The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “Details?” Michael asked.

  “Gert,” Adela answered, blushing into her brother’s shoulder again.

  * * *

  It was late at night that Adela talked. About Berkeley and Pretoria. Dad in California, who, for the years she lived there, treated her with an insulting politeness. She told stories of Aunt Kate, who smoked a mammoth amount of weed, their half-sister Leti, who was too sweet to be interesting. One night, the two of them sat on the deck. They passed a sorbet container back and forth.

  “Do you talk to Taro anymore?” he asked.

  “Do you still talk to Tobias?” she asked back.

  Adela asked if the noise she heard was the Baltic.

  “Just wind,” he said. “But you just left?”

  “Pretoria?” she asked, and he nodded.

  “I needed something else,” Adela said. Her feet rested on the railing.

  “There was a night,” she went on, “when I got home late. Peter kept repeating the time that I’d been expected. He followed me into the kitchen, where I tried to make dinner. As I chopped veggies, he stood right behind me, trying to figure out the math of how late I was.”

  “Peter,” Michael said. Adela ate another spoonful.

  “He kept saying, ‘How many hours?’ though he should have calculated minutes. ‘How many? How many?’ I took the bowl of vegetables and threw them against the wall.”

  The spoon scraped against her teeth. Their father had loved to throw shoes.

  “He laughed like a maniac. So loud that I went into my room and locked the door. And I passed out. Didn’t wake up for hours. When I went to check on Peter, he’d locked his door, too. And the food had been cleaned up.”

  In the German Lady’s place next door, a light turned on.

  “I ate all this,” Adela answered, and dropped the container onto the deck.

  “Any decisions on your plans?” Michael asked.

  “I’ll stay for a bit,” Adela said.

  When he asked if a bit might be longer, she answered maybe.

  Adela fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. Michael’s phone buzzed. It was the Potato Farmer, who wrote: I guess you were right. You’d just been busy. Though Michael was pleased to hear from him, to think of his perfect legs, his sister kept sleeping on his shoulder. Michael stayed, even as his shoulder began to hurt, his ass numb from sitting so long.

  * * *

  The drunk trio ordered straight vodka. Michael poured them beers instead. They groused and slammed their glasses on the bar. “Assholes,” Justine mumbled when they left. Ten o’clock came. Again, Adela asked if she could announce the confessions. Michael said sure. Justine looked at the rag in her hand. Again, Adela stared at the mic for too long. She shifted and kicked over a glass, then held the mic so feedback invaded the room. But she righted it and started, her voice loud and serious, and the worry Michael felt a moment before untangled. In the first confession, someone stole from a store and pinned it on a hated bully. The story felt too neat to be true. The next involved showing a boob to a cousin so he wouldn’t rat out her cigarette smoking. “Cigarettes?” Adela said. “That feels more like a crack-smoking sacrifice.” The way she stood, her feigned seriousness, was another impression of him. Michael wasn’t sure whether or not to be flattered. Adela unfolded the next entry.

  “In my teens I was briefly a neo-Nazi,” it began. “I was a mess and angry,” she continued, moving the mic to her opposite hand. “And there was a time when our city was inundated with refugees. I did some bad things and regret them. That’s my confession.” Michael surveyed the crowd. There was a man in his late twenties who might have been old enough. Another with short-cropped hair. People looked at their drinks or phones, or up at Adela, a cloud of risen smoke at her shoulders. Adela seemed scared of the microphone again. She finished and hopped off the bar. Justine was barricaded in glasses.

  “That’s a Lie Detector,” Justine said. “The two on ice are martinis.”

  Michael filled a shaker. The cash register rang, and customers shouldered up to the bar. Gert lifted his glass for another beer.

  “We need to pick a winner,” Justine said.

  “The neo, clearly,” Adela answered.

  “Ha,” Justine said. Her hammer-and-sickle earrings caught the light.

  Michael hadn’t known where he and Udo were going until they’d moved toward the stockade of skinheads and his cousin had picked up a rock. The skinheads had grinned, handed him more. Handed Michael one, too, which he held, hoping to turn into part of the background.

