Surveying the damage and the mess, she grins to herself, thinking how shocked her fastidious mother would have been. She gathers up some of the larger bits into a pile and places them by the back door; she will use those later. Then she tidies up the remaining wood, sweeping away the splinters and dust. Kneeling by the grate, she feeds the fire, little by little, until it blazes with warmth. The radio is tuned to a station playing music for the soldiers, and she turns up the volume.
And then—the song! Zarah Leander’s growling voice sings “Lili Marleen,” and Bettina begins mouthing the words to herself. Soon she is dancing, and then she is singing as loud as she can.
It is the story of lovers hoping to reunite under a lamppost by the barracks. A song that plays ceaselessly in homes and bars and even sometimes in the streets when someone opens their windows wide enough to let the notes fly through, sweeping over the cobbles and dirt tracks and touching the exhausted islanders with a rousing, familiar embrace. Bettina danced to this song with her boyfriend, Dieter, before he was conscripted, his long arms wrapped around her and his lean body—so thin, a young boy’s—pressed against hers. They kissed deeply and then laughed at their indiscretion, so certain of their future in spite of all the uncertainty around them. Bettina cannot listen to that rich, growling voice without remembering what conviction and pride felt like. She imagines herself a seductress or a lover, swaggering through a party, cocktail in hand, hope and lust and confidence transforming her into a beauty.
Bettina twirls around the small kitchen, crushing splinters of wood with her too-big boots, the music filling her up. The next song is faster, and she does a little jig. When Herbert Lange was courting her sister, Bettina and Dieter were sometimes allowed to tag along with them to the dance halls on Saturday nights. She would wear her favorite pumps, swinging herself from one eager man to the next until she was out of breath, muscles aching.
Everything had seemed possible back then. If she had been a little older and said yes to marrying Dieter before he left, maybe she would have a child to take care of now. A child—oh, the thought of a child. Would that be better or worse than being alone?
As dawn breaks, Bettina heads for the beach on her bicycle, her father’s camera bouncing on its leather cord around her neck. The streets are barely lit by the cool pink of a springtime sunrise, and vagrants are milling about, half-dead soldiers sleeping under trees and on sidewalks. It seems as though the whole world is on the move as the Russians march farther and farther west, ever closer to them. Her father’s last words to her as he lay dying had been, “Versteck dich, Bettinalein. Promise to hide.” But she can’t, not today. She badly needs to see the ocean again; she can’t stand being cooped up inside the house any longer. Bettina is willing to risk anything just to feel the sea breeze on her parched skin and taste salt in the back of her throat again.
A few fishermen have detangled their nets, hanging them to dry between long sticks. Bettina lifts the camera and looks down through the viewfinder, taking comfort in clicking the dial till everything comes into sharp focus. She presses the button, again and then again, even though the camera is empty of film. It has been years since she has been able to find thirty-five-millimeter cartridges. After a while she starts running, just so she can feel the wind against her arms and her legs, her neck and face. Her housedress flaps around her knees like wings beating against her skin. Close to the edge of the sea, she runs as fast as her feet will carry her, clutching the Rollei in both hands. Tar-covered debris littering the sand makes her footing clumsy, but she jumps over the pieces of wood, the twisted scraps of metal. She has become a woman, and she doesn’t quite know what this means yet. She runs until her side is pierced by a stitch and her breath comes in short, sharp bursts, and then unexpectedly her foot lands badly and she trips, falling spectacularly, flinging her arms out in front of her.
Something wet nudges at her shin, and in horror she jerks herself upright. It is a small dog, a ridiculous-looking mutt with yellow tufts springing from his ears. Bettina tries to stand, and a stinging pain courses up her leg. In the cove of trees not far from her, she detects a mound of fabric, olive green and filthy, next to which lies a boot. Dozens of Scotch pines, battered by wind blowing in from the north, stoop along the edge of the sand, gray and wizened. Crimped limbs have been broken by storms. It takes her a moment to realize the boot on the sand is attached to a foot, and a person is lying among the dunes in the shelter of the trees. The person stirs and sits up. It is a man, a soldier.
