Home Leave: A Novel

by Brittani Sonnenberg

  Chris speaks some German from his days as an exchange student in Stuttgart. He also comes from a farming town in northeast Indiana, where each of his ancestors can be traced back to farms around Hanover. Chris and Elise took a train to Hanover in the early fall, the trees as yellow as dandelions, their first excursion from Hamburg. Elise had found it depressing that the Hanover farmland looked so similar to Indiana, that Chris’s great-great-greats had traveled so far from home to face the same landscape. What kind of escape was that? Then again, the same regrets and insecurities haunt Elise now as those that haunted her in Vidalia, Atlanta, and London. Her moves have never resulted in the new personality she always hoped would come as a reward for the upheaval.

  Elise doesn’t notice when the boy turns a corner, until he shouts, “Liesel!” and waves furiously. She breaks out into a cautious run, holding her belly. She could begin the I’m not Liesel line of argument again, but she doesn’t want him to have a breakdown here and draw attention. So she follows his surprisingly quick gait for another fifteen minutes through small streets filled with bright balconies and large trees stretching their naked limbs to the sun.

  Then he stops at a small gate and they enter a series of private gardens, where city dwellers own small plots of land. She has noticed these Gartenkolonien scattered in pockets throughout the city, with their carefully tended rows and doll-like sheds, but she has never been inside. Now, in winter, the plots are all dead, the gates locked, apples rotting in brown grass. For the first time since leaving her apartment she feels uneasy and wonders if the boy has led her astray, or is simply lost himself. “Excuse me,” she calls out to him, coming to a stop. “Entschuldigung?” but he keeps going. As she catches up to him she can hear he is absorbed in humming a childish tune, the sort of thing you sing in grade-school choir. She can almost recognize it. He slips a hand confidingly in hers, and she falls silent.

  Then they hear voices. The boy quickens his step and grips her hand tighter. At the end of the path, on their right, is an open gate. Inside the garden, on a picnic table, are an enormous cake and a steaming thermos. Four people, so bundled as to make their age and sex anyone’s guess, huddle around the table, picking haphazardly with mismatched forks at the cake and passing around the thermos. No one has their own silverware or plate or cup. The air of disorder is decidedly un-German, Elise thinks, and for a second she feels a strong sense of camaraderie with the wayward winter picnickers.

  “Oma,” the boy calls out, and one of the bundles turns around and opens her arms. The boy lets go of Elise’s hand, and she watches with anguish as he falls into the old woman’s embrace. “Come back,” she wants to call, knowing she has no right to him. As soon as he leaves her side, the familiar lonely ache begins again, and Elise thinks of her bathtub and tries to picture the walk back home, how to get back in the hot scented water as soon as possible. The group regards her with silent curiosity, and the boy points to her and announces, simply, “Liesel.”

  “Auf Liesel!” one of the men shouts, lifting the thermos to her, and they all drink from the thermos, crying “Auf Liesel!” before they drink.

  “Nein,” Elise protests. “Elise. Ich bin Elise.” And then “Tut mir leid,” at the man’s look of offense and the boy’s scowl.

  “Natürlich bist du nicht Liesel,” says another man at the picnic table, offhandedly, picking at the cake. “Liesel ist tot.”

  Elise understands what the man is saying, even as the words fill her with an undefined dread. Liesel is dead. Elise feels nauseous and dizzy. She needs to sit but there is no place at the table for her.

  “Komm,” the boy’s grandmother says, and gestures for Elise to sit beside her. Elise freezes, recognizing the voice. It is the woman who spoke into the intercom, back at Elise’s apartment. The woman gestures again, patting the seat beside her. Weary of trying to make sense of it all—Germany, German, the old woman’s voice—Elise acquiesces, childlike, and finds herself sitting on the rough wooden bench between the boy and his grandmother, leaning her head on the old woman’s shoulder. The grandmother offers Elise the thermos. Elise realizes she is shivering, despite her heavy jacket and boots. Elise accepts the thermos, then discovers from its ripe, rich perfume that it is mulled wine, the smell of the Christmas markets that popped up all over Hamburg in mid-November. She gives the thermos back to the grandmother, pointing at her stomach by way of explanation.

  “Kein Problem,” the grandmother insists. “Gut für das Kind.”

