Leonie
Leonie opens the dishwasher and puts in the two soup bowls. Little pasta ghosts still cling to the sides, the remains of a bag of instant Halloween soup: a consolation prize for Lisa, who was in fact delighted to fish ghosts out of the much-too-tomatoey-smelling liquid, and thereby gradually forgot her defeat. Leonie threw in a package of colorful plastic spiders she’d gotten at the discount store as a bonus. With the distribution of the creepy animals, the washing off of makeup in the bathtub, and dinnertime, the night passes quickly. Felicia’s swollen lips shine under a layer of ointment; she wheezes, open-mouthed, her breath warm and smelling of children’s toothpaste. Lisa is completely exposed—her nightgown has ridden up to her chest, showing her skinny legs, which are long and tight with muscles. Blue and purple bruises, the marks of monkey bars and bike crashes, dot the fair skin of her legs. A pair of underpants with cat faces covers her hairless crotch. It would be so easy to destroy her, Leonie thinks—it wouldn’t take much strength, her bones would break easily, her flesh is tender. She’d follow anyone for a bag of gummy bears. She straightens the blankets and kisses Lisa, who sighs and turns over. “I’ll protect you, I’m with you always.” Leonie has tears in her eyes. At the same time she’s embarrassed by her unconditional infatuation with her children, the merest banalities an excuse for adoration: a scribbled drawing, a head movement. She can reason away the fears planted by the news and talk-shows, but the panic continues to throb in the pit of her stomach. Leonie is an eager and meticulous reader of newspapers. She tolerates invention only on television, where she can sit for hours watching the cheesiest soaps. Her daily reading is hindered, however, by the fact that she immediately turns the page on any article that deals with possible threats to Lisa and Felicia: assassins and sleeper cells, oil crises, atomic bombs, sugary beverages, pension cuts, climate change.
Leonie goes back into the kitchen, which, like everything else in the apartment, is oversized: sky-high ceiling, black-and-white tiled floor, a hulking island in the middle shimmering like a chrome altar. She turns on the radio: though she’s grateful for a bit of peace and quiet, she doesn’t like to be alone. The host’s artificially high voice softly permeates the room, followed by an eighties ballad. Colorful plastic cups, half-drunk mugs of hot chocolate, and her own soup, now cold, still stand on the wooden table by the window, and a nibbled slice of bread leans against the edge of the bowl like a miniature buttered slide.
She gathers the dishes and wipes off the kitchen table. The rag and the wet streaks it leaves behind give off a sour smell, like towels left too long in the washing machine. She throws the rag away and washes her hands. The bright highchairs are full of crumbs. Leonie gets the hand broom from under the sink. It has a worn wooden handle and shaggy black bristles that remind her of a wild horse’s mane. Sometimes Felicia clamps it between her chubby legs, runs through the apartment, and yells, “Witch, witch!” Though Leonie gets down on her knees with the witch’s mount every day, she still finds sticky gray-black islands of spilled juice or milk that has mixed with the dust and crumbs and hardened on the floor.
Her briefcase lies in the hallway, tossed amid a pile of children’s jackets. She takes out a green folder. She scans the papers with a furrowed brow. Her little office is a rugged landscape with stacks of paper clustered on the desk around a softly humming PC. There, unlike at home, she always finds what she’s looking for.
At the same time, this is the largest and most beautiful apartment she’s ever lived in: six rooms with herringbone parquet, a huge bathroom with bulbous white faucets, a claw-foot tub, a guest bathroom with a shower, and a balcony whose sandstone columns and octagonal terracotta tiles really deserve the grandiose name “loggia.” The best part is the plaster ceiling decorations: cherries in the living room, apples in the bedroom, strawberries and raspberries in the two rooms that the girls use for their bedroom and playroom, lemons in the dining room, and bunches of grapes in the room that Simon doggedly calls the library, even though it contains only one half-full bookshelf. The realtor claimed that these were the only moldings of their kind in southern Germany, perhaps in the whole world. Supposedly it had been decorated according to the taste of Baden-Württemburg’s first manufacturer of canned goods, a former fruit farmer from Remstal. Though Leonie loves the round-cheeked apples over her marriage bed, she also knows that the apartment is really a bit too big for them.
