This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  “Detain me for what?”

  “We could always complete this interrogation at headquarters in Berlin if you prefer,” he says stonily.

  “No, please!” Bettina resolves to submit meekly. “I understand.”

  “Good. So. Says here that you live on Apolonienmarkt, on the square in Saargen. This is correct?”

  She nods.

  “Your family is Burgher; they have owned the house since 1872, yes?”

  The man’s hair has been cut very short, and his ears are as pale as a newborn pig’s. They look laughable in contrast to the square line of his jaw, the steely eyes he assumes confer authority. He is like a child playing dress up, and she is filled with sudden rage at this game she is being forced to play. “That is correct,” she answers.

  “Well, that’s all going to end soon enough,” he says. “Private ownership. We’re seeing to that now.”

  She presses her lips together. She will remain calm and friendly. She will answer his questions, whatever they are.

  “Now. Your sister? Clara Lange, married since 1938 to Herbert Lange, formerly employed in the chalk mines—this is correct?”

  Again, she nods.

  “Served as an officer in the Fourth Panzer Army . . . and, I see, injured in 1942, discharged. Then he lost the arm. Lange, Herbert—work assessments consistently below average. Tardiness, insolence. Vocal about his point of view. Unwilling to cooperate with management.”

  Waiting for him to continue, Bettina concentrates on keeping her hands still on her lap. Is it possible that this has anything to do with Peter? She feels as if the mound of her accumulated sins is visible on her face like bruises from a beating. The urge to stand and simply walk out makes the muscles in her legs twitch. Werner has warned her a million times: Follow the rules. Do not draw attention to yourself. She can do this; she can. She must.

  “Oh, Herbert, yes,” she says. “He’s a good man, but he’s been terribly knocked about. Losing his arm, fighting in the war. Then—”

  “Just answer my questions, if you would. We’re not interested in reasons, just facts, yes?”

  Her fear is a fresh wound pried open with each question. The sting of it is a pain she must submit to, and she tells herself again and again: I can do this. I can.

  No, she does not know why Clara and Herbert Lange never returned from their trip to Trelleborg, and no, she and her sister were never especially close.

  No, they do not know anyone in Sweden, nor have they ever been there before.

  No, Clara never mentioned wanting to leave the island.

  Bettina has no forwarding address, no news, no reason to believe her sister will not be returning.

  No, she has received no letters. No, there was no forewarning.

  No, she is definitely not concerned.

  She can barely breathe. Yes, she will inform the authorities as soon as she hears anything, anything at all.

  23

  It is fall, and yet heat pulses around them, insects singing their relentless song, accompanied by the rustle of lingering foliage shifting, sliding, whispering. A reprieve before the sting of a northern winter wind. Bettina and Peter lie on a cotton blanket spread out in the meadow behind the Pfarrhaus. They are shaded by huge ash trees, compound leaves turning in the sunlight, cutting the blue sky beyond them into pieces of an ever-changing kaleidoscope. In a matter of hours, the temperature has climbed considerably. The vast carpet of meadow, its colors browning in swaths, has become brittle with the slow-shifting season.

  Side by side, Bettina and Peter lie unclothed, staring up at the dappled leaves and swirling colors. They ignore the bugs that tease at their shins and thighs. Peter’s forearm rests on Bettina’s chest, and with his other hand he plays absently with the pale hairs on his stomach. The trees and the unruly hedges shelter them from view. Aldo, Peter’s dog, rests his head on his paws as he pants, legs splayed out behind him and flies buzzing at his ears.

  Lying in the meadow, she tries to push away memories of yesterday’s unpleasantness—at least for now, for just a moment. The meeting at HQ, after which she was not able to return to work, her stomach so knotted up that the pain made her legs buckle. The way pretending she was fine took all the energy she could muster.

  Werner, agitated because dinner was not to his liking.

  His endless probing questions. What did they ask her? Who was the officer, what rank? Did Werner’s name come up? How did she describe what had happened? Was there going to be follow-up?

