The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  Michael took an unmopped corridor to the office. Part of him wanted to jerk off again, even with Fortana and Dazana one room away.

  In the bar’s main room, the sisters called out: “Not open.” Then came a knock at the door. “It’s your sister.” So many sisters, Michael thought. Fifteen minutes ago he’d been alone. His belt buckle had clacked as he thought about the shawarma guy, whose beard extended down his neck. In the bar, Adela examined posters. She spoke to one of the cleaning sisters, whose German was better than she’d let on.

  “Six years, we’ve been here,” the woman said.

  “I’ve been to Tirana once. Though you’re probably not from Tirana.”

  “Not far!” one of the sisters said. He really did need to learn who was who.

  When the sister asked why, Adela answered: “I was working.”

  Michael thought of Adela with her backpack of sandwiches. He had no idea she’d been in Europe a decade before.

  “It’s better here when it’s open,” Michael said.

  Adela’s expression tightened; the anger he’d felt watching her through the window must have come through. But that anger lost its footing, replaced with a nervous excitement at her return. He wanted to tell her that the bar—with patrons and music and lighting—had a magic it lacked in its bleachy, daytime state.

  “If you’re staying for a while,” Michael said—he didn’t know what Adela’s plan was or why she’d returned—“if you don’t feel like it’s beneath you or something, I could always use someone else here. Weekends are a bit of a mob scene.”

  “Peter,” she said.

  “The German Lady could watch him.”

  “What about Cindy?”

  “Can’t she watch him in your house?” Michael said in the Cindy voice they fell into more and more, though it annoyed Peter.

  Adela examined the SOLIDARITÄT poster, the Katarina Witt photo on the ladies’ room door.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “Wait,” Michael answered. “Where’s Peter?”

  “I told him not to touch anything while I was gone.”

  “That’s okay?”

  “I’m kidding,” Adela said. “The German Lady took him to the movies.”

  “She’s working.”

  “It’s Saturday.”

  The bar shone from cleaning.

  “You could start tonight,” Michael said. “Just to see if you like it.” It felt strange to lay himself so bare.

  “Let me think about it,” Adela answered.

  “We had posters like this at home, too,” one of the sisters—Dazana, Michael was fairly sure—said. She seemed eager to talk again to Adela.

  The first time they’d seen this bar, the sisters must have sucked in confused disgust. Must have been friendly to Michael because they thought he was terrible or dumb. They might see a dead cat on the side of the road and joke that they should pick it up for him so he could stuff it and act like it was his pet, an animal mowed over as amusing as year-long prison sentences for nothing.

  “Want to hear something funny?” Adela asked, and told him how Peter kept confusing the German word for night with the similarly pronounced naked. She rested her hand on Michael’s forearm. And though he was glad she was here, touching his arm, he also remembered another email Udo had sent her a year before, in which he’d written several times in a row, Now I am better.

  * * *

  Two days later, Beate walked in from work to find her children sitting in her living room.

  “We have a proposal,” Michael said.

  There was something officious in their presence. Adela’s shoes sat in the middle of the floor.

  As Beate slumped into one of the wingbacks she’d recently had reupholstered, Michael explained how Adela would help in the bar on weekends if Beate would watch Peter.

  “I have the killer cat,” Beate said.

  “Could watch him at our place,” Michael answered.

  Adela played with the tassels on a throw pillow. Beate did the same thing when she was bored or watched television. She and Adela were similar in many ways, but something stayed blocked between them. “I have to head back to the bar,” Michael said. “But the two of you can suss out the details.” Beate hadn’t said yes.

  Outside, Peter spun with a stick in his hand. Beate hadn’t been invited next door since Adela and Peter’s migration.

  “I won’t watch him over there,” Beate said. “A house without furniture.”

  Her children looked at the floor, their mother as unhelpful as history had proven her to be. But they’d ambushed her, then turned contemptuously amused. Outside, Peter howled, Beate impressed by his volume.

