The German House

by Annette Hess

  “Daddy hasn’t been singing any Christmas songs this year,” he replied.

  “He always sang them wrong, anyway.” Eva began to sing, “While shepherds watched their clocks at night,” but she got a lump in her throat. She swallowed.

  Stefan didn’t laugh either, and slid off the bed. He stood before her on the cheap rug and asked her bluntly, “What did Mummy and Daddy even do?”

  “Nothing.”

  How could she explain to her brother just how true that answer was?

  When Eva brought Stefan to the front door and pulled the orange hat back over his ears, he said, “I don’t want the bike or the dog. I don’t want any presents. I just want you to come home for Christmas.”

  Eva gave Stefan a quick hug and quickly opened the door to the stairwell. He went out and trotted down the steps. Eva watched the orange hat slowly disappear.

  A few days before Christmas, Eva received a piece of official mail: her visa for a four-day trip to the Polish capital had been approved. Eva went straight to a travel agency; the older woman, who also had a pine arrangement with a lit beeswax candle on her desk, shook her head incessantly as she paged through tables and made phone calls. It was impossible, she said. Too short notice. And certainly not by way of Vienna; those flights had been booked for weeks already. Was she not aware it was Christmas? Eva didn’t respond to her stupid questions. But ultimately the woman managed to cobble together a connection that was inconvenient but doable. Eva packed her bags, which also proved a challenge. Nothing fit anymore. The skirts slid off her hips, the jackets hung in loose folds around her torso. Wearing her pale plaid wool coat was like standing inside a tent. But Eva liked her slow disappearance, she liked running her hands over her back and feeling every last rib. She thought it only appropriate.

  Eva flew to Berlin-Tempelhof on a full flight. The woman innkeeper at the Auguste, a hotel on a cross street to Kurfürstendamm, eyed Eva warily: she mistrusted all women traveling solo. Eva ignored the look. She lay down on the bed in her room and listened to the distinct voices coming from next door. (“If you don’t want to buy me the stole, that’s your decision. But this one time I really hoped you wouldn’t let me down!” a woman’s voice yelled.) Eva got back up and left the hotel. She mindlessly followed the people and lights on the street and ended up at the Christmas market set up in the shadows of the ravaged Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Strains of “O Du Fröhliche” could be heard. It smelled like food everywhere. Grilled sausages, candied almonds, chicken. Greasy. Eva forced herself to eat a bratwurst at one of the stands. She thought of Schipper’s sausages at the Christmas market back home. Every year she ate one of those with Annegret, enjoying the delightful feeling of doing something forbidden, because their father was convinced that Schipper the butcher was a swindler. Eva stood opposite two tiny old people—they barely reached the top of the standing table. They were not speaking, each concentrating instead on their food, although they did bite down and chew their sausages in unison. When the woman finished her mustard, the man held out his paper plate, which still had mustard on it. He’s done that a hundred times before, Eva thought. Not far from them, a brass band began playing “Unto Us a Time Has Come.”

  “This is the most beautiful Christmas carol,” the woman commented.

  The man looked at her and smiled. “You don’t say.”

  The ensemble played well, with far fewer slips than the group Eva and Jürgen had once laughed at so uncontrollably. Then the woman began to sing in a quiet, unsteady voice.

  Unto us a time has come,

  And with it brought an awesome joy.

  O’er the snow-covered field we wander,

  We wander o’er the wide, white world.

  ’Neath the ice sleep stream and sea,

  Whilst the wood in deep repose doth dream.

  Through the softly falling snow, we wander,

  We wander o’er the wide, white world.

  From on high, a radiant silence fills hearts with joy,

  While under astral cover, we wander,

  We wander o’er the wide, white world.

  And her husband watched her as she sang, and listened.

  Eva suddenly knew what to do. She had passed by a phone booth earlier. She retraced her steps, entered, picked up the receiver, tossed coins into the slot, and dialed a number she knew by heart. It crackled and tooted. She waited. Tooot-tooot-tooot. And then finally, “Schoormann residence.”

  It was Frau Treuthardt’s self-assured voice.

  “Good evening. This is Eva Bruhns . . .”

  “How may I help you?”

  “I would like to speak with Jürgen, please.”

