This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  The fisherman’s cottage is no longer peaceful when Werner is at work. The baby fills her lungs with air—one long, shuddering intake of breath—and then lets out her wails in a series of prolonged bursts, punctuated only by the short silence of her inhalation before the next round of cries begin. Sometimes Bettina believes that Annaliese is crying for her dead brother, that she became accustomed to the warmth of his tiny body against hers in the womb and now feels abandoned, but this cannot be right. She thinks she is simply a bad mother.

  She stands at the kitchen counter, peeling misshapen russet potatoes for dinner, listening to the crying coming from the wicker basket in the living room. Doktor Kreefeld insists that she learn to ignore Annaliese’s wails, but each time she starts anew, the milk swells in Bettina’s breasts, and there’s a painful tug in her groin. The cat has taken to sleeping under the back stoop, as far from the screams as possible.

  She is growing so very quickly, this precious, tiny girl with the furious cry. Her silky black hair fell out and has been replaced by a thick dark fuzz that looks as though it might become wavy as she ages. Her eyes are neither blue like Werner’s nor dark like Peter’s but green, changing with intensity with her moods. When she is sleeping, her lips slightly parted and moist, her breath rasping in and out noisily, she makes Bettina think of Peter, and she stares at her for hours, still as stone. It is not so much that they share an obvious physical resemblance, but the baby’s energy—even in rest—her fierce curiosity, the neediness combined with strong will . . . all this reminds her so much of her lover.

  It has been over six months since she last saw Peter (one hundred and ninety-eight days). While she yearns for him physically—his absence creating a vacuum so vast it hurts her tissue, her bones; even her blood aches—most of all, she misses his voice. His mellifluous voice, its insistence. She did not realize how much she fed off that voice until she no longer heard it. He was always working on a play or a story, and sometimes, after lovemaking, he would read passages to her from his writing. In one way or another this had been a ritual for her all her life—as a child it had been her father reading to her; as an adult she’d listened to the radio. But with Peter it was fascinating to see the progression of the writing from rough to more polished. She found his ideas at once intriguing and intimidating. He started off so boldly that it could be confusing, and as he edited his work, he finessed his ideas and clarified his prose, sharpening and shaping and creating something of real beauty.

  It was not dissimilar to what she used to do when taking and developing her pictures, but it has been years since she picked up her camera.

  She can no longer bear to have a conversation with anyone, let alone with her husband. Every word that comes out of Werner’s mouth seems drenched in insincerity. Even Christa has noticed and has tried a few times to draw her out at work, asking about the baby, but all the doors inside Bettina are locked, and she cannot find an opening, not even for her old friend.

  She is not a decent wife, pushing Werner away if ever he attempts to touch her, and she is an inadequate mother, unable to comfort her constantly wailing child. At least having the baby seems to have temporarily released her from Werner’s constant, feverish scrutiny. Before, he clung to her, alternately begging or threatening, but now he seems perplexed and unnerved by her new role. As she tends to Annaliese, he watches her warily, and she wonders why he keeps his distance when he promised to do just the opposite. But when she hands the baby over to him, he seems completely at ease. At night, he often takes the child and puts her in a big tin bucket in the kitchen filled with warm water. He sits on the floor, legs folded awkwardly, reaching into the water to prop Annaliese up and splash water on her shoulders and belly. The two of them grin at each other, splashing and laughing, and as Bettina watches, she becomes ever more miserable, the delight in Werner’s eyes reminding her of her own failings.

  Her body is soft and yielding and surprisingly compliant, full of automatic responses to her child that spring from nowhere, even though her mind is captive to this deadening grief. Her body aches from sleeping so poorly. Annaliese is often up at night, seeking comfort by nursing, and sometimes Bettina’s mind is so blank, or so teeming with unstoppable thoughts, that she feels as though she is going mad. In the old fish shop she’d adored the rituals: getting there before the sun broke over the horizon, hauling fish from the fishermen’s baskets, cleaning the floors and the windows, taking orders, even hauling away the trash. For years her routine was unvarying, and she took comfort in that as an antidote to the chaos of war. Now she moves through the routine of her life as a mother and a wife without feeling the moments go by. They are bubbles, fragile and meaningless. Every now and then, when she is in the darkness of Annaliese’s room before sunrise, she can anchor herself firmly in that particular experience, but mostly she feels absent from her own life.

