished the room’s clean quiet. She’d decorated it with photos Michael had taken years before. One showed the sea and sky in symmetrical bands. The other, a close-up of a shoulder. As she stared at the opened medicine cabinet, Beate imagined coming out to find her company gone. The quiet might be a relief; it might haunt her, like the ringing in her ears after seeing a band at Mount Holyoke.

  The pictures Michael had taken filled the mirror’s reflection.

  * * *

  A few people slouched at the bar of Secret Police. Tables sat empty, apart from one filled with university students. The beauty of being young crowded their faces, even those heavier or more lopsided than they wanted to be. Michael stood behind the bar. He leaned toward a man on its
other side. Part of Beate wanted to slip out in the same way she’d come in. Michael and the man leaned closer; the crowd of students was pummeled with laughter. A hand touched Beate’s shoulder.

  “Frau Haas,” Justine said.

  Justine was tall, pretty, and frightening-looking at different turns. She wore a sleeveless T-shirt with a cartoon of Lenin on it drinking a Coca-Cola.

  “Everything okay?” Justine asked.

  “Sometimes I can’t sleep.”

  “Not being able to sleep is how I got into this business. What can I get you to drink?”

  Beate hesitated. Michael laughed into the young man’s shoulder.

  “He can flirt on his own time,” Justine said.

  “You can call me Beate.”

  As Justine interrupted Michael’s conversation, Beate sat at the bar. Justine was a head taller than her son, with bleached hair and long, lithe arms. Michael once told his mother that one man then the next let her down. Beate felt a flare of love for this young woman. She wanted to protect her, though couldn’t think how she might do that. The beer arrived. Michael kissed Beate’s cheek.

  The man he’d been talking to was handsome. Michael never had a shortage of handsome men. In the few months he’d lived next door she saw plenty of them arrive and depart, including the now-former boyfriend who looked like he belonged on a billboard, shining and clean and made of paper.

  “You’re up late,” Michael said.

  “Sometimes I don’t sleep,” she answered, though he already knew this. “I don’t mean to keep you,” she said. “But actually, I do. When’s your next night off?”

  The table of students engaged in giggling disagreement. Michael looked at the man, his expression both flirtation and the recognition that he’d been caught. Her lovely, slippery son. A loud song started to play.

  “What if I have plans?” he asked.

  “I need you to make yourself free,” she answered. “Dinner with Adela and Peter and me.”

  “I’ll come because we’re family?” Michael asked.

  “Or to be nice to your old mother.”

  “You’re not old,” he answered.

  Finally he agreed, and she finished her beer. And though she knew she shouldn’t have, at home Beate sat in her darkened window until Michael and the man from the bar came home. They kissed as soon as they got inside. The man pressed Michael to the wall. Beate wasn’t meant to see her son in these moments, but couldn’t stop looking. She was proud that he took what he wanted, wished she could tell him that. She watched and hoped that this man, that all his men, felt as good as she imagined they did, that Michael met each one and felt a flood of fortune.

  The man knelt in front of her son, Michael’s face in something like prayer.

  * * *

  Adela read labels on everything. When Peter picked cheese off Beate’s plate, she took it from him, and a scowl fireworked across the boy’s face. She and Peter were both thin, though Adela needed nothing, while he wanted everything. Peter smeared sunscreen on his face so thick it left a film. He ate so fast that he coughed to clear up a choke and kept going. He had the same hunger for German. He asked translations for everything he picked up, every action he completed. He also loved Cindy. This only grew after the animal scratched him. “Cindy,” he called when he didn’t know where she was. “Cindy!” he squealed when she scurried out of a room. Beate waited for Adela to remind him that the cat wasn’t friendly. But her daughter read a magazine or put on a sweater or asked about a painting on the wall.

  One afternoon Beate left work early to take Peter to the beach. They stepped close to the water. Then a wave crashed and he flew back to their blanket. “It’s only water,” Beate said. He looked at her dubiously and stabbed a stick into the sand. When he finally agreed to go in, he clung to Beate. The Baltic’s foam wrapped around their ankles. He let out squeals of delight or terror or both. He held her neck as they went in deeper.

  “Oma, Oma, Oma,” he kept saying.

  His breath droned in her ear. He spoke in a language she didn’t understand.

  “What are you saying to me?” she asked.

  “My face needs to stay above,” he whispered.

  His fingers cinched her shoulder. Nearby children jockeyed for a raft.

  “You can’t swim?” Beate asked.

  Perhaps he’d never seen the sea before. The quiet order of Kritzhagen’s streets, its wet and windy days, all of it strange to him. He held on harder as a wave came. “Oma, Oma, Oma,” he said again.

