This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  It was a record store. Above the door hung a sign that read MOODY BLUES DISCS. Cupping her hands on either side of her eyes, she pressed her face against the front window to peer inside. There were rows and rows of tables full of LPs, comfortable red chairs clustered in a corner, where a couple of people sat reading magazines, and a young woman with cropped black hair standing behind an old-fashioned till.

  It was the till that held Bettina’s attention. The woman rang up a customer, and the heavy drawer slid open; suddenly Bettina wanted nothing more than to hear the ping of the drawer and the tap tap tap of fingers on the till’s stiff keys. After the bombing, when she’d returned to her family’s fish shop to look for the sign her grandfather had painted, she’d searched and searched for the old till among the piles of bricks and the shreds of wood. That it could have been destroyed seemed impossible: it had been so very solid, weighing a ton. Now she longed to feel in her hands again the heavy push and pull of the drawer as its springs guided it in and out. A tug of nostalgia for the sawdust and the scarred wooden countertop, the crates that held eel and Forellen, yanked at her.

  She entered the dark interior of the store.

  Lingering in the aisles, she observed the other customers. It was a mixed group, as was typical in her neighborhood, with Hispanic children hanging on to their mother’s skirts and a compact Japanese man with jowls in the bluegrass section. Years ago, Bettina had picked up a record player at a yard sale, but the only records she owned were Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 and a single by the Beatles called “A Hard Day’s Night” that George had given her in an effort to introduce her to pop culture. She listened mostly to the radio; it had been her habit all her life.

  Handwritten signs were taped onto trays that held hundreds of albums: classical, country, Motown, jazz. Everything was sorted alphabetically. Flipping through the cardboard covers, she got to PR. Then PRO.

  There it was. Professor Longhair: the album Peter had played for her almost fifteen years earlier.

  The young woman smiled at her as Bettina handed over a few dollar bills and some change. When the drawer popped open, the bell on the till rang crisply, but Bettina barely noticed; she was in a different world now. Walking back to her apartment, she felt suspended in time, as though she could barely take a breath.

  It was hard to get the needle in the right place, but she found the song that Peter had played and listened to it from beginning to end. The energy of it, the raucous, playful noise, its complicated rhythm, was just as startling as it had been years earlier. She had thought that hearing it again might crush her, that it would grind the pain of her loss further into her heart, but instead a slow and steady fury built inside her.

  She played the song three times. Then she picked up the phone and bought her airline ticket.

  42

  Telegrams, along with files sent by messenger from surrounding precincts, stapled-together handwritten reports, and dozens of black-and-white photographs and contract sheets lay in a balsa tray on the secretary’s desk outside the offices of the director of domestic surveillance. Each day, Comrade Janklovitz looked through the stack of paperwork to flag anything important for Werner Nietz to peruse. In his early days on Normannenstraße, Werner would painstakingly look through all the material himself, a cool frisson snaking up his legs as he read, the act of thumbing through these items somehow intimate and unsettling.

  But there came a time when the papers flooding in became overwhelming, and he needed a trusted subordinate to sift through it and separate the mundane from the critical, the impactful from the merely perfunctory. The day he caught sight of a faint B on a telex from West Berlin (the paper quality easily distinguishing it from East German missives) was not a special day, and he was not paying particular attention to his duties. In fact, he had just returned from the doctor’s office (they needed to see if the cancer had reached his lymph nodes) and was absentmindedly standing at Frau Kellermann’s desk, waiting for her to return with a cup of coffee for him, killing time and absorbing the news he’d just received.

  That innocuous B: he caught sight of it, and his eyes moved on—and then flicked back to the word. Bettina.

  He picked up the sheet of paper and, having left his reading glasses on his desk, held it a few centimeters from his eyes. On it was typed: Bettina Heilstrom.

  Damn, he thought, his heart revving up. God dammit, this was what he’d been afraid of for the past decade.

