by Maxim Osipov
Betty hasn’t gone to the trouble of booking a hotel; presumably Elsa will invite her to stay with her. Elsa is forty-two, and appears to live alone. No matter how humble her living situation, Betty will have to make do: you can’t choose your family. Never mind. Who knows, her place might even be all right. Besides, having an ally in her sister won’t be without its advantages for Betty, what with all of these new laws about overseas bank accounts. But that isn’t why Betty’s here.
“Let’s take a right,” she instructs the driver. “I’d like to drive along the Spree.”
Stone, tiles, railings: here the Spree bears off straight into the embankment. It’s a so-so little river, kind of lousy, really—slightly bigger than Moscow’s Yauza, perhaps. Anyone with the slightest swimming ability would find it impossible to drown in there.
Betty takes out her mirror and inspects herself. Her father has exactly the same crease across his brow, although his is considerably deeper. It’s particularly visible in that photo of him as a young man, the one she’d finally been able to get ahold of—though not without some difficulty! When asked where he works, her father replies that he lost interest in everything after his wife’s death. Yes, he says, he works, the odd job here and there, but then he’ll wave off the question and cover his eyes: no one cares about the particulars. He curates projects, noncommercial projects. Publishing, education. The commercial world doesn’t sit well with him: little Liza can take care of those things.
The city itself is behind them now. It’s not even parks that surround them, but forests: the birds are chirping, the squirrels darting around. Where else would a riding shop be, if not in the sticks? There must be foxes and hares out here, too, and soon, by April or May, the old men will come sauntering out to sunbathe: Germans love baring all for the sun. Must be a sight.
We’re almost there. Betty unlocks her phone, turns off the sound, and flicks through the photos again. Then she checks she still has the opera tickets and takes one last look in the mirror before putting everything back in her bag and running her hands over her hips. Her fingers are long, with prominent, deeply carved joints.
“Oh heart, be still on this snow-filled night,” she sings, very quietly—almost inwardly, “As the band sets out on its brave patrol . . .”23 It’s a song that never fails to balance her spirits. As ever, she learned it from her father. He could never hit the high notes, but Betty would sing along, accompanying him on the piano. Oh yes, besides everything else, Betty once studied at the music academy.
Schiller-Allee, number 14. Where are the other 13? Probably somewhere over there, beyond the trees. Kremer & Kremer, half an hour before closing. It would be poor form to arrive late—as it would be to arrive early.
Betty gets out of the cab behind the building and lets it drive off before she takes a good look around. There is no one there—no security guards, no customers. Only a tiny, grayish car with horses’ heads painted on the hood and the trunk. No question whose that is. The sight sends new waves of sympathy coursing through Betty.
It’s overcast but not cold here; the rain has passed over but the air still hangs heavy. There’s a smell of freshly cut bushes: a strong, nondescript smell. Betty wanders around for ten minutes or so in the twilight. The time is now a quarter to six.
The store windows are brightly lit. Bridles, reins, browbands, numnahs, saddle pads in every color, fur-trimmed sleeves for saddles and nosebands: it’s all familiar, close to Betty’s heart. For a brief moment she forgets why she is here. There’s more: riding hats, top hats, and oh! What lovely breeches, with a suede seat—such a shame she wouldn’t have anywhere to wear them. Those boots, on the other hand . . . she’ll remember their name. Tiffany. All right, let’s go.
When learning to shoot, Betty was always taught to exhale fully, inhale slightly—maybe 25 percent—hold her breath, take aim, listen to her heartbeat, and then, in the interval between two beats, pull the trigger. Betty puts her hand on the door handle, pauses for a moment, then opens the door.
“Hello, Elsa,” she says, stepping up to the counter. “I have some good news for you.”
•
This story has a backstory. At the end of February, Betty’s father had called her and asked her to come over. His tone was sober, businesslike: he had two pieces of news. Start with the bad, as usual?
Cancer.
