The German House

by Annette Hess

  “The lead prosecutor sent me.”

  Eva hesitantly waved him inside. David entered. They stood at the bar, while in the kitchen, an Italian tenor sang his heart out. Eva could have joined in. “Seven days a week, I want to spend with you.”

  “The interpreter can’t enter the country, at least not yet. He was deemed politically unreliable, and he’s got to get his affairs in order. So we need a replacement. Trial begins Friday.”

  Eva was stunned. “You mean to say I should translate?”

  “I’m not the one saying it. They just sent me.”

  “Oh, my. And for how long? A week?”

  David studied Eva almost pityingly. He had pale blue eyes, and his left pupil was larger than the right. Perhaps it had to do with the light, perhaps it was something he’d been born with. It gave him an unsteady, permanently searching expression. And he’ll never find himself, Eva thought instinctively, although without a sense of why.

  “Have you already spoken with my agency? With my boss, Herr Körting?”

  But David appeared not to have heard the question. He recoiled, as though Eva had struck him, and leaned against the bar.

  “Are you unwell?”

  “I forgot to eat breakfast. It’ll pass in just a minute.”

  David caught his breath. Eva stepped behind the bar and filled a glass of water from the tap. She handed it to him, and he took a sip. As he drank, his gaze traveled to the opposite wall, which was densely hung with autographed black-and-white portraits. There were men and women, mostly local celebrities, he assumed—actors, soccer players, or politicians who had eaten at German House. They smiled at David and showed him their best side. He didn’t recognize a single one of them. He straightened and placed the half-empty glass on the bar.

  “Call this number.” David handed Eva a business card with the name of the attorney general, an address, and a telephone number. “And if you take the job, you’d better start learning the necessary vocabulary.”

  “What do you mean? Military terms?”

  “Every conceivable word for how to kill a person.”

  David turned abruptly and left the restaurant. Eva slowly closed the door behind him.

  Her father had come out of the kitchen in his white coat and dark trousers, chef’s hat on his head, a red checkered dish towel slung over his shoulder. He looks like a clown about to get a cannonload of spaghetti and tomato sauce blown in his face, Eva mused.

  “Who was that? What did he want? Perhaps another suitor, daughter dearest?” Ludwig winked, then got to his knees before the bar and with the dish towel, began polishing the tin facing at its base, which was there to protect the wood from being kicked. Eva shook her head impatiently. “Daddy, can you think of nothing else? It was about a job. As an interpreter in court.”

  “Sounds major.”

  “It’s a trial against SS officers who worked in that camp.”

  “And what camp would that be?”

  “Auschwitz.”

  Her father kept polishing the facing, as though he hadn’t heard her. Eva studied the back of his head for a moment, where his hair was thinning. Every eight weeks, she trimmed her father’s hair in the kitchen. He couldn’t sit still for long and fidgeted like a little boy. It was always a tedious process, but Ludwig refused to go to a barber. Eva had a deep aversion to the hairdresser’s, herself. She had a childlike fear that getting her hair cut there might hurt. Annegret called Eva’s fear “nervous nonsense.” Eva reached for the mop, dunked it in the bucket, and wrung it out with her hands. The water had gone lukewarm.

  Later that evening, her parents sat in the living room. Ludwig to the left, on his shabby end of the sofa, Edith in her little yellow armchair, whose velvet upholstery had once glowed gold. Purzel was rolled up in his basket. He yipped occasionally as he dreamed. The Tagesschau was on television, and small images appeared onscreen as the anchor presented the news stories. As usual, Ludwig provided commentary for each segment. Edith had pulled out some sewing. She was mending a tear in Stefan’s orange mitten—apparently Purzel had gotten hold of it again. The anchor was reporting on West Germany’s largest dike construction project. After only four months’ time, the final section of the three-kilometer-long protective dike on the Rüstersiel mudflats had been completed. The footage showed a great deal of sand.

  “Rüstersiel,” Ludwig said, with a bit of homesickness in his voice. “Do you remember the time we were there and ate fresh plaice?”

  Edith didn’t look up, but answered, “Mmh.”

  “In an art gallery in Detroit, a fire has destroyed thirty-five paintings by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The damage amounts to approximately two million Deutschmarks,” the anchor read. A Cubist painting appeared behind him, but on the small black-and-white screen, it had no impact.

  “That’s almost sixty thousand marks per picture! God only knows why these pictures are all worth so much.”

  “You wouldn’t understand, Ludwig,” Edith replied.

  “All the better.”

  “Federal Minister of the Interior Hermann Höcherl has ordered the transfer of former SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Wenger from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to the Federal Office of Administration in Cologne.” The wall behind the anchor remained gray. Viewers did not get to see what Erich Wenger looked like. Eva’s parents were silent. They breathed in time with one another. The weather forecast followed, showing a map of Germany covered in white crystals. It would continue to snow.

  “She should hurry up and marry that Schoormann fellow,” Ludwig said, putting on his thickest Low German dialect.

  Edith hesitated. But then she responded, “Yes. It would be for the best.”