  His utter lack of interest in her feelings. Her sister was gone, and all he cared about was how it would reflect on him. And then, just before Bettina slipped on her nightdress, he came over to her and stood with his hands on his hips. “You’re not going to get plump on me, are you, Bettinalein?”

  The doctor’s words invade her mind: Take good care of yourself; then everything will be well. How can she take care of herself under these circumstances? Ahead of her she sees only dead ends.

  But now, here, alone in this field, all she wants to think about is Peter’s long slim body, the warmth his skin radiates in the sun. They made love in the bright light, uninhibited by thought of anything but their own ardor, and in that too-brief interlude, Bettina had been able to forget everything. With the sweat of their lovemaking evaporating in the sunshine, the sounds and colors and thoughts come rushing back in. It seems to her that if she could only stay here, unmoving, she could wrap herself in dreams of the future that don’t require pain or courage, that only presage joy. These dreams include a baby with downy skin and blond hair, long limbed. The smell of milk, sweet and cloying. A child with gums as pink as candy and fingers curled in sleep. Cries in the dark soothed by dulcet tones and gentle strokes.

  But she can’t reconcile this conflict: that she loves this man, and yet to be with him, she must risk that child’s safety. Yesterday, as they fell asleep, she thought she heard Werner whisper at her back: “Du gehörst mir.” You belong to me.

  Above all she must do what is right for the baby.

  Sitting up, Bettina rubs her face with both hands and reaches for her clothes. Time will not stand still after all. They cannot exist in a vacuum.

  “Happy?” Peter asks her, his eyes closed against the afternoon rays. When she doesn’t answer him, he opens his eyes, a riot of colors reflected in his pupils, making them appear iridescent. “Or not happy?”

  She cannot talk.

  “What is it?”

  “Did you . . .” Bettina worries at her thumbnail. “Tell me, did you and Katya ever talk of having children?”

  He does not take his shining eyes from her. “Are you pregnant?” he asks.

  Of course he would guess. He can see right into her, to the very heart of who she is. “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “And you haven’t answered mine.”

  Bettina lies back down. She is in dangerous territory now, but she can’t seem to stop herself. “We haven’t been so careful always. I just wondered, what would we do . . . ?”

  They lie agitated but silent for a long drawn-out moment before Peter rises and pulls on his pants. He reaches down to his schoolbag and shakes a cigarette free from his packet. Three deep inhalations, and it is gone. Aldo rises, sniffs vigorously, and runs off.

  “Katya had a child,” Peter says. “Before she met me. His name was Thomas. He was three years old when we were married.”

  Bettina rolls over onto her stomach. The blanket is scratchy on the soft skin of her breasts. Breathing into the material, she fights back the urge to scream at him for having loved another child, a baby that wasn’t his and one that wasn’t hers either.

  “She, uh . . .” Peter pauses. “When she killed herself, she was very distraught. There had been an accident that day, and Thomas died.”

  Bettina holds herself very still so as not to give away her surprise. She had assumed his wife died from some kind of illness, but she hadn’t had the courage to pry. So this is the source of the drowning story he’s been
writing; this is the pain he was trying to exorcise.

  “He was a beautiful child, Thomas—amazing to look at. Blond curls and the biggest eyes—blue, of course. He was in all the parades, such a good little Aryan. Katya was very proud of that.” Peter hesitates and rubs his eyes hard with his thumb. “And then . . . then he drowned in the Rügendamm. Almost five years old. It was so shocking; he was a good swimmer. Just a small boy, but strong. Somehow Katya, she got his body out of the water and carried him into a smoking hut on the beach. It was late morning already . . . the fishermen had finished for the day. Thomas loved the smell of the smoked fish and the burning wood.”

  Sweat trickles between Bettina’s breasts. Peter’s white body, the taut, long muscles—she loves everything about him. She loves him for the breaking of his voice as he speaks.

  “There was a lot of rope lying around, fisherman’s rope,” he explains. “That’s how she . . .”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Bettina whispers, wrecked.

