This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  That meant her daughter had siblings . . . and a new mother.

  Once, soon after her own mother died, Bettina had fallen sick with the flu, and Papa had been worried that she, too, might succumb. Long nights sweating in bed, her skin slick and clammy, hallucinations making her believe that objects were no longer solid, that the ground was as mobile as shifting waters. She felt this same sensation now, sitting here: The people and the tables, the crockery and lights and the clock on the wall, were not part of her reality. They receded from her, hidden behind some kind of scrim; the world was one of transition, illusion, mutability, one in which nothing could be counted on. Her stomach turned over.

  “You know we’re not living on Apolonienmarkt anymore?” Werner said. He ground out his cigarette and began talking rapidly, spitting out the words. He’d been promoted to supervisor. He’d moved to a large apartment in Berlin, turning in his life on the island for a life in the city, working toward the betterment of his country. He was a director now, as she no doubt knew. A director. Politics wasn’t a sacrifice when you were working to improve the world for your children!

  Could she say the same about what was happening in America? he asked with gusto. This foolish man, Kennedy, and his “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Werner snorted. What about the social unrest, the riots? The rampant use of drugs so people could drown out their fear of nuclear disaster? No, in the East they were working steadily to build themselves a solid social and political system, fail safe; they weren’t trying to dismantle society piece by piece. In the East they didn’t have race riots, people turning on each other because they could never be satisfied, always needing something more.

  Sips of breath. In, out: Keep going. Don’t let him take over.

  “And your wife?” she interrupted quietly, placing a hand on her stomach. It was important that she get the words out; she couldn’t let him take the reins. “Your family is with you, here in Berlin”—deep breath; do it! Do it now; say it!—“and Annaliese is here too?”

  “Yes, yes, my wife, my family, of course they’re with me,” he said. His pale eyes stared at her, and this time when he smiled, it was broad, revealing his teeth. It seemed, perhaps, that in the face of her distress, he was having some fun. “Remember Irmgard Bandelow? We’ve been together for eleven years.”

  He whipped out a photograph from the pocket of his jacket: Six people, adults and children, in front of a brick building with a wide staircase. There was a sign hanging above the door: Lenin-Schule.

  He pointed at the children. “Annaliese, Petra, Kurt, and Henning,” he said.

  Her heart lurched again. There she was, the child Bettina had thought about every day, whom she had last seen as a baby, now a young girl with long thin legs. Willowy; angular features and almond eyes; heavy, arched eyebrows. Did Anna’s earnest expression mean she wasn’t happy? Her hair looked strange—too large and strangely coarse—and she was wearing a sack-like brown garment and oversize work boots. Everyone else was dressed in normal clothes, and one child was in a wheelchair.

  “Is that—right there?” Bettina said, pointing. “Is that her? That’s Annaliese?”

  “She was in the school play. Celia, in The Threepenny Opera.”

  The face was so different, and yet the eyes, the expression. This was her child, grown, growing, almost a young woman already. The fussy baby, the toddler, long gone. It was a punch in the gut to imagine all the time Werner and Anna had spent together, the endless hours and days, the laughter and meals and hubbub of a regular life. While Bettina understood that it was far better that Anna had a family who loved her, the pain of knowing this—and that she was not a part of it—was as sharp and sudden as a blade slicing through her muscles.

  “And you, Werner,” she said. “Can you tell me how you are? Are you ill? What’s happening?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. It’s nothing. It’s just—it’s from the polio. No reason to think I’ll be dropping dead anytime soon, much as you might welcome that.” His lips pressed together so hard they began turning white. It would be impossible to get him to be honest, she realized. He needed to protect his life from her. She could offer him nothing but disruption.

  But she couldn’t allow this meeting to pass without asking if Werner knew anything about Peter. Didn’t she have some sort of responsibility toward him too? The memory of her love for him was as vibrant and insistent as it had been a decade earlier. Her fingers dug into the fabric of her skirt. “I must ask . . . I wondered, what we talked about? Your promise to me, when I agreed to leave, you said you wouldn’t get Peter in—”

  Werner jumped up. “How dare you ask about that man?” Patrons from the tables on either side looked over at them, curious about the commotion, staring. He threw down his napkin.

