The Natashas

by Yelena Moskovich

  Over the years, she had tried again and again to express to her mother that she did not enjoy this scent. But every attempt to communicate this left her mother with the impression that Stargazer lilies were Béatrice’s favourite flower.

  The mother looked back at her from the front car seat.

  “Oops, how’d you guess! I put them on my lap with a scarf over, so you wouldn’t see it until after the concert. Oh well. Surprise … !”

  She pulled the bouquet out from beneath the scarf and pushed it into Béatrice’s face. Béatrice could already feel the particles gather in her throat. Her stomach swayed with a light nausea and her gut flinched.

  “Sweet and heavenly,” the father said and made a right turn.

  As the car pivoted, Jean-Luc was pressed into Béatrice’s shoulder.

  “… Just like you,” Jean-Luc whispered.

  XXIV

  Karl

  1

  César could not endure Sabine’s silence just as he couldn’t quite handle her small talk. Luckily, God bless this machine, the phone rang. Sabine unzipped the small purse on her lap and took out the phone.

  “Allo. Ich bin in Paris…. Nein … Leite es an Christophe weiter…. Ya … Tuesday, not Wednesday. Surtout pas, je vous avais expliqué. Ok, tak mi zavolej … Oui … Oui … Okay, goodbye.”

  “Something important?” César asked.

  “Work.”

  Sabine explained that she worked for the Volkswagen Group in Dresden as an engineer of some sort. (César almost blurted out, I knew a guy from Dresden once, but he stopped himself in time.) She mentioned computer modelling software and anticipating component behaviour and monitoring associated engineering issues with the final product, but all César could picture were those test cars with the dummies strapped inside that they crash into walls.

  “Interesting stuff,” César said.

  Sabine continued to explain that the Volkswagen Group had partnered up with the Czech Republic’s largest car manufacturer, Skoda Auto. That’s why she took regular trips to Mlada Bleslav in the north of Prague to visit the giant Skoda manufacturing plant.

  “The year of the big partnership was 1991, to be exact. I was barely twelve at the time, living in France. I didn’t know a thing about the East and the West. The world map consisted of Paris, Bordeaux where my grandparents lived, the Aquitaine region where we spent our summers, Arcachon, Sanguinet Andernosles-Bains, Dune du Pyla. But in 1991, as I’m sure you’re aware, the Soviet Union fell, and thousands of newly made businessmen carried off the crumbs in a hurry. Some built empires. Some were greedy and took a piece too big and got crushed underneath.”

  Across the canal, a couple laughed together. Then their voices subsided.

  “Only a year later, my mom moved me to Stuttgart and I got a taste of the changing world.”

  Sabine’s mother, Marcel’s ex-wife, met and married a German man from Stuttgart and moved there with Sabine when she was thirteen. Her mother’s new husband brought with him a son from his previous marriage, Karl. Karl was seventeen, with a greasy blond shag of hair and a patch of fine hairs on his upper lip, but otherwise no facial hair. His cheeks darted out of his gaunt face, and his lips were heart-shaped. He was tall and bony. It did not help that he wore baggy black jeans which he fastened to his skinny body with a flat, black leather belt slung tightly in the loops. Over his lean torso, he wore the usual white undershirt, and a short-sleeve, faded black button-up shirt (he buttoned every button, up to his protruding Adam’s apple).

  Most of the time, Karl just wanted to be left alone. So he was not thrilled to have two more people in his space to pester him. And if there was one thing Sabine was a natural in, it was pestering.

  She asked Karl if he knew that Stuttgart, which was also known as Benztown, was where the automobile and the motorcycle were invented, by a certain Karl Benz. She wanted to know if Karl had been named after the inventor.

  “No,” Karl replied.

  She continued then to inform Karl that the automobile and motorcycle were later industrialised by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach (in 1887, to be exact) at the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft (to be exact), and that she preferred the name Gottlieb or Wilhelm to Karl because to her “Karl sounds like someone who lacks ambition”.

