by Kelly Link
Anyway, one potato-blossom day in early summer, six years ago, I was roaming about with Ida—lead soprano in the Lutheran Church Choir, cleverest in our class, prone to moody silences—when we noticed Lise, peering through a window of one of the farmhouses past Neumarkt. Ida gave me her church choir soprano look (“It’s Lise Teppen, be careful”), but Lise said, without glancing at us, “Come see this.” We obliged. Inside: twenty or so farmers and their wives, ham and jugs of beer, a coin wrapped in paper pressed into the hand of a muslined bride, her eyes cast down beneath her veil.
“Everybody knows,” Lise said, “that she’s got a baby under that white dress. Something tells me she didn’t plan this wedding.”
Lise grimaced, then grinned, and then she whistled one of those tunes that monkeys play on coin-operated organs. Dah dah dah DAH dah dah. A mocking tune. Half the wedding guests looked up fast, and Lise ducked away, doubled over laughing. Ida grabbed my wrist. I stared at Lise. So this was how she operated. Poking little holes in the fabric of our rose-garden village.
Was that the same day when Lise brought us into the forest, when it all started? I seem to remember her beckoning us—
But look at me, lost in my reminiscences. You are here for the party at the Hotel Adlon. So, back to that swellest of places. While I sat daydreaming, the brass band picked up and the party surged towards the dance floor. Ladies slipped their slinky arms into their jovial men’s, ain’t we got fun? I watched them, taking notes for this very column: how do they all know when to head towards the floor? How do they know the right number of sequins for their drop-waist dresses? Or the right number of teeth to show when they laugh?
Well, after a few minutes of this, I fled to the gilded washroom. I leaned on the counter and listened to the soft rush of water through the pipes, which I could pretend was the stream from back home if I closed my eyes. At that point, I was sure that Lise hadn’t even come to the Adlon. The wild girl who whistled that monkey song to disrupt a wedding party did not become the sort of woman who suffered this kind of—what’s the phrase I’m searching for?—meretricious nonsense. I resolved to catch my breath, then take one more page of notes and leave.
But just then, the washroom door swung open, and who should appear in the mirror but Lise, six years older, wearing a fringed silver dress (you’re probably wondering whether it was Chanel, my readers, but truth be told I don’t care). Her right hand flew to the side of her bobbed hair.
Look at those fakers out there, Lise. Can you believe we’re supposed to hobnob with characters like that? Can you do the Charleston, because I certainly can’t. No, me neither, Mareike, let’s get out of here and run into the Tiergarten, and from there it’s not far to Grünewald, and then—
“Mareike.” Lise said my name in the tone of voice you might use when you’re saying, “easy, easy” to a hackles-up dog. “You—what are you—”
She stared at me and I knew exactly what she was doing: taking stock of me, my clothing, my long teeth. Assembling conclusions. Oh, I’ve seen that look before. It’s more fashionable than checkered stockings these days. What’s the matter with that girl? I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Look, I may have seen that look plenty of times, but I never expected to see it on Lise. It shocked me more than hearing her say my name as though I were a rabid dog about to attack.
Her mouth twisted up, she muttered a perfunctory excuse me, and she retreated towards the stall, rummaging in her clutch. I didn’t notice what brand of clutch it was. Instead, I slunk out of the washroom, my face burning. I couldn’t help it: I thought of the afternoons when Lise wore not silver fringe, but fur. Could that woman really be the same girl who once galloped through the forest on all fours, dodging red cedar pines and snuffling down deer morels? Had the girl who left our village six years ago, whose return was supposed to slice into my life and change everything, really become a rich man’s accessory, sneering, cold? I steadied myself against the wall as I contemplated this, this truly unbelievable transmogrification.
Certain of you—indeed, probably all of you, if you’re reading the society section of the Tageblatt—will know this already. But I was surprised to learn, two minutes after my encounter with Lise in the washroom, that it is, in fact, not only acceptable but even fashionable this season to bring bears to parties.
