The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  * * *

  After a morning at the beach where Wolfi waited for Julia like a nervous dog, Peter biked to his uncle’s new restaurant. Its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the sea. They were open, and breezes tunneled between tables. Peter pictured it lit up at night, the water dark beyond it. A woman working there pointed to an office where Michael should have been, but wasn’t. Through a back door he heard his uncle’s voice, a person laughing with him. Michael must have said something stupid or funny or mean. Peter peeked his head out. Michael stood next to a younger man, probably a waiter. They shared a cigarette; the man rested his hand on Michael’s hip. Then Michael kissed him. Their mouths moved as if eating. The man stopped and said he had to get ready. Seeing Peter in the doorway, Michael guffawed.

  “That wasn’t Frank,” Peter said.

  Frank was handsome, like Wolfi, who wouldn’t leave their spot on the beach that morning in case Julia showed up. Peter had swum out on his own. He passed a girl who’d told him he didn’t look German and he’d answered, “I’m from ISIS,” before diving into a wave.

  “Frank doesn’t care,” Michael said. “Probably does it, too. What’s that thing you say about faggots in your army?”

  “That isn’t a thing anymore,” Peter answered. “And faggots is a terrible word.”

  “You sound like your mother,” Michael said.

  When he got home, Oma understood something was wrong. Peter found he couldn’t keep it to himself. They sat on the sofa. Oma held a glass of wine. Her bracelets looked like rolls of masking tape.

  “There are parts of my son I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Frank probably does it, too,” Peter mimicked.

  “Maybe he does,” Oma said. “Can you imagine, though? Seeing someone and saying you’re cute and just—” She made a kissing noise. “But you probably don’t want to talk about kissing. With an old lady.”

  “Can I have a sip of your wine?” Peter asked.

  “A sip.”

  Oma didn’t treat his distress as a joke. Didn’t call him ridiculous, perhaps because she understood that what looked ridiculous to others was difficult and real.

  The room echoed without a rug.

  “My mother told me once that you lived here with only sleeping bags,” Peter said.

  “Briefly,” Oma answered. She slid books into a box. A reporter on television discussed a street fair that had been canceled. “Officials cite security challenges,” the woman said.

  “But then we got beds.”

  “From Liesl,” Peter added.

  “Your mother likes to tell that story.”

  “What about the goat story?” he asked.

  She’d told him the story of her great-grandfather several times; Peter always wanted to hear it again. Even though Oma hadn’t been there, she talked of the goat her great-grandfather had doted on. How her great-grandmother was making dinner when the goat pushed at her with its horns.

  “A friend of mine eats goat all the time,” Peter said.

  “In Pretoria?” she asked.

  “Adams Morgan,” Peter answered, and picked up a box. Though he hated this move, he wanted to help her. His paternal grandmother lived in Seattle and was always in her garden. When she’d told him to pick a melon on his last visit there, she’d asked how the one he’d chosen could have seemed ripe to him, as if ripeness were a subject he’d studied in school. He told Oma this story. She laughed and touched the back of his head. He leaned into her hand, as a cat might. He wanted to ask her how Cindy died, but didn’t want to alter the feeling in the room.

  Sneaking another sip of wine, Peter thought about telling Frank what he’d seen. But Frank would respond in some buttoned-up way, or say, You know your uncle. Peter thought about the ways he was like his uncle, also how he was different.

  * * *

  The table overlooked the sea. Oma went on about the place from decades before. “All the terrible carpet is gone!” she said. “What you’ve done with this place, Michael.”

  Michael and Frank sat across from them.

  “I just noticed that you’re going gray,” Peter told his uncle.

  “Makes me look distinguished,” Michael answered.

  “Or something,” Peter answered back. Michael looked delighted. Frank and Mutti talked about an offshore wind farm that Frank had gotten to see.

  “But you, Uncle, did not?” Peter asked.

  “I’m a lowly burgher.”