  Inscrutably, Elise obeys her, for a small sip, and a rich, sour, cinnamony taste flies down her throat, hot and safe, like the Russian tea, made of Tang, cloves, cinnamon, and sugar, that she’d drunk at Christmas back home. Shyly, Elise takes a closer look at the other women around her. They remind her of a ruddier version of the women her mother plays bridge with. Last week, her father told her over the phone that, despite Elise’s request in a recent letter, he and Ada wouldn’t be coming to Germany for the baby’s birth; it would be a waste of money. Chris had fumed at the news when Elise told him; it hadn’t occurred to Elise to argue with her father, just as she’d stayed tongue-tied when he’d told her she had to stay in Mississippi for college. She wishes she hadn’t asked, hadn’t scrawled the letter in a moment of weakness when Chris was on a business trip, hadn’t given her father the power to say no. It is her punishment, she knows, for the five years that she stayed away from Vidalia, for living abroad now. Elise closes her eyes.

  Suddenly, the table erupts in raucous laughter, except for the grandmother, who is shaking her head, looking mildly offended. One of the men is wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. Elise feels herself entering invisibility. Usually, it is an exclusion she deeply resents; if she were at a dinner party with Chris right now, she would be tugging on his sleeve, demanding a translation, faking laughter once he’d told the joke in English, but right now she feels her ignorance is a privilege, an excuse to opt out of the present company. The sip of mulled wine has warmed and calmed her, not unlike a bath. She eases herself off the bench. The grandmother gives her hand a squeeze; the boy gives her a questioning look but does not protest. The others take no notice as she wanders away from the picnic table, deeper into the garden.

  Elise meanders along the tall hedge of evergreen that separates the garden from adjacent properties. At the far right corner is a small gap in the branches, a gate leading into the next garden. Elise tests the latch. Unlocked. She glances back at the table. The grandmother and the boy are playing a handclap game. The others, from their increasingly impassioned gesticulations, seem to have entered some kind of argument. No one is watching her. She pushes down the latch and walks boldly through, as though the property were her own.

  * * *

  On the other side of the gate, Elise encounters not another garden, but a large greenhouse. Emboldened by the afternoon’s growing shadows and their gift of anonymity, Elise heads towards the tall glass structure. She tries the door handle and finds it is also unlocked. After a moment’s hesitation, she enters.

  Inside, it is spring. Colors crowd Elise’s winter-starved vision: lemon-hued forsythia, tulips the color of Dreamsicles. The air is humid; Elise can almost hear an exhaling. Or is it her own long sigh? She steps slowly down the aisles, bending her head over the blooms, pausing to fill her lungs with scent. At the end of the hall is another door that Elise continues through, this time without a second thought.

  The next room is a good ten degrees warmer, and Elise shrugs off her coat, lays it on an empty plastic chair. The plants here, arranged on shelves in neat rows, are suited for warmer climes. She spots her father’s favorites: gardenia, jasmine, lilies. All the flowers he tends with such care, the one luxury he allows himself: rare bulbs, heirloom seeds ordered from distant states. Usually the thought would make Elise scowl, roll her eyes at the irony of it: a father better suited for plants than children. But right now, in this warm, perfumed air, she feels a swelling gratitude to him, for working so hard on beauty. His garden (for it was always ref
erred to as his, never the family’s) often won first prize in the annual Tri-County Gardening Society contest. And he would bring cut flowers for Mama in the spring, Elise thinks, surprised by such an easy, happy memory of tulips on the kitchen table.

  “Ist da jemand?”

  Elise jumps at the voice, which comes from the other side of the room, behind a dark, waxy bush.

  “Hallo?” Elise stammers back.

  A woman, whom Elise guesses to be in her late forties, emerges from behind a row of shelves, her hands in gardening gloves, her face streaked with dirt, her graying hair tied back in an unkempt ponytail. She is sporting blue coveralls with innumerable pockets: the ubiquitous uniform of handymen and laborers throughout Germany. Elise has never seen such clothes on a woman before.

  “Was machen Sie hier?” the woman demands.

  Where to begin? Elise takes a deep breath. “Ich bin—es war—Liesel.”

  “Liesel?” the woman says suspiciously. “Liesel Kriegstein?”

  “Do you speak English?” Elise asks, giving up.

  “Yes.” The woman’s tone is arrogant, testy. “What are you making here? This is not a public garden.”