She goes to the refrigerator, pulls out an open bottle of Riesling, and pours some wine directly into her water glass, even though it’s not quite empty. Leonie drinks quickly and waits for the relaxing effect of the alcohol, which sets in quickly after the forced abstinence of pregnancy and the baby years. She walks to the window, buttered bread in hand. The orange glow of the streetlamps lights up the street. Wilheminian-era standstone buildings, which look like little knight’s castles with their turrets and opulent ornamentation, alternate with post-war concrete buildings, hastily constructed to fill in the holes that the bombs had left behind, which fortunately aren’t too numerous. Almost all the buildings have generous backyards—there are bushes and trees here, even in the middle of the city. On her new street, Leonie can see traces of the last World War only in the details: there are bullet holes in a few of the walls, the iron cellar doors are still marked AIR RAID SHELTER. The whole city is marked by the war and the hurried construction of the economic boom years. Leonie is unmoved by Stuttgart’s homeliness, and she hasn’t left the city for an extended period since her time in Montpellier. She has plenty of favorite places, including the Bopser woods, where she and Simon like to jog; Penguin Ice Cream on Eugenplatz; “Monte Scherbelino,” the hill that’s made of war rubble, where lizards are always scurrying around; and since August, Constantinstraße.
At the same time, Leonie had been loathe to move out of the Heumaden row house: a thousand square feet split between two floors, the beige carpeting, all tossed away like the cardboard boxes she’d once set up for her dolls. She wanted neither to part with the handkerchief-sized garden, where she could hear the neighbors’ phone conversations through their open doors, nor to leave the new development, which had been quite stylish in the eighties, with façades painted olive and cream. It had been their first house together—the Ostendplatz co-op didn’t really count. But it was in Heumaden that Lisa and Felicia had taken their first steps; there had been barbecues with the neighbors and bike rides through nearby fields on the weekends. It had been a good house: friendly, practical, and unspectacular. No one gasped when they came in, the way practically every visitor to her new apartment does—including her parents, who had walked through the rooms wide-eyed and enthralled. Her father had clapped Simon on the shoulder and said, “It’s fantastic, son. We didn’t start out with this much. Do you remember our first apartment, Heidrun?” Leonie had tried to point out that it was their third apartment rather than their first, but to no avail.
Simon is strategic. He wants to make the stages of his success visible on the map of the city. Little red flags identify each conquered territory: from Heslach to the hip student co-op in East Stuttgart, then the row house surrounded by greenery and finally, as the crowning achievement, the historic building in coveted Lehenviertel. Actors, singers, and dancers who work at the nearby opera house live here. It’s also teeming with architects that the architecture school spits out, rapid-fire—Leonie wonders how Lehenviertel can support so many. It’s a bourgeois neighborhood that does without front gardens or wreaths of dried flowers on the doors. The balconies are planted with climbing roses, lavender, and kitchen herbs, like mini-Provences. In other respects people project a studied casualness and proudly identify themselves with the stony neighborhood. Children play in the courtyards. The residents go to the Staatsgalerie, the library, and the black-and-white breakfast café on Hauptstätter Straße. Cravings for nature are satisfied at the Schloßgarten or in the nearby woods. The neighborhood’s inhabitants find themselves at the heart of a city which, despite its best efforts, will never be a metro
polis, and which therefore exudes a certain contented peace. The proximity to the little red-light district, with its African immigrants buying shriveled yams in tiny, crammed shops and trying to call home as cheaply as possible, and to the wild South—Simon’s old home of Heslach with its housing projects, döner stalls and 99-cent stores—is a subtle reminder that other, harsher worlds exist. For this reason Leonie is sure that Lehenviertel won’t be their last stop. Simon will never rest until he lives in his dream apartment: one with the right size and style, and also the most prestigious location—Killesberg, maybe, or the area around Uhlandshöhe.
She too had gasped when Simon first showed her the apartment and named the rent, with satisfaction, rather than horror, in his voice. It was more than her total monthly income. Nonetheless, she abstained from counterproposals, didn’t suggest that one could rent or buy a bigger house in Rohr, Vaihingen, or Red Stuttgart for less money. It was clear to her that Simon wanted to move here. When he slid open the door that divided the living and dining rooms, Leonie saw the twin of this apartment reflected in the polished oak floor that shone like spilled honey. It must have been at least fifteen years ago. They had been at a party together, at the house of a school friend whose parents were away for the weekend. It took place on the first floor of a villa that was elegantly situated on the side of a hill. Simon had roamed briskly through the rooms, throwing open doors even when something was clearly going on behind them, like in the dim, pot-suffused parental bedroom. That evening, Leonie, who loved to test Simon’s distractibility with her body, had no power over him. “Crazy! It never ends.”
