This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  “Raising the quotas again?” Bettina says. “I don’t think that’s even possible.”

  Anne-Marie casts a quick glance toward the exit door, where the factory manager’s office is. The smeary glass of his cubicle shows it is empty but for the reflection of the violet-tinged overhead lights. If ever his round face is pressed close to the glass, looking out at row upon row of aproned women standing on the factory floor, there is no talking whatsoever among them. “That’s not all,” she whispers. “They want us to double production, Franzie said—by next month.”

  Stefanie snorts. “Well, that’s ridiculous. We’re moving as fast as we can already.”

  Christa picks up her head. “Shut up, you gossips. You’re going to get us in trouble.”

  The women ignore Christa, who they feel has become boring and repetitive with her insistence on conforming. If she had her way, none of them would speak to one another again, ever. They understand her fear but find the constant reminders of it tiresome. The women are beginning to sense something shifting—something they’re finding harder and harder to ignore. It was one thing to be hopeful right after the invasion, when the Russians promised them all sorts of changes that would improve their lives drastically (after all, they’d been waiting for that since Hitler began making all those promises he didn’t keep). After they discovered what had really gone on during the war—the endless betrayals and lies, the ruinous, escalating evil that had been unleashed in the camps—they were ready to believe in better things to come. Communism promised equality, and that, surely, was unimpeachable. And yet . . .

  It’s been eight years since the war’s end, and in reality, equality translates into subservience; each woman is finding herself increasingly entrapped by the new rules and regulations, more constrained in movement and decision-making than before. Bettina is beginning to think that Communism is nothing more than an alternate version of fascism, in which the vocabulary is different but the goals are the same.

  She pushes her hair out of her eyes with the back of one gloved hand. Around her, the sonorous clang of machinery creates a kind of insulation against intelligent thought. Her shift is almost over, and all she has been thinking of is taking Annaliese on another walk. Now she shifts her focus to Anne-Marie; the last thing she wants is to have to add hours to her shift and risk losing her afternoons, the freedom to stroll with the baby, to use her muscles and lose herself in the rhythm of movement. She asks Stef, “What do you mean, that’s not all? What did you hear?”

  “Uwe, in Berlin?” Anne-Marie says, lowering her voice further. “He said the construction workers, they’ve called a strike.”

  “The ironworkers in Bergen, they’re striking too,” Stef says, stopping the rapid-fire movement of her hands for long enough that a few herring make it past her. Bettina grabs them and throws them in a bucket to finish later. If you miss a single herring on the conveyor belt, everyone is fined, and the money is taken out of their salary.

  The foreman’s face appears in the window of his office; Heike whistles under her breath, and all the women straighten their backs and speed up their movements. Putzkammer satisfies himself that they are getting on with work, and his face disappears again; everyone turns their bodies toward Stefanie. She shrugs. “They’re calling for a general strike. They want free elections in the East!”

  Christa struggles to keep up her work as the fish glide past her. She looks up, her brows sharply pulled toward her nose, her mouth grim. Her graying hair is working itself free from her hairnet. “How foolish can you be?” she hisses at the women. “Have you learned nothing at all? Do you not understand that we are just machinery in their system—the fancy new system that’s supposed to save the entire goddamn world?”

  Bettina makes her way through the streets by the harbor, rubbing shoulders with men and women lingering on the pavement. Unease rises in her with each step she takes. It is an uncommonly busy afternoon, when usually the streets are almost empty at this time of day, everyone either at work or at home eating a big, warm lunch. She clutches Annaliese to her hip and picks her way through the crowd.

  On the corner of Hauptstraße and Victoriastraße, a man stands on a wooden crate, people crowded around him. The fish shop used to be just around the corner, and Bettina used to know every centimeter of these streets by heart, every doorstep, cobblestone, tree, signpost. Over the eight years since the end of the war, the womenfolk cleared most of the rubble, piling the bricks into teetering walls, sometimes almost a meter thick, and burning the shredded wood. Today the air is filled with the melancholic cawing of gulls but also the low, insistent drone of voices punctuated by the man’s cries. He stands next to what is now a government-run store selling home goods shipped over from Minsk. Visibly agitated, he holds aloft a sign that reads, Stalin: Massenmörder!—“Stalin: Mass Murderer.”

