The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  Across the table, Josef’s bald head shone in the candlelight. Stefanie tapped his knuckles with her nails. As she started her salad, Liesl made a noise whose closest animal equivalent was a purr.

  “Beate,” Josef said.

  “Josef, Stefanie. Hello.”

  Stefanie wore a large necklace. She was very tan.

  “Josef’s company put a new roof on my garage,” Frieda said.

  “Josef and I were once married,” Beate answered. No other conversations were happening at the time, spotlighting theirs. People took sips of wine and water.

  “You’re well?” Josef asked.

  “Fine,” Beate answered.

  “Her daughter and grandson are here from Africa,” Liesl said.

  “Your daughter is African?” a guest she didn’t know asked.

  Liesl answered that she’d lived there. “Working with AIDS,” she went on, as if the disease were Adela’s colleague.

  “Adela’s son?” Josef said, and looked hurt that he didn’t know.

  “Adela is my daughter,” Beate said to Stefanie.

  “I know,” Stefanie answered, and ate a tomato.

  From another guest Beate didn’t recognize: “Is it right that your son owns that bar where people have to admit to working for the Stasi or some such thing?”

  “No one admits to being in the Stasi, do they, Beate?” Liesl answered.

  “But this is the one,” Frieda added, “with the memorabilia. The GDR the butt of a joke. I had a cousin in jail for seven months for nothing.”

  “Humor is one way,” Josef said, “to deal with the past.”

  The sweetness of his effort returned. Josef had transformed her house for Liesl’s wedding. He’d helped Michael with geometry. When Beate had been sad, he’d asked if she was okay. “And what if I said no?” she’d answered once. When he’d tried to hug her, she’d shaken her head and he’d moved away, as if he’d been scolded.

  “We should make concentration camp jokes next?” This came from a woman Liesl knew from tennis. She had slender, muscled arms.

  “It’s not my bar,” Beate said.

  “But you’ve talked to him?”

  “I stopped telling my son what to do a long time ago.”

  A moment of polite laughter before questions continued: What is the Stasi game? Do the waiters wear Stasi uniforms? What made your son think this was funny?

  Heinz tried changing the subject to a football match he’d seen.

  “But your son’s young. Where did he get the money to buy a bar?”

  “He’s frugal,” she said, wanting to add that he was German, after all. Adela—who used to read books about the Stasi, Goebbels, and Koch, too—would have had a perfect defense of his place, zooming in on these people’s discomfort. Beate looked up from her salad. The rest of the guests seemed to be waiting for more of an answer. “He saved,” Beate said, not adding that she and Udo had loaned him money.

  “This is a friendly dinner,” Liesl said.

  “And this is a friendly conversation,” the tennis woman answered.

  “If people are interested, we can head to the bar after dinner,” Beate said. “Talk about it there rather than ruining the lovely evening Liesl and Anke have worked hard to prepare.”

  Anke came in to find the salads mostly uneaten. Beate took a large bite. It was good. She would have told Anke, but her mouth was full.

  “What did you say to him when he told you about the bar?” Frieda asked. “As someone who’d lived here.”

  Anke cleared salads. Beate stood to help but was rebuffed. She wished she and Peter had hidden better, that she’d had her phone on silent.

  “I don’t remember,” Beate said.

  “Not word for word,” the tennis friend replied.

  “Just a general sense,” Tennis’s husband added.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember at all?”

  Liesl banged her fist on the table.

  “I didn’t have this party for fighting about bars and history and other nonsense.”

  Five months before, Beate had gone with her to identify Udo’s body. She’d stood behind her cousin as the sheet was pulled from his face. “That’s him,” Liesl had said. “It really is.”

  Liesl’s face now was beautifully made up, also tired. Grief a race without a finish, without the adrenaline of the possible. Liesl had planned a dinner in hopes of cresting the surface for a bit. Beate hadn’t read the invitation.

  “And you two were married?” A guest at the end of the table—perhaps Edith from golf—asked. Liesl had talked about Edith with annoyed envy for a purse she had, her lower par.

  “I’ve been married twice,” Beate said.