  Racking her brain for an answer, Elise realizes that language is not the issue. How can she begin to explain to the woman what remains a mystery to herself?

  “I came from a party over there,” Elise says, pointing in the general direction of the first garden.

  “Yes, for Frau Kriegstein, I know. They invited me also. I do not go. It is a strange habit, nicht? To have a birthday party for the dead. A tradition, where they come from, but for me, it is strange. I do not like it.”

  Elise nods, trying to look sympathetic, cataloging the new information. “It is Liesel Kriegstein’s birthday?”

  “Was her birthday. She died six months ago. But to continue to celebrate, after death, is not good. Besonders not good for her little boy. Time to move on, nicht? I am taking care of Frau Kriegstein’s flowers for many years. All of the gardeners from this Kolonie come here to my—how do you say—warmhouse, to give me their flowers for the winter. I keep them alive through the cold months, give them back in the spring. Every year, until now, Frau Kriegstein too. Now, her mother, the old woman, has the garden.”

  In her telling of Liesel’s garden, the woman’s tone has changed, grown wistful, and her face has softened into sadness. She turns to Elise with a hungry look. “Do you want to see Frau Kriegstein’s plants?” It is an order.

  Elise follows the woman to the room’s middle aisle, where about twenty potted plants—rhododendron, azaleas, begonias—bloom beautifully, on a shelf marked Kriegstein. “It was terrible to watch Frau Kriegstein being sick. Krebs. She always had the best garden, always a nice, polite customer. She came to the garden even when she was very weak. Last winter, she would visit me here, check on her flowers. But to make such a birthday party now, it is Unsinn.”

  Looking around the room, at the quiet order of the plants, everything in its place, Elise can understand why the woman would feel terrified by the chaos of the tipsy festivities happening in the garden nearby. She remembers the same look in her father’s eyes, regarding the wild chatter of his offspring at the dinner table, the obvious relief on his face when they excused themselves, one by one, to do homework or watch TV.

  The woman looks at Elise sharply. “You were a friend of Frau Kriegstein? I never knew she was speaking English.”

  Caught again. Elise tries her best to shrug helplessly and smile. She lifts the letter from her pocket. “It was a mistake,” she says. “My name is Elise Kriegstein. The little boy—Frau Kriegstein’s son?—came to my house with this.”

  The woman swiftly takes the envelope from her. As she unfolds the letter, shaking her head, Elise regrets having showed it to her.

  “What does it say?” Elise asks, her voice unconsciously dropping to a whisper, as the woman reads silently.

  “It is from Liesel’s mother,” the woman announces, and then, unnecessarily: “To Liesel. The stupid old woman, she thinks you have some way of connection to her daughter, because of the names. She saw your last name on your building’s directory.”

  “But why? How?”

  The woman shrugs. “She is strange. She is—how do you say it—suspicious? No: superstitious. Believing in spirits, connections. Ever since Frau Kriegstein dies, she is getting crazier, the way old people do—my aunt was the same. Talking to the plants, talking to her dead daughter, telling the little boy ghost stories. He believes her, of course. Such people should be in an Altenheim, not out on the street, giving letters to strangers. But she is not from around here,” she finishes, and shrugs, as though that explains everything.

  The woman returns to the letter. “Ah, wait—this is beautiful. Großartig. Listen,” she commands, as though Elise were her student. “Liesel’s mother quotes here a poem by Rilke: ‘Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter Dir, wie der Winter, der eben geht—’”

  Elise is unwilling to admit that not a word of this makes sense to her, but the woman is already translating, in her pedantic tone. “It means something like ‘Be in front of all separating, as if it is already behind you.’” She pauses, searching for the English words. “Like the winter, which is leaving.”

  Elise nods politely and the woman continues reading. “Denn unter Wintern ist einer so endlos Winter, daß überwinternd, dein Herz überhaupt übersteht.” She frowns, struggling with the translation: “For under winter—is a winter so long lasting—that…” She sighs and gives up. “I don’t know. Too complicated. Something with winter and überstehen…surviving.”

  “A good poem for a greenhouse,” Elise interrupts, feeling witty.

  “Where are you from?” the woman asks abruptly.

  “America,” Elise says.

  “Ha! Hollywood!” the woman shrills.