I almost didn’t stay long enough to discover this. After the washroom encounter, I was eyeing the staircase, strongly inclined to head home and pretend I’d never seen Lise. But just then, a new smell wafted out of that over-perfumed, over-smoked ballroom: the smell of berry scat and clean animal breath. I pivoted towards it.
A man, his hair waxed into a fashionable mess, was presenting a simpering woman with a leash, which trailed from a collar and muzzle restraining a black bear cub. The cub stumbled up on two legs and pawed the air, snuffling, his ears twitching. I wager Jacobs would tell me it’s not good practice to give voices to bears in fashion columns, but I’ll tell you anyway that I stared right into that bear’s desperate kohl-colored eyes, and I imagined he was thinking, Where is my mother, where is my forest?
“Dance,” shouted someone, and “Let’s hope the manager doesn’t know you brought a bear in here, Grimsey.” Jack Grimsey, the American stockbroker, who was holding the leash, snapped his fingers, and the bear made a pitiful little hop on the parquet floor.
I slipped into the ballroom, lurking between columns and shining windows. I said to a gawker next to me, “European mythology is full of stories about people who turn into bears and back again, you know,” but she kept staring at the bear as though I hadn’t spoken at all.
I was right, though. I’ve heard stories of arrogant Russian boyars transformed into bears, forced to perform three tasks. Scottish princesses married to bears, bears carrying the baggage of saints over mountains, Finnish peasants becoming bears on crescent-moon nights.
That summer, was the soldier who gave us the pendant Russian, maybe Finnish? I don’t know. I know he wasn’t German. You can tell plenty by someone’s clothes, and his background was crystal-clear to me from the prisoners’ uniform that he wore when we found him wheezing blood into a bed of ferns behind the military hospital. I stroked the hair off his waxy forehead—I’m touching a dying person, I thought, and I had never imagined at seventeen touching someone about to tip over into death. Lise twirled on her heel, scanning the forest as though she wanted to call for help, but Ida laid a hand on Lise’s forearm. Lise jerked back, as though shocked that Ida had dared touch her, but Ida surprised us all sometimes. She was also the cleverest of us, and although she didn’t say that there was no help for this man, when she squeezed Lise’s arm and shook her head, we all knew.
The soldier rummaged under his saggy uniform and produced a dented bronze pendant, bearing a crude outline of a bear. He dropped it at Lise’s feet, then fell back, his breath shallow and quick and then nothing. The smell of latrines rose through the birch trees.
We stared down at him. Then Lise darted forward and pressed his eyes shut. Ida mumbled a prayer. Lise hesitated, then snatched up the pendant. We walked in circles through the forest, trampling plants, the lake glittering through the trees, debating what to do about the man, whether we could tell our mothers. I reminded them that he had been an escaped prisoner, and wouldn’t people ask questions, if we told? Let them ask, Lise said, but she sounded unconvinced, and in the end, we headed back to the clearing and covered the body with loose dirt and a handful of white daisies.
We were terrified by our first brush with death, strung thin and frightened, and hungry, of course, as everyone was in those days. If it had just been me and Ida, we would have fled home, curled in blankets under her dormer window and replayed the details of the dying soldier, nursing them and nursing them.
But it wasn’t just me and Ida. Lise was there too. And she grinned, and slipped the pendant chain over her neck.
When Lise swept into the ballroom, I e
dged further back between the columns. A waiter shoved a glass of wine into my hand (Bordeaux—only the best at this party, of course) and I gulped half of it, then kept on my retreat. I wanted to escape without another encounter with the woman Lise had become. My heart was pat-pat-patting in my throat as I imagined what she might say if I had to talk to her again. Something to stomp right on my deepest wish, my fondest dream.