  This scene stops Bettina cold. A shiver runs up into the base of her skull and begins a dull drumbeat against her temples that will become her first migraine headache. She holds on tight to Annaliese. People jostle against her, but she finds that she cannot move.

  After Stalin’s death a few months earlier, businesses closed, and banners were strung up all over town declaring sympathy for the East Germans’ Soviet brothers and the devastating loss of this visionary leader. But no one dares say out loud what so many are thinking: that Stalin was a monster no better than Hitler. There are whispered rumors of poisonings, corpses piled high in secret camps, newly leaked evidence of betrayals and atrocities. Werner has been launching lengthy tirades against the rumormongers, insisting they be strung up like traitors. This big talk of his rings false, but it’s also unnerving.

  “Have you seen the prices, I ask you?” the man on the crate shouts, pumping his sign up and down. “The prices go up and up and up. How much does your butter cost? How much is your bread? Can you even get bread when you want it, I ask you?”

  Some faces are pinched in concentration, and others are slack with bewilderment. But the crowd remains quiet until the man cries: “Stop acting like animals, dumb farm animals, and look around you! You can take control—you can demand fairness!”

  “Fairness?” one man shouts back. “We don’t have that right anymore!”

  “Idiot,” a young woman with lacquered hair admonishes, “everyone has the right to fairness.”

  “You’d better watch out,” someone calls from the other side of the street. “They’ll call the Vopo!”

  The murmuring rises as people begin talking among themselves. The man on the crate becomes red faced with the effort of yelling, but Bettina can no longer hear his words. They rise on the wave of communal noise. She hears “bread” and “quotas” and “pigs” as she forces her feet to move again, to take her away from this crowd, whose energy feels spiteful and fickle.

  Can humans ever keep their motives pure? Politics ruins the world, and power corrupts. Is democracy the answer, then? Bettina wonders—will people make the “right” decisions, choices that stand to reap profits not only for themselves but also for others? This talk of “free” elections and complaining about the extra labor it will take to fulfill the new quotas, this endless wondering about where Communism will take the country . . . she wants to believe there’s a point to it but can’t. Bettina is an anemone in an ocean of sharks and whales. What can she do that would change anything, when she cannot even advocate for the life she wants for herself? She yearns for the simplicity of a love that is requited and uncontested, a love that sings as unfettered as a note from a violin. But the realities of the world do not allow for this.

  She shoulders her way through the crowd. Annaliese is squirming in her arms, heavy as a sack of concrete. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches sight of something green: The Volkspolizei. Five, six, seven of them running down the street. People scattering out of their way, clutching their bags to their sides, straining to see where they are headed, relieved when the police run on without stopping. Bettina strains, listening for sounds—and then she hears
them: First a scream, then another. A shout and then a shot. And then, quickly after that, another shot and another.

  Annaliese hears them also, and even though she cannot possibly know what it means, she, too, starts to shriek.

  31

  The Rüganer does not run a detailed story of the riots that took place all over East Germany that day—alluding only to “mild unrest”—but someone at the factory gets hold of a West Berlin paper that makes the rounds in the bathrooms, where Bettina reads it, and another newspaper turns up in HQ in Bergen, where Werner and his colleagues pretend not to care about it.

  Truth is, all over the entire eastern part of the country—a nation that was split in half and taken over by another system—furious German workers emerged to protest. They protested the rise in production quotas and demanded elections. Right there on the front page of Der Tagesspiegel is an image of the tanks this new country, the DDR, set upon its own people—the T-34s providing cover for the Vopo. The paper asserts tension was so high that the East German ruling party called in the Soviets for crowd control. Forty thousand people had gathered on the streets of East Berlin. Under the inside fold is a list of hundreds of casualties. These stories are instantly debunked by Werner’s team, but there remains a sense of impending disorder that cannot be entirely ignored or erased.

