This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  “Oh, him?” she says. “That’s Alma’s teacher.”

  “Peter Brenner,” Irmgard whispers, leaning in. “Literature teacher at the middle school in Bobbin. Brainy, that one. Single too.”

  Bettina sits up straight to get a clearer view over the heads of the crowd, but as everyone begins filing out, there is nothing to see but bodies, torn woolen coats, yellowed shirts, and shabby print dresses.

  Outside, a hint of winter edges the breeze and rifles through the almost-bare tree branches. Bettina stands in her little group, silent, clutching her overcoat close to her and waiting for Alma to emerge. It is disconcerting to see the beach man in this setting and even more perplexing that he has turned out to be an academic. No wonder his preoccupation with the lessons of recent history and his looking to the future for answers. But an intellectual, an artist? She had imagined him to be a farmer, in his dungarees, or a fisherman perhaps. This new image of the stranger intrigues her, and as she waits in the darkness, her breath lit up in the air from the floodlights, she replays their strange conversation in the graveyard, wondering if he thought her banal.

  “Wasn’t it beautiful?” Alma calls out, bursting through the doors into the night air. “How did I play? I was so nervous!”

  “Oh, I forgot my handkerchief,” Bettina says, surprising herself with her lie. She digs around in her purse. “It’s getting cold—you all go on ahead, and I’ll make my own way back.”

  The hallway and auditorium are almost empty of spectators now. It smells of beer, and the floor is sticky. In among the rows of chairs, some teachers and a few janitors are picking up crumpled programs from the floor. Bettina strides up to one of them and asks if they found a pale-blue handkerchief with white stitching on the edges. Her voice echoes in the nearly empty room—quiet but for the scraping of chair legs—and Alma’s teacher raises his head and looks at her. Their eyes meet, and he smiles in surprised recognition.

  “Haven’t found any handkerchiefs,” he says, “but you can have some eyeglasses if you like.” He holds out a pair in his palm.

  A sharp panic strikes Bettina, breaking into her voice and making her bold. “Thank you,” she answers, “but those are not mine. Should you find the handkerchief, I . . . ahem, I live in Saargen, in the old square, Apolonienmarkt.”

  Her heart rattles against her rib cage. She is remembering the beach, all those years ago when she was still just a child, the freighted look they exchanged. It was so knowing, unnerving. It is so vivid in her mind that it seems to have happened just minutes ago. She wants very much to talk to this man, watch his lips moving as he tells her what his name is, hear him say her name aloud, see the changes flicker in his face from seriousness to levity and back again.

  When she turns and leaves, she knows that he will follow her.

  16

  Bettina doesn’t have to wait long. The doors swing open, and the man walks toward her. The audience has dispersed, leaving the two of them alone under glaring outdoor lights that illuminate their faces as though they are the last performers on an empty stage.

  His suit jacket hangs jackknifed over his arm; underneath, his shirt is thin and stained. In the stark light he appears slimmer than she remembered. In the churchyard he had hidden himself in the thick overalls and a farmer’s shirt. Even though it is already late October, the skin of his face is dark from the sun.

  “Are you not cold?” she asks him.

  “Will be soon, I imagine. If I hang around here with you for too long.” He hunches up his shoulders. “Shall we perhaps go somewhere warmer?”

  She considers this. What will she tell Werner when she gets home? Can she trust this man, a stranger? There is something about him that seems dangerous: a certain looseness about the mouth and eyes, a fluidity to his movements. The shadowy eye sockets under those pale brows. He appears to move from thought to action with no hesitation.

  She knows that she will say yes to whatever he asks of her. “My name is Bettina Heilstrom,” she says in response, deliberately using her maiden name.

  “And I am Peter Brenner. Nice to meet you formally, after all these years.”

  This makes her smile self-consciously. Just hearing him say his name is like seeing him unclothed.

  “Did you find your handkerchief?”

  She nods yes, and his smile tells her that he knows she was lying.