Her body stiffens. This is what her father warned her about; she should have known better.
Acknowledging what must be a look of terror on her face, the beach man lifts a hand and waves at her.
A wave—a commonplace, casual wave! No one waves at strangers anymore. Bettina struggles to her feet. Leaning heavily on her ankle, she winces. As the man rises and begins walking toward her, she attempts to back up. His uniform is stained in oily patches and torn at the seams, and around the sleeve of his jacket is a grubby white armband.
“Please, I don’t . . . ,” she stammers, backing away from him. “Please don’t hurt me . . .”
The man stops. His face is fine boned and narrow, patchy with dirt and stubble, his eyes weary. He crouches down to pat the dog, and there is quiet for a time. The islanders have become so furtive, talking rapidly in hushed tones, eyes wide and mistrusting, yet this man seems different. When he looks up at her, it is with the look of an ordinary person, unafraid, unhurried. As he moves his hand over the small animal’s back, his shoulders are relaxed. An unaccustomed stillness settles over Bettina. Under these circumstances, in the early morning, on a litter-strewed beach at the end of a brutal war, she finds this discomfiting yet also exhilarating.
“I . . . uh . . . I was just going for a walk,” she says, and the man laughs, such a startling sound. But it is good natured, and as he rises, he lifts his rough workman’s hands into the air in a gesture of surrender. In one hand he’s holding a tattered notebook and pencil.
“A walk, at this early hour? Never mind—let’s take a look here.” He is close now and carries with him a penetrating musty odor, as though his clothes have never fully dried. His blond hair is darkened with grease. He sticks the notebook into his breast pocket. “The leg, can you put weight on it?”
She glances down at her bare feet, covered in sand, and shifts her weight onto the foot. It hurts, but not as much as before. Nodding at him, she begins to back away again.
“Good, that’s good. You know,” the man says, hands on hips, narrowing his eyes, “there will come a day again when we can greet strangers without fear. When children will run on the beaches, and there will be laughter, and we will laugh along with them. It will happen. We must believe this.”
She scowls. What gives certain people this confidence in the face of all that’s already happened? “We must believe? Believe what?”
“Come, come,” he says. There’s something so impish about his smile—a kind of uninhibited joy—that she finds the muscles in her jaw beginning to relax, and her lips draw into a hesitant smile in return. “Just look at the beauty everywhere.” High above them a white-tailed eagle soars on the thermals, the fringes of its shadowed wings elegantly splayed. They track its path; then their eyes settle on each other again.
“Well. I expect the children will forget all about the war, won’t they?” Bettina acquiesces.
“Aha—so I win!”
“We’re competing, are we?” she shoots back. She points the camera at him and clicks the shutter a few times, then laughs aloud into the brightening sky. “Sorry. I haven’t had film in years. I really miss it.”
Bettina limps toward her bicycle, and the man heads back to the pine grove. The dog trots alongside her. He seems quite content, and when she hitches up her skirt and lifts herself onto the seat, he regards her levelly, as though to say, Oh well; next time, perhaps. Far away on the beach, the soldier in green is just a speck among the pine needles, but a small white obj
ect moves back and forth rapidly in front of his body. He is waving again.
As she cycles back toward home, she wonders where the man will go. Does he live here, or is he passing through, on his way somewhere else? She wonders what he writes into his little notebook. It was impossible to tell how old he is, but she herself feels very old, like a woman who has already lived many lives. He could have been as young as seventeen or as old as thirty. He was filthy and emaciated; should she have invited him back to the house and given him some of her food? It would have been the right thing to do, but she promised her father she would be cautious, that she would try to stay safe.
The butcher Johann is an old family friend, and after both her parents died, he started dropping by occasionally to check on her. He gave her a treat for her birthday, and later that afternoon Bettina takes it out of the icebox and places it on the counter. Half a goose breast with some spiced fat preserved in a little glass jar. Her mouth waters just looking at it. Placing some of the fat in a pan, she sears the meat, sniffing frequently to prolong the pleasure. She brings out her grandmother’s plate with the picture of a stag painted on the front and a crystal wineglass and sets a spot for herself at the dining room table. She chews the meat slowly, the richness of the flavor like molasses. There is only water in her glass, but she pretends it is wine. As she eats, she thinks about humankind’s mysterious compulsions. Why is it that people insist on treating each other so cruelly? Why do men behave with such pride and violence and fear?