He’d rather not go into . . . Yes, of the male sort. The prostate. His so-called urologist at the polyclinic had said it was just a bit of cancer, nothing special. But she had recommended—as Betty’s father reached this part, he couldn’t restrain a yelp—she had recommended castration.
“And where’s their guarantee that’ll help? There isn’t one!”
Of course, Betty wouldn’t stand for such barbarism. She would find him the right doctor. They would go abroad, to Germany.
“Ah yes, Germany,” said her father, suddenly calming down. This was why he had called her.
However, there was one obstacle. They aren’t allowed—
“Who’s not allowed?” Betty interrupted.
“Do I have to explain everything?”
They—former employees of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (yes, that KGB)—aren’t allowed in Europe, anywhere; it’s an open ban. Her father said it all quickly, even with a hint of distaste: You’re a smart girl, quit feigning surprise.
She’d picked up on the odd thing, of course she had. Once, when she was thirteen, Betty had happened to overhear a neighbor she knew as Uncle Savva in their apartment. He was chuckling about how one of his and her father’s colleagues had almost killed a surgeon who’d performed a successful operation on him. Turns out he’d given the surgeon a bottle of top-notch whiskey or brandy in thanks, but the bottle contained huge amounts of a certain poisonous substance (Betty had forgotten the name). A bit of a boo-boo, really: he’d taken the bottle from the wrong safe. Betty’s father had quickly shushed him and kicked him out. And then Betty heard that wonderful English phrase for the first time, as muttered by her father: Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies. Plus there was the fact that he never traveled abroad, instead preferring to vacation at home. If she gave it some thought, she’d have been able to remember more.
Anyway, that was the bad news: cancer. Not to mention the prospect of being treated in Moscow, by some old Homo Sovieticus. Betty hates the term Homo Sovieticus herself: though she was barely alive during that period, she’s sure many aspects of it get overlooked, including a great deal of good. But when it comes to their health care, she feels her contempt is justified. So what was the good news? There was something her father was in no rush to share.
He smiled, pleading, pained. He was embarrassed—something Betty had never seen in him before. The good news? Betty probably had a sister, in Germany. It was clear why he had kept this under wraps for so long—Betty’s mother—and why he was speaking up now: a family reunion was his only chance of treatment in the country.
As for the circumstances: from the start of the seventies until 1982, he had lived in West Berlin under the Serbian name of Milić. Why not Fischer, or Schmidt? What can you do? Maybe his German just wasn’t up to scratch. Where did he work? What was he doing? He worked with maps, geographic maps, in a bureau. It fit with his academic background. The only thing is, his maps were all but unnecessary: by the seventies, things in Berlin had settled, an equilibrium had been reached. Which gave him time to make his trips to the river; get married; have a baby girl. His wife’s name was Anna. What did she do? Nothing much, she just taught music. She was quite a lot older than him—by now she’d be retired, if not already dead. All in all, he’d lived well enough—had it easy, some might say. They had made plans together, no hidden agendas. They were planning to buy a house, raise their little Elsa. Then suddenly he got his orders to come home. Someone had been compromised; there’d been some sort of leak, not from him. Ask me no questions—Betty knows.
So he had his orders. They gave him a good amount of time to prepare�
��two whole days. He set out early one morning, as he often did, to the Spree, left his clothes on the shore, and then . . . he had his methods. They’d offered to bring over his family, but Anna would hardly have wanted to go along with it: as far as he could tell, she had no great liking for Russians, nor for the socialist camp. Anyway, it never came up.
“But our relationship was fine. You know me, Lizonka, in principle I get on with everyone.”
He got up to show her to the door, and then he gave her an unusually big hug: “By the way, I wanted to ask, when you mention things over there . . .”
“What—where?”
“I never, in any way. . . see what I’m getting at? I never did Germany any harm.”
