This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  But before she can get past him into the house, Werner snatches the letter from her. “And this?”

  She forces herself to slow everything down. “It’s nothing. It’s not important.”

  The envelope jostles in his hands as though it’s a piece of metal scalding his skin. He will open it, he will read it, and then he will know where Clara is.

  “No, sorry. It’s—actually, it’s from my sister.”

  Werner says nothing. His look is hard to parse: he seems neither surprised nor angry.

  “I just wanted to know that she is all right. I’m sorry. I miss her, Werner . . . she’s my only family . . .”

  “The butcher gave it to you? How is he involved in this?”

  There’s an uncomfortable flutter in her chest. “He—Johann—he’s an old friend of my parents. He’s like a father, almost. It’s not as though—”

  “How is any of that relevant?” Werner tucks the letter into his pants pocket. “So you’ve known where she is all along.”

  Bettina looks down. She fears she’ll never see the letter. And what if Clara has written something about Peter?

  “You knew where she was, and you didn’t tell me.”

  His voice is too calm. She watches as he turns his back to her and heads into the house.

  The Tatra handles just fine with its new muffler, and the next day after dinner Werner drives to Bobbin, claiming that he’s meeting a new MfS recruit; in a way he is indeed working. He parks behind the church, partly hidden by a decrepit outbuilding in which lawn equipment is rotting away, a good fifty meters from where the literature teacher lives with his lunatic alcoholic father. Werner sits for a moment before turning the engine off and climbing out. He’s been doing his research. He knows quite a lot about the two of them now—these sad-sack Brenner men, the only ones left.

  He cannot see anything through the impenetrable blackness. The screeching of invisible birds in the dark overhead is making him tense. Rustling—of what, leaves? Two police cars had raced ahead of him and parked right in front of the Pfarrhaus. After the hurried slamming of car doors and some muffled banging, there is silence. If someone sees him, they will certainly wonder what on earth he is up to lurking around the woods at night. With his hands stretched out in front of him, he stumbles up a short hill through some brambles that catch on his ankles and heads toward the trees on the rise behind the church so he can see what is taking place in the clearing below.

  Three policemen in khaki uniforms, truncheons and pistols strapped to their belts, stand outside the house. Their headlights carve shivering beams of light into the darkness. The house looks as though it is crouching, uneasy under the glare.

  The front door is open. Werner waits.

  A few minutes later, a policeman comes out, leading the old man by the elbow. They climb into one of the cars and execute a tight turn to head down the road toward town. Instinctively, Werner crouches down so the glowing beam of light does not hit him through the trees. When he rises again, he feels the old resentment rising in his chest: he would have liked nothing better than to storm into the melee below, make a huge racket, take his gun out of the glove compartment where he stashed it, and wave it around. Perhaps even take a few shots! At the same time, he knows this would not be wise—he still has to think of his end goal. If he’s learned one thing over the past years, it’s that it pays to be patient. To be slow and methodical.

  Then they bring him out. A black police dog bounds past the teacher and runs in circles in the front yard, as though chasing a rabbit. In the glow from the lights of the car, the expression on Peter Brenner’s gaunt face is visible. He does not look defeated—he looks defiant. It is the man in the sketch; there is no doubt at all.

  Werner waits for them to drive off. What now? He cuts a ridiculous figure huddled in the woods like a common criminal. He straightens up and heads down toward the empty house. The front door is still open. Inside it smells of stale air and the sweat of two grown men. Cooked food and dust. Neglect. It is clear there is no woman in charge here. He is disgusted at the thought that his wife, so clean and orderly, might have come to this house to be with this man. Quickly, he trots through the hall and the living room and into the kitchen. The old Volksempfänger radio on the countertop is blaring. It is jarring to hear the announcer’s voice, deep and calm, presiding over this empty space.

  Upstairs there are two bedrooms, one of which is obviously the old man’s. On the table by the bed are a copy of the Bible and a stack of newspapers. On the floor lie a few empty bottles of Kowalski vodka. The other room is as bare as a cell and contains an iron bedstead and a dresser. There are no books or clothes anywhere. Where does this Peter Brenner sleep? Does he even live here?

