The graveyard is orderly and ancient, except for a pile of upended stones under the yew trees on the periphery. Irmgard Bandelow, Bettina’s neighbor on the square, has a family plot in this wild lot, the gravestones etched with the names of multiple generations. When her husband was killed during those insane hand-to-hand battles at the end of the war, Irmgard found him by the bridge to the mainland and carted his body home in a wheelbarrow. Now he rests here, under a modest blue-toned marble slab—with a rough, empty spot at the very top where Irmgard tried to shave off the swastika after it was clear they had lost the war.
That blank section of stone gives Bettina pause. Even though she thinks of herself as a simple woman, she has strong ideas centered around hard work and nurturing others. These are ideas she feels deeply but isn’t especially vocal about. These days, she often wonders why she didn’t think Dieter was wrong to sacrifice his life for the Führer, why she wasn’t ashamed that her father wore the Nazi Party pin. She was so very ignorant then. During the fighting, she saw the world through a narrow lens: what the violence and fear were doing to her parents, her friends, her community. Is this the natural instinct of those who find their homelands transformed into war-torn countries, she wonders, or is it because she was a child? Either way, the awareness of all she didn’t know is a burden and a sorrow she can’t shake.
Once the Russians came, she was shaken wide awake. The aperture on the lens was yanked open, then, and there was no more ignorance, whether willful or not: Bettina and the villagers saw the pictures from the concentration camps; they learned about the extermination of entire peoples, the senseless, despicable cruelty. It had been unimaginable, and then suddenly it was no longer unimaginable. She carries with her now the indelible stain of this knowledge, the horror at what her people have done, of what happened because of a system gone mad.
She runs her thumb over the blank spot on the gravestone.
“Why the frown?” comes a voice from behind the stones.
A tall figure is leaning against an oak sapling. As though released by command, the shaggy-haired mutt comes from the man’s side and runs to Bettina, yapping a few times, tightly circling her legs.
Jumping back, she lifts her foot and tries to shake the dog off. But the scratchy tongue tickles, and she finds herself smiling, clutching the collar of her shirt as she stumbles around. Her blue hat is tipped to one side, and the pin holding it in place pulls at the strands of her hair. When she looks up again at the man, she sees herself as he must see her, and instead of regaining her composure, she starts to laugh.
“I’m glad you find me so amusing,” the man says. He’s wearing a fisherman’s cap and old dungarees and stands with long arms crossed in front of a slim chest. His eyes are obscured under the hat, but his teeth are straight and flash at her like a signal that she should not stop; she can laugh as long as she wants to, and he will not think less of her for it.
She reaches up and pulls off the lopsided felt hat. Her crisscrossed braids are coming loose, and she thinks of how Werner would throw her a disapproving glance if he were here. This makes her stop smiling at once.
“Hm, liked you better when you were happy,” the man says, putting a piece of grass into his mouth and sucking on it. “Standing in a graveyard with an expression on your face as though someone’s just amputated your ear, well. Doesn’t suit you nearly as well.”
The tone. The air of calm. It is him: the man from the beach. “You’ve been watching me?” she says, unsure where to rest her eyes. If only he would take his cap off, she could see his face better.
“Don’t I know you?” he asks.
Her pleasure at being remembered is so intense that her color deepens. “I think so, yes.”
“The girl pretending to take pictures, yes?”
She nods. Steam rises from the thick-grown meadows, evaporating into the morning air. The dog stops his prancing and lies on his back, baring his pale belly to the sun and waiting for Bettina to notice him again and to scratch him just where he wants. The skin of his stomach is pink, delicate like a baby mouse.
The man sucks on the piece of grass intently. “I was in trouble back then. You didn’t realize that, I think. I’d just run away from my regiment.”
“As did so many others too,” Bettina says. They address each other with the formal Sie rather than du, and it sticks on her tongue like an affectation.
“What was left of the regiment, that is. I’d been with them for two years straight. I could think of nothing but home—of the beach. Coming back home.”
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
He laughs again, but there is no genuine humor in it this time. “You are naive, then. There’s something to be ashamed of in most things humans do.”
“You’re a moralist? Haven’t you had enough of moralists yet?”
He tips his fisherman’s cap back and reveals soft, pale eyebrows over deep eye sockets. The startling black of his eyes is further exaggerated by shadow. “Is this someone you knew?” he asks, ambling over and pointing at the Bandelow gravestone. He has the look of someone who is good at dissembling: one minute this, the next that. His head is much higher than hers, and the coolness of a slight shadow falls on her arm.
She nods again, pressing her lips together.
Taking off his cap, he runs his fingers through his hair. It is blond and a little too long, unkempt like a boy’s. But his face is not boyish; his eyes are serious, the irises almost purple. The curve of his upper lip is long and shallow. In a flash he has shifted from his slightly mocking, lighthearted manner to one that makes her nervous, as though he is assessing her. She is accustomed to a judgmental look in most men she encounters—what is it about her bearing that makes even strangers defensive, when she tries so hard to disappear?—but this is different. He is both weighing his impressions of her and declaring himself on her side.
