This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  She is shivering. It is brutally cold, with a fast wind sweeping in over the water, carrying with it the promise of ice and snow. What is she going to do, she wonders, allowing herself to think now of Peter Brenner. She has tried so hard to ignore what’s happening to her. But since the night of the friendship performance, there is not a moment of the day during which she does not ask herself, Who am I? What am I doing? Where is he now? Will I see him again?

  Over and over again she replays their conversations in her mind. Certain that her most secret thoughts are written across her face for everyone to see, she withdraws ever further into herself. But her mind races ahead of itself, sending her into a tailspin. At night she cannot sleep, and during the day she stands next to her coworkers without being present, neither fully awake nor asleep. Instead she is in a new and frightening place where anything is possible because everything is suddenly unfamiliar. This is also oddly comforting to her: She is alive, burning up with the intensity of every sensation and every thought. Her body reacts to the slightest touch, whether the slippery skin of the herring or the rough wooden handles of her tools, as though she has never before felt these things. It makes her jumpy and nervous and thrilled all at once.

  Who am I? she thinks. What do I want?

  One night she tosses in bed for so unbearably long that she reaches out to Werner, startling him, and their lovemaking is so familiar and disappointing that afterward she creeps into the bathroom and weeps while sitting on the cool porcelain edge of the tub.

  Each day her husband looks at her with those unfathomable eyes, asking something of her that she cannot give him. Of course, it turns out that she misread those eyes back when they first met. What she had taken as the capacity for soulfulness is in actuality a tendency toward self-pity. The pale color of his chest testifies to the fact that he is an office worker and barely spends a day in the sun. That he prefers the still air of an enclosed space to the wind of the beach or the dusty heat of the fields. Werner’s hands are small and delicate, with carefully clipped fingernails and smooth skin. Peter Brenner has the rough hands of an outdoorsman, hands that show the veins under them in startling blue ridges. Though she knows he is a writer, she imagines him in the fields, hoisting his long body up onto a tractor, the sun beating down on his overgrown blond hair, bringing up a rash of freckles on his nose and shoulder blades. He is strong and wiry, and he towers over her.

  This afternoon she has been given the unexpected gift of time, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She does not want to return home just yet; she will fall into her old patterns of washing and ironing, and she cannot imagine busying herself with these thankless, mundane tasks. It’s been months since she picked up her camera; after that day on the piers, Werner’s words ring in her ears every time she tries to take a picture: You’re wasting your time with that business. His disdain presses down on her, and she hasn’t had the energy to fight this new and disorienting insecurity. Why does she take pictures? She never does anything with them. It’s a costly hobby, and pointless.

  But then she thinks of the youth center, of Peter’s interest in her photography, how he called her an artist. What is she, in fact? What does she want from her life, and what can she make of it? She is unsure of what to do with the surges of energy that prickle and tease, making her body hum with a strange sort of exhilaration.

  After she has changed out of her tunic and apron and cleaned up a bit, Bettina begins walking toward the center of Saargen. She stops at the bakery to see if they have any fresh bread, but the line snakes out the door and along the sidewalk. Unclipping her long hair, she lets it fall to her shoulders and walks on.

  Then she thinks of her sister; yes, she will take the bus to Gummanz, drop in on Clara. Months have passed since Bettina was last at her house, and once the weather turned cold, they abandoned their weekly walks on the promenade. She feels better now that she has somewhere to go that is not home.

  Clara lives at the end of an unpaved road, not far from the open-faced chalk pits. The house is a large multilevel structure with a fading orange tile roof. It belonged to her husband’s family and was divided after capitulation into multiple apartments. She and Herbert went from enjoying the space and money that came from his stake in the mines to living in a cramped first-floor apartment where the coal heater takes up half the living room.

  Outside is a pounded dirt playground with a broken wooden seesaw. Some neighborhood children dressed in coats and multicolored hats scream with excitement as they play with a stray cat they’ve trapped in a small box. Bettina rings the doorbell and waits. “Herbert, hello,” she says as he answers the door. “Hope you don’t mind I’ve come unannounced.”

  He stands against the wall to let her enter. What used to be quite a lovely entranceway is now a hall from which one door leads to Clara’s apartment on the left and another leads to the Lichtenbergs’ on the right. Everyone in the house uses the single bathroom located on the second floor. The stairway going up has been patched where the railings broke. On Clara’s wedding day, she stood on these stairs to throw her bouquet at the assembled girls clustered around its base. Now it is dark inside, with one unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling, and Bettina has to let her eyes adjust before she can see that the walls have been covered in striped paper, alternating brown and yellow.

  Herbert shrugs. “She thought it would cheer the place up,” he says. “It was the only paper she could find. Why aren’t you at work?”

  “The conveyor belt,” Bettina says. “Broken again.”

  “I’m home for lunch.” Herbert checks his wristwatch. “Have to go back in a few minutes.”

  “Clara is here?”

  “She’s resting.” Herbert ushers her into the apartment. On the table in the living room sits his empty plate from lunch and a tray with some slices of sausage and cheese on it. “Are you hungry? There’s some left here.”