The apartment building where the nineteen-year-old Simon had lived with his mother lay on one of the main roads that ran from Marienplatz to Heslach. A wholesale meat distributor, whose bright orange sign beckoned garishly from afar, was on the ground floor. In the immediate vicinity there was a laundromat, a Portuguese restaurant with greenish bullseye-glass windows, and a newspaper stand that was permanently barricaded behind a folding grate. The stairwell, with its artificial stone steps, smelled putrid. The elevator door closed behind Leonie with a metallic creak, like the dented lid of a cookie tin. She saw her face in the mirror under the brownish-yellow light—too heavily made-up for her first visit to Simon’s parent-free digs. She was freezing in her calf-length denim coat. Every button was done up, since underneath she was naked, apart from a garnish of red-and-black polyester underwear. Ingrid, Simon’s mother, was in the perfume store on Königstraße, selling soap and body lotion. Leonie was glad not to have to meet her. She was greeted in the hallway by a pleased and excited Simon, as well as by a folding laundry rack where Simon’s boxer shorts hung next to Ingrid’s size-fourteen leopard-print slips. A vase with dusty silk flowers stood near the telephone. In the living room two threadbare faux leather armchairs were arranged around a mosaic table, upon which a clean ashtray stood at the ready. A single narrow bookshelf towered next to the television. The middlebrow paperbacks and magazines were propped up by a depressed-looking porcelain Pierrot. A mirrored closet reflected the worn sleeper sofa; an alarm clock and a half-full bottle of mineral water stood on the floor next to it. In the kitchen, a meat grinder was clamped to the cracked countertop. Simon’s room was an oasis of normalcy, with an impressive Hi-Fi system and a huge poster of Luc Besson’s Le Grand Bleu.
Later, dressed in one of Simon’s sweatshirts, Leonie wandered curiously through the apartment. The sweatshirt was stiffly ironed and smelled like fabric softener. A single framed black-and-white photograph hung over Ingrid’s sleeper sofa: an aerial view of a landscape. Hills, woods, a small river, the scattered cubes of a little village in Hohenlohe. Simon commented from the couch. His mother had been wild, got pregnant too early, longed for the big city. Her family had kicked her out of the house. Nonetheless she had later inherited a run-down single-family house in which she invested every penny, with help from Simon. A new roof, new plumbing, a first-rate kitchenette—all paid for by the two of them; she was planning to move in as soon as she retired.
Despite the fact that Leonie’s father had a lucrative job as an accountant, money was never mentioned in her house. Simon’s forwardness in such matters astonished her. Furthermore, it became clear that his close relationship with his mother would pose an obstacle to their relationship. She could never make plans with him on Sunday afternoons because he always met his mother for coffee, and he seemed to see this not as a burdensome duty but a sacred ritual. On the subject of contraception, he was downright obsessive. He brought it up before they even left the parking lot of the observatory, where they often went late at night: “If you get pregnant now, you have to get an abortion. I can’t pay for a kid. I owe it to my mother not to fuck up.” Though Leonie felt like she belonged with Simon more than with any other man she’d been close to, it was speeches like this one that ultimately spurred her decision to apply for the foundation courses in France.
Ingrid never got to cook so much as an egg in her new kitchenette, never got to enjoy the view of her childhood fields through the insulated glass windows that she’d picked out with her son. While Leonie was in Montpellier trying to get over Simon, his mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage. “She was already cold by the time I tried to wake her.”
A few months after Ingrid’s funeral, Simon got in his car and drove to Leonie’s dorm in Montpellier. The two hadn’t exchanged even a postcard for three-quarters of a year. Yet when they saw each other, nothing seemed to have changed. She caught the train from Montpellier as soon as she had finished her last exam and moved right into his co-op on Ostendplatz.