After clearing up, she unrolls some brown packing paper used for wrapping fish and brings out a few bits of charcoal. For hours she sits on a stool in the kitchen, almost motionless but for her left hand moving back and forth over the paper, drawing. Mostly she draws faces from memory, working especially hard on getting the eyes and brows just right. Today she is copying an old sepia photograph of Dieter dressed in his Wehrmacht uniform. The rejuvenated fire keeps her warm for many hours, and she does not head up to bed until very late.
In the coming years she thinks of that day often, the last birthday she spent alone. The radio with its portents of what was about to come. The beach, littered with debris, wind whipped. The food she savored but did not share. The unexpected laughter and the pictures she did not take.
3
Chicago
Summer 1965
The overhead lights dazzled her. It was like staring into the sun or being examined by an eye doctor—all sense of depth snuffed out. Looking out over the crowd, which was growing steadily by the minute, Bettina could make out a few splashes of color but no familiar faces, not one. She stood on the platform, holding a microphone unsteadily. A headache insinuated itself up the back of her skull toward her temples.
Who were all these people?
George, her boss, gently took the microphone from her and tapped on it. “Hello? Hello, everyone! Quiet, please—quiet.” His tone, its deep bass rumble, was an anchor. The swell of voices began to falter, and when he spoke again, a hush fell over the room. “Welcome to the Parkington Gallery,” he said, flashing a big American smile. Even after all this time, that was how Bettina still thought of those smiles: American. In no other part of the world could people instantly turn on that kind of warmth.
Standing at well over six feet tall, George was an enormous man in every way: oversize facial features, a rounded stomach, his laugh a bellow. He had a way of commanding attention, something about the way he spoke, his calculated hesitations, and he was tough as nails, relentless in his pursuit of breaking news stories. He’d once admitted to her that as a black man, he had to work twice as hard to be heard, and she had smiled in recognition; this was something she understood. They both knew what it meant to be an outsider, to be perceived as a threat.
“We are here to celebrate this remarkable woman, Bettina Heilstrom, and her art, so compelling and timely,” he said. “Art that provokes and asks questions rather than providing answers. Art that takes everything in, and everyone—wherever you come from, whatever you believe, your class, your work, your soul—Bettina Heilstrom can pick up on your essence with her camera.”
A wild surge of applause fell on her like hail. Could such praise be sincere? It was hard for her to tell these things.
George gesticulated as he spoke, revealing big, leathery palms. “Over a decade ago, Bettina arrived in Chicago with nothing more than a suitcase and a camera. She came to work at the Tribune, cleaning the floors and dusting desks—and look where she is now. But listen: I’ll let her speak for herself. Please give a warm welcome to Bettina Heilstrom, winner of the Smithsonian photography prize in the category ‘The American Experience’!”
Later she would not be able to remember if she’d actually said one word of what she’d written down on the scrap of paper that was wilting in her damp fingers. Time slowed as people waited to hear what she would say. They were so patient, so generous, and this helped her relax.
She forced herself to smile broadly, without hiding her teeth. “Guten Abend—Willkommen,” she said, addressing in this way the fact that, as a German, she was so obviously on the wrong side of history. “Thank you for having me, and thank you all for coming. You have welcomed me with a generosity of spirit I could never have imagined back when I worked in a factory on an island in the Baltic Sea.”
She kept that part of her story simple. That was not what these people were here for; it did not interest them. That part of history—what had happened after Hitler, after the war had finally ended—seemed irrelevant to them. Clearing her throat, she tried to concentrate on what she thought they wanted to hear. How, on a cool afternoon about a year after arriving in Chicago, she had ventured out alone and had absentmindedly grabbed her Rolleiflex for company. The old camera she’d ignored for so long. The camera that, in a way, ended up saving her life.