  Back downstairs, Werner stands in the hallway, stymied. He is jumpy and exhilarated, like a child doing something he knows to be wrong. He is compelled to see where Peter Brenner sleeps, where he shaves his face in the mornings before going to teach at the school, where he writes letters or marks students’ papers or eats his food. Werner pats the pocket of his jacket nervously.

  He remembers having seen the Pfarrhaus in daylight and wondering how the family uses the ramshackle lean-to in which the chickens and pigs were kept in the old days. Now he turns to his right and sees a door.

  Peter’s room is actually quite large, low ceilinged, with a brick fireplace in the far corner and a coarse wooden floor covered in an old rug. Two windows face the front, and two face the back. Flowered curtains hang limply, pulled open. On a compact table sit an almost-empty bottle of beer and a stack of books and papers. The floor near the bed is strewed with papers, and the bed in the corner is unmade, a wool blanket cast aside. The walls seep moisture.

  The papers on the floor have been scribbled on and discarded.

  Apocalyptic, Werner reads. After that, something is crossed out with thick black strokes of a fountain pen.

  The man with two faces. Perfidy in yellow, their bobbing heads full of lies.

  A slob, this man! An intellectual and a poet and a slob. Werner’s heart races. He takes one of the papers and folds it into small squares and slips it into his jacket pocket. It might come in handy. There is an animal smell in the room, musty but also acrid, like the smell of a sweating horse. Does Peter Brenner bring women into this room—has Bettina been in here? Being here in this place where he lives and drinks and writes and sleeps makes Werner feel diminished and impotent all over again.

  A deep throbbing begins to radiate through his jaw. Everything will be all right, he tells himself. I just need to think.

  There is a faint rap on the front door of the Pfarrhaus, and Werner jerks his head toward the sound. It seems there is no back exit to this room, and he will have to go either back into the main house or out the side exit, in plain view of the front door. Werner reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pair of panties—very small, for a young girl. He lifts the thin mattress and shoves them underneath. An insurance policy for the future, in case he needs it. He will not allow himself to be made a fool of.

  Flipping off the light switch, he heads back to the main house. At the front door stands a woman a little older than he is, hair pulled back with a clip. Her blonde hair is heavily streaked with gray, her pointy face like a skittish bird.

  “Excuse me,” the woman says. “Marie—I’m Marie from next door. Johann is my husband? The butcher. I just wanted to check—I think my nephew may have called the . . . the Vopo.”

  “I’m done in here,” Werner says, shutting the front door behind him. She thinks he’s from the local police force? Foolish woman. The way he stands in front of her, with authority, takes away her right to ask who he is or what he is doing. “The men have been taken to the police station in Bergen for questioning. I’m with the Stasi.”

  “Is everything all right? What have they done?”

  “I’d lock your doors if I were you.” Werner sees fear flicker across the woman’s pinched face, loosening her brows, slackening her lips. “Those
boys, they were bad seeds, all of them. I’d watch out for him—”

  She recoils. “You mean Peter? Why?”

  “Yes! Do you have children, daughters? I’d keep them well away from him; that’s all I can say for now.” Werner lowers his voice, the growl of it reverberating in his throat. “I shouldn’t say anything, but he’s under investigation. We have it all under control. But be careful, mind you. We can never be too careful, can we? And I’d keep an eye on that husband of yours too.” He strides away as quickly as he can, given his limp. The woman is following him with her eyes, surely, wondering who he is. But he knows that as long as he walks with purpose, speaks without hesitation, and states allegations as fact, sooner or later everyone will forget their loyalties, their memories and personal experiences . . . and the seeds of distrust will begin to flower.