  “So lowly,” Peter answered, unable to resist their banter. Michael and Frank probably had an understanding. Perhaps Michael told him what Peter had stumbled upon. When his mom and Bob had gotten together, Peter’s dad was a mess. “The idea of her with him,” he’d kept saying, and even at nine, Peter understood that his father meant sex. But Michael kissed one person, then another. The thought of so many mouths was terrifying.

  Their salads came. Peter worked to eat slowly, but the food was good. And he was always hungry in Kritzhagen. “The sea air,” Frank said. “The beach,” Oma added. “Whatever debauchery he’s involved in,” Michael said.

  “Learned from the best,” Peter answered.

  “Wind beneath your wings,” Michael answered back. Sometimes in D.C. Peter thought he heard his uncle’s voice and turned around to look for him.

  The waiter from the alley moved past them with a tray of drinks. He smiled wide and easily. As he moved toward the back door, Peter excused himself.

  “Don’t just go to the bathroom to throw it all up, now,” Michael said.

  “It’s not the food that makes me want to throw up,” Peter answered, meaning to be mean, though Michael appeared charmed. Love for these people heated Peter’s cheeks. He moved between tables.

  Peter found the waiter in the same alley, smoking a cigarette. He paused at the door, audacity and fear pulling him in different directions. The waiter noticed Peter watching.

  “I’d like a cigarette,” Peter said.

  “How old are you?” the waiter answered.

  “How old are you?” Peter asked. His throat was dry. His tongue tasted of salad. “You know Michael is like forty. And he’s my uncle.”

  “You’re not from here, right?” the waiter said. “Your German is perfect.”

  “America. Thank you.”

  “I was in New York once.”

  “New York is big,” Peter answered, and the waiter inhaled. “I’d still like a cigarette.”

  The waiter had stocky fingers and nicks on his throat from shaving. Noise sounded in the kitchen.

  “You can’t say where you got it,” the waiter said. “And don’t smoke it now.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Peter said, though that had been his plan. He wanted to ask the waiter if he and Michael kissed all the time. If this was what it meant to have feelings for other men, kissing and sex as simple as a shared sandwich. Peter’s fourteen-year-old body was his to rub and clean. Sharing it with so many others was as unthinkable as taking his dick and balls out on the Metro.

  “Promise?” the waiter said with a singsong that made him seem stupid.

  Back at the table, the fish Peter had ordered was waiting for him.

  “Isn’t that the best thing?” Frank said. “Coming back to your food being there?”

  Peter and Michael shared looks announcing that the list of things trumping this was long and wide. Something in the kitchen clattered. A woman one table over held a hand to her chest.

  “People drop things,” the man with her answered.

  “It’s just,” she said, “I wasn’t expecting it.”

  * * *

  At night Peter and Oma packed. Sometimes they watched news programs showing Syria or France, or the investigation of a Baghdad wedding that had recently been bombed to oblivion. Oma held a pillow over her stomach. Peter wondered where Wolfi was. He’d gone to Wolfi’s house that night, but no one was home. He wondered if the sister still had the Turkish boyfriend. If Wolfi’s parents still pretended not to have a problem with him.

&
nbsp; The next day, though, Wolfi found Peter at the beach. In the two and a half days since he’d last seen him, Wolfi looked like he had aged another year. He whispered about a party at Julia’s house that night. His breath smelled of soda.

  “Her parents are in Majorca,” Wolfi went on. “So a party. So you’ll come with me.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Late,” Wolfi said. “So you’ll have to…” He pantomimed sneaking out. What was cockeyed between them righted. They went into the water and Wolfi raced him, though later he said he hadn’t been racing at all. And though he had a foot on Peter, and adult muscles, Peter almost beat him.

  * * *

  Julia’s house, with its shrubs and echoes, reminded Peter of Liesl’s. People gathered in a sunroom. Some swam in a lit-up pool and tracked chlorine smells into the house. When a girl asked where he was from, Peter said he was a Syrian refugee. Wolfi and Julia vanished. Peter stayed. He drank more than he ever had before. He was dared to kiss a girl and did, though it didn’t feel as he’d hoped and as he kissed her he thought about his uncle’s mouth on the waiter’s, and how, when he’d gone to the beach with Michael and Frank, he’d opened his eyes underwater to look at Frank’s legs.