  “But I—”

  “Why would I not keep my promises?” Werner barked. He grabbed a cane and pushed his chair back. “Why would you think I’m not a man of my word? When I’ve only ever been true to my word, when my word is everything.”

  She grabbed his forearm. “You can’t go. Werner, please, I beg you.”

  He snatched his arm away. “Don’t touch me.”

  “You took everything from me, everything. I have nothing.”

  “That’s not my fault, is it?”

  “But it is . . . you’re the one who decided it had to be that way. You!”

  They stared at one another as the other patrons slowly turned away, red faced, embarrassed by the raw look on the faces of these strangers, the terrible, trembling moment they were witnessing. And into that lacuna between Werner and Bettina, there flowed a silent stream of invective and pleading, of unspoken pain so sharp and hope so eager it could be mistaken for the shredded remnants of a kind of tenderness.

  Losing his balance, Werner lunged to one side awkwardly. He raised both palms in a gesture of desperation: back off. As he walked away from her—limping, too thin, afraid of ghosts—she had the sense that nothing was quite as straightforward as it had seemed, that it was possible she had never known or understood him at all, and that she never would.

  Outside, the streets gleamed in the continuous rain. Werner was already gone, whisked away in a car across the border into the East. As Bettina walked, she was deaf to the sputtering of the cars and buses and blind to the careless gaze of passersby swaddled in rain jackets and hats.

  The look they’d shared after that last exchange had revealed something new and unsettling that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. He seemed to have done something he felt guilty about. The possibility that Werner had, in fact, broken his promise to her caused rage to swell inside her, and as she walked on, she thought she might be capable of doing him physical harm. But this, too, was laughable: he had vanished, and she couldn’t get to him. Her temples throbbed. Clutching her camera to her front, she passed through various neighborhoods: residential areas with towering apartment blocks, scarred with bullet holes and graffiti, plane-tree–lined avenues. Great pockets of land remained empty, the bricks tidied up, most of the destroyed buildings swept away.

  It was still broken, this city, and now it was split in two by a wall.

  This wall, four years old already, dissected the street in front of her. In a daze Bettina climbed a ladder to a wooden platform to look out over the truncated boulevard that ran, on the other side of the wall, in a straight line to the horizon. The plainness of this concrete barrier slicing the city in two was stunning: an expanse of yellowish gray, hideous, patched together. On this side there was graffiti—slogans and cartoon images—and on the other side dusty earth, tamped down by the sudden rains, studded with wire and watchtowers. There were large prefabricated concrete slabs upon which rows of concrete building blocks were stacked, hardened mortar appearing to drip sloppily between the seams. The wall varied considerably in height and design, and it almost seemed as though drunken workmen had hastily patched it together. At the very top, Y-shaped pieces of metal were attached at intervals, strung with barbed wire. She’d read somewhere that
four million East Germans had fled to the West before the wall was built. Shoddy or not, it was achieving its purpose: controlling the flow of people in both directions.

  To her left was the old Brandenburg Gate. The goddess of victory on her chariot was brutally charred and broken, like a violated woman saddled with useless tools. What had been a busy thoroughfare in the heart of Germany’s capital city had become a yawning, deserted square to the east. How had it come to this, her country being divided, with her daughter on one side and her on the other?

  Her head was packed with competing images, jostling against one another, Kodachrome slides in a jumble. The boy, the young one in the wheelchair she saw in the photo. Were the children cherished in that household? Anna wearing that awful wig, acting in a play (that was something she hadn’t imagined as she’d clicked the beads on her camera strap). Anna in a Bertolt Brecht play, trapped on the other side of this monstrous wall. A squat white building at the border, years ago, where she’d been forced to sign away her rights. (What was it like now; would she be able to make it across the border if she tried?) Irmgard . . . their old neighbor. Her square face, the blonde hair. What kind of mother was she? Bettina remembered the ravaged look on her neighbor’s face as she held the child when Bettina was taken away. The woman had been a kind of friend, looking out for Bettina from time to time. Did she love her Anna, her stepdaughter? Was she gentle, patient?

