The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “Something happened,” Udo said, and sat on Michael’s kitchen floor. Dirt streaked his hair. In the small kitchen, he looked enormous.

  “What happened?”

  “It was an accident,” Udo answered.

  “What was?”

  Udo covered his eyes. Michael imagined a terrible thing done to Angela or some stranger. He felt afraid for his cousin, afraid of him. Udo explained that he was driving and a dog appeared out of nowhere, that he couldn’t stop in time. He breathed hard. His feet ticked back and forth and smelled awful.

  “Did you find out whose dog?” Michael asked.

  Udo sucked in a breath as if about to slip underwater.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Udo said. “I buried it.”

  “You have to unbury it,” Michael said. “Unbury it and find its owners.”

  “What if it doesn’t have owners?” Udo asked, peevishly loud.

  “What if it does?”

  Udo nodded, so quickly it looked as if it hurt. Michael touched him and Udo stilled. He slipped on clothes and went with him.

  Udo found the spot right away. He took a shovel from his trunk and got to work. The shovel chugged. Udo grunted. When a fragment of fur appeared, he used his hands and looked like a dog himself. Every once in a while, nearby headlights brightened trees. The dog was medium-sized and shaggy. Udo picked up the animal, dirt shivering from its fur. In the glaring headlights, dog at his chest, Udo seemed monstrous. Michael saw something disgusting in Udo then, who buried the dog out of rattled guilt, who needed someone to tell him what he should have known. Michael rarely felt fed up with Udo, but in that moment he wanted to call him an asshole, to tell him Adela’s unreturned messages weren’t as crazy as he thought.

  “Check for tags. Then put it in the backseat,” Michael said.

  When they finally located the owners, it was morning. They parked in front of the house. The dog in the backseat had begun to stiffen. Just when it appeared Udo would sit there indefinitely, he got out, picked up the dog, and walked to the door. Though Michael stayed in the car, through the opened window he heard Udo knock, a woman’s voice as she answered. The woman leaned close to the animal. “An accident,” Udo kept saying. “Why is she dirty?” the woman asked.

  They drove away, and Udo became a different person. He turned up the radio, asked Michael if he was hungry. Michael answered that all he needed was sleep. But he wanted to ask Udo what was wrong with him. He closed his eyes for the ride back to his apartment. He got out and didn’t look back at Udo, who in his relief turned vulgarly happy. Didn’t remember what he said to his cousin, if he said anything. And though that night he’d thought to tell Justine about the dog, he felt like an accomplice. Udo texted an effusive message of thanks. Michael answered with a Sure.

  Now his ashes sat in a box Udo had given him. Michael thought to spread them at the beach, but the sea had enough of him already. Considered the yard behind the house, but that house had brought him mostly misery. He could sprinkle them in front of the Adult Learning Center where the Roma camp had been. Udo had volunteered there, teaching basic wiring to immigrants, part of him forever trying to atone, atonement not a single act but a perpetual emotional fitness.

  The box sat next to the sofa. Udo was gone. Michael’s greed for what was left of him remained. Already Adela felt like an ill-conceived affair. Already the anger of her going carried the hazy frame of memory.

  * * *

  A few days later, Michael was up at six in the morning. His ribs ached less than the day before. Sun moved across the wall. Then Mutti’s back door opened and she walked into her yard. Dead Cindy drooped in her hands. Michael moved to the door with careful steps. Seeing her son, Mutti’s face contorted.

  “Morning,” she said, and tried to smile, which made her look worse. She seemed to sense this and looked down at Cindy, who was probably still warm.

  “First Udo, now Cindy,” Mutti said. “Jesus, that’s a ridiculous thing to say.”

  Dew cooled their feet. The trees behind Mutti were hit with light and as still as a painting.

  “Every day you look better,” she said.

  He thought to hug her, but she held the cat like an offering. And hugging hurt his ribs.

  “Can you keep me company?” Mutti asked. “I need to dig a hole.”

  After Mutti finished burying Cindy, they drank coffee in her kitchen. Dirt browned her fingernails. The radio reported on the Middle East’s endless combustion, also the story of a local politician embroiled in scandal.