  Finally Johann the butcher drops by. He’d admired her father, even shared some good laughs with her mother, and he loved the two Heilstrom girls, so he’d agreed (though not without some trepidation) to be a conduit for news from her sister. Clara had sent a letter to his co-op in Bobbin, addressed to a fictitious person. The envelope carries no return address on it. Inside there is sparse information, except that they have settled in Chicago and quickly found work. Herbert has started his own business, something to do with bathroom renovations, and Clara helps him with the paperwork. They have been given a small line of credit from the bank and entered into a partnership with a group of Germans who pool their savings. After one year, they are starting to turn a profit.

  Oh, Bettina wants more, much more: She wants to hear her sister’s voice, to tell her about Peter, about Annaliese! She wants to ask about the high rises and the accents and whether Americans really do smile all the time. She wishes she could hear about the first months of loneliness and what helped Clara survive. Does she miss the island, the thatched roofs that smell of farmyards and woods, the endless winds that blow in from the north? Does she think of her sister and what she left behind?

  Not a day passes that Bettina does not wonder whether she can make it through the hours without heading toward the middle school in Bobbin, hoping to catch sight of Peter Brenner, or walking once again to church and staring at his ruddy neck during Sunday services. Doing her daily chores, she imagines his serious face—the shadowy eyes and full lips—and the thought grips her that he will storm back into her life in some dramatic way that will endanger them all. She wants this desperately while also dreading it. His features are imprinted on her mind when she wakes up and when she closes her eyes to try to sleep. He is with her as the baby’s fists hit the delicate skin of her breasts while nursing, summoning energy and life from she knows not where. Peter is in her baby’s cries and in her laughter. She could swear that she is able to sense whenever he is thinking of her, for she feels his eyes on her like a caress, and sometimes she will spin around, certain that he must be nearby.

  The ghost of his love is like a living thing. It is a strange sensation, to feel that Peter has become part of her in a way that will never go away no matter how alone she is.

  29

  In the old pram, Annaliese lies staring at the sky with round green eyes, cooing intermittently as anything of interest comes into her line of sight: a bird, a puffy cloud, the earnest face of her mother. She is almost four months old and has a full face, pale from being inside most of the sunless winter and spring. Bettina has discovered that the child loves to ride in the carriage, lulled by the movement into a kind of ecstatic calm, spit burbling from her lips. Now that the weather is lovely, the sunshine broken up by the shuddering leaves of overhanging trees, they walk and walk together, hour upon hour. Sometimes Werner joins them, but he is slower than Bettina, and she loves to stride along at a good clip, aimless and exhausted. She is beginning to accept the feeling that she is indeed the mother this child has been given and that she can do the job. She must.

  A few times she has tried picking up her colored penci
ls to sketch again, but her efforts are disastrous. She lacks the patience when she gets something wrong to apply herself to fixing it. When the baby has fallen asleep, provided Werner is not yet home, she will often pick up her old camera and turn it in her hands, grazing the bumpy, worn leather cover with steady fingers, playing with the levers. Ever since that day at the piers when he tore it from her and threw it on the ground, she’s kept it in the back of her closet. It is so heavy in her hands. She loves to think of all the scenes she’s captured over the years, times when she still inhabited what she thinks of as her real self. Peter used to ask her about it, encouraging her to commit to start taking pictures once again. “Being an artist isn’t easy,” he’d say, “but it is worthwhile. And I know you can do it; I know you have the eye.”