  Peter Brenner leads her down a side street. He can’t take her to the pub—it will be full of people she knows. Does he even realize that she is a married woman? On her finger she wears a wedding band, as befits a wife. Almost daily she presses her husband’s shirts, prepares his meals, helps him up the stairs when his legs begin to hurt . . . but she also secretly prays that Werner will be too tired to make love—and that when they do, he will not take offense at her frozen responses. They come to a door, and when the man unlocks it, they tumble inside along with the cold air.

  It is a youth center, a cavernous space with posters lining the walls and tables set up where children can do their homework or art projects. Ropes hang from the ceiling in one corner, and there are bars installed on one of the walls for climbing. Bettina is amazed to see a Ping-Pong table and a record player. She picks up a pamphlet from a pile on the table and pretends to study it.

  “The latest five-year plan from the government,” Peter says.

  It’s a pale-blue booklet with an image of a family on the cover. A young girl sits on her father’s shoulder, and the mother is waving, her hair rolled back just like Irmgard’s. “Good stuff, is it?” Bettina asks. From the opening page she reads aloud: “Something new has happened: For the first time in German history, our fatherland is guided by a plan that considers only the needs of the people and aims at building prosperity and reconstructing of our fatherland. Only a few years have passed since the terrible catastrophe—”

  “Enough of that,” he says. “You’re far too serious, you know.”

  She puts the pamphlet back down on its pile. “How do you know? I might surprise you.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice,” he says.

  “You teach this stuff? Isn’t this economics? Or politics? My neighbor said you teach literature, no?”

  “What’s in there isn’t very literary. Now, if they’d let me write those things, I could get people excited. Stories, art—that’s how we’ll change the world.”

  “You believe that?”

  He casts her a sharp look. “You don’t?”

  “I can’t say, really,” she answers, thrilled with their disagreement, the energy of caring what this man thinks and believes. “After what’s happened to us, what we’ve done . . . I suppose I don’t really know what I think anymore.”

  “You can’t let that happen. You must always think for yourself.” He presses his lips together, assessing her. “Art, literature—it allows us to explore our equivocation, all our uncertainties—this is what makes it so powerful. It asks us to use our minds, to dream and discern and assess. To ask questions.”

  “You write, do you? What sort of writing—the kind that changes the world?”

  His smile is small but genuine, his eyes warm; he is amused by her stubbornness. “I write plays. Political plays that everyone hates. I write poetry sometimes, but for that, well, for that I need to be inspired.” He cocks his head to the side. “Poetry is romantic, no? You’ve got to be in the mood for it.”

  “My father and I used to read together. Poetry sometimes, but mostly novels.”

  “Ahhh, so you are in fact literate. Excellent.”

  “Of course!” she snaps, before realizing he’s teasing. “Reading is a way to learn about people, why we do what we do.”

  “Yes, yes. And that is the great and terrible crusade, wouldn’t you say—our eternal search for meaning. The endless battle for what we believe in. It’s as Yeats said; do you know it? About Ireland. ‘All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.’”

  She swallows, her throat dry. Something inside her shifts. He means there i
s a terrible beauty in life. The rightness of his words makes her head spin. She’s been trying to make sense of these things, too, in her own way. “I take pictures. When I can, that is. I like to, uh . . . I try to record what I’m seeing, not so much what’s happening, but what I see. But there’s a risk in it . . . as though by capturing it, you’re also diluting it; does that make sense? There’s a risk in seeing, in documenting.”

  “Oh, no. No, no, no—I disagree. Unless we share, take that risk, what does anything even mean?” The whites of his eyes shine in the half dark, bright as a fox’s. She understands better now what happened between them in the graveyard when he couldn’t stop talking. He’s a writer, a thinker. He was telling her his story, trying to make sense of the world. “So then, you’re an artist too.”

  Her shoulders drop as muscles begin to loosen: he called her an artist; she has never thought of herself that way.

  “What I really want to do is write a novel. A novel read by thousands that will change people’s lives, open their eyes to the beauty and the ugliness. But alas”—he laughs lightly at himself—“that’s a lot easier to say than actually do.”