What had made the biggest, bleakest impression on Betty was not her father’s revelation, nor his diagnosis, but the stifling, slightly sweet smell of rotting flesh that she caught on his arms and mouth when he hugged her. She went home, quickly washed him off her, and started looking for her sister. She found her.
There she was: Elsa Milić, born 1973. Luckily she hadn’t married, hadn’t changed her name. A useful thing, Facebook. Elsa had sixteen friends, a bit subpar, frankly. Someone had been taking photos of her, at least. In all of them, Elsa was alone, not counting the animals. The dogs were shaggy and ancient, and the horses weren’t the freshest, either. Travel, food, politics, missing children: she seemed uninterested in it all—horse rations and the health of stray dogs were the extent of her concerns. There was a photo, uploaded the autumn before. She hardly looked like their father at all—her face was quite flat, with a high nose and cheekbones. Reddish hair, flecked with gray. A little makeup would help. Still, this must be one of her better photos, otherwise she wouldn’t have put it up. Another one: Elsa standing with some horses, in profile. If Betty were going to be blunt, she’d say her sister was a bit pear-shaped, stumpy. No sign of any mother, but then, there’s no obligation for an old lady to be hanging out on social media.
Betty had asked her father to remember something—anything—about Elsa: she had already started to pity her.
“Her successes, you know, they weren’t anything special, nothing compared to yours, you’re much more capable,” he’d said. “Once I told her: ‘Some kids you have to tell off or punish so they’ll try harder; others you have to praise or spoil. But which one you are, Elsa, I have no idea—with you, none of it works,’ and Lizka, can you imagine what she said? She said: ‘Dad, just make your own mind up.’ ” He had thought for a while. “Even so, Lizka, I’d set my sights on the girl, not the mother.”
On Facebook it’s fine to get straight to the point. So Betty had written to her sister in English (better for negotiations—it’s a language foreign to them both): “If you are the daughter of a man by the name of Mirko Milić, please let me know. I have extremely important information to disclose. I’m willing to travel to Berlin.” A few days had passed before Elsa read the message (Facebook’s symbols told Betty as much), and a few more passed before she replied, in terrible English: Come to the store at closing, any workday.
So here Betty is, at the counter. She holds out her hand and says, in German: “I have some good news for you. You are looking at your sister.”
•
Gestures are more convincing than words. Betty has planned and rehearsed this first scene meticulously: she would shake Elsa’s hand for three seconds; place her left hand on Elsa’s right; make eye contact.
Elsa’s eyes are red and inflamed, her eyelids swollen: allergic conjunctivitis. Elsa works with hay, after all.
“I’d get itchy eyes and a runny nose, too, back when I rode.”
A shared allergy, a shared passion. So far, so good. Elsa’s better looking in person than on Facebook, despite the conjunctivitis.
“No, that can’t be,” Elsa says, her voice quiet and husky, like a smoker’s. “You’re a decade younger than me; you couldn’t possibly be my sister.”
Twelve years, actually, if they’re going to get into that. Anyway. Betty gets out her phone and shows her the photograph of their father when he was young. They had had to turn his apartment upside down to find just one old picture of him. In the end, they had taken a photo of his old Komsomol membership card.
Elsa studies the photo intently. It’s not the way you look at a stranger.
“Where did you get this?”
It sounds stupid: Kommunistische Jugendverband. Der Komsomol.
“He died when I was eight—I don’t know anything about his Yugoslavian past. No photos of him were left.”
Jesus, Yugoslavia already. Is now the right time? Even good news can come as a shock, but she’s going to have to put it all out there at some point.
“Elsa, that’s the thing . . .” she says. She wants to take her hand again, but Elsa’s already moved it out of reach, “you see, our father isn’t dead. He’s alive.”
She almost throws in something about him not being in tip-top shape right now, but decides to save that little nugget for later.
Betty swipes the phone screen to bring up a new photo: “This is what he looks like now,” Betty had spent ages trying to get her father to pose for that shot, but Elsa throws it only the most cursory of glances.