While I was edging backwards, I bumped into a lurid man eating parfait with a spoon. He glared at me, the frumpy girl with the strange teeth. Then he returned his hungry gaze to the skinny girl next to him. An heiress, I believe, but I can’t tell you to what. Her checkered stockings were rolled down just perfectly over her knees. She was proclaiming that she simply couldn’t stand Thomas Mann’s new book, it was too old-fashioned, she read ten pages then itched to put on her dancing shoes. As she performed this monologue she slowly but deliberately retreated from the man, who was staring at her as though he would rather be jabbing his spoon into her than into the parfait, if you catch my drift. I thought about how sometimes Jacobs presses his thumb against the collarbones of the Annas and Gertruds in the office to check them for sunburn, while they titter uncomfortably. He’ll press his big thumb against my cheek and joke that he’d check my chest too if there was any chance that the sun had touched me there recently. And although the hair on my back always rises up like hackles, what am I supposed to do? I can’t bite my boss.
If only Lise were here, I’d thought so many times. She’d show Jacobs. She’d show this rude man, or that cruel woman, or both. But as I stared at the girl and the lurid man, I remembered that I couldn’t default to that dream anymore.
“Mareike.” Lise was headed towards me, calling over the band’s din. I backed up a few steps, but she’d seen me, and she knew I’d seen her. She looked me up and down, wrinkling her nose. Then she seized my elbow and steered me along the back wall and onto a balcony. Below us glinted a hundred thousand neon lights—Schokolade! Wurst!—that illuminated even the void of the Tiergarten beyond the Brandenburger Tor. We turned night into day. What an achievement.
“I want to ask you something.” Lise, who smelled of the Bordeaux, touched her mouth as though her rose-colored lipstick might have bled. Once I saw Lise with fish-grease smeared all around her snout, halfway up to her wild eyes. “Do you still, that is. . . .”
Her palms pressed against her rhinestoned chest. “Are you still—is it still part of . . . Are you still part. . . .”
Well, my readers, I had to bite back a grin. Liselotte Acker, wife, flapper, and socialite, still carried around a little something from that summer. My mind gyrated and somersaulted, spinning out the possibilities. Could it be that she would still consider—
“You are, aren’t you.” Lise checked the French doors leading back to the ballroom, then extracted the tip of a tortoise-shell-sheathed razor from her wrist-bag. “It’s disgusting,” she breathed. “I have to shave it off every hour. Karl thinks I’m obsessed with smooth armpits. But I can’t wear sleeves all summer, can I?”
I tugged my long sleeves further over my wrists, bracing myself hard against the railing. She stared out at the Unter den Linden below us, where a girl was leaping around in a circle of revelers, trailing long scarves. “It’s madness, isn’t it, the way something horrid you did a few times as a child stays with you forever, isn’t it?”
“A few times?”
Lise returned her gaze to me. She reached her hand towards her bob, then dropped it. You know, her hands haven’t changed. They’re still the same hands that I watched explode into fur and sinew and claws. “A few times, five, six, who knows? It was one summer, at any rate, and it was so long ago, and still. . . .”
That summer was creeping up on me as though it had only happened ten minutes ago, that summer of sneaking out every night to run into the forest, disappearing for lazy afternoons so my mother started to believe we were sneaking around with soldiers. But it wasn’t something ordinary like that. It was Ida snatching fish from the stream, clambering up trees, Lise leaping on a deer, opening it from tail to neck.
Listening to Lise’s take on that summer, I felt as though I’d missed a step descending out of my familiar flat. What had I misremembered? What shame, what horror had I failed to notice? Was there any? Or had Lise simply spent the last six years fitting herself into Karl Acker’s world, scraping away our adventures the way she scraped fur off her skin?
“Have you heard about Ida?” Lise said, and because of the disapproving and eager cant to her voice, I knew she was about to gossip. “You know what she does? She dances . . . she dances in one of those. . . . establishments in North Berlin. Called Papagai. What she does afterwards I don’t like to think, but she dances . . . she’s naked except for her fur. Little pious Ida. They say people like it. Can you believe it?” Lise’s mouth twisted.
I hadn’t heard. I’d lost touch with Ida too, just as Lise had stopped answering my letters after she’d moved to New York. I imagined Ida’s moody gaze transposed from a provincial forest into a smoky strip club. I tried to imagine her in only bright nipples and fur.
“I can’t,” I said. “I really can’t.” I struggled back through the conversation, to what Lise had said about that summer. My readers, I wanted her to acknowledge that it meant something, once. “You know, I do think we became bears more than a few times.”