  Peter straightens his shoulders. “The coroner declared them both accidental deaths. But I know how it really happened; I know what she was thinking. She was afraid the Russians would punish her for the work she did for the NSDAP. She was a secretary, you know, for the Nazis. And I . . . I had been gone almost two years already. But she never truly loved me anyway, I don’t think. It was because of Thomas that we married.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Without him, without the boy, she was afraid of not being strong enough to withstand what she knew was coming. Do you see what I’m trying to say?”

  “I’m . . . I don’t know,” Bettina says. There’s barking in the distance. A sound that echoes through the woods and peters out as it carries over the meadow.

  “The children—without them there’s just no point. They’re what we do all our work for. They’re the very reason we strive and compromise and suffer indignities and reach for the stars.”

  She wants to tell him about her dreams when she was little—how she would bathe her dolls in a bucket of warm water and imagine the brood she’d have one day. Babies nestling against her breasts, taking sustenance from her body. That she married Werner because she thought it might be her only chance at realizing this dream. She wants to tell him that she loves Thomas even though she never knew the child, that she knows his curls, his bright eyes, the tiny teeth and dirty palms and porcelain forearms. Most of all, she wants to tell him that she is pregnant.

  But she hears, faintly, her name, borne on the heavy breeze, interrupting the buzz of the insects and the rustling leaves. “Bettina! Bettina!”

  She and Peter look at each other, and she jumps to her feet.

  24

  Werner’s leg is throbbing as he pumps the pedals of his bicycle. He hates this damn bike. For one thing, he has to attach a chunk of wood to the left pedal to compensate for his shorter leg, and this arrangement is conspicuous and demeaning. It makes it difficult for him to maintain his balance. But the ride from home to Bobbin is relatively quick, whereas the walk would have taken him almost an hour.

  Sundays when Bettina goes to the Bobbin church, as she now does with some regularity, he does not let her borrow the bicycle. This is a matter of principle. Stubborn as she is, if she insists on this silly ritual of picking the neighboring church over the one in their very own village, well, then she can walk.

  It is an unusually warm afternoon, and Werner is still wearing his wool suit from work. Rivulets of sweat run down his forehead into his eyes. He has already been to the fish factory, certain that today was Bettina’s long shift, and then he trawled the streets of Saargen looking for her. When she did not come home after another hour of waiting, he became impatient and thought of that old church she liked. God only knows what she could be doing in Bobbin on a weekday afternoon, but he’d left work early to tell her the latest news, and now he is driven to find her.

  A truck carrying tin barrels of milk from the new co-op rumbles behind him, and Werner waves it down.

  “Guten Tag, Comrade Nietz!” the milkman calls out. A stubby cigarette sits in the slit of his mouth. “Can I give you a lift?”

  Detlef Elkin grew up on the same street as Werner. Although they never played together as children, Werner had admired the boy’s short, hairy legs—like pistons, with their bulging muscles. Those were legs that enabled him to win every neighborhood race. Even now in middle age, his ruddy skin tone and beefy arms are signs of an enduring strength that Werner lacks. Werner lays his bicycle down at the edge of the road and motions for Elkin to hold on a moment; he needs to catch his breath.

  “Congratulations on your award,” the man continues. “Soon they’ll be sending you off on fancy vacations to Hungary or Czechoslovakia, lucky devil.”

  Werner heaves himself into the cab of the truck. He reaches for a handkerchief and wipes his forehead. “Well, thank you, Comrade Elkin. How did you hear about it? They only confirmed it this morning.”

  “My sister,” the man says. “She must have a second pair of ears and eyes in the back of her head, that one. She’s a secretary in Bergen. Antje. Remember her?”

  Oh, Werner remembers the sister well: a small, dark beauty who repeatedly rejected him when they were teenagers, then aged as befits a shrew, with an ever-widening rear end and a face full of wrinkles from her ill temper.