Here she raised the camera itself in the air, holding it out under the glaring lights, the weight of it like a boulder in her palm. It had a leather strap with twelve beads laced onto it. Every corner, every dial and lever and minuscule bolt of this camera, was familiar to her. It was a bulky piece of machinery, quite outdated, beautiful with its twin lenses and engraved metal plate secured into place on the front. Box shaped, awkward to hold or sling around your body, it allowed you to flip up a viewer on the top so that you didn’t have to place it in front of your face but could look your subject in the eye while shooting. A lever on one side wound the film forward, and a dial on the other focused the bottom lens. This camera had been dropped, it had been rained on, flung aside, and once it had even withstood falling on the sand. The whole thing had practically been taken apart and put together again, and yet it had somehow managed to survive it all.
“The camera is a friend,” Bettina was saying to the crowd. “A reliable friend at all times. It allows you to be in dialogue, to observe, yes, but also to communicate.”
That Sunday years ago, she had gone up to the Calumet River around Ninety-Sixth, drawn to explore the steel mills, blast furnaces, railway tracks, utility poles, and bridges. The industrial landscape was both familiar to her and alien, the tangle of electrical wires crisscrossing the sky like vast spiderwebs. At home on the island in the years after the fighting was over, factories had sprung up like mushrooms, and yet Rügen was beautiful in a way this city was not. There she’d had the churning Baltic Sea, the herring gulls that carved elegant paths across clear skies. The smell of salt and shifting colors. In Chicago people were overwhelmed by glass, steel, grime, faded industry.
Bettina did not say so now, but that day walking along the neglected riverbanks had been as close as she’d ever come to thinking that life was no longer worth living.
For hours she had assumed she was the only person on site, and she’d wandered around, alone but not entirely alone. Always, always an insistent, familiar voice whispering in her ear, encouraging her to look closely. To absorb and engage, to never succumb to the too-easy idea of giving up. She’d caught sight of a woman and a child standing in front of an a
bandoned shoe factory. The woman’s pale features, the child’s chapped cheeks, took her by surprise: The color among the gray tones. The . . . what was it? Softness of their skin. Their two faces contained a thousand conflicting stories.
What were they doing in this godforsaken place? Where had they come from? Were they mother and daughter? The child, a girl of about eight or nine, looked at Bettina with an intense curiosity that seemed at once arrogant and vulnerable. She was gaunt, rangy. Without thinking, Bettina had clicked open the Rolleiflex and captured what she saw: the contrast of shapes, the inanimate buildings behind the warmth of these ravaged faces. All the while, the three of them looked at one another, silent.
That day taught Bettina that she could be both invisible and seen, and this contradiction would allow her to make it through that day and each day after. It helped her learn about her new world and achieve a more intimate knowledge of its people. It had, eventually, led to this prize, this celebration. She had learned that she had not only the will to live but also the desire to achieve.
“Sometimes a moment can do this,” she summed up, looking over the bleached-out faces. “Sometimes things can change in an instant because you decide to take a certain action. When we do not act, we die inside.” She did not mention that she had given the mother and child the last of her money, almost fourteen dollars. That she’d decided that very day to begin carrying the camera with her everywhere she went—and that shortly thereafter, she’d picked up two colorful beads and strung them onto its strap, buying a new one every year after that on the occasion of her daughter’s birthday. Deciding to open her eyes again, to allow herself to remember and imagine.
Last week after her prize was announced, the Tribune ran an editorial calling her work “a postmodern look at the dehumanizing nature of industry and the individual’s struggle to emerge from the shadowy masses. Bettina Heilstrom skewers universalist notions of morality and human nature to reveal that we are, at our core, complex and vulnerable, brave and fearful, constrained and yet also seen.” She hadn’t fully understood what the words meant; when she snapped her photos, all she was conscious of was that her eye was drawn to contrasts. In the development process, Bettina worked on heightening the focus on her subject’s features—the droop of the eyelid, the yank of skin at the corner of a mouth—while leaving the background slightly unclear. But what it all really meant, she wasn’t entirely sure.
This Terrible Beauty: A Novel Page 3