  But she is not special; she realizes that all humans have outer selves they share with the world and inner selves they keep hidden. She knows, too, that her core has dissipated like steam, simply vanished; she is a stranger even to herself. There’s a dizziness that overcomes her, a kind of slide into a void. It leaves her shaky. Holding the camera gives her a feeling of substance, if only briefly, and Peter’s words of encouragement, his belief in her vision, come back to her, fortifying her.

  Bettina picks the baby up from the fishery’s crèche, intending to take her to the ocean for a few hours, hoping that the clean salt smell of faraway places will entertain them both. Her work shift has changed, and she now scales and debones in the early mornings, relieved of duty every day by two o’clock. This leaves her with many hours of half freedom, when she and Annaliese can roam as they please before Werner returns from Bergen, expecting his dinner of Vollkornbrötchen und Leberwurst. Often he stays so late at work that she does not even need to feed him until the baby is already in bed.

  Once she has scrubbed her hands in the communal facilities, changed out of her dirty uniform, and settled Annaliese in the pram, Bettina emerges into the sun-drenched Saargen streets and feels the warmth pouring down on her, and her feet carry her not toward the port but to the once-familiar road to Bobbin. A cotton jacket tied around her waist, she walks with bare arms, her legs too warm in wool tights. She reasons that it is the middle of the day in the middle of the week, and Peter will be busy at school, not at the Pfarrhaus or in the church, not playing with Aldo in the meadow.

  As she nears Bobbin, her feet move with surprising lightness, and her pace is brisk. Already she can anticipate the rush of feelings that will tether her back to earth. A horse pulling farm machinery clops past her, and she waves at the man holding the reins. The occasional motorcycle rumbles by, but otherwise she sees no one.

  The pram’s big wheels have trouble on the cobbles, so she lifts Annaliese out and holds her close as she climbs the path leading to the church. As she enters the dark anteroom and steps over the threshold into the interior, her heart speeds up. How she has missed it here: the cool blue light that comes in through the leaded windows, the ornately painted confessionals. At the end of the small room is the painted altar, nothing changed. In the many months she has been away, her own life is unrecognizable to her, and yet here, all is the same. The feel of the hard stone floor beneath her feet and the musty air on her cheeks is a kind of homecoming.

  The baby begins to fidget and mew, her tiny hands chilly. She nudges urgently at her mother’s shoulder, but Bettina can’t feed her in here. Outside, the sky is marred only by the swooping of the ever-present gulls. The graveyard is set alight by the sun, and the pale faces of the headstones flash. Annaliese is calm briefly, as though the intensity of the colors distracts her from her empty stomach. The cluster of saplings on the rise, where Peter showed Bettina the discarded gravestones more than three years earlier, offers a small stone slab where Bettina can sit and nurse out of sight. As she makes her way there, a shaggy gray animal—the size of a fox—becomes visible under the overgrown bushes. A scraggy head, yellow tufts on the ears visible even in the shadow of the overgrowth. Catching her breath, Bettina scrambles toward the mound.

  “Aldo!” she calls out. “Annaliese, darling, look—it’s Aldo . . .”

  When she is still a few steps away, she stops; Aldo has not raised his head. He lies on a bed of pine needles and browned leaves, his nose pressed into his two front paws, hind legs stretched out behind him, as though he is running and resting at the same time.

  “Aldo?” she says. When no response comes, she whistles gently a few times.

  Clutching Annaliese, she kneels down and touches the rough fur on the bumpy ridge of the dog’s back. Under her hand, his fur is like a hard wire brush. Sweat springs up on her arms and behind her ears. A sharp intake of breath, and she is back on her feet.

  The door to Peter’s quarters in the Pfarrhaus is not locked. Bettina bursts into the dark room. All is familiar: Piles of papers and books line the floor, the fireplace is filled with half-burned wood, and the narrow bed in the corner is unmade. On the table lie a candle, a book, and an empty tin milk jug.

  “Peter!” she cries out, a hitch in her throat. “Peter? Aldo—Aldo is dead!”