  “Herr Schoormann is away on business. He won’t return until tomorrow. Would you like to speak with Frau Schoormann?”

  “No. No, thank you. But where is he? Is he reachable elsewhere?” A lengthy pause followed. “I . . . I was his fiancée.”

  “He’s in Vienna, at the Hotel Ambassador.” She sounded affronted.

  “Thank you, and—”

  But Frau Treuthardt had already hung up. Eva leaned against the glass wall; the booth stank of urine and damp ash. She counted her change, then asked the operator to connect her with the Hotel Ambassador. The front desk suggested she try reaching Herr Schoormann in his room. The phone crackled and tooted again. The coins dropped. Eva was about to hang up, the receiver suspended above the cradle, when she heard Jürgen’s voice. “Yes?”

  Eva still hesitated.

  “Hello? Who’s there? Brigitte?” Jürgen asked.

  Eva brought the receiver back up to her ear, her heart pounding heavily. “It’s Eva.” Jürgen didn’t respond. “I’m in Berlin, on my way to Warsaw, and I was just at the Christmas market, and I just wanted to talk to you,” she continued rapidly. The final coin clattered, and Eva inserted a mark.

  “What are you doing in Warsaw?”

  “There’s someone I want to look for, a prisoner from the camp. The lead prosecutor found him and called me.”

  “And why? Why . . . ?” The connection sputtered and began to echo. Why? Why?

  Eva remained silent and added another mark. “I don’t have much change left.”

  “Can I call you back?”

  Eva examined the pay phone and found a metal plate engraved with the number at the bottom. “That must be it.” She read off the numbers for Jürgen, then they both fell silent. “We can still talk,” Eva said. “I already paid.”

  But they both waited and listened to the clicking over the line. The final coin tumbled, and Eva quickly said, “Wouldn’t you like to come to Warsaw?”

  Click. Tooot. Eva hung up and waited. She watched the lights of passing cars through the streaked glass of the phone booth. The headlights turned into stars, then burned out. At last the phone made a strange buzzing noise. Eva answered. “Hello?”

  “It’ll be tricky with the visa,” she heard Jürgen’s voice say. Eva was silent. Outside it began to snow.

  EVA WAS UP by five o’clock the next morning. The border crossing, the woman at the travel agency had told her, would take at least two hours. The train to Warsaw departed from Ostbahnhof at ten thirty-five. Eva got out of the subway at Friedrich Strasse. Armed border guards patrolled the station, scrutinizing everyone they passed. Eva walked up to a booth and pushed her documents through a narrow opening. The young uniformed man behind the glass studied her identification, visa, and passport photo for an unnecessarily long time, only to wave her through impatiently. Eva walked down tiled passageways that seemed to have no end. It smelled like the zoo back home. Like the hippo area, where the hippos emerged from their “poop soup,” as Stefan called it, an expansive mass surfacing and just as slowly opening their enormous mouths, as though they wanted to devour the entire Bruhns family.

  Eva came out of the catacombs on the eastern side and blinked in the winter glare, as if she had been underground for weeks. She had never been to East Germany. She was curious about life there, about the people’s ea
rnest activity. Everyday life existed here too. For its citizens, the GDR was normal. Eva recalled the two lawyers from the East who had represented joint plaintiffs in the trial. It always seemed to her that they behaved as if they had a handicap, as if they especially had to prove themselves. They always spoke a bit more loudly, more insistently, than the other lawyers. An hour later, the train was clattering its way out of East Berlin. Eva looked out the window and tried not to think about the other trains. Cranes twirled on the horizon, as though the wind was carefully playing with them.

  After they crossed the border into Poland, the snowy fields grew larger, the forests endless. Later, in the dining car, Eva drank a beer that was so flat, bitter, and lukewarm that her father would’ve thrown it in the waiter’s face. The waiter was exceptionally friendly, though, bowing to Eva with a flourish of his white napkin. When he discovered that she spoke Polish, he couldn’t contain his delight. And by the time they pulled into the capital’s central station, Eva knew his whole life story and even more about his brother, who’d had a lot of rotten luck in life. The ladies were his bane.