Is she stupid? Or just very restrained? Elsa rummages around in a drawer and pulls out a photo wrapped in plastic. She places it in front of Betty.
A lawn; two gravestones. One bears a cross with two crossbars, the inscription MIRKO MILIĆ and the years of his life: 1944–1982. The other: ANNA MILIĆ, with the image of an angel, and beneath it the words Der Rest ist Schweigen—the rest is silence.
Though she’s ashamed to admit it, the news of the death of Elsa’s mother comes as a relief to Betty. She and Elsa, it would seem, have already had their fair share of woes.
What she died from is unclear. Elsa refers to her mother by her first name: Anna didn’t like to visit the doctor. In her last four years, she never left the house. Elsa still remembers her father’s funeral: the candles, the singing. There was a Serbian Orthodox priest, too. That stuck in Elsa’s mind.
“Where, where was it?”
“At the cemetery.”
Betty smirks—probably a bad move, but that response reminds her of a joke about IT support: technically correct, but absolutely useless.
“I should hope so. But which one?”
Elsa waves her hand, shuts her eyes, and bows her head. It’s exactly what their father does when he doesn’t want to respond.
“Elsa, my dear, your father isn’t under that gravestone.”
To Betty’s surprise, these words have no effect, either.
“Of course not—he drowned. His body was never found. He was declared dead in absentia. They buried the clothes that were left on the shore.”
And why does Elsa suppose they were never able to find his body?
“The Spree flows into the Havel; the Havel flows into the Elbe . . .”
Betty wants to interrupt: “And the Elbe flows into the World Ocean.” Instead she simply asks, sweetly: “Elsa, why all this geography?”
“The Havel and the Elbe went through the GDR. That impeded the search.” So that was how it was explained to them.
Can Betty get a quick snap of the headstone? No? Fair enough. But Elsa should listen to what she has to say. Betty lays out the little that she knows about the Berlin period of her father’s life. The fact that he could have taken his family with him, however, she neglects to mention.
“Very interesting,” Elsa says, pensively, without looking up, but her voice—her voice is shaking, and her hands probably are, too. Why else would she have put them in her pockets? “Very interesting,” she repeats. “But why now?”
“Oh, please don’t bring up perestroika and all that freedom-of-movement baloney. . .” Betty thinks.
“Why not before, while Anna was still alive?”
Betty shrugs: Life, eh? What can you do?
“Listen, Elsa, I understand you must be pretty. . . surprised, shocked, a
nd all that, but that’s life; things happen. You have to be able to take it for what it is, right? This was all news to me, too.” Betty takes a look at her watch. “Look, I’ve got tickets to the opera. Do you like opera?”
Elsa looks at her strangely, as though she doesn’t understand. Yes, clearly she’s a bit dim. Difficult, too.
“I thought you were all music lovers,” says Betty. It’s like she’s constantly having to justify herself. “The Magic Flute. It’s an opera. By Mozart.”
“I’m a music teacher by training,” Elsa eventually replies. But she doesn’t appear to want to get up.
“Really? Why did you give it up?”
“I didn’t give it up. I graduated.”
Fine, we’ll save that for later, too. Are they really going to have this conversation from opposite sides of the counter?
Elsa shrugs.
“I’m comfortable here.”
Something hasn’t quite gone according to plan. Betty’s going to have to lay all her cards on the table.
“Okay, first things first, let’s leave Dad out of this for a while—especially seeing as he’s not well right now. He’s got a tumor.”
Elsa doesn’t bat an eye. It’s like trying to talk your way out of a speeding ticket: you have to throw all you can at it, hope that something sticks.
Secondly, Betty herself only learned she had a sister a few days ago, and already she’s found her and flown here to offer her friendship, from the bottom of her heart. And Elsa should take it from Betty: she’s a good person to have as a friend.
Still no reaction. It’s really quite impolite.