  “No, thank you.” Bettina hasn’t been eating well for weeks. “Clara’s all right? Is she sleeping?”

  “Yes, she’s in bed. Go on in.”

  The bedroom curtains are drawn shut, and Bettina can see the outline of a bump on the bed. Leaving the door open behind her for light, she goes over to the bed and looks down at her sister. Clara is asleep, her hands tucked under her cheek, her dark-blonde hair stringy and tangled on the sheets. Her breath is light, as though she is skimming a dream, neither here nor there but somewhere in between. “Clara?”

  “Go away,” Clara says in an almost whisper, keeping her eyes shut. “I hate it all. I hate him; I hate this house; I hate this country. Leave me alone. Just let me sleep.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” Herbert says when Bettina returns. “She sleeps fourteen, fifteen hours at a stretch.”

  Bettina takes a seat on the wooden banquette opposite him. Since their outing, when they swam so long together in the frigid ocean that all the color and feeling drained from their bodies, she’s begun to think of Herbert differently. It had been devastating to see him so transformed when he lost his arm; then, in the water, when they were both blurred into new versions of themselves, she saw that he had not really changed at all. He was still the young man she’d laughed with years earlier, the striving businessman her sister fell in love with, the soldier doing his duty. He is all those things and more, just as she is more than the sum of her circumstances.

  He wipes his mouth with a napkin and places a hand on the table. The open end of his right shirtsleeve has been folded over and pinned together to cover his stump.

  “Everything all right, Herbert? How long has she been like this?”

  “No. It’s—I’m out of business, once and for all. They’re merging the Sassnitz mines into the Volkseigene Kreidewerk. I’ve lost all my shares.” Herbert had started out as a laborer in the mines, hacking away at the open cliff face for years and then supervising the addition of water to the sedimentation tanks. He was so inventive and driven that he’d worked his way up the hierarchy to shift s
upervisor and eventually manager, investing in the company along the way. “Sometimes I wonder, Betty—what have we come to? What has happened to Germany?”

  “Nothing can stay the same forever.” Bettina has overheard people talking in the canteen at the factory and outside the gates as they smoke cigarettes or wait for the bus. Werner is full of enthusiasm for the new police force, coming home at night teasing her with half-revealed stories. She badly wants to be hopeful.

  Herbert clears his plate and tucks in the tail of his shirt. “I hear—in America? They have cars with no roofs, and you can drive with the wind in your hair. Everybody owns their own house.”

  America. All she knows of that country is what she has read in the papers and heard on the radio. Americans had been the enemy, but then they gave candy and food to starving German children after they invaded. Contradictions everywhere. In photos, the American soldiers seem loose limbed, constantly grinning. Is it lecherous and greedy, or are those smiles a sign of generosity? According to the local papers, they are still the enemy—shallow capitalists obsessed with money rather than progress and community.

  “But this is our home, this island, this country,” Bettina answers. “Could you live without the sea? We can’t just give up.”

  “They’re taking everything away from us,” Herbert says. “Everything meaningful. What will we have left in the end?”

  For days afterward Bettina can think of nothing but her sister’s words, spoken in that miserable darkened room: I hate it all. I hate him; I hate this house; I hate this country. In the youth center, talking with Peter Brenner, Bettina experienced a moment of such urgent belief in the possibility of growth, of understanding—and yet at the same time she’s been thrown into a state of quiet chaos.

  She is coming to understand that the accumulation of small, insidious changes can be just as destructive as the catastrophic events that throw life off kilter. Unexpected twists have taken her so far from where she thought she’d be that she barely recognizes her life any longer. She struggles to make sense of where she finds herself. She does not want to end up in a bed, sleeping away her days, hating her life.

  18

  That Sunday she is one of the last people to enter the nave. The Bobbin church is almost full, and today Peter Brenner is sitting on the right-hand side near the aisle. Throughout the service, Bettina is able to stare at the back of his neck, ruddy as though from a lifetime of bending his head down in the sun. In that exposed skin, vulnerable with its deep creases and brushed by wisps of too-long blond hair, lies his very essence. When she studies it, she can imagine him as a baby, as a boy running around causing trouble, as a young man in the first blush of love. The words of Pfarrer Brenner’s sermon find no foothold. Since the friendship performance, it is as though a hand or a leg has been amputated; she is experiencing a stunned feeling of loss while at the same time this man is present in her every thought and every activity. The music he played her runs through her mind at all times, and she often finds her mouth curled in a smile. There are a thousand questions she wants him to answer. She needs to know everything about him, even the most inconsequential details.

  At the end of the service, Bettina exits quickly and lingers in the graveyard. It isn’t long before he emerges. He walks right by her without catching her eye, heading toward the Pfarrhaus that lies in the glade behind the church, beyond the winter-thin thickets, gray and brambly. As she follows him, sweat breaks out on her neck and chest. Between them there is a safe distance, but already Bettina is beyond caring whether anyone sees her.

  Peter enters the gate and walks into a thatched brick-and-timber structure that is attached to the side of the house where his father lives. She dawdles, then a few minutes later treads the same path. Stepping over the threshold, she is blinded by the darkness that settles on her like a damp palm over her eyes.