  “But what I can do is lock Cindy in her crate. Can leave the crate in my room. Cindy is capable, but she can’t open doors.”

  “Like I said,” Michael answered, “the two of you can iron out the details.”

  “This means you’re staying?” Beate asked Adela, after Michael left.

  In their occasional phone calls over the years, Adela had always discussed her work, then Peter. Talked of women getting antiretrovirals but only taking them when they felt symptoms, or splitting one dose with other infected friends. When Beate said it sounded hard, Adela answered: “There are so many more sick people.” Now Beate would watch Peter, who toggled between grumpy and tender, who sought her out each morning. The day before, he’d greeted her by reciting the German alphabet, forward then back.

  “Child,” Beate said, “it’s good that you’re staying. I was just asking.”

  Adela moved the pillow to her stomach. Her brow was thick, like that Mexican painter who loved wild colors and monkeys and painting her dreams.

  “I know,” Adela said. For a moment Beate forgot what question her daughter had just answered.

  * * *

  After a few days of deliberation, Adela agreed to start working for Michael. On her first day at the bar, Beate locked Cindy away and Adela and Peter walked in. He took a roll from the kitchen and bit into it.

  “You can’t just take things,” Adela said. She wore jeans and a pair of boots Beate hadn’t seen before. “You have to remember that you’re a guest.”

  She kissed Peter’s forehead and went on her way.

  “You’re not a guest,” Beate said.

  Later that evening, she and Peter sat outside. He was drawing pictures of Cindy when her cell phone rang. It was Paul. He opened with a short monologue on California’s collection of bone-dry days.

  “You’re calling with a weather report?” Beate smiled.

  “I’m calling with a question,” he answered. She’d forgotten about the deepness of his voice, his precise consonants. She’d seen his name on her phone and turned excited, then embarrassed. Peter’s crayon scratched against his paper. “I’m wondering what Adela’s plans are.”

  “You’d have to ask Adela,” she answered.

  “She hasn’t responded to my emails.”

  “I take it that that is unusual.”

  “B,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she answered, though she wasn’t sure what she was sorry for.

  “She’s a bartender?” he asked.

  “Along with our son.”

  Michael had declined the invitation to Paul’s wedding, didn’t answer Paul’s email after his half-sister Leticia was born a decade before. A certain respect, perhaps, left Michael outside Paul’s domain. Or giving up felt easier. As Paul talked, Beate felt dumb for the hope she had no cause to feel. She wished people would tell others to give up instead of spouting adages about following dreams as if they were as necessary as brushed teeth, as easy as catching as a cold.

  Paul sighed, and she thought of his chest rising. Beate had recently found a picture of him online. His hair had turned white. Perhaps his chest hair had whitened, too. She used to put her hand on that chest, feeling its muscles rearrange. Used to slide her fingers into that hair until they were partly hidden. Give up, Beate thought, though that idea was
met with other feelings she tried but failed to squelch.

  “Asking our children questions is harder than you’d think,” Beate said.

  “When she was two years into Berkeley,” Paul answered, “I asked what she might major in, and Adela told me a story about a street fair.”

  “When I ask Michael if he has a new boyfriend, he shows me shoes he wants to buy.”

  “Shoes,” Paul repeated.

  Beate wondered if he was sitting or standing, what people passing him might see. Dumb, she thought, though dumbness felt good, easy, and she pulled more things she remembered about Paul out of the ether.

  * * *

  Sometimes Peter ate dinner with Adela and Michael. More often with Beate. As he watched her cook, he asked how to say slice or bake or leftovers. Occasionally, Adela or Michael came over after work to claim him. But mostly he stayed with her. In the morning, he and Beate sat in the dewy yard working on vocabulary or the dative case. When he mastered a new verb, she’d kiss the top of his head and he’d create sentences featuring her. Oma waits. Oma and Peter will wait. Oma and Peter have waited. Windows thrummed open. Laundry on lines floated and fell.