  And Werner—the color of his skin. His misshapen body and the terrible limp. It was evident that he was sick. Was he going to die? Part of her thought he deserved to die for his single-mindedness, his capacity for cruelty, and yet she also knew that Anna probably loved him dearly. That his death would cause her pain, and this was not something Bettina could wish for.

  By the time she made it to the Tiergarten, the rain had stopped. When she’d lived here for those months before leaving for America, most of the park’s trees had been razed to make room for vegetable gardens, and the ground had been pitted with craters and covered in debris. Now supple trees stretched limbs toward the watery sun. Stopping at a bench, Bettina sat down. A shiver ran the length of her damp body. All those years she’d worked so hard to forget were now telescoped into a single black hole; in the face of all this, her life in Chicago felt very far away, implausible and insignificant. So much had changed and yet so little too.

  And then another detail from the picture Werner had shown her came to her mind—Lenin-Schule—and she had an idea.

  43

  A week after Werner had had Bettina exiled, the local Volkspolizei turned up at the house on Apolonienmarkt. Along with four others, an officer with a severely shorn head revealing a bluish scalp crowded into the front hallway. He carried a briefcase and a folder and had tucked his cap under his armpit upon entering. “We will be recording the dimensions of the rooms, reconciling it with our documents. I’d like to see the Grundbuch,” the man said, asking for the house records before glancing down at the papers in his hands. A confused expression crossed his face. “Comrade Nietz. I apologize. I see you’re with us—in the Operative Technical Sector. I failed to check before heading over. Apologies, uh, I’m not entirely sure of protocol.”

  It was evening, and Werner had been preparing to try to put the baby to bed. He’d changed out of his suit and was wearing a cotton tunic on which Anna had thrown up after rejecting the carrots he’d cooked. “Head of accounts for the OTS since last year,” he said wearily. “Supervisor of the greater Pommern region.”

  “In the regional offices?”

  “Yes. With a possible move to the BV.”

  “I see, hmmm. MfS district administration?” The man seemed uncertain, as though Werner was now claiming too much credit for his position. He made a notation on the paper. “I’m afraid I still need to check that deed for the house, Comrade Nietz, per orders. As you likely know, we’re overhauling our inventory of all privately owned property.”

  Werner dug the paper out of an overstuffed file tucked away in the breakfront. Those first awful days when Bettina was gone, his lifelong propensity for bad timing and bad luck had finally become clear to him. For weeks before he kicked her out, he’d been hearing talk in the office that property owners close to the water and the borders were to be evicted. He’d made inquiries about the house and his position regarding ownership. At that point he’d simply been seeking authority over Bettina, some sense that he was in control. But when he saw her with that man Peter Brenner, when he realized what had been going on behind his back, it was as though he’d been smacked in the face with a plank of wood. Furious at himself for his idiotic blindness, he’d reacted swiftly and with great purpose.

  But his unwavering certainty had lasted all of two days. The baby cried incessantly for her mother, and for the first time the idea of raising this child alone terrified him. If only he hadn’t been so very rash. Now they’d sent over this local baboon who didn’t even seem to understand who he was, and for all Werner knew, he’d be kicked out, or some other family would be assigned to move in with them.

  The policeman satisfied himself that the document was in order. “Your wife? Bettina Heilstrom Nietz . . . may I ask where she is? She is listed here, on these papers.”

  Werner cleared his throat. “She’s not here presently. And I don’t know that her whereabouts are your business.”

  “Comrade, let us sort through the information as best we can, yes?” The man’s eyes rested on his, causing Werner to shift his gaze away. “When are you expecting her back?”

  “I’m not entirely certain.”

  Steady creaking came from the men above them as they moved back and forth over the old floorboards. “Do you wish to file a missing person report?”