  He heads to the record player and pulls out a disc from under a pile on the bottom shelf, then slips it onto the player. “Here we go,” he says to her over his shoulder. He fiddles with the needle on the player, and music starts. “This is from the Amis—Professor Longhair. Listen.”

  This has the effect of a slap in the face: He is playing American music?

  “You’re surprised?” he asks when he sees her expression.

  “I mean, the Americans . . . they, well—they betrayed us, didn’t they? We’re not supposed to listen to their music.”

  “Because they’re capitalists? Or because the music is evil?”

  “Both those things,” she says. “But mainly because if we’re caught, we’ll get in trouble.”

  “There’s something you should know about me right away,” he answers, coming up to her. He peels back her overcoat. She is wearing one of her old housedresses, but he isn’t looking at her clothing or her body; he is looking right into her. His eyes are almost purple. He seems to recognize her fear and hesitation but her excitement too. “I break rules. I follow rules, yes . . . but I also break them.”

  She laughs. “That much is obvious.”

  “It is?”

  “Well, we’re here, aren’t we?”

  “Should we not be?”

  He throws her coat onto an old couch covered in shredded brown fabric. It is chilly in this empty place that smells of cleaning fluids and rubber balls. “Because I . . . I am . . . married.”

  Placing his forefinger over her lips, he shakes his head. “Listen; listen to this! This will make you understand why music can only be good, not bad. Even if it is made by Americans. Just listen.”

  This music is unlike the waltzes and polkas to which she is accustomed. Nor is it similar in any way to the popular ballads of the day. It has a manic energy, a big sound that is startling—there are horns and strings, a piano being thumped in the background, the growling notes of a bass bringing together all the seemingly disparate chords into one rhythmic, crashing tune. There is something about it that is entirely new to her, a different kind of beat she doesn’t recognize.

  Peter Brenner is snapping his fingers in time. His lean body bobs up and down, his knees soft. “Piano blues,” he says over the raucous notes. “Jazz—anarchy in music form. But this, he has a strange style, no? Cuban influences. Recorded in New Orleans.”

  “How on earth did you get hold of it?” Bettina asks, unable to keep her tone from sounding disapproving.

  “Old friends from Berlin. You know what he’s saying?” he asks, and when she shakes her head, he adds, “‘Bald head.’ About a lady with no hair . . .”

  This makes her smile, and he reaches out a long arm and grasps her around the waist, and she has to catch her breath.

  Pulling her in tight and then pushing her away, he starts a kind of dancing that involves moving toward each other and then back again, swinging their arms and then letting them drop, turning in unison and separately. She parodies his movements, and even though it is terribly awkward, it is also fun. Usually you dance in one way: clasped to your partner, one arm around the waist and the other held up in the air like the prow of a ship. This new technique—half-together and half-apart—makes Bettina laugh so hard she has tears in her eyes. She is hurtling through the room, in and out of this man’s arms, breathless, her heart pumping wildly, and yet she remains entirely in his control. His every nudge and tilt tells her exactly where she is supposed to go. Tripping a few times, she bends over laughing, only to be grabbed again and hurled in another direction. When the music stops, they stand facing each other, gasping for breath. Yes, anarchic and purposeful.

  “I don’t care that you’re married,” he says, using the informal du to address her. It sounds natural on his lips, as though they are old friends who share years of secrets. “I was married, too, and I was not happy.”

  He is serious now, having seconds ago been so lighthearted as to toss her around like a ball. Already she loves this ability in him to shift and change like a chameleon. She is tired of people capable of only one emotion at a time.

  Standing on tiptoes, she raises her face to his, and they kiss.

  Pushing her against a tabletop, Peter Brenner lifts her up so that she is sitting. She parts her legs, and he slips his hips between them. They press against each other. When she breaks away, a sob escapes her. He puts one hand on her throat and stares at her. A high, thin note of tension courses through her chest and between her legs. Her underpants are wet.