  “Well, when she heard, she came over to the co-op, ostensibly for lunch—you know how it is with women! Did you know she never married? At any rate, I was just leaving to do the delivery. ‘Remember Werner Nietz?’ she said. ‘Remember he used to. . .’” Elkin hesitates. “Anyway, she remembered you from the old days. Bit of a gossip, that one. But I’m happy to be the first to congratulate you.”

  Elkin drops him at the top of the hill. It is silent at the church, and there is no sign of anyone. In the graveyard out back, a small dog, some sort of shaggy mutt, scuttles about under Werner’s feet, barking, tripping him up twice. He sheds his jacket and rolls up his sleeves. The sun beats down on his head. From afar, ravens sitting on the branches of a tree in front of the Pfarrhaus look like lumpy black fungus, but then they caw, flapping their great wings and swirling up into the air, swooping first overhead and then down toward the bottom of the valley. Werner catches sight of a dissipating cloud of smoke coming from behind some bushes and trees in the middle distance, followed by another small, dense puff.

  It does not look like a burn pile; someone is over there smoking a cigarette.

  “Bettina?” he calls out, cupping his hands over his mouth. He feels somewhat foolish, but he cannot help himself. He is as excited as when he’d received his Klausur from school: the highest-ranked child in his class. “Bettina, bist du da?”

  Just as he begins making his way through the undergrowth, cursing himself for having worn his polished work shoes, he catches sight of her.

  She emerges from behind some bushes, out from underneath the shade of a grove of ash trees. When she comes into the sunlight, the shine off her dark hair makes it appear wet. Waving, she makes her way up the slight hill toward him.

  Werner’s breath catches in his throat. She looks beautiful stomping through the grass like a child, hitching up her skirt in both hands. She has gained weight recently, and it suits her, softening her sharp features. Perhaps his news will make her proud. He smiles and waves, but she appears not to notice. This dampens his enthusiasm and reminds him that he has been looking for her for the past few hours. And what, it occurs to him, has she been doing at the edge of the neighboring field, smoking a cigarette?

  When she reaches him, she is out of breath and flushed. “Werner! What on earth are you doing here?”

  Her tone puts him on guard. During their courtship, he admired what he saw as a certain strength of mind, an inherently practical nature, but he wonders whether this is perhaps simply stubborn self-importance. He says, “I might ask you the same thing.”

  At this, she takes him by the elbow and steers him back up toward the little church. “Le
t’s go inside,” she says, her voice more gentle now. “It’s much cooler in there. Can you believe this day! The warmth is so lovely.”

  The stone walls are dripping with moisture, and an earthy odor fills the nave. They walk, single file, up the aisle until they reach the wooden altar. For such a small church, the altar is quite something: a series of trompe l’oeil black curtains drape from the ceiling to the floor, flanked by a gold-and-black checkered pattern. It is a remarkable church, he must concede, small and modest but with flourishes that are awfully charming. He’s beginning to see why she makes the trek here so often.

  “Bettina, I had to find you. I’ve been given an award!” he says.

  “An award,” she repeats. She is staring at the painting of the curtains around the altar, her face turned away from him.

  “Do you know what this means? They’re having a ceremony for me next month. We’ll be allowed to go away on holiday. We might even be assigned an automobile!” He is making up this last business about the vehicle, but he wants to elicit a reaction from her.

  “A ceremony in your honor? But what’s it for?” Bettina’s cheeks are red from running through the meadows. In some ways she looks younger to him than when they first met, as though the years have been running backward for her, whereas for him they march relentlessly ahead. He would like to brush the loose strands of hair from her glistening forehead, but an intimate gesture seems wrong right now.

  Drawing himself up, he reminds himself that she should be proud of him. “Well, it’s to honor heroes, antifascistic heroes. They have decided . . . see, Irmgard Bandelow told them about the soldier. I don’t know how she knew, but still. You must have said something a while back?”

  “Wait, what? She told them about the German boy?” Bettina asks, looking at him with her piercing eyes.