  The hotel was a modern high-rise. Eva had stayed here before, two years ago, when she traveled with the executive board of a machinery company as their interpreter. She and the director’s secretary were the only women. The secretary warned Eva about her boss: he made a pass at everyone. And sure enough, that evening at the bar, the man took a seat beside Eva and launched into his jokes. He was entertaining and told such funny stories that Eva couldn’t help but laugh. Suddenly his tongue was in her mouth. She was in such high spirits and drunk. She wanted to finally experience it for herself, and took the company director up to her room. He’d been her first.

  Now, Eva couldn’t sleep. Her room was on the third floor, right above the lobby. She could hear muffled dance music coming from the neighboring bar. She thought of Herr Jaschinsky and of how he had lost his daughter, the girl with the funny nose. The Beast had summoned her for interrogation, because she was supposedly passing on secrets. She was shot three days later at the Death Wall. Eva stared at the gray nighttime ceiling and missed her Don Quixote. To be perfectly honest, she didn’t know what she was doing in this city. The closer she came to her goal, the less she understood the purpose of this trip.

  The next morning, Eva walked down a lively street with many small businesses, lined up like a string of beads: shoes, potatoes, coal, milk. It was cold, the air a hazy gray, and people wrapped their faces with scarves and hid them under fur hats. It’s snowdusting, Eva thought, as she scanned the numbers on the doors. She knew it wasn’t flakes of ice floating through the air, though, but rather bits of soot belched out of the countless chimneys dotting the rooftops. The hairdresser’s was number seventy-three. Eva spotted it on the other side of the street and froze. Her heart was pounding. She hadn’t managed to eat any breakfast, and now she had a knot in her stomach. The words “Salon Jaschinsky” were written in blue above the door. It was a small shop, and hanging in the front window were two pastel photographs of a woman and a man with hairstyles like cast metal. Like helmets. Two figures moved inside the salon, one a younger woman with towering teased hair who was serving a client. The other was an older, gray-haired man sweeping. Herr Jaschinsky. Eva crossed the street.

  A little bell tinkled above the door. The young woman, who was shaving the back of her client’s neck with a straight razor, didn’t look up as Eva entered. In practiced motions, Herr Jaschinsky took her coat and hat and led her to one of the chairs. A numbing smell of soap and hair tonic pervaded the room; the shop was utterly spotless. Eva sat down, and in the mirror, she could see a little girl bouncing excitedly in a chair, Herr Jaschinsky watching her with a smile. She turned to him. He returned her gaze languidly, his eyes magnified behind his thick lenses.

  “What will it be today?”

  Eva began haltingly: she was from Germany. Herr Jaschinsky started, then took out Eva’s updo. He began to brush her hair in practiced motions.

  “Shampoo and trim the ends?”

  Eva felt naked. But she was determined and continued, “We’ve met. I was still a child, and my mother brought me along. To the salon. At the camp.”

  Herr Jaschinsky slowly kept brushing her hair. Then he paused and looked at the oblong scar above Eva’s ear, where the hair didn’t grow. He lowered the brush, his face ashen, and for a moment Eva feared he might faint. The young woman looked over. Eva turned her gaze up toward Herr Jaschinsky.

  “I want to ask your forgiveness,” she said quietly. “For what we did to you. You and your daughter.”

  Herr Jaschinsky peered down at Eva, but she couldn’t tell what was going on inside him. Then he regained his composure, shook his head. He started brushing her hair again, more vigorously than before, and said, “You must be confusing me for someone else. I was never at any camp. So, what will it be today?”

  “I’d like for you to cut off all my hair and shave my head. Please.”

  Herr Jaschinsky’s expression hardened. He set aside the brush. The young woman, whose client had left the shop, came up and asked something Eva didn’t catch. Herr Jaschinsky waved her off.

  “I won’t do that,” he then said to Eva. “It isn’t right.”

  He strode over to the coat rack and retrieved Eva’s coat and hat. He came back to Eva, who was still sitting in the chair, and held out her things. He looked at her resolutely. She nodded, twisted up her hair, and stood. The little bell above the door tinkled.

  Inside the shop, the young woman stepped up to Herr Jaschinsky. He stood by the window, watching Eva in her pale plaid coat disappear in the haze. He looked agitated, and tears welled up in his eyes. The young woman had never seen her boss like this. Perplexed, she asked who that woman was. He didn’t respond.