  Karl scratched his chin, then left the room.

  2

  At first Karl spent most of his time in his room, on his computer. But after starting a new high school in Stuttgart, a beat-up car began turning up with four guys in it. It would honk on arrival and Karl would tuck his faded black shirt into his jeans and head out the door.

  Karl’s father and Sabine’s mother, who were both worried about Karl’s transition to the new family and the new school, were somewhat relieved to see he had found a group of friends. The only problem was that Karl still kept to himself, and never talked about his social life to them. As soon as he got in that car, though, the boys slapped each other’s shoulders in such brotherhood that you could see Karl’s eyes shine like two sun-lit rivers.

  “So … What do you do … with your friends, you watch movies, or you stay inside and play your games …?” Sabine’s mother asked delicately.

  Karl snorted. “Why would we waste our time on that?”

  Karl’s father interjected. “But you used to love your games. I mean, the ones with the cards and the ones online?”

  “Not any more.”

  Karl left more and more regularly in that old car with the boys. When Sabine’s mother demanded to know where it was he was going, Karl said, “None of your business.” When she demanded that he speak to her with respect, Karl said, “Earn it first.” When Karl’s father stepped in to reprimand the boy, Karl said, “Save it for your other illegit kid.” With that, he slammed the door and was off to one of his meetings.

  At least Karl had grown out of his introverted internet games and found some intra-personal social activity, his father reasoned. This, like his games, was surely another adolescent phase. Both parents decided to leave it at that and wait for Karl to outgrow this phrase independently.

  3

  A month before graduation, Karl had managed to grow a thin, golden goatee on his chin. He had also shaved his head. Then, coming home in the middle of dinner, he announced that he was moving out. His father set his fork and knife down and stood up.

  “Karl. You come and go without a word. You’ve no manners with your mother and sister—”

  “You mean your new whore and her little bitch,” Karl said flatly.

  The father squared up to his son. He was twice as bulky as the boy, but his son’s eyes were packed with more muscle. The men looked at each other in silence.

  Sabine waited for the father to hit his son in the face. But this was not a man who could use his strength for violence. Anger surged through his body limply, like tears running down his veins. The father peered into Karl’s eyes, trying to find his son. Everything was familiar, except what lived within those two holes. Karl broke the eye contact and glanced at Sabine.

  “Karl. Look at me,” demanded his father. “I raised you to be a man of respect and principle.”

  “I am, Father.”

  Karl took a seat and began to speak about integrity.

  4

  Sabine and her mother were asked to leave the room. Karl’s voice was heavy with concern and responsibility as he spoke to his father, about human suffering. He explained ugliness so precisely that one could imagine he was performing surgery on the bellies of ants. His father was ready to let the past go, to reach out to his son and take him into his arms and help him believe in his own beauty, when Karl suddenly said, “… Ugliness, like yours.”

  His father sat still, taking apart this phrase in his head.

  Karl picked up where he left off without changing expression. Now, however, the content of his speech jarred more and more with his calm, charitable tone. He spoke highly of an older woman, for whom his father almost assumed he had romantic feelings, until Karl quoted her speec
h to young German women, urging them to lead a lifestyle that minimises the risk of rape in order to avoid the mutilation of human life. He explained to his father the Sabbath of perverts, when men degrade themselves with other men. He asked if his father had ever put a cockroach in his mouth. At this, his father almost jumped from his seat. He continued, “How, then, could he kiss that woman on the lips day after day?” By that woman, of course, he meant Sabine’s mother.

  It was clear now. Perhaps it had been clear from the moment Karl got in the car with the boys, from the moment he began tucking in his shirt, from the moment he shaved his head, but now it was undeniably clear, and yet his father was desperate to make it less clear.

  “Why would you say such a thing?” Karl’s father pleaded.