  Stumbling through the streets, Bettina trips over a loose stone and loses one of her rubber shoes. She stoops to pick it up and tries to slow down her breathing. She looks to see if Peter has followed her but sees only the watery light from the lampposts reflected in the buildings’ windows and a dark, empty street heading down a hill. Everything on this little side street—from the shuttered art supply store to the bakery, the lindens lining the sidewalks and the wrought iron waste bins—is familiar to her and yet looks strange now, even ominous. How many times has she walked along this street as a child, then as a teenager, an adult, a married woman, and not really seen it? Not noticed the crumbling plaster outside Schenkov’s Uniform Supply Store, the way the roofline of the old insurance building abruptly turns, creating a broken line that reaches into the navy night sky. What has previously been so commonplace as to be utterly forgettable is revealing itself to her as unknown. Have the series of uneven doorways always looked like a row of sentries, keeping people out rather than inviting them in? And the trees—have their half-naked branches ever reminded her before of the terrible pictures she saw of the concentration camps? In her panic it seems to her that every object her eyes fall upon is a reminder that nothing is really as she had thought.

  Peter Brenner is nowhere to be seen, and Bettina is at once relieved and let down. After that kiss, the frantic fumbling, she could not stay—God only knows what she would have done—yet now the disappointment is almost too much to bear. After slipping her shoe back on, she hurries through the winding streets toward home. She turns into the square and stops in front of her house to adjust her shirt, which she buttoned up incorrectly in her haste to leave.

  Werner is asleep. In the small bathroom she lights the water heater and runs a bath, hoping the sound of water in the pipes will not wake him up. She drops her clothes on the floor and steps into the old porcelain tub, which is only partially filled with lukewarm water.

  Eventually her breathing becomes more regular again. The half of her body that is not submerged underwater is white and covered in goose bumps. Closing her eyes, she pictures his large hands, almost luminous in the semidark . . . sees them touching her. When the pulsing between her legs becomes unbearable, she slips her hand between her thighs, clenching them together tightly.

  In the youth center they only kissed that one
time, but in her imagination he is gentle with her, then rough. His hands are soft, then hard and insistent. He smiles, but then, like a child, he weeps. Bettina’s fingers press into herself, and she utters a sharp cry as though she has been hurt, when really it is a reaction to the surprise of the explosion inside her—tender and yet so very violent that it shatters the logic of her life.

  17

  The conveyor belt has stopped working again, and Putzkammer is exasperated. The mechanics take it apart and discover so much wear and tear on the bolts that hold the belt in place that they all need to be replaced. No more work until tomorrow at the earliest. Anne-Marie, Stefanie, and Christa unfurl their aprons and head for the changing rooms. Christa has lost weight, and her work tunic swims on her body. Since coming back to the factory, she has stopped talking much except to offer up a perfunctory Guten Morgen or Auf Wiedersehen. Bettina misses the idle chats, the smiles, and the pithy one-liners. In the past weeks since her dancing episode with Peter Brenner (that’s how she has trained herself to think about that night), Bettina has returned a few times to Bobbin (to see her work friend, she tells herself), and yet each time Christa rebuffed her in some small way—with indifference or an unwillingness to joke around or even smile.

  “Christa, wait!” Bettina calls out.

  Christa’s haggard face remains impassive. “Yes?”

  “I have some time now. Can I walk home with you? I haven’t seen the children in a while. Last time I was there, you were busy, remember?”

  Christa shakes her head no and steps away toward the changing rooms. “We are fine. We do not need your charity,” she says. Then she lowers her voice. “I do not want your prying; you’re not helping matters.”

  “But . . . I’m . . .” Bettina watches her walk away, then pushes against a heavy metal door and emerges onto the gravel where she and her coworkers sometimes take cigarette breaks. Is it because of Werner that she is being quietly pushed aside? At work now the women fall silent when Bettina passes them, raising their brows at one another in warning. Lunch breaks are quiet affairs without the customary lighthearted ribbing she once enjoyed being part of.