  “Once to me,” Josef added.

  More polite laughter.

  “Now he’s married to Stefanie,” Beate said. “Who owns one of Kritzhagen’s best salons.”

  “She cuts your hair?” someone asked.

  Beate shook her head. She couldn’t look at her cousin, whose sadness felt contagious. Beate dug her fingernails into her leg. She’d worn a dress she could have gotten away with at a funeral. Thoughts of dead Udo, a sheet pulled to his shoulders, swatted at Beate. Her fingers dug harder. “It really is,” Liesl had repeated, in a room that smelled of chemicals, fluorescent light on Udo’s face and shoulders. He doesn’t see that light, Beate had thought. Doesn’t feel the table against his back. He wasn’t elsewhere but gone. Perhaps Liesl had had a party too soon. Her daughter Petra moved out of the kitchen.

  “Beate cut hair briefly, Stefanie,” Liesl said. “I don’t know if you know.”

  “When?” Stefanie asked.

  “I’d just come back,” Beate said.

  “From Africa?” the tennis friend asked.

  Shrimp tails wreathed people’s plates. Liesl shook her head. Perhaps she wanted these people gone, this party not lifting her, but reminding Liesl of the distance between her and the living world.

  “Her daughter isn’t African,” Liesl said, and twisted pasta into her spoon.

  * * *

  Anke was serving fruit tart when the doorbell rang. Heinz was trying out a bit about Merkel and Obama, funnier because Heinz never did things like that, rather than because of its execution. Anke came back and whispered to Beate: “It’s Ines, who used to work with us.”

  Ines stood on the front steps, in a T-shirt featuring a cartoon animal.

  “Peter said he needed you,” she said.

  “I’ll be home soon.”

  “He said he had a question,” Ines continued.

  “Did you ask him what it was?”

  Ines pulled on the sleeves of her shirt. Inside the dining room, she heard Liesl say: “Adela’s boy.”

  “The African,” someone joked.

  Forks scraped plates. The tart was delicious, but Beate was full. She went into the dining room, picked up her plate, and walked outside.

  “Where is he?” Beate asked; Ines eyed her car.

  Peter sat in the back seat. Beate handed him her slice. She should have been annoyed by his interruption, but felt relief. Her new best friend was about to enter the second grade.

  “You had a question?” Beate asked.

  “Somebody’s already eaten this,” Peter said.

  “I have eaten it,” she answered. “You had a question.”

  Peter kicked the seat in front of him. He put the tart down and mumbled something Beate couldn’t make out. She brought him inside. Made Peter say hello to Liesl, introduced him to Josef.

  “I used to be married to your grandmother,” Josef said.

  “You’re the grandfather?” Peter asked, and Josef laughed. Her grandson’s face soured.

  “I’m not the grandfather,” Josef corrected.

  “Peter wanted to say good night,” Beate said, though she’d brought him in. She wanted these people to see her and her grandson together. They said good night and walked outside.

  When they got back to Beate’s house, P
eter said: “I remember my question, Oma.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you think she’s coming back?”

  She was about to say who, then felt like an idiot. Peter sat on the bottom step, eyes glued on her. A dollop of tart stuck to his chin.

  “Tomorrow, mein Kleiner,” she said. “Let’s get you upstairs.”

  “You call me that because I’m small?”

  “A term of endearment,” she answered. Peter’s scowl asked: How am I supposed to know that word?

  “It means that I like you.”

  “Okay,” Peter said, and plodded to the guest room. Beate sat at the foot of his bed. He asked about the dinner party, telling her to answer in German. He asked who Josef was, if not the grandfather.

  “I was married to him after the grandfather. Sometimes when people—”

  “I know what divorce is,” he said. “I just don’t know how to say it in German.”

  In the middle of the night, she called Paul. She asked how old his youngest daughter was.

  “Twelve,” he said.

  “Ooph.”

  “She’s good, though. Like her mother.”

  “Not like our people?” Beate said, once a single entity with him. “Peter calls you the grandfather, as if you’re the only one in the world.”

  “When you first moved to Germany,” Paul said, “Adela told me Michael nicknamed me the California Father.”