  “I know I shouldn’t care about a cat,” Mutti said.

  “You should,” Michael answered. He wished he’d been kinder to Cindy, whom Mutti had just buried between two cherry trees.

  * * *

  When Michael’s doorbell rang, he joked to himself that it was the shawarma guy.

  “You’re looking better than a week ago,” the Potato Farmer said, standing outside.

  “How did you find my address?”

  “Don’t I work for your doctor?”

  “Isn’t that a doctor-patient violation?” Michael asked.

  “You’d like me to leave?”

  Four questions, Michael thought. He invited him in.

  The Potato Farmer said nothing about the empty rooms, the piles of dishes.

  “You’re less busy now, I take it,” the farmer said.

  “My ribs are beginning to heal.”

  The Potato Farmer wore shorts and a button-down. Every time Michael saw him, he remembered that he was handsome. Michael asked if he hated the nickname. The farmer asked if it was Michael’s mother he’d seen pulling out of the driveway next door. “We’re neighbors,” Michael answered. “Which is an accident, or a story.” When Michael asked after his dog, the Potato Farmer said, “I imagine you’ll see him soon,” and blushed. Michael wanted to kiss him but had a stitch in his lip. And leaning forward gave him trouble.

  “I just wanted to see you,” the Potato Farmer said.

  “Nice to be seen,” Michael answered.

  “I’m going to take a nap,” Michael added. The Potato Farmer stood. “You don’t need to go. But it won’t be that kind of nap. Everything hurts a bit too much.” They went upstairs and lay on Michael’s bed. It felt nice to feel a shoulder against his own, to listen to another person’s breath. Had Udo been around, the Potato Farmer would have been a character for them to invent—his house lined in tubers, back permanently curved. Udo wasn’t here, he tried to remind himself. He was gone, or here but in a box. Ash and slivers of bone that Michael sometimes looked at, that he sometimes rubbed between his fingers.

  When the farmer said he had to get going, Michael hobbled to the door. He said goodbye using his actual name.

  Mutti’s car was gone. She must have been at work, relieved for its activity. Cindy’s carrying crate sat next to the garbage. Michael crossed to her driveway. The clematis that grew over her garden shed shivered in the wind. Michael picked up the empty carrier and brought it into his house. Mutti might want it again someday.

  Back inside, Michael took the container of ash and went into the bathroom. He stood in front of the mirror and dipped a finger inside. He started with an eyelid, smearing until it turned gray. Dust slid into his eye and he closed it. He tried his cheeks next. It didn’t stick as makeup did, some streaking, some floating away.

  “A faggot monster,” Michael said.

  He walked through the house with the ash on his face. He stood on his deck and hoped someone would notice his exceptional ugliness. His phone sounded. From a number he didn’t recognize came a text: I heard about Cindy. Another message arrived a moment later: Peter spent the first few days of school pretending he spoke only German. Adela had been in this house a week before. He wanted to ignore her message, or write: He left half of this house to you. Michael missed Adela, was glad she was gone. Ash slipped down his face. Michael touched his cheek and stared at the gray on his palm. The phone rang this time. And as he stood on the deck, hands streaked w
ith what was left of his cousin, he let it ring a second, a third time, and decided whether or not to answer.

  2016

  Wolfi asked if Peter was joking. They lay on the beach, the frites between them collecting sand. In the ten months since Peter had last seen him, Wolfi had become a man. His voice deep, shoulders yoked. Time turned fast and sneaky.

  “She told me as we drove home from the airport,” Peter said.

  “And what did you say?” Wolfi asked.

  “I didn’t ask if she was joking,” Peter answered. Wolfi let out an amused grunt.

  Peter didn’t tell Wolfi that, when Oma announced that she’d sold the house along with the furniture she wasn’t taking, he’d cried. That when he and Oma got to the house he hadn’t gone inside, but snapped branches off her trees.

  “You’re hurting the trees,” Oma had said.

  “They’re hurting me,” he’d answered, and pulled down another one.