  While Werner’s division isn’t directly involved, Stasi are asking who was where, taking down names, scrutinizing photographs of the impromptu gatherings in Saargen, Bergen, Garz, Arkona. Government officials are beginning a sweep through the coastal regions, moving anyone who owns property to state-run holdings on the mainland. Everyone is on alert again—both those in charge and the ordinary citizens trying to live normal lives.

  Because of his special status, Werner and Bettina are permitted to stay in the house on Apolonienmarkt. Each night he comes home with bright eyes and recounts to Bettina the important things he has been called upon to do. As he tells her his stories, he carefully assesses her reactions. He wants her to be proud. He searches her face for a sign that she is impressed, and he finds instead a vague, resigned friendliness.

  Nothing is as it should be. His mind is churning.

  Bettina is not sleeping at night, even once the child is settled and Werner is fast asleep beside her. She wanders the rooms downstairs in her nightgown, shivering despite the damp heat, hair in wild knots. The books eye her accusingly; the windows with their blank faces have no comfort to offer. The grass in the garden out back feels as lush as velvet under her bare feet, and she pads back and forth between the house and the shed, face turned upward to the night sky. If only she could sleep . . . when she closes her eyes, she again sees the young soldier Werner killed all those years ago, his incontrovertible humanity. Perhaps he would be a family man now, living on the southern ski slopes of Bavaria, a bunch of freckled, feather-haired children helping him with chores. Though she remembers her own terror—the crazed look in his eyes, his brutality—it is the pain of the future he lost that weighs on her. Her heart races to think of the millions of lives cut brutally short and how the Germans are failing to make up for the bloodshed despite their best intentions.

  And Peter . . . Peter is on her mind at all times, but most of all when she is begging sleep to descend on her, willing her body to relax. It is then that she hears his insistent voice telling her everything will be all right. That it is truly possible they can fix the world, because two people united in love can overcome anything. But his tone is wrong—faint and fading—and sleep races away from her on cloven hooves, and she is back to her nightmares.

  And then she sees him again.

  Werner, their widowed neighbor, Irmgard, and her two foster children are standing with Bettina by the door of the cottage. There’s an unruly rosebush twisting its way over the front entrance that Werner has been attempting to cut down, and the children have tucked fallen pink blooms behind their ears.

  “You’re welcome to these,” Werner is saying, holding out a basket of eggs toward Irmgard. “Really, Frau Bandelow. Our backyard production is so efficient it far exceeds our own quotas.” He laughs, and the woman joins in uneasily.

  “Herr Nietz, you are too kind,” Irmgard says, tucking a wisp of white-blonde hair behind one ear. Her handsome, square face has become more angular, her eyes in their deep sockets wary, observant. She looks to Bettina like a woman who does not like to live without a man. Although her clothes are drab and threadbare, she has a slim figure pinched in at the waist with a wide leather belt, and the eyes of the neighborhood men are often drawn to her as she makes her way to the market or to her work at the post office. “You know, I still can’t get that widow’s pension,” she continues. Her husband was killed in the last days of the war, and many war widows are still having trouble collecting pensions. “They just won’t budge. Poor Ernst. You’d think we deserve better, after all we’ve been through.”

  “We can make an omelet!” Elise pipes in, touching the eggs. “Or fried eggs, if we have some lard.”

  Standing between the two houses, Irmgard puts down her watering can and wipes her hands on her apron. Miniature daisies have sprung up in a series of small earthenware pots that she tends to daily.

  A black BMW turns into the square, and as the growl of its engine makes its way past the group, Bettina catches a flash of light hair inside the vehicle. Her eyes remain trained on the car. The wheel wells are rimmed with rust eating into the lacquer.