  37

  It happens one day ten minutes after she returns from seeing Peter at the youth center. Waking up that morning, she did not know that she would not lie back down on her bed again that night or any night thereafter. Werner took the child on a walk to see the beekeeper on Seemannstraße, and when Bettina gets back home, she begins watering the roses in the front yard. She is flushed from lovemaking, her lips swollen and smarting. Her heartbeat has yet to resume its natural rhythm. It was hot and rushed, and they heard noises outside that made them stop—holding their breath. This has served to strengthen their resolve: they must leave soon! Just a few days earlier Peter and his father were picked up by the police and questioned for almost three hours straight, well into the night. Two men wearing the green uniforms of the Stasi asked Peter about his writing, his allegiances. They doubted his support for the system, and no amount of explanation assuaged them.

  “They’ve turned on me,” he told her. “It’s time to make a plan.”

  But they have no plan yet, and as she bends over, watering, Bettina hears her daughter in the distance. Lusty, gurgling shrieks of anger. Anna is cinched in the crook of Werner’s arm, her fists coiled like ham hocks, sweat silvering her cheeks. When she sees her mother, she leans her body back wildly and reaches out for her. Bettina straightens up. Something about the way Werner is walking through the gate tells her instantly that there is trouble ahead.

  “Na, kleine,” she says, rubbing palms suddenly slick with sweat against her cotton skirt.

  Werner is wearing his summer linens, the slack in the weave causing ripples where there should be none. He won’t even look at her. With one hand firmly on Anna’s back, he does not break his stride. “Follow me,” he barks.

  “I’m just . . . I’m watering . . .”

  He disappears into the house. If only her body could stay there in the garden, in the process of executing menial tasks. If only she could ignore the tone of her husband’s voice, the implication of his reddened face, and the way he was gripping their child in his arms. It is all so ordinary. And yet it is clear that after this stunningly ordinary moment, something profound will change. The anticipation in her stomach is like a bleeding ulcer. She follows him inside.

  “You are leaving this house today,” he says to her. The baby is sitting on the worn carpet in the front room, a slant of light coming through the mullions and casting a latticework of shade onto her bloomers. Anna is hiccuping and focused on the cat, who sits immobile and smug, waiting for the moment when he’s had enough and will swipe at her with his claws. Bettina takes all this in. She’s not quite present; a woolly feeling has enveloped her, as though time is altered in some permanent way.

  The child. Bettina wants to pick her up but does not move.

  “Did you hear me?” Werner says. “You will leave this house today.”

  The second time he says it—in that imperious tone—Bettina is jolted from her stupor and makes a move for Anna, but in a flash Werner has scooped her up again. Bettina freezes. She badly does not want to make her baby cry—if she hears that cry again, if she is the one who causes it, there will be no fixing this; she knows it. She will be doomed.

  “Let’s put her upstairs,” Bettina whispers. “In the crib.”

  “What? What did you say?” Werner says. “Didn’t you hear me the first time?”

  “Please, let’s not—”

  “You are a lying whore.” He is speaking now in a tone so low and gentle that Anna, in his arms, turns her face toward her father and places a small hand on his cheek. The words are soft, slow, and nothing has ever sounded as ominous.

  “Werner, the child . . . ,” she says.

  “You will never, ever see her again.” Werner kisses Anna’s cheek. She looks over to her mother, aware now that something is wrong. Her eyes are intent, lips parted. She is teething, and a trickle of saliva runs down her chin, staining her shirt in a dark half moon.

  Bettina begins to back up. “You’re scaring me,” she says. “I won’t talk to you while Anna is here. I . . . I . . .” But Werner pushes past her and begins to labor up the stairs. It would be possible for Bettina to wrestle the child from his arms, but then Anna would be alarmed, and she’d scream. It seems very, very important that Anna not sense the terrible power of their anger, of their insidious, poisonous fear. So Bettina waits at the bottom of the stairs in the hall, next to the dish on the sideboard holding the Tatra keys, the graying lace doily her grandmother stitched, the mirror whose wonky reflection reveals a world trapped in a snow globe. The urgent pulsing between her legs has not stopped, and inside her a coil of self-hatred unfurls: the beautiful ache of sex revealing itself as dangerous. There is no one to blame but her, and she must face whatever is to come.