  When Oma started in on something else, he answered: “Don’t tell me I’m being ridiculous. My mother’s favorite thing to say to me. Like when Malcolm cries all night and I tell her it kept me up. Or when I asked if I could go to school here for a year.”

  The scratches lining his hands stung from the salt water.

  “So she’s selling it,” Wolfi said, and moved onto his back. The hair on his toes, his thick neck, all spoke of seriousness, when their last three summers together had been effortlessly silly.

  “Sold,” Peter said.

  “Shit,” Wolfi answered.

  “Total shit,” Peter agreed.

  A girl passed and waved. When Wolfi waved back, she turned to her phone.

  “Oma tried to make it better by saying she could visit us in America more.”

  “I’ve never been to America,” Wolfi answered.

  It was Oma and this place Peter had fallen for. The sea they could bike to, Wolfi down the block who picked up the previous summer’s thread the moment they saw each other.

  “Who was that girl?” Peter asked.

  “Friend.”

  “With benefits?” he said, in English.

  “That’s someone else,” Wolfi answered, and purred out the name Julia. Peter’s face turned warm; he excused himself and trotted back into the water. “My best friend lives in Germany,” he sometimes told people at school, and they’d look at him as if he’d made Wolfi up. “Fuckers,” Peter would mumble, and walk out of the cafeteria.

  He swam out far, avoiding jellyfish and a shoulder of driftwood. A lifeguard whistled and waved. Peter waved back, but the whistles continued. Peter was the only person between Germany and Denmark. Water beneath him wound dark and cold.

  “Want to go somewhere?” Wolfi asked when Peter returned, and they traveled farther down the beach where Wolfi’s girlfriend and her friends lay on a blanket. They wore bikinis and expressions of sweaty boredom. Peter found them terrifying. But each of them knew who he was. The girlfriend, Julia—who was pretty and, like Wolfi, looked like an adult—hugged Peter. They talked about the American family who’d turned famous from a sex tape. Peter pretended to find it interesting. Wolfi watched him and Julia together as if this moment had been a dream and a worry. Because I’m difficult, Peter understood, and for the rest of the afternoon projected difficulty’s opposite.

  * * *

  Peter’s annual summer trips to Kritzhagen had started when he was ten. Oma and Michael had flown over for his mother’s wedding to Bob, who was as boring as his name suggested, and he returned with them. Oma’s house came back to him immediately. When he and Michael biked to the beach, Peter led the way. German came back with equal ease, so much so that he articulated a complicated idea on his second night there and felt like he was speaking in tongues. He’d met Wolfi that summer, too. Within days, he and Peter were inseparable. He told Wolfi about D.C., also Pretoria. Wolfi told him about his older sister’s boyfriend whom his parents hated.

  “Hate why?” Peter had asked.

  “Because he’s Turkish,” Wolfi said. “Not that they’d ever admit that that’s the reason.”

  Each summer Peter returned, staying for six weeks, sometimes longer. Comforted by his grandmother’s quiet warmth and the freedom she gave him, her stories of growing up in one country, then the next. He learned nuanced German and fell for this city’s cold beaches. Even more for Oma, who looked like a grandmother from a storybook but swore in English. Then there was his uncle. Peter stopped by Michael’s bars before they opened. “Your new best friend is here,” a bartender would say as Peter parked his bike by the jukebox.

  “Hello, new best friend,” Michael greeted him.

  “Hello, old best friend,” Peter answered. “And I mean old like old.”

  “Right. Because I’m an old person.”

  Getting back to D.C., Peter compared his tan with Angie Sanchez’s next door. He’d tell her stories about the house that seemed haunted but was not, the German movie theaters with assigned seats and carts that sold ice cream and beer. Spent the next ten months cursing Washington’s joyless people and swamp-yard weather. Also his mother, so busy with her policy job and with Bob, who taught biology. In Kritzhagen Peter had a kind of celebrity. In D.C., he was seen as mean and strange. He emailed Oma regularly. She sent back pictures of a new thing she’d planted, a sign he’d find funny. He texted his uncle who hated being called uncle. How is my uncle? Peter would write. Does uncle’s new friend have tattoos? Dear bastard nephew, Michael would reply. I wouldn’t call him a friend. Peter wrote their exchanges in a notebook and read them at his father’s when Dad’s girlfriend talked over the television.