  The main house is silent, and she goes from room to room, uncertain what she’s looking for or what she will find. Annaliese begins crying once more, this time with greater urgency, hitting her with her fists, and Bettina stumbles out through the front door, searching again for a quiet place to feed her child. Next to the jasmine bushes is a dilapidated wooden bench, and when she sits and unfastens the buttons of her dress, covering the skin of her chest with her jacket, Annaliese becomes hysterical. She throws her head back and forth, searching for her mother’s nipple. Bettina leans forward so she can feel her breast inside the baby’s soft lips, and a wave of grief speeds through her. The image of Aldo lying in the shadows attaches itself to the black undersides of her closed lids, and she begins to cry.

  Then, a shadow: There is a man standing in front of her. Tall, rod thin, with unruly gray hair. Small light eyes, red rimmed and puffy. An oversize men’s shirt hanging from stooped shoulders. It is Pfarrer Brenner, Peter’s father.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks. “I know you; you’re Peter’s girl.” His pale eyes shift from her face to the baby in her arms and back again. “You’ve come back.”

  “Pfarrer Brenner, hello,” Bettina says. “I . . . yes . . . we went for a walk. I really just wanted to see the church again.”

  “You . . . ? Well. I see you have a baby.”

  There’s nothing she can say to this, so she remains silent.

  “I wish you hadn’t come. You’re no good for him,” the father says, taking a step away. “They’ll start watching us again. It’s been quiet. I like it quiet here—when no one’s bothering us. Peter has been very quiet. He keeps to himself. I don’t want trouble starting up again!”

  Bettina realizes that the man is drunk. She nudges the baby off her breast and covers herself.

  The father swings a finger in front of his face and places it on his lips in an exaggerated gesture. He whispers, “They came to ask me about my sermons. They wanted to know all about Peter too. I can’t—I’m no longer permitted to keep preaching. Religion has become bourgeois, it seems. Capitalistic, corruptive . . .”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Bettina says in a small voice, looking around. There is no one nearby. Last night she was unable to sleep after hearing loud noises in the square below the bedroom; moving aside the faded yellow curtains, she watched as a police car idled on the cobblestones. Two uniformed officers holding flashlights were standing at the door of the Jantzes’, the stucco house kitty corner to hers. Bettina stared as the police handed over some papers to Herr Jantz. The old man wore a tattered dressing gown, his huge head of white hair backlit by a hallway light. Even from that distance and in the darkness of night, Bettina could see his wife’s face crumple into tears in the yellow light of their hallway.

  Now, her throat so dry she can hardly form the words, she says to the priest, “Aldo is dead. Did you know that?”

  “He went off
this morning. I found him a couple of hours ago.”

  “Are you . . . you’ll just leave him there?” She shifts Annaliese onto her other side and clumsily buttons her dress with one hand. The baby has a dumb expression on her round face, her eyes half-closed.

  Pfarrer Brenner stares. “Are you coming back again? I wish you wouldn’t.”

  She bows her head. “I don’t think so, no.”

  “He’s better off without you.” There is something about Peter’s father that seems deeply neglected and distracted, but when his eyes meet hers again, he appears to be lucid. “You should go home now, and don’t come back.”

  30

  “The production quotas, have you heard?” Anne-Marie whispers. Bettina and Stefanie are leaning over the conveyor belt with long narrow knives poised in their hands, scooping up the fish and filleting them with expert twists of their wrists. “They raised them again. Did Putzkammer tell you?”

  “What are you talking about?” Stefanie’s shoulders are hunched forward. “Enough already.” Typically, Stef likes to get on with work and save the chitchat for the locker rooms afterward, when the women make way for the next wave of workers. They strip off their thick aprons and gauzy hairnets, take off the heavy waterproof boots, and become themselves again, women in dresses with pretty hair; that’s usually when words flow more freely. Bettina likes that about Stefanie: her ability to concentrate, to be professional, even while doing the most monotonous job. So many of the women just do the bare minimum, trying to get through their days as quickly as possible. Stefanie has integrity.