  IN WEST BERLIN. MUST SEE YOU URGENTLY. CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY. STAYING AT INSEL HOTEL. WE MUST SPEAK. BETTINA HEILSTROM.

  The hubris! The unbelievable hubris of this woman. He stormed into his office, slammed the door behind him, and grabbed his glasses. No additional information. Sent earlier this morning. An order summoning him. His breath caught in his throat like a marble.

  His office was far more spacious than his previous one in Bergen and was carpeted in a yellowish shag with a blond wood closet system covering an entire wall. Inside were shelves crammed with files and boxes of recording equipment (he was often sent prototypes of devices to try out). The window looked out toward the street, which disappeared into the near distance of gray concrete sidewalks and denuded trees, apartment houses filled with people striving to live well and serve their country. He took a slow breath in and let it out while counting, then did it again. His logical mind was telling him not to revert to his old ways, but the tone of this self-talk was shrill. The nylon lace curtain hung in the corner of his vision, and he had the urge to grasp it and yank as hard as he could, pulling the rod from the wall and bringing the whole contraption to the ground. Instead he breathed in and out as slowly as he could.

  It had taken years to exorcise this woman from his mind. The child, Annaliese, had cried so insistently for months that Werner had been swamped almost instantly with regret about what he’d put into motion: yes, he had wanted to cause Bettina pain (the way she had caused him such pain!), but more than that he’d wanted to be a good father to the child—that perfect, innocent creature who looked at him with eyes shining with devotion and trust. The joy of taking care of her had, over time, eclipsed his bitterness. And now, just like that, he was transported back to a place he thought he’d long left behind.

  Frau Kellermann came in with his coffee. “No interruptions,” he barked at her, and she scurried away. The coffee was black and oily, so hot it steamed up his eyeglasses, and as he drank, trying to regain a modicum of control, tears burned his eyes.

  He saw her standing on the dock, pointing her camera toward those Kellermann boys. She was high-stepping through the overgrown meadow, her dark hair loose, brushing her face. Her arm, lying against the sheets, was smooth and white, and as she slept, her mouth was slightly parted, teeth just visible. As a girl she stomped up the steps of the town hall, and as a woman she brought him dinner on her grandmother’s crockery. Her face, so serious in repose. The snaggleteeth that gave her face its alluring asymmetry, that made her human. They were supposed to grow old together. At this point she was still a relatively young woman, not quite forty by his calculations. Perhaps she was ill, too, and wanted to beg his forgiveness before leaving this earth. That was not going to happen.

  She had gone to America, to that sister of hers. He could not help but wonder whether she had changed, her face rounder (or perhaps leaner?) and her manner less guarded, her habits those of an Ami after all these years in their midst. Did she wear reading glasses, have silver strands in her hair? Had she been broken by the consequences of her behavior, or was she even more brazen than ever?

  The minutes ticked by as he stood at the window, staring blindly into the distance. Then he pulled himself together, buzzing in Frau Kellermann. He dictated a note putting on alert the border crossings at Bornholmer Straße, Chausseestraße, Brandenburger Tor, Friedrichstraße, Heinrich-Heine-Straße, Oberbaumbrücke, Sonnenallee, and Invalidenstraße. In the bottom drawer of his desk at the back, along with some artifacts from his old office in Saargen, were a few photos from the h
ouse on Apolonienmarkt. It had been years since he’d been pulled back into the pain of remembering, and now he reached in there and hauled the pictures out. Later he would find a better likeness of her, but he needed to alert the borders instantly in case she was already trying to cross into East Berlin. The prints were faded, but there was one in which you could see her face, its angles and the shape of her eyes. Her hair was loose, and she wore an old housedress. He clamped his teeth together and handed the picture to Frau Kellermann.

  “This will do for now,” he said. “Call up her file for me, would you, and have it sent over to the records department. And distribute this immediately. Highest priority.”

  Hadn’t Bettina built a new life for herself after all this time?