She tries to repin the hat on her loosened hair. “Where did you fight?”
“Stalingrad. Then Pomerania.” After a pause, he spits out the piece of grass and adds, in a rush, “Almost every night I dream of it, of the killing.”
She inhales sharply, flushed with recognition. “I do too.” This unexpected shift in their banter slips between them easily, like an invitation she can’t turn down.
“Millions died at our hands, even if we did not pull the trigger or jab the bayonet, drop the bomb. Man is rather inventive, is he not?”
“So then, you’re a moralist and a pacifist,” she says.
Taking her lightly by the elbow, he indicates with a nod of his head a small mound behind the graveyard, crowded with saplings and overgrown sea buckthorn. In among the weeds and clumpy earth lies a disorderly pile of upended gravestones. On his hands and knees, he clears the black soil from some stones and then points at one just to his left. “This one here, he’d have kept on fighting, if he could’ve. My brother.”
“Tobias Brenner,” Bettina reads aloud from the stone. A swastika is embedded in the upper right-hand corner, the image of a boat on the left.
The beach man sits on his haunches and stares ahead of him. In the shadows of the overgrowth, he could be a refugee or a beggar. “My older brother. Taught me to ride a bicycle and had a soft spot for Zündapp motorcycles and for girls. ‘Watch out for the pretty ones,’ he’d say, ‘they’ll break your heart.’ But let’s see—my younger brother’s here somewhere too. My father dug out the stone markers, threw them in here with the others that had the swastika on them.” He stands and shakes out his legs. “My father’s the pastor—Pfarrer Brenner? My wife was the one who had the symbol put on them, back in—”
Bettina raises her brows. “Your wife?”
“Yes, yes, I was newly married. Just six months. Katya, she arranged the stone for Tobias, and then for Berndt, later. I was in Eastern Pomerania then.”
He is talking so fast she isn’t entirely following.
“Now there’s just me left. And Vati. He raised the three of us boys.” He looks at
her so intently—as though making up his mind about something—that she cannot hold his gaze. He rubs his eyes before slipping the fisherman’s cap back over his head. When he continues talking, the words tumble out. “Tobias, he was a guard at Oświęcim; you’ve heard of it? Auschwitz? And Berndt, he worked in Fünfeichen.”
This man, so big and gentle, who seems as though he has a good heart, had two brothers who worked in the camps—how did he avoid being sent to the Gulag after the Russians invaded?
He seems able to read her mind. “I had impeccable antifascist credentials, having run away from my unit and all.” He fixes her with his eyes. “Socialism, it’ll be our saving grace. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ Things are changing.”
“You sound like my husband,” she says, but actually, that’s not quite what she thinks. What she thinks is that this man is focused on the theories, the ideas, whereas Werner is enamored of the machinery of it all, the levers and bolts and hydraulics of the system.
Something has shifted inside the man, and he begins to talk.
“As a child, had you known me then, well. You would not recognize me now. I was so lackadaisical, carefree,” he says. “But something happened when I started fighting. I . . . I did well. I followed orders. I fired the PaK 38, with its armor-piercing shells, packed at their core with tungsten, blasting the Russian tanks, and then . . .” He pauses. “Then the tungsten ran out, and I skewered the enemy with my bayonet, blew limbs from their sockets with hand grenades.”
His face reddens and sets in a way that makes her see how he will look when he is elderly, frail, when youth no longer allows him the tender hope that better things are to come. There is something about the way he talks that stirs her; he is careful with his words, deliberate. He is launching himself, without restraint, into the truth of his telling. She has never heard anyone talk in this way before—not Dieter, not her parents, certainly not Werner.
“In the end, pulling the trigger or the pin, thrusting the knife, it was really not all that hard for me. I felt little fear. No pain, no remorse.” He stares at Bettina as though daring her to turn away from this terrible confession.
She does not turn away.
“And shame? No. No shame, not then. Some men I killed were so young they did not even have stubble on their faces yet. Their families, their homesteads, their beloved pets, their loves and desires and needs—none of these things were real to me.
“But . . . that all changed. It all changed so fast I didn’t see it coming right at me! We were fighting, we were in the dust and rubble, and there were these earsplitting salvos, but they were followed by a sinister silence, awful . . . a kind of freighted peacefulness, and we trudged and trudged toward the next town. It was nightfall. We were flushing out entire villages; bodies lay along the roadside. The cries, they started so quietly . . . I was barely aware of the sound; I walked past the ditch, and then”—he looks away from her now—“that’s when I recognized the cadence of the sobs. It was a child I was hearing—a child crying.
“Then a shot. And no more sounds.”
Her body stiffens. In one instant they have been catapulted into yet another realm, taken a step even closer to a place of such horror that she cannot take a breath.
“Those cries,” he says, his face drained of all energy, his eyes unwilling to meet hers. “They touched my conscience. It was unbearable. I waited that night; God, I waited until my men fell asleep—we were in the basement of a bombed-out library. And I gathered my backpack and my pathetic supplies, and I started the long trek back to Rügen. I deserted them. I had no thoughts of what I’d do when I was home again; I wasn’t thinking about retribution or punishment. Self-centered, even then! The only thought as I walked was that I had to set foot on the island again or I would explode.”