  His preternatural calm is more intimidating than if he were screaming. Anna is in her little room, and Werner paces the master bedroom. “I saw you this afternoon on Hermannstraße. I watched you enter the youth center. I saw Peter Brenner”—Bettina sucks in her breath sharply at his name—“that teacher. Peter Brenner from the middle school. The writer with the crazy father and the dead Nazi brothers. Yes, I know all about him. I waited with your child in my arms until you came out again, you damn whore. I know you’ve been having an affair. I have proof now, Bettina. We took photos—don’t even try to deny it.”

  Is it worth telling him he’s mistaken? Should she try to find a way to explain why she would sneak around on a weekend afternoon in a place she clearly has no reason to be? His will is towering and formidable—she will have to climb a mountain a thousand kilometers high, claw her way up a cliff of ice. “Werner . . . ,” she begins, taking a seat on the bed and running her clumsy fingers over the coverlet. But she doesn’t know how to save herself.

  “You don’t have anything to say?” He regards her with a mixture of disdain and something that looks like horror—or maybe it’s just surprise. He expected her to fight back. Perhaps he is hoping she will tell him that he is wrong.

  “I’m so sorry,” she answers. “You don’t deserve any of this.”

  “How long has this been going on? How many—is it . . . how long has it been? Tell me,” he stutters. He needs to know if it’s possible that the child isn’t his, but he’s afraid to ask.

  This is where, later, she will think she went wrong. If she had told him that the child was not his, that it was Peter’s, perhaps his anger would have turned—perhaps it would have grown to include Anna as well, and then Bettina would have had a chance to keep her child. But instead, with his barely contained fury pushing against her, she takes pity on the man. What has he ever done to her but tried to take care of her?

  Also, she cannot deny him the possibility that the child is his because she herself does not know. She shakes her head. “I was so unhappy, Werner; I was like an entirely different person. I made decisions I regret.” He will no doubt think she is talking about the terrible months after she had Anna, but he continues to simply stare at her. She tries again. “I don’t know if I can explain—it was as if I was possessed. I didn’t even recognize myself anymore.”

  He snorts and cuts his eyes away from her. This is not the right thing to say,
but it is true, more true than she can hope to explain. She simply did not know who she was until she met Peter. The person she thought she was at nineteen, when she married, and at twenty-five, when she struggled to make sense of her life, is not who she is now. There was no solid foundation upon which to build a love for Werner. But how is she supposed to have known this until it was proven to her? It took falling in love to reveal to her how wrong she had been in her choices as a young woman.

  She clasps her hands so tightly that her knuckles are leached of color. All these justifications ring hollow to a husband who has been deceived, though this does not make them untrue. Yes, she had finally determined she must leave him, take the child, and start anew with another man, but she had not yet thought through what she would say or do when faced with his devastating disappointment, his righteous, undeserved pain. “Werner . . . I’m . . . I truly mean it—I’m so very sorry for the pain I’ve caused.”

  “It’s convenient to be sorry, Bettina. And anyway, it’s beside the point. I forgive you. You are a human being . . .”

  Her heart lifts—can this be true? He can let go of his need to punish her?

  “. . . and no one is perfect. But in this case, Bettina. In this case you behaved like a prostitute. You are not the woman I thought you were.” He begins pacing again, and this time his movements are jerky, and his left foot is dragging a bit. “You’re not special, Bettina. You are ordinary. You are weak, and you are ordinary, and you have no self-control.”

  “You yourself said—”

  “You will leave Rügen. I want you out of the house. I can’t continue here in this community when my wife has been parading around with another man. Do you understand me? You will leave here today, and Annaliese, she is staying with me.”

  Bettina jumps up and hurls herself past him. In the small room where the maids used to sleep, Annaliese is trying to pull herself up in a huge wood-slat crib, pumping with her thick legs, hanging on the railing with both hands. Dark-brown curls stick out in clumps, and her mouth is open wide in a glistening smile at seeing her mother again.