What would Ingrid have said about their new place? Leonie was convinced they would have gotten along. “I’m probably the only woman in the world that actually wants a mother-in-law. Someone to tell me what Simon was like as a baby. When he was potty-trained and how soon he slept through the night. Whether Lisa and Felicia look like him. She would certainly have liked the little house in Heumaden. It was so like hers.” She was sure her mother-in-law would have found Constantinstraße posh and elegant, but too expensive. Ingrid and Simon’s mutual life’s work, the result of steely frugality and shrewd schoolyard dealings, was easily rented. Simon went there no more than once a year to see that everything was in order. He talked little of his mother. “It’s a damn shame you never got to meet her. She was a good one.” Leonie uses Ingrid’s best china, a simple white and blue set, and constructs her image of Ingrid from Simon’s occasional tidbits.
She swallows the last bites of the already-stale bread and pours herself more wine. There’s more activity on the street than usual. The last of the guests from the Wren House Halloween party are on their way home. Small groups of children and teenagers in costumes stand on the sidewalk and in doorways. Amid the turmoil, old Herr Posselt from across the street is taking his dog for a walk—an aged hound with short silver and brown hair and a liver-colored snout. He limps a little, but still pulls so hard on the leash that his owner can barely keep up. Posselt, a middle-sized man with excellent posture, must be nearly eighty, yet he still keeps himself presentable, his white mustache trimmed and his silk scarf fastidiously knotted. When the girls run into Schlamper, usually on the way home from St. Anton, he slackens the leash and exchanges a few words with Leonie; despite his general reserve, these platitudes about the weather somehow convey a certain aura of intimacy. Schlamper patiently tolerates Felicia and Lisa’s clumsy caresses and only occasionally lets out a deep breath, which sounds like a sigh.
Leonie looks for sweets in the cabinet over the refrigerator—some costumed kids are sure to come by. She extracts a bag of chocolate bars from the jumble of open packages of cookies, candy necklaces, and stray gumballs and sets them in easy reach next to the stove.
The large windows in the building across the street are filled with yellow light. It’s the kind of light that makes one pause during an evening stroll and gaze in, drawn by the foreign warmth, the promise of a kind of privateness one’s own four walls can never offer. Le
onie steps back and turns off the overhead light. Then she returns to her post, conscious of doing something embarrassing. A round table with a lobster-red tablecloth stands close against the window. Leonie sees a steaming dish, a breadbasket, deep blue plates, candles, a bouquet of asters, and wonders whether she and Simon even own a tablecloth. Yes, she says to herself, there’s the Christmas tablecloth with the dancing St. Nicholases. Across the table a slim woman with long black hair fills the bowls as they’re passed to her. They’re having soup. “Well, we had soup tonight too,” she thinks, continuing to stare in the neighbors’ window. Two children are sitting at the table—boys Lisa and Felicia’s age. They’re wearing pajamas, and they spoon the soup up with great concentration. The father, blond like his sons, passes around a bowl of salad. The whole family is using cloth napkins that match the tablecloth. Leonie looks at the clock: “They can sit still so long. They haven’t gotten up or knocked anything over or spilled on themselves. And they’re eating salad.” The man is talking about something, and the children listen attentively. A modern lamp with a frosted glass shade hangs over the table; the walls are painted yellow. Tea lights burn on the windowsill alongside large stones and flowers arranged in vases and jars. From this small glimpse, as tiny as the scenes behind the doors of an advent calendar, she can tell that the household across the street is run by a person who spends her whole day at home. In Heumaden most of the mothers had worked, even if only part-time, in order to pay off the little beige houses before they retired. Leonie’s five-day workweek was unusual, but not as exotic as it is in Lehenviertel. There’s a trend toward three-child families at the girls’ kindergarten. Most of the highly-educated full-time mothers seem satisfied with their roles as unpaid cleaning ladies, chefs, and chauffeurs. Simon is proud of his “business babe” and has always been supportive. Sometimes he irons Leonie’s blouses when she’s too tired. Thanks to Ingrid he can cook simple dishes, and he notices when things get dirty or untidy. Recently, this help has become less frequent, though. He comes home later every day. Compared to the man across the street, he’s a macho, a guaranteed absence. The neighbor has broad shoulders, and his good-natured face, which consists mostly of nose, makes him look like Gérard Depardieu’s younger brother. He’s home at the most unlikely times: he regularly returns for lunch, and when it’s the family’s turn, he takes care of sweeping and tidying the sidewalk in front of the building, his sons often tottering behind him with miniature brooms and enameled dustpans.
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