Lise’s hand clenched tighter around her razor. “Does it matter? All I can say is that I’m glad we stopped when we did. As it is—the last time did us in. Don’t worry.” She pursed her lips. “I don’t blame you, exactly.”
Did us in? The last time pushed us over the edge into disgrace, made us the kind of women who had to spend our lives hiding in unfashionable blouses or concealing razors in our expensive clutches? That’s what Lise thought, wasn’t it?
“Did us in? Is that how you’d—”
“Wait, Mareike. You . . . oh. You miss it, don’t you?”
At that moment, my readers, I hated this woman who had stolen the body of my friend. I wanted to rip the sequins off her expensive dress. I wanted to roar in her face.
Instead, I said, “How exactly did you hear about Ida, anyway?”
Lise lowered her lids, as though she wasn’t sure where I was heading.
“Did Karl tell you? Does he leave you alone, often, to go to North Berlin strip clubs? Of course you’ve had plenty of practice with being left to your own devices.”
Lise stared at me.
“And how,” I said, “is your brother?”
Just then, a cluster of swell gents and flappers burst out onto the balcony, all sharp angles and soft cigarettes. Lise shouted their names as though they were her own personal saviors.
“And this, dearests, is Mareike Moser, a columnist for the Tageblatt. She was just telling me that she wishes that she were a bear.”
The gents and flappers laughed, then looked at me, as though expecting me to banter with a witty comment about how bears had such nifty leashes this season. I didn’t say a word.
“I mean, she really, honestly wishes that she were a bear. Isn’t that cute?” Lise smiled at me, a grim smile. The flappers and gents were going quiet, fiddling with loopy necklaces.
“Well, it’s a bit odd, isn’t it?” said one heart-faced flapper, bravely, but the others exchanged looks—the look—then tittered and talked about other things, and the whole time Lise smiled and smiled and smiled.
My readers, in the past six years, I’ve often awoken confused from a dream. But it’s not a dream, is it? It’s a memory. A crescent-moon night. But let me start earlier. That day, Frau Teppen told Lise she was sending her to Darmstadt, to live with her cousin and train to be a secretary.
Lise told us this in a small and steady voice. Ida and I exchanged looks, the kinds of looks that can only pass between girls who have known each other since childhood, and I said, “You can’t go, you won’t be happy th
ere, you can’t leave us,” and Lise said, “What do you suggest I do, Mareike?” And I said, “Talk to your mother, you can stay here with us, I’ll ask Mama, anything—” And Lise said “My mother wants me far away, and maybe it’s better,” and I opened my mouth to argue when Ida laid her hand on my arm, and that’s when I realized, Lise didn’t want solutions. She wanted to go.
And then, that night, we transformed, and Ida snuffled around the lakeshore and Lise swam through deeper water, her fur decorated with moonlight. I was craning my neck up at the stars—bears have different constellations than humans, they find elkspire and forest pine in the heavens—when something rustled on the shivery forest path.
From between the trees, a few boys emerged. I never saw their faces, but whoever they were, they stared at Ida. What might have happened, my readers, if Ida had been not a bear but a girl? But it didn’t matter, not that night. Lise and I roared out of the lake, burst onto the silty bank next to Ida and the three of us growled around our night-black tongues, and then Lise opened her jaws and a roar ripped through the reeds, and then we all roared, shaking the night. The boys scuttled away, and we forgot them, and we roared and roared, galloped through the reeds. My belly and back were caked with mud, my hackles up, my teeth long and blinding-white, and we were hungry, so very hungry, and we were loud as though we owned the night, as though we owned everything, but—
I knew, somewhere, that this was the last time, that Lise was leaving, she wanted to leave, and my claws flashed, my weapons, carving the air towards Lise, who snarled and recoiled, and then I was ripping through undergrowth, tearing through ferns in pursuit of her scat-smelling shadow, and I lunged and connected and the shadow tumbled, and I swiped, and I was laughing, I think I was laughing, I think she was too, because bears can laugh, you know, we were fighting, but we were also playing a game, a game called, don’t leave me.