  In the Schoormanns’ mansion, Jürgen sat at dinner with his father and his second wife. Like every evening, they didn’t sit down to eat until half past eight, a by-product of working in the mail-order industry. Jürgen had worked well into the evening with his staff on the new catalog. Now he watched his father, who sat across from him at the table, warily dissect his bread and cheese. His father was deteriorating noticeably. He’d always been bulky but was now turning into a shrunken little man. Like a grape becomes a raisin when left in the sun, Jürgen thought. Brigitte sat close to his father, stroked his cheek, and placed a slice of cheese back on the bread.

  “It’s Swiss cheese, Walli. You like that.”

  “At least Switzerland is neutral.”

  Walther Schoormann took a careful bite and began to chew. He sometimes forgot to swallow. Brigitte gave him an encouraging nod. She’s a blessing, Jürgen thought. He was certain his mother would approve. The first Frau Schoormann, whose gentle face appeared in soft focus in a photograph on the sideboard, had been killed in an air raid on the city in March of ’44. Jürgen, then ten, was living on a farm in the Allgäu region, where his parents had sent him. The farmer’s son told him his mother had burned up, that she had run through the streets like a flaming torch. Screaming. Jürgen knew the boy just wished to torment him, but he couldn’t escape the image. He began to hate everything. Even the good Lord. He nearly lost himself to it. His father was in prison at the time. The Gestapo had picked him up in the summer of ’41 for his membership in the Communist Party. On an early morning two months after the war ended, he appeared on the farm in the Allgäu to get his son. Jürgen shot out of the house and embraced his father, refusing to let go and crying so hard and for so long that even the farmer’s son had pitied him. Walther Schoormann hadn’t said anything then, and even now, he refused to speak about his time in prison. Since falling ill, however, he had taken to spending hours in the little garden shed, perched on a stool and looking out the barred windows, as though an eternal prisoner. Whenever Brigitte or Jürgen took his arm and tried to lead him out, he fought back. Jürgen was baffled by this, but Brigitte believed that his father was doing it perhaps to come to terms with something he’d experienced. Walther Schoormann swallowed and took another bite, lost in thought. The bread an
d cheese tasted good. As a former Communist and later businessman, he was a much-respected anomaly. He had always insisted, however, that his social attitudes were the very reasons for his success after the war. He wanted to help those people who had lost everything by offering affordable products. Affordable because he bypassed retailers, saved on sales and distribution, rent, and employees, and delivered straight to households. Within ten years, the “Schoormann Shop” grew into a company of 650 employees, whose proper treatment and social security Walther Schoormann always prioritized. In the mid-fifties, he built a house in the Taunus hills that turned out a little too big. Its many rooms served no purpose, and the pool was only filled that first year. The blue-tiled basin remained drained and deserted after that. Now, five years after Walther Schoormann remarried—one of the underwear models from the Schoormann catalog, thirty years his junior, worldly and ever optimistic—there was at least one person in the house who appreciated the luxury. The pool was filled with water once more, and Brigitte swam her daily laps. The smell of chlorine gently pervaded the house again. Eva would live here too, and maybe even swim, Jürgen thought. Eva. He knew she was waiting for his call. But something he could not pinpoint—nor wanted to—was holding him back. Jürgen had wanted to become a priest since childhood. The captivating rituals, numbing smell of incense, magnificent robes, and infinitely towering naves had fascinated him. And God undoubtedly existed. His devout mother supported his inclinations and played Mass with five-year-old Jürgen. She sewed him a purple cassock, and when he stood at the little table in his room and intoned “O Lamb of God . . .” she represented the congregation and humbly responded, “Hosanna.” Lit candles and incense were the only things he was not allowed. His father, an unwavering atheist, always disparaged the performances. And when, shortly before his final exams in secondary school, Jürgen expressed his wish to study theology, father and son found themselves at odds. Ultimately, Walther Schoormann deferred to the wishes of his late wife. Jürgen was free to begin his studies. But everything changed two years ago. Walther could no longer be left alone, the company suffered marked losses under a succession of new managers, and Jürgen traded in his life plan for his father’s lifework. But if he was honest, the idea of celibacy had increasingly concerned him. Eva. She had come to the office a few times to translate correspondence with their Polish suppliers. The first thing he noticed was her hair, which she wore in an updo, rather than a more current style. There was something touchingly antiquated and naive about her, he found. She would take direction—she would behave in subservience to her husband. He wanted to have children with her. Only he wasn’t sure what would happen when he confessed to his father that Eva’s family ran a restaurant on Berger Strasse, of all places. It helped that the Bruhnses were Protestants. But a restaurant in the “merry village” of Bornheim? No matter how innocent Eva was or how vehemently Jürgen stressed that their business was in the decent section of the street—anything on Berger had to be a flophouse! Walther Schoormann was not only a socialist businessman, he was also one of the rare examples of a prudish Communist.

  “Jürgen, what’s so funny? Can I get in on the joke?” His father looked at him directly, his eyes clear, as though a line in his brain had been reactivated. Jürgen set down his silverware.

