This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  Old seaside mansions stand like stalwart aristocrats fallen on hard times, lining the curving shoreline overlooking the walkway and the white-sand beach. Ornately carved wooden balustrades are splintered, and gaping holes appear in railings. Entire porches that once invited well-dressed occupants to sip tea and watch the sun play over the water now list at dangerous angles. Some of the houses have no roofs at all, their interiors exposed and rotting in the salty air. Now that East Germany has split decisively from the West, some houses are used as hostels for the migrant workers shipped in to run the new factories that are beginning to replace the family farms. Mechanization, increased production, chemical engineering—these are all on the upswing; they represent the hopes of the Deutsche Demokratishe Republik, the DDR. Everywhere you look, there are signs that their world is changing.

  Bettina likes the way the houses line up: devastated, unruly, yet hinting at a kind of perverse resilience. Because of her experience with the dog yesterday, she’s brought along her Rolleiflex. She snaps a few pictures, but her heart isn’t really in it. It has become harder and harder for her to decide which images are worth capturing and which are a waste of precious film. If only resources weren’t so scarce. If only she could snap away and develop canister after canister and not worry about where the next roll will come from or how she will pay to have them developed.

  “I’d listen to Werner,” Clara is saying under her breath. “Poking your nose into someone else’s business is a surefire way of getting yourself into trouble.”

  This is what Bettina expected her sister to say, and yet resistance rises inside her like bile. Why is Bettina so quick to take on other people’s problems? It is a trait her grandfather used to comment on, his erratic brows rising with disdain, yet she has not been able to rid herself of this tendency. “But he might be able to help. Isn’t that worth doing, for a friend?”

  Clara shrugs, and Bettina wonders when her sister became so cynical. “Isn’t he just an accountant?” Clara asks. “If he’s willing, I suppose. But I wouldn’t push, Bettinalein. Remember, Papa always counseled us to mind our own business: Deine Sache, was du machst.”

  It has warmed up considerably, and Bettina peels off her prickly cardigan, letting her pale arms soak up the sunshine. The water to their right is covered in sharp-edged whitecaps. The promenade is crowded with people taking an afternoon stroll; in the past half hour she has seen the Gronwalds, old Siegfried Rattenbach, and Käthe von Kohs. Each time they pass another person they know, Clara digs her elbow into Bettina’s rib cage.

  “Don’t you feel like a zoo animal?” she whispers. “The tiny provincial zoo of Rügen, where all the species come out to gawk in their Sunday best, one day a week . . .”

  Bettina laughs. She thinks of her neighbors on the square and how much she knows of their lives. Old man Henning likes his liquor so much that he often starts in on the beer before breakfast. When she and Clara were little, they played with Ilsa Schiffer’s daughter, Jane, who became pregnant at sixteen and was sent away to a convent in the south (they were the only Catholics Bettina knew). When Werner moved in, her neighbors were silent and watchful; no doubt they had been curious whether Bettina would become an old maid.

  In a way, life had become even harder after the Russians took over, when it seemed as if most of the old allegiances and friendships that had survived the Third Reich were severed for good. Some of that was positive, Bettina thought (those old cronies and the young diehards who believed the insane race rhetoric, they were in for a reckoning), but some of it was devastating. Anyone labeled a Nazi—whether they had actually been one or not—was hauled in front of a makeshift tribunal, and soon brothers were turning in sisters and vice versa. Rivals turned in former business partners. Scorned wives fingered their husbands. Fear and uncertainty made people do the unimaginable.

  And it’s still happening now, just for different reasons. Clara was telling her about something she’d heard in the typing pool at the mine: a trial being conducted in central Saxony of Germans who are still imprisoned by the Russians. Over three thousand of them, some of whom had been teenagers during the war, charged with war crimes and sentenced to death. There is a price to pay for what the Germans did—Bettina knows this—but when will it end? That ordinary people like Christa are now considered a threat is unthinkable. The new regime, the Communists, promised modernity and progress, but it sometimes feels as though their lives are running in reverse, away from progress, not toward it.