  “I’m not kidding,” Adela went on. “Like the Stasi really cared about overhearing people talk about their sex lives.”

  “Adela,” Michael said.

  “If we want real confessions.”

  “We want people coming here to confess murder?” Justine asked.

  “Is this murder, Michael?”

  Adela’s teenage version emerged, eager to confront this confession’s author. To remind Michael that he’d stood behind Udo, that they’d all pretended her anger had been the real problem. Michael wanted to go back to the office. To grab his phone and find someone to sleep with. The crowd of customers was three people deep.

  “It could have been murder,” Michael said. Adela’s face stayed hard and he knew he’d let her have this one. “But it wasn’t.”

  Justine shook her head. A customer ordered a Party Line. Michael looked at his sister and said, “Up to you,” deferring to her as he had when they were young and he looked to her for everything.

  Adela jumped back onto the bar. “The winner,” she said. The crowd kept talking. “Ladies and gentlemen. We need silence.” Twice before, Michael and Justine had made bets as to who the winner was. Justine had gotten it right once. Michael never. “The winner,” Adela repeated. The crowd hushed. Justine rattled a shaker. Adela read the neo’s entry verbatim.

  Conversation blasted the room. Each time someone moved—to go to the bathroom or order a beer—people stared. Patrons waved to Michael for drinks, but he watched his sister standing on the sticky bar. Euros scattered at her heels. “Going once!” She looked pleased.

  “Going twice,” Adela said, and fanned herself with the entry.

  When no one came forward, she jumped back behind the bar.

  * * *

  Gert stayed as they closed up. He and Adela leaned in close conversation. “Think they’re talking about bikes?” Michael asked Justine. She asked if she could head out.

  Adela and Gert left on his bike. Seeing Michael in the bar’s door, Gert said: “My car broke down.” Gert seemed young, though he and Adela were the same age, his sister who saw the world’s forgotten and, with everything she did, let them know she remembered them. The bike moved with buoyant grace. Adela had smiled as she’d announced the winner. And as she’d stood there, flushed with pleased anger, Michael remembered how she’d held Udo’s arm outside of the camp as the girl with the frying pan hit him.

  * * *

  As August tilted toward its end, Adela and Gert decided to go to Juist. The morning of the trip, Peter followed Adela from room to room. He sat outside the bathroom as she showered and got in her way as she packed. But when she left, he was all sunshine. He and Beate sat on her sofa, conjugating the verb to see. And he pummeled her with questions: What are German schools like? Why were his mother and Gert going to a beach when they lived next to one already? Where were all of Germany’s black people?

  Rain’s white noise washed the windows, and low clouds brimmed the trees. They watched movies and played card games—easy ones first, then harder. Peter grew obsessed with each game until he mastered it, the cards large in his hands. When he figured out a strategy, he looked like he would burst, and Beate turned smitten, letting him play long after he should’ve been in bed. On the second day, wind joined the rain. The fruit trees leaned. Squirrels darted with peevish fear. Juist was an island, Beate told Peter. It allowed no cars. That’s what made it different. He answered that he was hungry, and
she scrambled him an egg. Peter ate it with an apostle’s careful devotion.

  Despite the rain, he and Michael went swimming. Peter came back and asked, “How do you say ice cube in German?”

  He and Beate took a tourist cruise up and down the coast. Peter insisted that they stay on the deck, though it rained and the boat bounced. Their hands gripped the railing. Water hit their faces in juicy pops. Peter howled and told her to howl, too. Beate did, half-heartedly. “Again. And better,” Peter said. Beate closed her eyes. Planting her feet, she howled. Peter joined. The ship rose and fell beneath them.

  Back in the ship’s cabin they drank hot chocolate, and Peter asked more questions: Does the boat scare fish? Does it ever snow here? Why does Michael kiss men?

  “The fish know better,” she said. “It snows a few times a year. Michael kisses men because he loves them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He loves them the way your mother and father loved each other.”