  Can it be the same vehicle she used to see parked outside the Pfarrhaus? Is Peter inside? The driver does not look in her direction, but she catches the self-conscious hunch of shoulders, tense hands gripping the steering wheel. His awareness of her ignites the air, and Bettina feels overheated and faint. It can be no one else but Peter.

  A towheaded neighborhood child grabs Elise’s arm and pulls her away. “Come play hopscotch,” he says. “Can she, Frau Bandelow? I’ll bring her back in an hour!”

  “Yes, dear,” Irmgard says. “Careful—that car.”

  Werner is watching this exchange with interest and cocks his head to the side. “Frau Bandelow, we’ve known each other for many years now, have we not? I know you and your family to be good people; I can vouch for that. I will take up the matter of the widow’s pension again. You should be paid what is rightfully yours, after all this time. It’s only correct.”

  She shifts the basket of eggs from one arm to the other. “I’d certainly appreciate a word to the authorities, if you could, Herr Nietz. Doesn’t seem fair that we should have to beg and borrow.”

  Werner’s expanse of white forehead creases into myriad lines as he smiles at her. He stands with his hands clasped behind his back, baring his teeth. There is something to this grin that reeks of false generosity. Bettina would have given the extra food to Irmgard with no fanfare, quietly leaving it on her back stoop. The weight of the air on her neck presses in on her like unwelcome fingers. The colors—grass, flowers, even the sky—are creamy and vague but sharpen ominously under the intensity of her sudden sense of dislocation. She could be nothing but an empty body standing there with these people, transported to some other realm of existence, yet her eyes and ears are on high alert, like a dog who can hear frequencies inaudible to humans.

  “Excuse me . . . ,” Bettina interrupts. There is a palpable absence—Peter was right here, and now he is gone—and yet also an overabundance of stimuli. Was he trying to tell her something by driving past her like this? “I, uh, I forgot to pick up our flour, from Studemeyer’s? I want to bake some Brötchen for the morning.”

  “Too late for that now,” says Werner. “It’s past closing time.”

  “Oh, but . . . that’s not a problem.” The band of her apron feels tight on her waist, and she slips her fingers under it, fiddly and distracted: it seems to be restricting her ability to syncopate her breathing with her speaking. “Studemeyer, he, uh. Well”—deep breath as she tries again—“he usually leaves the bag in the back shed if I don’t pick it up in time on Thursdays. I’ll tak
e a look. If it’s not there, I’ll see about trying Bechmann’s.”

  “Really?” Werner remains with his hands behind his back, his brows arched. “Well, run off then, if you must. The baby is asleep?”

  “Playing in her crib.” Bettina takes off the apron and hands it to Werner.

  “Come, Frau Bandelow,” he says, waving Irmgard toward him. “Come inside and see how much little Anna has grown . . .”

  “Lovely,” Irmgard says, smiling. She gives Bettina a quick wave and then follows Werner into the house.

  Bettina runs out onto the main road. There is no black BMW anywhere in sight. The sun has dipped behind some clouds, and the skin of her forearms prickles. As she pulls the air deep into her lungs, a stinging sensation travels down her windpipe. She continues running past Studemeyer and on past Marienstraße.

  The Pfarrer’s old BMW is parked on a side street next to the youth center. Glancing around her quickly, Bettina slips along the side of the building to the back entrance. She waits a second to catch her breath and to listen for footsteps. The pounding of her heart is a reminder of her body’s mechanical systems, its astonishing resiliency: she is standing on this street, flesh and bones, her body more determined than her mind.

  The door is ajar. The lights are off in the shabby room with its outmoded furniture and listing pool table. The sudden darkness shrinks her world, like the shutter on her camera when it’s stuck. She widens her eyes, tries to catch her breath.

  There he is. Leaning against the wall, arms folded in front of his chest, wearing a mismatched suit. He appears vulnerable yet possessed of a manic, unpredictable energy. Light hair is falling over his eyes. She steps closer and then stops. It has been so long. Has he changed? His hair is longer, his jacket unfamiliar to her. On the way here her mind was a tumble of words, but now she is mute.