  “Where are we going?” Bettina calls out to the men, who are walking toward a sandy stretch of beach.

  Herbert waves them onward with his good arm. “Have something to show you,” he yells, his words dissolving in the wind.

  Bettina and Clara shuck off their shoes and ankle socks and follow the men. The sand is cool and damp between Bettina’s toes. They walk along the water’s edge, past the trees, after which the beach becomes a sliver of sand, covered here and there by boulders spilling out toward the ocean.

  Werner and Herbert sit on a large flat rock, finishing up their smokes, looking out over the water as the women approach. Both men have rolled up the legs of their trousers and are tipping their faces toward the sun.

  “Isn’t this beautiful?” Herbert asks.

  “We’ll have to head back soon if we want to catch the afternoon bus,” Werner says, and all three of them look at him in irritation.

  “I’m so warm,” Bettina complains, unbuttoning the top of her blouse. They are protected from the wind by the chalk cliffs that rise abruptly out of the water on one side and the cluster of wind-gnarled trees on the other. She walks backward toward the water, flips the camera open, and raises it slightly to catch the magnificent rise of chalk above the ocean, hundreds of meters of soaring crags. The tiny people in a cluster at the foot of the cliff. A sliver of sand and water at the bottom of the frame.

  Herbert stands up. He’s taken off his shoes, revealing sturdy ankles covered in dark hair. For a tall man he is surprisingly nimble on his feet. “Let’s go swimming!” he says, grinning at the women and horsing around. “That will cool us down.”

  “But we can’t,” Clara says. “We didn’t bring our bathing suits. And anyway, it must be freezing.”

  Bettina points over at the trees. “We could leave our clothes over there. Go in wearing just our undergarments!”

  “That would be unseemly,” Werner says, casting a sharp look in her direction.

  “Oh, come on. Isn’t it fun to be unseemly sometimes?” she asks, pushing on his chest with the flat of her hand. “Are you never just a little unseemly? Never?”

  He doesn’t smile back at her. “Now you’re being silly.”

  She was in fact trying to be silly, but she turns away and walks toward the trees. “I think it’s a fabulous idea,” she calls out.

  The water is so cold it freezes the breath in her lungs. Wearing only her brassiere and slip, Bettina plunges forward into the shallows to cover herself, holding her head above the waves. She swims furiously, going farther and farther out. She could keep going and never stop until she hits land again.

  Treading water, she looks up at the boardwalk in the distance, the people passing by, some of whom have noticed her swimming and are pointing. There is a little girl, hair as white as dandelion down, leaning over the railing, calling to her mother to come see. She is screeching, delight all over her face. Bettina waves, and the girl waves back, her body stiff with excitement. How old is she? It’s hard to tell from this distance. A boy clutching a small red object peers over the railing and laughs along with his sister. They nuzzle each other, sharing some secret, gesticulating toward the water.

  Bettina swims away, tears burning at her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she sinks down into the water, raising her hands above her head and letting herself slip downward. It doesn’t matter that she’s ruining her hair; who cares? The icy water is shocking on her warm scalp. She wonders whether she is perhaps doomed to never have children after all. She had tak
en for granted that marriage would, at the very least, give her a child to love and care for, and it is possible that this is not to be. Perhaps instead she will spend an entire lifetime working at the factory during the day and cooking a meal for two at night. That thought leaves a hollowness inside her chest that aches.

  After spinning around a few times under the water, she opens her eyes. The legs of a man become visible at a distance, and she swims underwater toward the figure. For a brief moment she thinks it might be Werner after all, and her heart lifts with the possibility that for her sake, he might try to change his ways. Coming up for a quick breath of air, she dives down again and opens her eyes to the hidden world. The salt water stings, but she keeps her eyes open.

  It is not Werner; it is Herbert. He has kept on his undershirt and pants, and they cling to his lean frame. Is he so ashamed of his body that he will not reveal himself, even here in the camouflaging waters of the sea?