  He biked home very late, the city so still he could hear the sea from blocks away.

  Oma snoozed on the couch. Asleep, she looked older. Someday she’d be gone. Someday it would be Peter without all of them. The great-several-times-over-grandfather had built this place for the spot’s isolation. Now there were houses everywhere. Peter didn’t even know what this man had looked like. When Oma told stories about him, she’d say: “I’m not sure if all of this is true.” Peter would turn equally obtuse. A hundred years would drive forward and wipe him from living memory. The new family buying this house knew nothing about the goat or the orchard Oma’s father had planted. They might chop down those trees to bring in more light, might find the hoof marks a nuisance and redo the floor. Oma took a breath. She was here, as the great-several-times-over grandfather had once been. Also Oma’s parents, whom she talked about sometimes and got sad, though she said she was happy remembering them. Perhaps one day he would think of her in the same way. Perhaps he’d have someone who’d want to hear stories of Oma in this house and in Cologne and Minnesota. Of Michael kissing a waiter in an alley, Oma watching the news with a pillow over her stomach. His mother in Pretoria fighting a disease that might become as antiquated as polio. Everyone was afraid then, Peter might say, fear in the past tense. A breeze blew through the window. Everything seemed to be leaving. Peter’s summer here, with four weeks left, already over. There were more boxes in the corner than had been there that morning.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” Peter mumbled, and tried to conjure Frank’s legs kicking in the water the afternoon before. To think of what might be in the kitchen for him to eat.

  Oma’s eyes opened so wide that all the confusion and fear of the elderly seemed hers.

  “You’re just coming home?” she said, and looked at her watch. “Three in the morning.”

  “I didn’t know you knew. That I went out.”

  Her look told him not to be stupid. He felt dumb, angry at her expression.

  “I’m supposed to take care of you,” Oma said.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Out at all hours.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me. It was a party. At a house. Probably the safest place in the world.” He’d heard Oma tell Liesl about the new security guard they’d hired at the Pflegeheim who used to be in the army. How she’d hired an orderly who wore a headscarf and some residents didn’t want her near their things. “I have no problem with them,” Liesl had said. “But why can’t she just take the thing off at work? She probably has beautiful hair.” Oma twisted a ring on her finger.

  She’d stayed up imagining scenarios that a few years ago she’d never had to consider. At Dulles, Peter’s mom had stood outside the security line until he’d made it through. She told him to call after he got off the plane, and again from Oma’s car. His father texted him: Don’t get too much sun! and tried and failed with emoticons. Part of Peter wanted to write to his mother: Made it out of the airport. No bomb. To his Dad: I’m telling people here that my name is Al-Qaeda. But Oma looked afraid now, also tired, and Peter knew he’d sparked those feelings.

  “I’m sorry you were frightened,” he said, thinking of the awful scenarios she’d imagined as he dangled his feet into a pool and had another beer and kissed a girl because he’d been dared to.

  “I should have told you about the house before you got here,” Oma answered.

  “My mother told me about a time you’d moved to a new apartment and left a note taped to a wall.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Oma said.

  “My mother doesn’t tell me things, either. She wore giant sweaters for a month before she told me she was pregnant. I thought she was getting fat.”

  Oma smiled. “Your mother fat,” she said. “She eats berries and twigs.”

  “Moss and lichen,” Peter answered.

  “You’ll not stay out until all hours,” Oma said.

  “You going to tell my mother?” Peter asked.

  “When you were young and we got ice cream,” Oma said.

  “I hate when people don’t answer questions.”

  “I’m getting to it.”