  He returned to Kritzhagen each summer to a slightly older grandmother, an uncle with another bar added to his empire. Peter wandered into the attic to read letters his grandfather had sent decades before, a man Oma spoke of fondly now, she and him talking on the phone from time to time or sending each other articles. On other trips to the attic he searched out pictures where Oma looked so young it made him laugh. Or examined a notebook his uncle had used to map out this city when they’d first moved here. And Oma told him stories of Mom as a child. Stories of relatives who’d lived in this house a hundred years before, like the great-several-times-over-grandfather who built this house when the city’s edge was miles away.

  But this summer, there were boxes where a bureau had been. Art had been taken from walls, extra beds sold.

  “Where will I stay next time?” Peter asked on his second night. He and Wolfi had played Ping-Pong in his basement. They’d smoked weed, Peter not admitting that he’d never smoked it before. Then Julia had shown up and he went back to Oma’s. His mouth felt like paste. TV news showed city blocks in Nice cordoned off with police tape.

  “I can’t imagine you’ll want to come much longer,” Oma answered.

  Peter’s foot tapped the bare floor, its rug sold or given away.

  “I can,” he said, surprised by how little she expected from him. Her combination of warmth and sadness felt just right. When she was down, he’d turn ridiculous until she laughed or smiled with sad appreciation.

  “When you’re twenty, you’ll still come in the summers?” Oma asked.

  “When I’m older I can come when I want.”

  “Your uncle has space, too.”

  “Then I’d be stuck with him and Frank, and have to deal with all that.”

  “All what?”

  Michael and Frank had been together for a few years. They lived in Frank’s place close to the coast. Frank did something with the government. He was handsome and his shirts were always tucked in. Peter had no idea what he and Michael talked about.

  “All that love.”

  Oma mussed his hair.

  “But it’s been done,” Oma said. “The new family comes at August’s end.”

  “Crazy,” a woman interviewed on TV said via a translator. Peter could become a translator, could live in Hamburg or Berlin, which people talked about with the irritated envy of a more adventurous sibling. He left the roo
m. He wrote terrible words on his bedroom wall, then tried to erase them, angry with Oma and with himself and with his eraser for giving up so easily.

  * * *

  Coming back from visiting a friend in Viersen the winter before, Beate found the second floor inundated with leaks, so many that she had to borrow buckets. “This place is falling apart,” Liesl said as she showed up with her contribution. Her daughter Petra played a game on her phone. “It’s big here,” Annette said. Liesl smiled as if her daughter had said something extraordinary, though Beate forgave Liesl’s doting on this girl, thinking of the long slog of grief that would always weigh her down. Liesl left and Beate moved through her extra bedrooms. She couldn’t remember when she’d last been in them.

  The next day she hired a roofer; another man to take away the furniture that had been destroyed. “You can take that, too.” She pointed to a desk she never used. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” the man answered. Soon after, on a whim, she looked at an apartment with a view of the sea. She remembered their apartment in Cologne, the story of each day told in a neighbor’s barking dog, the man who’d bought her wine leaving at the same time every morning. Letting go of the house turned to a relief. When she told Michael, he looked serious for a moment. Then he grinned. “Adela and I text about that sometimes,” he said. “Betting as to how long you’ll hold on to this thing.”

  “I thought you loved it,” Beate said.

  “There are a lot of things I’ve loved,” he added, and she answered that he didn’t have to make everything dirty, though she adored how he joked with her so crassly. Selling the house quickly turned real. A real estate broker came. “It just keeps going,” she said, and cited a price so good that Beate reddened at what she’d been sitting on without realizing. She could stop working sooner than she’d planned. Could wake up each morning to a view of the sea. And it felt crazy, then, that she’d stayed in the house for so long, that she hadn’t thought to picture anything different.