  She needs to take a breath but doesn’t want to surface yet. Everything is so calm, drained of all color and form. She cannot really tell that Herbert’s arm is missing. From this perspective, everything is softer, muted. Closing her eyes, feeling her lungs bursting, she considers staying underwater, letting the sea fill up the growing emptiness inside her.

  9

  There is a rap on the door of Werner’s office, and his fingers pause above the calculator. When his superior enters without waiting to be invited in, Werner jumps to his feet. The desk is covered with paperwork, and he wishes he’d had a chance to tidy up. “Good day, Comrade. What a pleasure,” he says to Franz Josef Bieder.

  Invariably, Bieder makes Werner feel as though he’s been caught doing something perverse, like reading a Karl May western or fiddling with himself under the desk. The man has one glass eye that fails to move, giving his face a startled look while also suggesting a certain intransigence and rigidity. Bieder appears not to notice his subordinate’s discomfort. Since February, he’s been working at the police headquarters in Bergen with Inspector Fröse. Some days earlier he called to ask for Werner’s help pulling together information about Saargen residents, explaining that he now works for a newly established organization, a kind of modernized police force: the Ministry for State Security, known as the MfS.

  “Any letters of complaint?” Bieder asks Werner. “We also need names of residents trying for exit visas, yes? Those with relatives who’ve already gone West, and so on.”

  Until Bieder took him into his confidence, Werner had no earthly idea that Germans were leaving the East at such a high rate. Perhaps a neighbor or two disappeared, but this hasn’t concerned him much, at least not until now. After the war, when the Allies gave western Germany back to the Germans, the Russians had other ideas about the entire eastern half of Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia . . . all have become Communist. What a very strange outcome that his country is now split in two, each side governed by enemies, and that he happened to fall on this side by accident of geography.

  Bieder opens a folder and points at a teletype from Berlin headquarters. “We’ve only just gotten started,” he explains, “but soon leaving the DDR will become a punishable crime.”

  Werner looks at the piece of paper. Is it not an act of political depravity when citizens, whether young people, workers, or members of the intelligentsia, leave and betray what our people have created through common labor in our republic to offer themselves to the American or British secret services or work for the West German factory owners, Junkers, or militarists? Does not leaving the land of progress for the morass of a historically outdated social order demonstrate political backwardness and blindness?

  Yes, indeed, these acts are political depravity. The old order is steadily being erased—those disgraced young noblemen of yore, the Junkers with their unearned superiority, and the capitalistic owners greedy for profits, those people have been stripped of all power. Change is a good thing for the Germans. The words written by the Socialist Unity Party’s Agitation Department call out to Werner as though spiked with special energy, compelling him to be strong, to direct this strength toward the right goals.

  The German people, too, in particular the working class, have seized the banner of peace, democracy, and socialism firmly in their hands and will not rest until democratic conditions also prevail in West Germany.

  It is a mandate, and he is being chosen to help make it a reality. Werner goes to his file cabinets and begins pulling out paperwork. Over the course of the next two hours, he hands over updated lists of inhabitants, their personal wealth, and their holdings. Requests for repairs, for divorces, and for visitation rights.

  Afterward he sits at his desk and wipes his forehead with a clean handkerchief. He regards Bieder as the man packs away the last of the papers into a large carton. “Comrade, you mind my asking something? There’s a woman—she works with my wife.”

  “Your wife?” Bieder straightens up. “Where does your wife work?”

  “At the fish factory, here in Saargen.”

  The man gives him a small smile that barely alters the shape of his mouth and has no effect on his disconcerting eyes. “Ah, yes. You must be referring to Frau Kellermann, who was apprehended at the factory last week.”

  “By the Vopo?”

  “By the Stasi, not the locals. I take it you’re aware of this new police force, my friend? Part of the MfS.”

  This response gives Werner pause. Is the man saying this to lull him into a false sense of security or because he does in fact consider him a friend? Werner can’t be sure; he has not had that many friends. The leather on his chair creaks as his weight shifts. “I see. The new police force, right.” Werner is aware of the formation of this force—apparently called Stasi—under the jurisdiction of the Ministry for State Security; he brought home a new cap they’d unveiled a few months ago to show Bettina. He wants to ask more but hates to appear ignorant.