  “I say it because others remain cowering in their silence. In their silence, their tongues, like yours, father, are covered with the filth of it all. With the filth of the ugliness around us, father. The filth on the flailing tongue of this country, father. The filth in the crevices of this decaying world. The filth you, father, have brought into our own house. And the filth you have dug your manhood into, you reek FATHER you smell of IT!”

  5

  Karl moved out and despite his father’s continual efforts, cut ties with the family. By then, Sabine had entered high school. She did not have many friends, partly because of her relentless commentary on everything. She informed everyone around her, her teachers included, of all kinds of facts that they surely should know, unless of course they were downright stupid. She retreated into her studies, and did exceedingly well. But she remained a girl who was hard to like.

  The more time that passed without Karl in the family, the more his father believed that it was not Karl who had abandoned the family, but rather he who had abandoned Karl. His father lay next to his new wife at night, with a disgusting texture growing in his mouth. If Sabine’s mother tried to reach over to him, he would flinch, then say he was sorry, then get up and go to the hallway to look at a childhood photo of his son. Karl, barely standing on the grass, with his biological mother behind, holding him up. Now both this woman and the son were gone. The thought terrorised him: it’s all my fault.

  6

  What the father did not know was that Karl made regular visits back in his absence, to rifle through the apartment and stock up on supplies. He would come home wearing the same loose black jeans with a black shirt tucked in, except this time with black gloves. He carefully went through the drawers in each room and slipped valuables into his pockets: cash, jewellery, the occasional credit card.

  Sabine was the only one who knew, because she had caught him once.

  7

  “That’s my mother’s,” Sabine said from the hallway, referring to her mother’s wedding ring from her first marriage. Karl put a leather-gloved finger to his mouth as he slipped the ring out of its case and down his long jean pocket.

  “You can’t take that. It’s not yours. That’s stealing. You’re a thief. You’re disrupting society. You belong in prison.” Sabine spoke in an endless trail as Karl tried to move past her. After several attempts, Karl saw this girl would not budge from the doorway. He leaned down and looked his stepsister straight in the eyes and said, “Sabine.” As he reached out to take her shoulders, Sabine began to flail her small hands at Karl’s chest, screaming, “DON’T CALL ME THAT, DON’T CALL ME THAT!”

  Sabine charged at him, but Karl flung his long arms out and pushed her back. She fell into the wall, but got up immediately and charged at him again. He caught her at her shoulders, then grabbed her throat to stop her screaming. He brought his face into her bulging eyes.

  “Sa … bine,” he said. His hot breath went into her nose.

  Sabine twisted and heaved.

  “SA-BINE,” he repeated. “SABINE. SABINE. SABINE.”

  Tears and mucus ran down her face. Karl let go and Sabine stumbled back coughing. She caught her breath and glared at Karl. Her eyes terrified him. When she charged at him again, he pushed her back with greater violence than before. She ricocheted straight into the hallway table, then dropped on to the floor. Her skirt flew up to her waist and her chin tucked into her collarbone. Karl looked at her immobile body, at her barely teenage legs and her thin, white underwear the texture of gauze. He gritted his teeth, made a ball of saliva in his mouth, and then spat it out on to her naked thigh.

  8

  When Sabine came to, it was already late afternoon. She got up, fixed her skirt, and wandered dazed down the stairs.

  That evening, when her stepfather asked what had happened to her head, she said she did not remember. When her mother came into her room at bedtime and kneeled at her bedside and told her to be honest now, Sabine said, “I’m always being honest.”

  9

  Years later, after achieving a high-level university degree, Sabine had moved to Dresden, got a well-paying job at the automobile manufacturing company where she had authority and integrity, and finally a position where she was paid to boss people around and inform them of things they should know.

  The thing that continued to bother her were the sightings. She could never be sure, but she had the impression that perhaps Karl was following her.

  She first spotted someone who looked like Karl at a café near her apartment building. Then she swore she had spotted him again, behind a tree in the small park across the street from where she was having dinner by herself at a Turkish restaurant.