  “About what fish know.”

  She made a fish face, and Peter wiped fog off the window. He grew tired and napped with his head on Beate’s knees. When he woke, he asked for the translation of drowning.

  While she was at work, Peter stayed with Michael. Beate got home to him in the yard, waiting for her. The rain stopped, though clouds and wind remained. He held small stones behind his back, her task to guess the number.

  “Twenty-three,” she began.

  “Oma,” he chided.

  “Six,” she tried. He revealed two.

  The next round she guessed two. He’d gathered six. For the third, she wagered five, but his hands were empty. A few minutes later, she heard a knock at the front door and shushed Peter, perhaps because she felt giddy from the way he employed strategy, how he couldn’t keep his delight down when her guess was only one off.

  “Why shh?” he asked in his terrible whisper.

  She slipped her hand over his mouth. He stuck his tongue against her fingers. Though Peter found this hilarious, he somehow stayed quiet. “Someone’s knocking,” Beate whispered, wanting more games with her grandson, who howled and savored everything she fed him.

  “And we’re hiding from them,” Peter said. They slid behind a shrub.

  At the door stood Liesl. She wore a short skirt. When knocking produced no results, she rang the bell once, again. Perhaps she knew Adela and Gert had gone out of town.

  “Your cousin,” Peter whispered. He looked from his grandmother to Liesl, not knowing this woman’s son had pushed his mother away from this place. Beate’s phone rang. Liesl looked toward its sound, saw them, and scowled. Her cleavage shone as if lotioned.

  “Good morning,” Beate said as she answered the phone. It was Paul.

  “Afternoon where you are,” he answered.

  To Peter, Beate said: “Tell Tante Liesl I’ll be right there.”

  “Is that Peter?” Paul asked.

  “We were hiding from her,” Peter answered.

  “A joke,” Beate said.

  “Can I talk to him?” Paul asked.

  “Your grandfather wants to talk to you.”

  “Sofu?”

  “The other one.”

  She handed Peter the phone. He stared at it, then said hello.

  “You never responded to my invitation,” Liesl said.

  “I don’t know that I got it.”

  Liesl walked inside, Beate following. A pile of unopened mail filled the front table.

  “Some of these are from your bank,” Liesl said as paper whispered between her fingers. She stopped at a large envelope, the address written in her hand.

  “A dinner party I’m having tonight,” Liesl said.

  Liesl’s dinner parties were a thing of legend. For Chinese New Year she’d purchased a twenty-foot paper dragon that bobbed with the heat from the table’s candles. For May Day, she wound her largest tree with fabric and made flower crowns for the women to wear. Christmas meant three trees, boughs over every doorframe.

  “It starts in two hours and you hadn’t called me back.”

  Beate didn’t remember a call from Liesl, then did, vaguely, as if grabbing at pieces of a dream. Her life was the Pflegeheim and Peter’s growing tenancy. Paul’s calls every other day turned friends and obligations into a past era, something to remember rather than act upon.

  Peter answered his grandfather’s questions with clipped noes and yeses. One time he nodded, then smiled. “I was nodding a yes. But you can’t see me.”

  “He wants to talk to you,” Peter interrupted.

  “Tell him I’ll be right there.”

  “International is expensive,” Liesl added.

  “It’s not 1975.”

  Peter held the phone at his hip.

  “I don’t have anyone to watch him,” Beate said.

  Liesl smiled as if she’d caught her cousin in a lie, took out her own phone, and dialed. The person on the other end of the line listened as Liesl explained and gave directions.

  “Ines will be here at seven,” Liesl said.

  “The one I fired?”

  “She’s looking for work,” Liesl answered. “And I’ve heard she’s a great babysitter.”

  Liesl left, and Peter passed Beate her phone. She told Paul she’d been talking to her cousin.

  “The one with the boobs?” Paul asked. “Adela used to call her that.”

  When she asked if Adela had other nicknames for Liesl, he said he didn’t remember. Paul’s voice brought to life the shape of his eyes when he was considering. She felt nervous and dumb and wanted to be alone so she could see her face in a mirror as she talked to him.