  She told a story of getting him ice cream, though she wasn’t supposed to—he remembered those years when dairy was forbidden with anger still—and his mother had figured it out. Then Oma said: “This is between you and me. You are not a child. Not a grown-up, either. This can’t become a habit.” She lifted a hand and he held it. Peter wanted to cry, for the feeling of things falling away he couldn’t shrug off.

  “I’m sorry,” Peter said.

  Oma made a gesture as if wiping crumbs from her fingers. Peter wanted to sleep, to pretend the room upstairs would always be his, that a man who did something with banks wasn’t moving in with his family a month later.

  * * *

  Michael arrived one afternoon to help pack. They wrapped plates in newspaper. Peter sometimes stopped to read articles and asked the meanings of words. “That article is old news,” Michael answered. When Peter asked about the waiter, Michael checked to make sure a cabinet was empty. Gray ringed his head. It did make him look distinguished, especially with his tan. One flight up, Oma moved through rooms. Peter wanted to know about the waiter and other men. He remembered men from years before, he and Mom sleeping in a dead cousin’s bed, Michael down the hall with a new one every few days. Peter asked again. He’d watched his mother push in the same way when she wanted to know. Knowing felt like the only thing, also what Michael wouldn’t give him.

  “Feel free to tell me that you hate hearing this,” Michael said.

  “I hate hearing this,” Peter answered. Michael looked amused, also unsurprised. Peter tried to think of more original answers.

  “Frank and I are good. I know you think you saw something.”

  “I don’t think anything.”

  “Think it meant something,” Michael said, and finished the box he’d been packing.

  * * *

  On the last night in the house, packing finished, Oma asked if they should order food or go to Michael’s restaurant. “Restaurant,” Peter said. Again, they ate by the window. The waiter his uncle probably did plenty with slid between tables and it felt like a dance. There were candles and good food. His uncle let him have a glass of wine. Frank arrived, looking handsome, and this place felt good, safe, though it was as safe or unsafe as any other place. Michael joked about Peter’s tan.

  “You’re so dark, people might wonder.”

  “I told one girl I was from ISIS, as if that were a place. Told another one I was a Syrian refugee. She believed me for a minute. Even when she heard Wolfi call me Peter.”

  Michael beamed. Oma toggled between amused and horrified. She left a handful of potatoes on her plate. Peter picked one up. Wh
en he went in for another, she smacked his hand away and he pretended it hurt, while she pretended she was angry.

  “Wolfi went along with it,” Peter went on. “Said his family sponsored mine. That we were living above his garage.”

  “Didn’t think he had it in him,” Michael said.

  Wolfi had become a man. When Peter had gone back to D.C. last September, Wolfi messaged him almost every day, the habit of the other like a fresh wound, and he’d felt like Peter’s, felt like someone else’s now. He’d invited Wolfi to stop by the house one more time that afternoon, but he hadn’t shown up and Peter hadn’t been surprised.

  “I didn’t, either,” Peter said.

  * * *

  As they ate dessert, the street lit up with noise. Michael moved to the front door. Peter followed. One car had crashed into another. A stop sign had been run, a turn made without looking. People spilled out of the restaurant, relieved at the quotidian disaster outside. The offending driver got out of his car fast. The woman who’d been hit stared at her steering wheel. For a moment, Peter worried that she was dead. But he saw her shift. As he got closer, she rolled her window down.

  “Don’t move,” Peter said. Oma called for an ambulance.

  “I’m fine,” the woman answered.

  The restaurant behind them glowed and was beautiful. Peter couldn’t see the water, but heard it and smelled it, felt its mist against his skin. The woman went through her purse. Peter again advised her not to move. Michael went from table to table. He paused at Frank, who said something before Michael continued.

  The woman looked up at the dozen diners and waitstaff on the sidewalk. Peter repeated his instructions to stay still.

  “Where did you all come from?” she asked.

  * * *

  Peter lay in bed and wondered what the woman had been thinking right before she’d been hit. He heard the quiet hum of the radio and went downstairs. Oma sat at the kitchen table. The clock showed that it was just after four.