  “What did that woman want?” She put a hand on his arm. Herr Jaschinsky calmed down some. “What did she want from you?”

  He turned away from the window. “Consolation. They want us to console them.”

  Eva ran down the street; everything around her seemed louder and more garish than before. The city seemed adversarial to her. She ran faster. She was out of breath, kept running. Her feet hurt, and her hair came undone beneath her hat. She wheezed, her pulse hammering. She ran and ran, as if running away from something. She eventually had to stop. She struggled for breath where she stood, in front of a monument apparently honoring some Polish national hero. Her chest ached, and she coughed, then gagged and swallowed. She sobbed suddenly in despair and forced herself to admit what Herr Jaschinsky had truly said to her, which was not, “It isn’t right.” What he’d meant was, “It isn’t your right.” Eva stared, breathing heavily, up at the stone figure covered in a thin layer of snow like icing. Its eyes looked back coldly. Eva realized now that she truly didn’t have any concept of the life, love, and pain of others. The people who had been on the right side of the fence would never comprehend what it meant to be imprisoned at that camp. Eva felt ineffable shame. She wanted to cry, but couldn’t. An ugly wheezing was all that crept out of her throat. I have no right to cry, either. Hours later, when Eva finally found her way back to the hotel, the concierge had a message for her.

  The next morning, Eva waited in terminal two at the airport for the delayed flight from Vienna. She walked back and forth outside the barrier and wasn’t sure whether to be excited or nervous. Whether what she had blurted out so spontaneously was a good idea. But when the board registered that the flight had landed and the first passengers emerged from behind the light blue wall, and when she glimpsed Jürgen—his tall, dark figure—he appeared so familiar to her that she broke into a smile of relief. Jürgen was also moved by the sight of her, something she could tell the moment they spotted one another from across the barrier. And as he stood facing her, she discovered something new in his eyes: openness. They didn’t know how to greet each other after such a long time. They ended up shaking hands.

  The childlike roundness in her face has gone, Jürgen thought. Then he asked,
“Don’t you eat anymore?”

  They waited at the carousel together for his suitcase. A little hatch in the wall industriously discharged pieces of luggage that then twirled onto the belt as though being displayed on a cake plate. Jürgen’s suitcase never appeared. They went to one of the counters, where they were told to go have a cup of coffee and come back in an hour.

  Eva and Jürgen stepped into a futuristic café of chrome and glass that overlooked the airfield. They sat down beside each other on a bench upholstered in silver leatherette and took in the view. Pale clouds were gathering on the horizon, the skies above promising snowfall. Jürgen told her that during his flight he had read in the paper that the people setting fire to baby carriages in Eva’s neighborhood were caught. It was a group of students, brothers in a fraternity apparently. They stated that they did it to draw attention to the threat foreigners and migrant workers posed, and to the imminence of miscegenation.

  “And were they arrested?” Eva asked. They had to pay damages, Jürgen responded. There wouldn’t be any trial, though. The whole thing was being written off as a boyish prank. Eva looked at Jürgen incredulously. Yes, he said, and it seemed the students’ influential families played some role in it too. Eva took a sip of her coffee, which looked blue in the café lighting.

  “That’s terrible.” Then she told Jürgen about her visit to Jaschinsky, what he had said, and what she had realized.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Eva,” Jürgen said. “You’re very brave.”

  Eva looked at him and again; it seemed like he had changed. He seemed vulnerable, like he’d set aside some heavy armor. Jürgen briefly stroked her cheek, then her hair.

  “I, for one, am quite pleased that Herr Jaschinsky reacted the way he did.”

  “How long does your visa last?” Eva asked.

  “I fly back tomorrow morning. It might be the last Christmas Eve I have with my father. He and Brigitte didn’t go to their island this year, for the very first time.”

  “How is your father doing?”

  “He can’t speak anymore. No, that’s not quite true. There are two sentences he still says: ‘Please help me’ and ‘You’ll never get me to talk.’ Like in a spy movie.” Jürgen laughed cheerlessly. Eva was silent. He looked at her. “What about you? You don’t want to see your family?”