  Werner clasped his hands in front of him. “Well, I suppose . . . ,” he started, but he was interrupted by the others coming back down the stairs.

  They poked their heads into the front room, their faces unreadable. “Finished,” one of them said.

  The head officer closed his folder. “Comrade, you must know—you have five days, and then you will need to file a report, or your wife will be considered a Flüchtling.”

  “She is,” Werner said. Saying this made it even more permanent. It opened the door for the life that would come next. His colleagues at the MfS knew and supported him, of course (they were the ones who’d picked her up in the van), but now it was a matter of telling the local authorities. Of beginning his life without her and making it official. Annaliese began protesting her imprisonment in the kitchen, stuck in the high chair with the overcooked carrots, momentarily distracting him. “She’s emigrated, gone to the West.”

  The man scratched at the bristle on his skull with a pen. This news did not seem especially shocking to him. “You’ll need to file that paperwork, then, Comrade,” he said. “It’s a travesty, isn’t it?”

  Annaliese’s shrieks got louder, and Werner took a step backward.

  “Best attend to that,” the officer said, making to exit with the others. “You have your hands full.”

  A month or so later, he arranged for Irmgard to watch the baby again, and as he handed Anna over for the day, she smiled at him, revealing her slightly graying teeth and the beginnings of what would become deep creases at her eyes and mouth. He thought back to that day she’d come to his office with her white gloves and coiffed hair, and he began to recognize the possibility of an altogether different future.

  “Frau Bandelow,” he said. “Why don’t you join me tonight for a drink?”

  Out of propriety, Irmgard declined the invitation. When they saw each other again later that week, she pursed her lips before conceding that yes, it would be a pleasure to share a drink with him. As she walked back into her house to fetch a cardigan, Werner watched her movements. She seemed to be a woman who had seen a thing or two, someone who was independent yet also traditional in a way that Bettina had never been. Werner wiped his hands along the thighs of his dark trousers. Inside his chest there was an unfamiliar prickle of excitement
. He had the brief and pleasant thought that he could reinvent himself if he so chose, that maybe his errors in judgment would be washed away by a tide of sudden good luck.

  When Irmgard joined him in the living room ten minutes later, she brought along a bottle of Goldbrand. “I’m so sorry I don’t have an unopened one,” she said, “but I thought it would be better to bring a little something rather than turn up empty handed.”

  Her lips were freshly reddened. Thinner than Bettina and shorter, she had narrow shoulders and a face that had clearly been quite pretty once. A large tortoiseshell pin held her hair off her face. Werner thought of Bettina’s gleaming curtain of dark hair, how she had often worn it down even though he found it untidy. This woman seemed to be everything that Bettina was not.

  Irmgard liked to tell bawdy jokes, and her humor made Werner laugh in spite of himself. She was especially fond of poking fun at the regime, and the fact that he found humor in her risqué remarks encouraged Werner’s altered sense of who he was and who he could become. After the third glass of Weinbrand, they were sitting side by side on the Biedermeier couch. The sleeve of her cotton dress was touching his jacket. He slipped the jacket off and laid it on the armrest.

  Leaning toward her, he planted a kiss on her cheek. She turned toward him immediately and offered her mouth. The woman was hungry for attention; her mouth was soft and wet and inviting. Werner placed a hand on the side of her breast, flattened out under the pressure from his own chest. He tried to slip one hand under her skirt, feeling with his fingers the thick nylon hose covering her legs, and she pulled away from him and slapped his face, laughing good-naturedly.

  They kept this game up until late wintertime, when Werner decided what to do. He had held the authorities off for this long, but he knew that eventually they would assign him some rowdy family to share the small house. Did he want a life in which it was just him and his darling little Anna, living among strangers who would never be family? His love for Bettina had been so all-encompassing that it had almost obliterated him. He was wary of this—of the intensity of love, the way it made men vulnerable—and he was tempted to turn away from it for good. But this woman, Irmgard, she was so alive under his fingers, her heart pulsing just beneath the skin, her body pressed against his. She wanted to live and laugh, and it seemed she also wanted to be with him.