  “Who’s Gert?” Paul asked.

  “He might get Peter a bike,” Beate answered.

  “Why is Adela away with him?”

  The little Beate had heard about Taro made Gert seem like a strange successor. Taro finished college in two years and won an award from a senator. Taro got a job at the consulate in Johannesburg, Adela had written to Beate several years before to explain her move to a third continent. Gert worked with his hands. His voice never rose above a whisper. Perhaps Taro had let Adela down too much. Maybe she relished the way Gert was easy.

  “They’re dating, it seems,” Beate said. “Michael calls him her boy toy.”

  “And he rides bikes?”

  Paul’s voice didn’t carry the impatience she’d remembered, but appealed for direction.

  “Maybe it’s a phase,” Beate said.

  “Like Michael being gay?” Paul answered, a smile in his voice. The cleft in his chin probably appeared, stubble there he could never adequately shave.

  “A phase for two decades.”

  “A hobby, then,” Paul ceded.

  Peter stood at the end of the driveway. A boy biked past. Peter waved, and the boy stuck up his middle finger. Peter stuck up his as well. The boy lifted a second one and almost fell from his bike. Peter looked amused. A neighbor across the street shaped shrubs with a clipper.

  “Oh,” Paul said. “I remember another nickname for her: Saint Teresa.”

  “Wasn’t she excommunicated?” Beate asked.

  From six thousand miles away, she felt Paul’s laugh across the back of her neck, like a hand. Beate tried to tell herself she was being stupid, but that voice barely registered.

  When she got off the phone, Peter asked more questions about Juist. “I’ve told you all I know,” Beate said. “I’ve never actually been there.”

  * * *

  Liesl’s house was modern and large, with shrubs Michael said were sculpted to look like poodles. Unlike her other parties, where Liesl hired a staff of caterers, tonight she answered her own door.

  Music played that sounded Brazilian. Guests filled the living room. As Liesl handed Beate a glass of wine and her daughter skulked through the room, Beate saw Josef and his new wife, Stefanie, in the crowd.

  “You didn’t tell me,” Beate said.

  Stefanie was short and younger than Beate. Hair dyed. Lipstick b
right. Beate’s dress was gray. When she’d worn it a week before, Adela told her she looked like a professor.

  Liesl waved a canapé in dismissal. “Because you wouldn’t have come.”

  “Exactly,” Beate said.

  “Not every man you were once married to is your enemy,” Liesl answered, and Beate thought of Paul’s laugh, the tick of the t when he said her name. “Go say hello.”

  Beate found a colleague to talk to. When Heinz came around with wine, Beate lifted her glass for more. Josef moved in her direction and Beate slid into the kitchen, where Liesl’s friend Anke placed salad on plates. Anke worked at the Pflegeheim, too. Beate once had to chide her for giving a resident a cigarette.

  “Let me help,” Beate said, and Anke nodded.

  “Liesl roped you in?” Beate asked.

  Anke answered that she was thinking of starting a catering business. The room smelled of roasting meat.

  “You’d leave the Pflegeheim?”

  Anke stared at her cutting board. When Beate had had to discipline her, she’d stared at the floor.

  “This is not—” Beate went on. “I’m not asking as someone who—” She hated the word boss, the imitations of niceness others summoned because of it. Anke examined each of the sixteen plates for a similar number of tomatoes. “In any official capacity,” Beate finished. “My ex-husband is here. Liesl hadn’t told me. It didn’t end well.”

  “In divorce,” Anke said. She handed Beate a bowl of tomatoes and pointed to plates in need of more. “I’ve always wondered if it would feel—not nice—but evidence of a life lived, to say, ‘my ex-husband.’ Just hearing that someone has an ex-husband, I think: There must be a story.”

  * * *

  Liesl’s friend Frieda sat next to Beate and complained about a recent meal she’d had in Cologne. “With the candles and the prices,” Frieda balked.