  What was her life like?

  What did she want from him? Why now?

  Berlin smelled steely and urban. The rainwater rushing along filthy curbs, streaming into cracks in the boulevards, gave pulsing life to the acres of paving stone and concrete. It was so different from Chicago, a city of sleek skyscrapers lining the riverside: the buildings here were gnarled giants, colossal and imposing. On the long walk from her hotel, the sky broke open to release slivers of rain, and by the time she arrived at the Ratskeller, Bettina was wet all the way through to her undergarments.

  Would she have recognized Werner on the streets of Berlin had she bumped into him on the Kurfürstendamm or Unter den Linden? He sat at the far end of the café, head bent over a newspaper. Though she did pick him out of the crowd, it was the wide brow, the shape of his head; everything else about him seemed foreign to her. He wore a blue shirt and a navy jacket. His torso was considerably slimmer than she remembered, and the wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose were long and rectangular, the kind a beatnik might wear. Had she clipped his shoulder in walking, she doubted she’d have realized it was her former husband.

  Yesterday she had received a telex from him at her hotel with the name of this café and a meeting date and time. In that moment it had not seemed real, and the prospect of being face to face with this man once again had made her knees go weak. She’d needed to sit down. She would see him—he had agreed to meet . . . this fact was incredible. It was a good sign, surely, but if she couldn’t pull this meeting off, when would she get another chance? It was so important that she find a way to connect with him, to see if he would be willing to put their daughter’s interests above his own. Inside her there was a heaviness that felt as though it would send her spinning if it tipped off kilter.

  The glass entryway pinged with the sound of rain pelting the roof and windows. The clerk at her hotel had told her that the café was well known as a spot where East German functionaries came on day passes to take meetings with West Germans. Now that there was a wall dividing the city, it was harder to come and go from East to West and vice versa, but passage was still possible. The café was bustling, and though it was barely nine o’clock in the morning, the room was drenched in a haze of bluish cigarette smoke. To calm herself, she let drop Der Tagesspiegel with which she’d covered the Rollei on the way over, unclipped the camera’s stained leather case, and flipped up the viewfinder.

  Looking down, she located Werner again and turned the crank on the camera. Before she’d even taken the picture, it was clear to her what she would focus on in the darkroom: heightening the sharp corner on the left frame of his glasses, revealing the eyes scrimmed by lenses. He was situated much farther away than she preferred her subjects to be, but there was a powerful sense of intimacy even though he didn’t realize he was being photographed. She would emphasize the tunnel of hazy detritus—people, tables, waiters, food, ceramic cups, crumpled napkins—that led to this man, sitting alone reading his paper. The act of waiting revealing in an unexpected way the permanence of shared humanity. The world could change, it could shift on its axis, and still people would wait, uncertain and on edge or fizzy with anticipation and hope.

  Werner fumbled with his coffee cup, tipping it over and spilling coffee on the tablecloth and his pants leg, and gestured to a waiter impatiently. The crank turned as Bettina took picture after picture. Her fear was shifting as she watched him, slowly sharpening itself against the rock of her deep-seated anger and turning into something different, something much more useful: resolve.

  He had taken too much from her, this man, and she was going to get it back.

  As she approached him, Werner looked up and stood abruptly, knocking his hip against the small round table. His face flushed deeply. She forced herself to keep moving toward him; she could not allow herself to falter under his greedy gaze, his palpable alarm. Once he was erect, it was obvious that his new slimness was not in fact a sign of healthy activity and energy: His back was curved quite severely, and deep creases emphasized his jowls. The color of his skin was off, too, yellow at the center of his face and pale at the edges. His eyes were red rimmed behind the modern spectacles.

  “Bettina,” he said, and as she slid her chair away from the table to sit, his eyes caught on the camera in her hands. He did not offer her a cheek or a hand. His eyes were large as he slumped back into the chair, a man who had counted on one thing only to discover something else entirely was happening.