  The years passed and she accumulated many sightings of Karl. She had changed the lock on her door a total of nine times in three years. But Karl, whether he was there or not, never came face to face with her. Maybe she had imagined him. Every time she called home, her mother and step-father each swore that they hadn’t seen or heard from Karl since the night he had left. Though her mother once told her in secret that she thought she had seen his face on TV during the riots in Leipzig. Then again, she couldn’t be sure. “Oh, honey, they all look the same with their arm stretched out into the air like a bunch of idiots. Your grandfather would turn in his grave if he knew. It was one thing for me to marry your father—”

  “Which one?” Sabine cut off her mother.

  “Oh, darling, don’t hate me, please don’t hate me.”

  After a silence on the phone, Sabine pronounced in a childish voice, “I don’t care any more.”

  After she hung up the phone, she remembered her grandpa telling her about his time in the concentration camp at Drancy, just outside of Paris, before he was deported, how some stole bread from children and others died for strangers. He had believed that heroism would be a greater force than organised cruelty. Perhaps his belief system was his saving grace, as he survived. At the end of his stories, however, his tone would drop as he said, “… Look around. What a world to survive for …”

  Sabine went to the bathroom mirror and slapped herself hard in the face.

  10

  In her wheelchair now, on the canal with César, she expressed none of this. It passed unspoken beneath her rolling list of facts and figures of Dresden, automobiles, highways, and emperors. He waited patiently for the pauses to say “uh huh” and “oh” as if he were filling in mortar between bricks.

  Then she closed her lips, as if for good. The sudden silence concerned César.

  “S-s-so … you’ah … miss your family?”

  Sabine turned to look at César. There was a flash in her eyes.

  “Come on. We aren’t done with our walk.”

  César got up, brushed the back of his jeans. He looked around him at the young people, drinking, smoking, snacking, belonging to their moments. He sighed and pulled the wheelchair around, back on to the cobblestone road.

  11

  “Here, right here, you missed it,” Sabine said.

  César made a brisk U-turn with the wheelchair. He was getting the hang of this.

  “Here?” he asked.

  “Yes, here.”

  The terrace of the bar was crowded with smokers and chatterers. C
ésar wheeled up, excused them, and tried to get in. People were annoyed by César’s attempt at entry, but as soon as they saw the woman in the wheelchair, they quickly smiled and scooted themselves in the most polite manner. Body by body, the crowd opened up and César inched Sabine toward the entrance.

  Around the edge of the door, behind the sitting drinkers, were rows of standing ones, with their backs to César making an impenetrable comb-tooth wall. César reached over and tried to tap some people on the shoulder. One person turned, then another, then a small passageway was made and bodies shifted to the side like a curtain being drawn.

  César placed his hands on the wheelchair handles and gave Sabine a soft slide forward. A light reflecting from the stage blinded him momentarily, then shifted over his head. In front of him, all the tables were full with people sitting, sipping their beers and wines and looking intently at the stage.

  On the stage, a bearded man held a double bass and strummed. On the other side, a clean-shaven man played the piano. Behind them, a bald drummer held the rhythm steady. At the centre, in a long, black lace gown, the woman held a note with her eyes closed. Just as the note finished, she opened her eyes and looked at the crowd. Her hand let go of the microphone and swept over the lobe of her ear, then up over her tightly wound, blonde chignon.

  XXV

  The white rose

  1

  The light from the terrace of the bar spilled into the quiet street, where it lit the fingers and mouths of the crowd. Across the road, a solemn stone church had its back to the lively bodies on the terrace. Young men chatted with young women with their hips crooked forward into their drinks. Young women asked for a light from their young women friends; some had the shadow of a shared childhood between them. The middle-aged were coupled, mainly to their present partner or to a silent vibration of their past one, a fretful wind in the fields within their eyes.