  Mowers sounded in the background. She thought of the tan Paul got in the summer, the thrill she used to feel in seeing him naked, his tan line marking what was hers alone, what now was someone else’s, what was really only his. In one of the recent pictures she’d seen online he’d worn an ugly baseball cap and a neoprene band around his sunglasses. Beate didn’t care.

  “I didn’t mean to bother you,” she said, though she’d wanted just that, then felt silly for turning hopeful each time she heard from him.

  “Why are we calling each other?” Beate asked.

  “I was checking on Adela,” Paul said.

  “You’ve checked on her,” Beate answered. She wanted him to tell her she was being how she’d always been, Beate straining to figure out what he’d just thrown. Wanted him to say, Really? with the same ire he had when, once, after a fight, Beate had taken off her clothes and kissed his neck. A ticking in California may have been a sprinkler.

  “You called me, B,” Paul said.

  Beate put her head on the kitchen table.

  * * *

  Peter stepped into the bar. He climbed a stool as if it were a ladder, his storm of hair barely cresting the counter.

  “Supposed to be in the office,” Michael said.

  “The office is boring,” Peter answered.

  “That was the agreement.”

  Peter’s brow fell, a reminder to Michael that his nephew hadn’t agreed to anything.

  It was Ingo’s birthday. He’d planned a last-minute dinner party and invited Mutti.

  “But Peter isn’t invited,” Mutti had said that morning, she and Michael and Peter eating breakfast in her kitchen. She stood up and wiped down the already-clean counter.

  “I can take him,” Michael said.

  “To the bar?” she answered, her eyes blown wide.

  “He can watch movies in the office. A sofa there, just like there’s a sofa here.”

  Mutti stared at her coffee. “It’s more than just having a sofa,” she said.

  But Peter, who’d heard so much about the bar, wanted to see it in person.

  After Mutti said, “I don’t know,” for the third time, Peter scowled and she nodded and he hugged her knees. Delight crowded her face. Michael worried what might happen to Mutti if Peter and Adela left them.

  Peter stood on his stool, leaned his elbows onto the bar. Patrons looked at him with sweet amusement, and as Michael pushed hair from the child’s eyes, he realized that they mistook his nephew for his son. A table of women seemed wooed. One of them, coming up for another drink, said, “The two of you have the same hair.” Peter answered with a doubtful squint.

  “You can be out here for three minutes, then back into the office,” Michael said.

  “How do you say jail in German?” Peter asked.

  “How do you say,” Michael said, then reminded himself that Peter had turned seven three months before. He made a tray of Don’t Drink the Kool-Aids for a crew of college women from somewhere in the West. Days of rain kept customers away, gave everything a wet dog smell.

  “This place has, like, saved us,” one of the women told Michael. “The rest of this city is so boring.”

  “Not boring if you know where to look,” Michael said.

  “It’s all terrible beach hotels,” the woman went on.

  “Well, I’m the mayor of the not-boring part of the city.”

  “Mr. Mayor.” The young woman smiled.

  “What?” Peter asked when he got back behind the bar.

  “What, what?” Michael asked back.

  “What did you say to those ladies?”

  “A joke about being the mayor.”

  “You’re not a mayor,” Peter answered.

  On a napkin, the boy tried to draw a bicycle.

  Rain hit the windows. Candles bobbed as people moved out and in. Michael filled his tray with empty glasses and full ashtrays. The night Udo had vanished it had rained. Michael wondered if his cousin had checked the weather before heading out on his namesake. He hoped Udo had been killed quickly, a wave burying the boat, but as he dumped detritus into the trash can he felt the ache in knowing that he’d never know exactly what had happened. A text tickled his pocket. Adela. Gert and I are extending the trip one more night. He wanted to ask if she’d ever emailed Udo back, or send her a picture of Peter at the bar with a caption that read: Guess he takes after the German Lady. But part of Michael was still afraid of her. He settled on: Enjoy the fucking.

  “This shit place!” one of the three drunks who haunted the bar said, the other two stumbling in behind him. They had round faces and juvenile beards. As they careened closer, Michael realized that their drunkenness had reached new heights.