  As Elise is trying to find a subtle way out of the conversation, the woman removes scissors from her pocket and heads to a trellis smothered in honeysuckle vine, which Elise has not seen until now. The woman clips a short piece of the vine, with six pale, buttery blossoms, and hands it to Elise. “From your Heimat, oder?” she asks, smiling unnervingly. “I can smell it on you.”

  “Thank you,” Elise says, frightened now, but clutching the honeysuckle (a shade lighter than the one that grows in Vidalia, in the Eberts’ backyard, close to the ravine) as though it were her plane ticket home. She holds out her other hand. “Can I have the letter to Liesel, please, so I can give it back to them?”

  “Oh no,” the woman says, nonchalantly. “I keep it.”

  “But—”

  “It is none of your business!” the woman cries, in a sudden rage, waving the letter. “Like you said, you are a mistake!” She calms herself and looks away. “I am sorry. But I loved her too, you understand? In your country, you are quick to love, oder? It is easier to talk about love in English than in German.”

  For a moment, in the wake of this awkward outburst, both women are silent, and then Elise clears her throat, preparing to go. But the woman speaks first, in a low tone, almost to herself. “Frau Kriegstein, before she falls sick, has the same hair like you. Locken.” And suddenly, as quick as a garden snake, the woman’s hand is reaching out towards Elise’s face, fingering one of her curls. Despite the heat of the greenhouse, the woman’s dirty gardening glove, which glances Elise’s cheek, is cold, and Elise shivers before startling to movement, drawing back violently. Unperturbed, the woman smiles, a bullying grin that Elise remembers from the older girls in high school, taunting her in the cafeteria. Her cheeks hot, Elise snatches the envelope from the woman’s grasp. The second it leaves her fingers, the woman cries out but does not protest further. They stare at each other for a second, and then the woman lets out a bitter cackle.

  “You Americans. Always having to win, always hungry for the happy ending. The liberators.”

  “The letter was delivered to me,” Elise says evenly.

  “Ein Fehler. It does not belong to yo
u. But that has not stopped you before.”

  Elise is both bored and irritated by this thinly veiled political critique, and moves towards her coat. “I should get going.”

  “Of course!” the woman begins moving to another aisle, where she picks up a spade and, with a manic energy, starts digging around the roots of a rhododendron bush. “Get going, get going! I am also busy! I have fifty gardens to keep alive! What do you have to do, Hausfrau?” she spits. “Who do you have to keep alive?”

  Elise, holding her stomach protectively, as though to protect the unborn from such venom, hurries away, as repulsed now by the gaudy blossoms as she was enchanted when she first entered the greenhouse. She considers tossing away the honeysuckle at the gate to the other garden but thrusts it in her pocket instead, next to Liesel’s letter.

  * * *

  Back in the first garden, the picnickers are gone, and only the boy, the grandmother, and a few cake crumbs remain. The boy is asleep in the old woman’s lap. The grandmother gathers Elise in one look and then shakes the boy, who moans. “Los,” she says. The boy opens his eyes and looks at Elise, full of longing. Elise opens her arms to him and he burrows into her, nestles against her neck.

  “Es ist kalt,” the grandmother states, as pragmatic as ever, and begins marching off, jerking her head, indicating that the two follow her.

  The sky is pinkish. Elise feels more tired than she can ever remember feeling. She wants to lay her head down on the picnic table, but the grandmother looks back at her and shakes her head no. Elise recalls what the woman in the greenhouse said about the grandmother’s dementia. She was wrong, Elise thinks. I trust this old woman more than I trust myself. Elise feels for the letter in her pocket. I will translate the letter, Elise thinks. I’ll spend the next week at home with the dictionary, skipping German class, poring over the looping letters. I will read it aloud to Liesel. It is an unhinged idea, Elise knows, but to live so far from home, in Germany, is just as unhinged. That’s what being foreign is: being lonely enough to follow a small boy through a city, unbalanced enough to believe you can help a dead woman receive her mother’s letter. Ironic, Elise thinks, that the visions she craved so badly back in Vidalia as a child, thinking if she prayed hard enough, she could glimpse what others sometimes claimed they witnessed—a holy light, the voice of Christ—never came. It is only now, in Hamburg, where she feels herself so lost, that the uncanny unfurls, godlessly, in spring’s saturated colors, throbbing with secular love.