  “Do you know what Schurick wanted to include in the catalog? An electrical device that pokes holes in eggs. Apparently it’s all the rage in America.”

  His father smiled, and Brigitte shrugged. “I’d buy one.”

  “Because you’d buy anything.”

  Walther Schoormann took Brigitte’s hand and gave it a quick, but loving, kiss, then held on to it. Jürgen looked past the two into the snowy yard, which resembled a park. The outdoor lamps wore snowy caps. The bushes were still. He had to call Eva.

  Eva sat at her desk, an extremely useful piece of furniture, and made an attempt at a letter to Jürgen. She voiced rage and disappointment and threatened blackmail, while also attempting to spark love and desire for her and her body and her virginity (which, of course, he didn’t know no longer existed). It was useless. She crumpled up another piece of paper, sat there for a moment, at a loss, and then pulled the business card David had left out of her pocket. She turned it indecisively. There was a knock on the door, and Annegret came into the room. She was wearing her powder pink dressing gown and hadn’t put on her face or done her hair. Eva welcomed the interruption. She put the business card on the table.

  “Don’t you have work?”

  “I have off. I worked a double shift yesterday.” Annegret dropped heavily onto Eva’s bed and leaned back against one of the posts. She’d found a package of pretzel sticks in the pantry, and she pulled them out by the dozen and snapped them off in her mouth.

  “We’ve got a newborn, a boy, two weeks old, who almost died. He was totally dehydrated.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes, it really isn’t funny anymore. Someone must be carrying these germs in. The doctors, they can’t be bothered about hygiene, but of course there’s no talking to them. I sat with the tiny bean for eight hours and kept giving him sugar water, one drop at a time. Little fellow was in pretty good shape again by the end.”

  Annegret’s eyes fell on the balled-up papers.

  “Has he still not been in touch?”

  Eva didn’t respond. Annegret hesitated. She pulled a pack of cards from the pocket of her dressing gown and waved them invitingly. Eva sat down across from her sister on the bed. Annegret shuffled the cards in a quick, practiced manner with her fat but supple fingers. She was wheezing slightly. Then she set the cards on the blanket between her and her sister. “Ask a question. Then draw a card.”

  “Will Jürgen marry me?”

  Eva concentrated and drew a card. Annegret took the stack and laid out the cards following some pattern. It was clear she knew what she was doing. Eva noticed that her sister smelled slightly of sweat. Annegret was excessively clean. Although their parents thought it a waste of water, she bathed daily. Nonetheless, she could never quite rid herself of the faintest whiff of pea stew set out in the sun. Eva was filled with affection as she watched how earnest Annegret was in laying out the cards for her. I love you, Eva wanted to say. But they didn’t say that to each other. And it would have come across as pity, condescension. She let it go. Annegret pulled another handful of pretzel sticks from the bag and crunched into them. She studied the arrangement of cards as she chewed.

  “Queen of hearts, upper left. You will become a queen, the wife of a millionaire. Provided you don’t make a mess of it. Here’s the seven of spades. That means there’s still a chance of botching things.”

  “That’s a real help, Annie. Where is Jürgen? What’s he thinking? Does he love me?”

  Annegret gathered the cards. “Now you shuffle. Then lay out the cards. The twelfth card is Jürgen.”

  Eva shuffled as though her life depended on it, and sent a few cards flying. She laughed, but Annegret remained solemn. Eva then laid out the cards and counted under her breath to twelve.

  “Why are you counting in Polish?”

  “Doesn’t that count?”

  “Sure it does, but I think it’s odd.”

  Eva paused before turning over the twelfth card. She looked at Annegret.

  “Do you know what’s really odd?”

  “All of life in its entirety?”

  “I’ve always known my numbers in Polish. I mean, even before I began studying translation. Perhaps I was a Pole in a previous life?”

  “Who cares about your previous life, little Evie-cakes? Show me your Jürgen. Come on now, show some courage!”

  Eva flipped the card. It was the eight of hearts. She looked at it, blind to its significance. Annegret grinned.

  “Well, my pretty little sister, be as dotty as you damn well please, because you’ll never shake this man off!”

  “And why is that . . . ?!”

  “The suit is hearts, and eight is the symbol of infinity.”

 
“Or handcuffs,” Eva said.

  Annegret nodded. “Either way, your days here are numbered.”

  Annegret collected the cards with her eyes lowered. She looked like a sad lump all of a sudden. Eva stroked her cheek. “Can I have a pretzel?” Annegret looked up and gave her a crooked smile.

  The sisters lay beside each other in the semidarkness a while later, chewing on the last of the pretzel sticks and watching the gently quivering Don Quixote on the ceiling.

  “Do you remember seeing the film in the theater?” Eva asked. “Where that old man attacked the windmill with his lance and got it caught in the sails. He was carried off and spun ’round and ’round on the windmill, screaming. I thought it was just terrible, it made me sick to my stomach.”

  “Children always find it unsettling when adults lose control.”

  “Annegret, should I take it on, this job? Translate in the trial, I mean. It’s—”