  “I lied, at the youth center,” he says.

  As her eyes adjust, she sees that he is standing by a chair and a small table in the middle of an austere room. “What do you mean?”

  “I do care that you’re married. It matters.”

  They stand in silence. She shuffles her feet, wondering now whether he might reject her. Can he not feel what he has done to her already—how he has changed her?

  “I don’t really—” she begins but stops. Of course, she cannot say that she doesn’t really love her husband, that she doesn’t care about betraying Werner as long as it means she can resolve the unbearable need to touch Peter. Perhaps he thinks her foolish—or, worse, selfish and vain. But her body seems to recognize immediately the timbre of this man’s voice, the smell of his skin. Even the way he walks seems familiar to her. Though her mind tries to wrestle with logic, knowing what she is doing is dangerous and foolish, an uncustomary clarity envelops her in his presence.

  She wants to touch him. She has to be near him.

  “Bettina Heilstrom,” he says slowly, as though finding pain and delight in each syllable. “I hope you know we are going to suffer for this.” He offers a timid smile.

  “I know,” she answers. When she smiles back, she does not try to mask her teeth. Let him see every flaw in her—she doesn’t care to present anything other than her real self to him. She slips her coat off and places it on the chair. Removing the hatpin and the hat seems to take forever. When she is done, he stands looking at her, and she wonders what to do next.

  “I hate hats,” he says.

  She laughs out loud. “Yes, I noticed that.”

  “They hide your face.” His voice has become low and heavy, and her mind flashes to his wife. She wonders whether he wept upon hearing of her death. Had he loved her at all, ever? None of this matters, except that she wants to get to the core of him, to know every secret fear, every secret joy.

  “Do you want to go for a walk in the woods?” he asks her.

  “No,” she cries out.

  “I’ve been thinking of this moment for so long . . . and now I don’t know what you want me to do.” He comes to stand next to her. “You’re—you’re not free. Do you see—I must take my cue from you.”

  She leans forward and places her cheek on his chest. Today he is wearing a cotton tunic, and underneath his heart bangs in his rib cage: Thump thump. Thump thump. The pulse works its way through the material to her eardrum and into her body. “Do anything you want to me,” she whispers. “I’m asking you to. Please.”

  His breath is warm in her hair. He touches her chin lightly, and then, as she presents her face to him, he falls upon it. When he bites her lip, she thinks, Yes, yes. He slides his hand into the gap between the buttons of her shirt and touches the swell above her breast with his thick fingertips. With a quick intake of breath, she presses into him. Then, unable to wait, she steps back and unbuttons her blouse, letting it fall to the floor, and then reaches behind to unhook her brassiere. Her breasts are full and white. Touching one with her own hand, she feels a streak of heat shoot between her chest and groin.

  If he stops, she will scream. If he keeps touching her, she will scream. They tear at each other. There is no going back.

  Every part of her life is transformed. In the mornings when she heads to the factory, she smiles to herself secretly, trying not to give away her inner delirium. At work Stefanie tells mindless stories about her skirmishes with her mother-in-law while Bettina nods, her mind somewhere else. Even Christa, so insular and subdued, stares at her quizzically. At the dinner table, Bettina finds herself talkative and solicitous with Werner, as though by covering up the unease with words she can plaster over the damage she has done—and is doing.

  She pushes away all thoughts of where this might end. None of that seems relevant; she is so strongly drawn to the present, to every sensation, to the constant thrumming of her body. Practicalities can wait. What matters is now. When she will see Peter again. When she can feel his skin under her fingertips.

  They exchange a couple of cryptic notes on slips of paper and meet on the beach in the early-morning hours
when she is supposed to be at the early shift, not daring to walk too closely to one another in case they are seen. They do not touch, yet as they walk side by side, there is something charged in the air, a connection between them that makes them feel alone in the world even though they know it is not so. This time they talk without ceasing, both of them, words flowing with the swift energy of water from a spring, at once meandering and purposeful. Peter tells her of the novel he has been struggling to write, his search for something “important enough” to write about. He is impatient with social realism in writing, which has recently become so popular with East German writers.

  “You take your pictures not to document the world but to interpret it, right?” he asks her. “In the same way, I can’t write simply to show things as they are supposed to be. Where does truth lie, anyway? Is it in the vast brushstrokes, you know—the big-picture story—or is it in the details?”

  “The details,” she says. “Details tell the story. The everyday is honest.”

  “And yet it is not enough, at least not in my work,” he insists, and she is thrilled by his ambition, his unwillingness to simply make do.

  Once, they meet again at the Pfarrhaus, and after making love, they lie together on his small bed, the air in the room heavy and pungent, and she talks about the first time her father let her handle his Rollei. Tracing circles on her thigh with his forefinger, Peter does not interrupt or ask questions. As she tries to explain how heavy the camera felt in the palm of her hand—how the world suddenly seemed less constrained, more multidimensional—she realizes this is the first time she’s had the chance to talk in this way since her father died. In explaining herself, trying to understand her own motivations, she feels filled with hope and curiosity.