  “Drinks!” one of them barked.

  “Drinks!” another garbled.

  Theirs was a particular maleness Michael hated. They grinned, and it felt mean. They looked him in the eye, and it was belligerence they offered.

  “Peter,” Michael said.

  “Not three minutes,” his nephew answered.

  “I’m breaking my promise.”

  “Baby at the bar!” one of the drunks said. He tried and failed to pick up a menu.

  “I wonder what’s the baby’s favorite drink,” one of them slurred.

  “The Party Line!” another guessed.

  “Peter,” Michael repeated.

  His nephew watched these young men with fear, also interest. Despite his size, signals of his someday self emerged in the directness of Peter’s gaze, the sarcasm he could detect in two languages.

  The trio’s leader leaned next to Peter. “Maybe the baby has a recommendation,” he said.

  “Maybe the baby,” a friend repeated.

  Michael picked up his nephew and carried him back to the office. Peter went limp with resistance. As Michael put him on the couch, Peter bit his uncle’s shoulder.

  “I’m not fucking around,” Michael said.

  “Fuck fucking fuck fuck,” Peter answered.

  “Those are not good people.”

  “I know,” Peter said. He tried to stand on the sofa, but its cushions did him in. Michael left and locked the door. Peter kicked it. Michael heard him scream fuck, in English then German, then something about tits for breakfast. Michael was impressed. He also hoped his nephew hadn’t gotten that from him. His shoulder ached where Peter’s teeth had sunk into it.

  The three men slurred drink orders across the room. Justine stacked glasses, and Michael moved behind the bar.

  “You have any Nazi cocktails?” the leader asked. He pulled a lime from the caddy
and sucked on it. Michael flipped its lid down. The young man lifted his hands in false apology. He looked to his friends, lime lining his teeth.

  “Kristallnacht Sour,” one minion said.

  “Hitler and Tonic,” another stuttered.

  “Enough, please,” Michael said. More droopy-eyed amusement from the three, who repeated, “Enough,” over and over. One stumbled, was saved by a stranger’s shoulder. A quiet kick sounded as Peter failed to overwhelm the door.

  Udo often sat at the bar’s corner. Even drunk, he would have asked these men to leave, and they would have listened. Michael missed him terribly.

  The drunks gripped the bar and spoke in stage whispers.

  “We’ll settle for beers,” the leader said.

  Michael looked at the tap, part of him ready to give in. Justine stepped forward.

  “We’re not serving you,” she said.

  The cowardly relief of being rescued warmed Michael’s ears.

  “You’re not?” the leader said.

  Michael moved next to her and said, “Gentlemen.”

  “We are gentlemen!” a drunk answered.

  “A Nazi bar,” a different one repeated. They lit cigarettes. Every once in a while they called out: “Gentlemen,” or “Enough, please.” Michael felt young, made useless by fear, more terrified as he remembered he was meant to be in charge. Justine and a customer shot each other looks. One of the men lurched toward the table of the Western women and asked them to buy beers in their stead. Michael wanted Adela there, wanted Udo. Wanted the spinning in his gut to stop long enough so he could think of something. A drunk swatted a low-hanging fixture. The lamp’s beam spun over shoulders. Customers whispered, and a man at a back table dialed his phone. Michael skimmed through things he might do, but held on to nothing. Peter kicked again. A drunk knocked over a stool.

  Michael switched on the overhead lights and turned off the music. The bar transformed into a parking garage.

  “Closing early,” he said. “Finish your drinks and leave, please.”

  “Closing early!” one of the men mimicked, his impression of Michael hysterical, feminine. The men turned giddy.

  Patrons filed outside, where the rain had left behind shining puddles. “Gentlemen,” one of the drunks said. “Enough, please,” his friend answered. They waited for the rest of the customers to leave before weaving outside. They eyed the Western women climbing into a taxi. As it puttered down the street, the men called after it with dumb, obscene words. To be a woman, Michael thought, to have men call them ladies, then bitches, then talk about the body parts they hoped to see and feel. The men stumbled in the taxi’s direction.