  If neither Michael nor Adela were up by the time Beate left for work, she’d bring Peter to their house and leave him in front of the television. Sometimes she made them coffee. “You should tell them you made it,” she said to Peter, who looked confused, then clear. He spouted out more German words: coffee and making and lazy. His face fell as he realized Beate was leaving him. “I’ll tell them also,” he said, trying to delay her exit, his German growing every day, “that I am my own babysitter.”

  * * *

  Michael worried that the bar would bother Adela. That she’d hear orders for one too many Communist-themed drinks and a curdled taste would stay with her. On her first Phone Tap Friday, she bused tables and lugged buckets of ice, all of it done happily. After Michael stood on the bar and read entries, she said, “You’re good,” and went to deal with a spill. Later, Adela poured beers. Someone at the bar looked at its largest poster and asked: “Solidarity with whom?”

  “Against the West,” Adela answered. “The GDR supported Communists everywhere.”

  When customers commented on drinks, Adela explained a name’s origins. A young man scoffed at a cocktail named after decomposition. She told him that Zersetzung had also been a Stasi strategy, sharing stories of resistance groups the Stasi infiltrated, operatives convincing each of the group’s leaders that the other was a spy.

  During her third shift someone asked if she was the historian, and the things she’d read to Michael decades before became part of the bar’s subversive charm. Adela talked to the university students who filled the place about the uprisings of 1953 and the Republikflucht. Told them how her grandparents paid a thousand marks for fake passports. Justine reminded her that there were glasses in need of cleaning.

  * * *

  On her third Phone Tap Friday, Adela asked if she could announce the entries. The poster behind her showed a couple ecstatically marching, ghosts of Marx and Lenin in the background.

  “Sure,” Michael said.

  “Sure,” Justine added.

  Ten o’clock came, and Adela climbed onto the bar. The microphone’s cord whipped around her feet. She looked at the mic, then at her brother. Adela appeared terrified. Also tall. She shuffled entries, and the crowd quieted. The trio of drunk regulars began to hoot. Michael was getting ready to hoist himself next to his sister when she said hello. A few patrons answered.

  “I’m sorry, citizens,” Adela said. “That’s not what I expect when I say hello to you.”

  “Hello!” more people shouted. Adela’s face hardened. “Hello!” the crowd wailed.

  “Let’s begin,” Adela said.

  She glanced at the first confession. One of the three young drunks called out: “Lady on the bar!” They were red-faced and loud and took up more space than they needed.

  “First entry: I used to jerk off to catalogs for nursing supplies,” Adela read. The drunks whooped and were shushed. The next entry was about a hand job given to a large Asian man, whom the person called a sumo. “An actual sumo wrestler?” Adela asked the crowd. “If not, I believe that’s racist. At the very least, mean.”

  Stepping off the bar, she said: “I liked the one about the grandmother.” In that, the confessor admitted to taking small sums from a grandmother’s purse—one mark, then ten, even after Oma noticed and felt like she was losing her mind. “The rest were bragging.”

  The winner, a young woman, walked sheepishly toward the bar to claim her prize.

  During quiet moments, Adela asked about the posters and the people, about Michael’s list of suitors he could message day and night. And as she asked questions, as she tried on his sunglasses and muddled sugar and mint, it became clear that she’d missed him. In his version of her California years, then her job in a township hospital, Michael assumed he’d been forgotten. But even as she’d treated young women who went from healthy to breathlessly sick in a week, his life had been a story she’d constructed.

  The drunk trio made a loud exit. One of them barked, “Sumo!” A man at the far end of the bar kept smiling at Adela. He had a full mouth Michael pictured putting to use.

  “One of my people, yes?” Michael asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Adela answered.

  “She’s right,” Justine said. “That’s Gert. He manages a bike shop.” Justine told them how Gert grunted in lieu of using words, reminding Michael of Udo saying nothing for an entire dinner. Michael excused himself and went to the office, not jerking off because the probability of getting caught was too high.