A slow inhale, the air in her lungs on fire. There are no words with which to comfort or excoriate him.
His eyes come to rest on her face again, tentative, daring her to reject him. “And then I saw you, on the beach,” he says.
They are both aware that he has overstepped some boundary. Her head is filled with the scenes he painted with his words. She senses that this man, this stranger, has a power inside him that has never had a chance to be put to good use—but it’s not that; it’s not really about power. Perhaps it’s strength. Or conviction. She feels faint, as though something heavy is pressing against her, but it’s not unpleasant. If she let herself, if she were less self-conscious, she might burst into tears. In the face of all his words, she cannot say a thing.
“We’ll find a way to redeem ourselves,” he says after a time. She can tell that he is trying to smile, that he wonders whether it was a mistake to tell her his secret. “The very least we can do is ensure everyone is treated equally. I’m not entirely sold on Stalinism—but shhhhhh, eh? We’ll have to see what happens.”
Politics. She is yanked back to earth and thinks of Putzkammer, the foreman at the factory, and how he likes to drone on about the proletariat. Stefanie, with her profane remarks, whispering derisively as soon as the foreman turns his back. Christa’s perpetually moving hands, flashing back and forth as she wields her filleting knife. Are the socialists—the Communists—really on the side of the workers, the ordinary Germans? But then, this isn’t about fairness or taking sides: everyone is aware of the steep price they have to pay for being German.
“I apologize for going on and on,” he says. “I don’t have that many people to talk to.”
“What about your wife?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “She died.”
The congregation is beginning to filter into the church. They nod at one another stiffly, and Bettina heads for the church door as the man walks away from her, toward the copse. When she sits down, she realizes that she has been holding her breath. That day the psalm is number forty-two. The small group of townspeople sings heartily, led by the strong, slightly off-key voice of Pfarrer Brenner.
Wann werde ich dahin kommen,
Dass ich in Gottes Angesicht schaue?
Meine Tränen sind meine Speise Tag und Nacht
Weil man täglich zu mir sagt: Wo ist nun dein Gott?
“When will I finally see God’s face again,” Bettina sings. “Day and night, tears are my only sustenance, because daily I am asked: So then, where is your God?” As she tries to follow the verse, her singing falters. It seems clear to her that if in fact there is such a thing as God, her people have been abandoned by him. The man, the deserter, claims they must learn to live as equals, but is that actually possible now that they have all been poisoned by the bitter taste of power and humiliation and fear?
11
Digging in the scrubby backyard, Werner pauses his work and looks up at the house. Bettina is preparing breakfast in the kitchen. He can see her through the back window. Reaching down to bring out the heavy iron pan in which she will cook some eggs, she briefly disappears from view. Then, straightening up again, she sweeps her brown hair from her eyes in that characteristic gesture of hers. As always, a sense of wonderment flushes through him: amazement that she is his wife, that they share a bed, that she ever said yes to him.
When she smiles, which is too rare, snaggleteeth soften her otherwise startlingly handsome face. She always tries to smile with her mouth shut to hide what she thinks of as an embarrassing imperfection, though Werner insists this is precisely what makes her beauty unique. Her body is trim and strong, and the curve of her hips suggests that behind her intensity something sensual is hiding, something that she herself does not recognize, even.
He stubs out his cigarette on the brown grass, watching her fluid movements in the kitchen, and—though he has tried so hard to control this irritating natural tic of his—he feels a flush stain his cheeks, accompanied by an urgent pounding in his chest. Each day that he avoids talking about that woman from the factory is yet another day that he is letting his wife down. It has already been a month. He heads over to the chicken coop,
where the speckled Hamburgs chitter and squawk, and searches the cages. Only two eggs today.
Palming them gently, he returns to the kitchen. “Bettinalein,” he begins. She stands in front of him, the wooden spatula in her hand hovering in midair. Reaching over, he hands her the eggs, still warm and encrusted with droppings. “Perhaps we could head over to Binz with a picnic later?” he asks.
Bettina carries two china plates and two small glasses on a tray into the dining room. “They didn’t have any flour at the bakery yesterday,” she says over her shoulder. “So there’s no bread.”
“This is fine,” he answers, taking a seat next to her. “I was thinking. We could plan a trip sometime, you and I? Perhaps go to the mainland, stay in Stralsund for a night.”
She stares at him long enough that he begins to feel heat rise under his collar. Her face is sharply angled, so when she is serious, all the energy seems drawn toward her mouth, making it turn down slightly and darkening the shadows under her cheekbones. And then, whenever she smiles, it is as though her eyes and cheeks have been loosened from some knot at her core, and her whole face softens.
Now her jaw is stiff. “What?” he asks, his mouth full of egg. “Wouldn’t you like that? I can get a travel permit from work.” At the mention of work, Bettina presses her lips together. “What is it?”
This Terrible Beauty: A Novel Page 8