  As they left the beach, weaving between chairs she’d only ever seen in Kritzhagen—with sides and a roof to protect from wind and whipping sand—Beate bought them ice cream. But as they strolled home, Beate remembered that Peter wasn’t meant to eat ice cream. When she told him as much, he held his cone closer.

  “I guess we don’t need to tell your mother everything we did,” Beate said.

  “How will she know?” he answered, delighted at his grandmother’s worry. He licked again and wrapped his sticky fingers around hers.

  But when they got home, Adela took one look at his chocolate-stained palms and figured it out. In her annoyance, she looked older than her thirty years.

  “Please don’t ask him to lie,” Adela said.

  “She didn’t ask anything,” Peter answered.

  “You didn’t tell me he couldn’t swim,” Beate said.

  “Something happened?”

  “Oma was with me the whole time,” Peter answered, with such bravado that it seemed he was covering for something else. He went outside and lay under an apple tree, pulled out clumps of grass and threw them in the air. The hopeless ineptitude Beate sometimes felt rallied, as it had in their first German weeks when she saw temporary as permanent and lay down in its traffic. Her house, with Cindy and a fridge filled with forbidden meats and cheeses, was a carousel of mistakes. For a moment she wished that her daughter was gone, then felt buried by unkindness. She remembered this same swoop of feeling after Adela’s move to California, when days, then weeks, would pass and everything seemed easier without her.

  “I’d forgotten,” Beate said.

  Adela eyed her mother skeptically, then went upstairs. Beate picked up the clothes her daughter and grandson had left strewn across the floor.

  * * *

  Peter packed his mouth with bread. He swallowed in gasps. The vegetable casserole Beate made sagged in the middle of the table.

  “You have a bar,” Adela said.

  Michael put down his knife and fork. “You know the name?”

  “Secret Police,” she said.

  “Polizei,” Peter added.

  Michael tapped a stub of bread into his plate. Peter breathed and chewed.

  “You imagine I’m offended by it?” Adela said.

  “It doesn’t seem to you like I’m poking fun?”

  “What’s wrong with fun?”

  Michael seemed unsure, though he’d learned to mask it with the flirtation he turned on when talking to old ladies or barking dogs. He touched his cheek, as if thinking deeply. Watching him was like seeing a heron swoop to a landing, a spider spin a corner into silver. He lifted his glass in the air.

  “Cheers to that,” Michael said. He and his sister clinked glasses. Peter moved onto his knees, insisting everyone clink with him, too.

  “It does seem, though,” Adela went on, “like a bit of an easy target.”

  Michael laughed with performed delight.

  “Easy Target should be the name of my next bar,” he answered.

  Their last time at this table had been mostly silence, Michael taking too long to pass something, Adela frowning when he chewed with noise. Now they smiled into their plates. The terrible casserole Beate made—no meat or cheese—anchored the table.

  “Fish in a Barrel,” Adela added.

  “Sitting Duck,” Michael said.

  “Easy Duck?”

  “Easy as Duck!”

  In a nearby yard, a mower wound into action.

&n
bsp; “Why do you live next door?” Peter asked Michael.

  “Your adult dream isn’t to live next to your mother?”

  Peter’s testy confusion was treated as a delight. Adela bit into the casserole. She saw food only as fuel, the joy of ice cream nothing next to its animal costs. Beate’s daughter, like a Russian novel, was both admirable and difficult to hold. Michael poured more wine. Every once in a while, a question was asked and answered.

  As dinner proceeded, her children slipped back into the rhythm of their early years, though Michael—with his comments about the Stasi or his expensive watch—tried to resist. “A friend of mine just bought a five-hundred-euro sweater,” he said. His hand touched his shirt, which also looked expensive. “I hope it’s warm,” Adela answered. When he mentioned that Gerd Mögen, whom they’d both known—Adela as a classmate, Michael as someone who tried to kiss him when he drank too much—was now the leader of the province’s conservative party, Adela answered that Gerd had always had an interest in politics. “To politics,” Michael toasted. “Even the wrong kind,” Adela added.

  They made jokes about Cindy that had the smoothness of practice. Michael morphed into a crackling-voiced imitation of the cat. Adela picked it up without pause. They turned Cindy into a chain smoker, born during the GDR, a fan of the autocratic order of her kitten days.

  “So quiet on the streets then,” Michael mewled.

  “Quiet because everyone was terrified,” Adela said.

  “Terror,” Michael answered, “keeps the riffraff out of my roses.”

  When Peter went for another roll, Adela stopped him. “There is other food in the world,” she said, and put salad on his plate. Beate wanted to feed the boy, who stared at mayonnaise and meatballs with prurient, angry wonder.

  Michael and Adela talked about a former Glens Falls neighbor.

  “I was in love with him and he was awful,” Michael said.

  “He was awful,” Adela answered.

  “How awful?” Peter asked.

  “Eat your salad,” Adela said.