  “Well then, Nietz. What is it you wish to know?” Bieder taps out a cigarette and places it between his lips, then strikes a match to light it, managing to keep his one eye on Werner throughout the entire process.

  “I was wondering, Comrade,” he tries again. He can see from Bieder’s sharp gaze that this is not really a conversation between equals. He decides to take a different tack. “The interrogations—they’ve been successful, have they?”

  “May I give you some advice?” Bieder thrusts one hand into the pocket of his suit pants. The material is shiny where his hands have slipped over the seams time and time again. With the other hand he punches the cigarette in the air in compact little thrusts. “Better to stay in your lane. Showing personal interest in specific cases is unwise.”

  “Of course,” Werner answers. It is galling to think that Werner was right all along in his thoughts on this, but Bettina has been insisting that he interfere. He wants to please her, but he wants to please his boss even more.

  “So what do you think?” Bieder continues. “If you had a choice, what would you do with her, with Kellermann?”

  Werner taps his fingers lightly against the desk. “Depends what she’s done wrong, Comrade.”

  “Her son—the oldest one—a traitor to the people. Agitating against the state. Handing out pamphlets about supposed ‘wage cuts.’” Bieder takes a box of papers and places them next to the door, and Werner jumps up to help him. “As a dedicated socialist, what would you do with such a woman? A woman who brought up a child like that?”

  “He’s in custody, is he? The son?”

  “No. Rolf Kellermann has fled.” Bieder lets out a long string of cigarette smoke. “Went over to West Berlin in March—”

  “Listen,” Werner blurts. “It’s of no consequence to me what happens to the woman.”

  “You would send her to the camps, would you?”

  He barely hesitates. “Enemies of the state should face the appropriate consequences for their actions. We must be vigilant.”

  “That we must.” Bieder grinds out his cigarette
in a porcelain ashtray on the desk. He props the door open with his foot and grabs another box. “Good day, Comrade.”

  On his way home, Werner replays this scene to himself again and again. It seems he is inching his way up the ladder. A man of significant influence has taken an interest in him. He has married a beautiful, healthy woman, and they are working on starting a family. His future is promising. So why is it that he feels as if Franz Josef Bieder was trying to test him? And why is it Werner does not feel entirely comfortable with the answers he gave?

  That night he and Bettina sit opposite one another in the living room, listening to the radio. She is embroidering one of his handkerchiefs, periodically looking up at him with her penetrating gaze, dark and somehow too intense. She mentions that a friend from work taught her how to do this. It is warm in the room, and the window is open, letting in the faint scent of freshly mowed grass. Behind her, the old books in their faded cloth covers are lined up like good soldiers, and he remembers the teletype from earlier, its reference to “Junkers” and the “outdated social order.” All these books in this room, they are from another era. They represent a time that the Germans have left behind. He knows he should still be feeling energetic and enthusiastic about all these changes underway—as he had felt earlier, alone in his office—but as his wife tries to make conversation, Werner finds he cannot meet her eye.

  10

  Bettina begins to go to Bobbin regularly. She wanders through the graveyard, wiping her face on the hem of her shirt, keeping an eye out for the little dog. Sometimes her scruffy mutt is there, sometimes not. Often, she times it so that she can attend Sunday services; though she’s never been a religious woman, she finds the earnest singing and the steely coolness of the church’s interior comforting. Increasingly, she can’t stand being cooped up. At home, on her knees, swishing suds around the tile floor, she becomes almost claustrophobic. She used to get such pleasure from scrubbing and washing, ironing and tidying, and now all she yearns for is the open air. To really breathe it deep into her body, to feel a kind of delectable pain when her lungs are close to bursting. It is only once she’s begun to sweat on her march along the dirt road toward Bobbin and the breeze rushes over her skin, cooling her down, that she feels alive again.