  When he came back out, Adela and Gert were talking. She leaned and made faces large and coy, and Michael realized she was doing an impression of him. Gert made a joke. She rested a hand on her cheek. Gert asked a question and she whispered her answer.

  “We’re short on glasses,” Michael said, though a press of them sat behind her.

  “Fuck a duck,” Adela answered, as she and Michael walked away. “What was that?”

  “A rescue.”

  “If I need rescue, I’ll do it myself. You’re just upset because you thought he was cute, too,” Adela added.

  “You thought he was cute?” Michael asked.

  “Not from your side of the river.”

  The bar closed. Gert stayed. As they put up stools, Gert told Adela he’d wait for her outside.

  “Outside?” Michael asked.

  “As in, not inside,” Adela answered.

  “Outside and inside and outside and inside,” Michael said, faster, more salacious each time. “Outside.” His hand smacked the bar. “Inside.” His hand again.

  Adela passed him with a tower of cocktail shakers. “What am I doing?” she whispered.

  “Outside and inside,” he whispered back, and she covered her mouth. His sister had probably never gone home with a man she’d met at a bar.

  * * *

  She came home the next morning with stories of Gert draped across her, Gert who’d mumbled in his sleep that someone needed to open the store. When she woke up in the middle of the night, she found him awake, too. “And ready. It’s like he’s eighteen,” she said.

  “The best, when they’re like that,” Michael said. “Insatiable.”

  They lay on Michael’s bed. It was six-thirty in the morning. She wore a T-shirt of Gert’s, and her hair spilled across Michael’s pillows. When she went quiet, he asked if she was asleep.

  “Just thinking,” she said.

  “About?”

  Adela pulled a pillow to her face.

  “You should see him again,” Michael said.

  “So I can tell you more stories?”

  “So you can have more fun.”

  Peter walked in without knocking. His bathing suit on, hair lopsided from sleep.

  “We’ll swim soon,” Michael said.

  “You slept in here last night?” Peter asked Adela.


  “We were talking.”

  “I’ll be right down,” Michael said.

  Peter’s bathing suit sat high up his waist.

  Biking to the beach later, Peter tapped his shoulder.

  “We’ll be there soon,” Michael said.

  “Breakfast?” Peter asked.

  They stopped at a bakery, where Peter stuffed sweet rolls into his mouth. His sticky fingers held Michael’s shoulders as they joined the other beachgoers who funneled toward the shore. Michael was ready to swim. Even more, he hoped Adela would see Gert again, that there’d be more stories, Gert something he and his sister orchestrated together.

  * * *

  That afternoon Michael met up with the concierge. They went to his place, their shirts off before they’d closed the door. Each time Michael kissed a part of his body, the concierge named it: “My foot,” he said. “My stomach.”

  “Out having fun?” Adela asked, when he got home.

  “Am I that obvious?”

  She pointed to his shirt’s mismatched buttons.

  “It’s never scary?” Adela asked. “So many of them?”

  “When I first started doing it, I was sometimes afraid,” he said. Afraid that it would hurt, that he’d come before anything good happened. AIDS and his feelings for young men had exploded together, like dependent variables. He felt afraid sometimes, he told her, but continued.

  “Sometimes when I was at work,” Adela said, “I worried about you.”

  “I’m careful,” Michael said. “And with Gert?”

  “Shut up.”

  “You still never told me,” Michael said. “If it’s straight or curved. Fat or skinny.”

  Adela had started making complicated drinks at the bar. People came in to ask if it was true that they had a historian working there. One young woman, drinking an Eastern Bloc, barked that this was the best museum she’d ever been to. Adela reddened and leaned onto Michael’s shoulder. She was always leaning on him, picking lint off his shirts or fussing with his hair. Adela had come back. She had no job other than the one Michael had given her, no mailing address apart from the house they again shared. And though she changed the subject when he asked about her plans, Michael toggled between hope and the feeling that hope turned him stupid, and couldn’t help but wonder if she might stay.