  “Werner,” she said, the heaviness inside her shifting.

  “Don’t tell me you still take pictures,” he said, pointing to the camera.

  Her clothes clung to her like the skin of a lizard. Water dripped from her skirt onto the cool skin of her shins. She turned the camera toward him again and cranked the lever, all the while keeping her eyes on his face.

  “Did you just take a photo of me?” he asked. “Is that what you just did?”

  “No, with this? No,” she answered, and inside her there bloomed a fleeting sense of satisfaction at besting him. He had written this camera off from the very beginning—too bad for him that he didn’t know its power. She sat down and unraveled a large linen napkin, drawing it quickly over her face, wet from the rain. Having snapped his picture, she was reminded that in a way she owned part of him and always would, because he had loved her, and she had not been able to love him back. It was true that she was at his mercy, but he was at her mercy too.

  The creamy half moons of his fingernails glinted as he played with a cigarette and then, taking his time, lit it with a silver lighter. He was working hard to appear at ease. “Why—why in heaven’s name are you still wearing my mother’s ring, Bettina?” he asked. “How could you?”

  “Oh, I—I should have taken it off; I wasn’t thinking,” she stammered. “It—well, it protects me.”

  Smoke from his cigarette curled up toward his nostrils. “You need protection from what?”

  It was hard to tell if he was goading her or genuinely didn’t understand. She didn’t want to start in on the details of her life, her work at the newspaper, whether she had found love or not. The purpose of this meeting was not to explain herself to him. But she needed to do whatever possible to cajole him into being his best self. “I’m, uh. I’m single. A single woman who works in a newsroom,” she said flatly. “I’m one of only two women there.”

  “And you haven’t found a new man yet? With all those men around you all day?”

  “I haven’t been looking for a man.”

  He was curious about her; he wanted to know the details of her life, and this made it obvious that she was the one in control here. But uncertainty gripped her; she didn’t know how to play this out. All she really needed to secure through this meeting was an agreement that she could see her daughter again. One step at a time. Just one step and then another. This had seemed possible when she was in the States, buying her ticket home and imagining her future, but now in this smoke-clogged café, it seemed absurd: Why would he give her anything? It was obvious that she was making him angry and defensive.

  The waiter hovered nearby, and she ordered a black coffee. In front of Werner sat a plate of sliced sausage and black bread with pickles. The shine of his forehead was split by furrows that ran from
one temple to the other. “What is it you want exactly? You flew all the way here to see me—you said it was important, and I’m here. I’m assuming this is about my daughter.”

  My daughter. But Anna was hers too. “Come now, Werner, please. I’m here with good intentions.”

  “I’m supposed to trust you? Ha.”

  Her coffee was hot and strong, and it scalded the top of her mouth. She ran her tongue over the instant swelling. “Werner, are you ill? I’ve heard rumors. If you’re ill, it changes everything, doesn’t it?”

  “You, with a whole new exciting life—working, taking pictures. Worried about me; fancy that.” He pressed his lips together and swiped at them aggressively with his napkin. “You dare come here and confront me, after all this time . . . I thought I made myself clear. Any court of law would agree that I’m the wronged party. Your rights have been dissolved. There’s no point in begging.”

  “I’m not begging. I’m here because no matter what you think of me, I’m still a mother. I want to know how my child is. I want to know how you are. It matters to me because it affects Annaliese. Werner, you don’t look well; you—”

  “I’m quite well; thank you. Very well, in fact. Did you know that I have four children?” He smiled at her for the first time, a tight smile that showed no teeth.

  “Four . . . children! Goodness. I . . . I’m happy for you.” When she brought her coffee cup to her lips, she was dismayed to find her hands trembling. The skin under one of her eyes began to twitch. For a long moment, she couldn’t come up with more to say about this extraordinary news. A family—he’d had more children? She had to admit to herself that she’d never considered this might happen.