The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “Make my clothes with these,” she said when Mutti returned, not with groceries, or anything at all.

  “I’ve taught you to sew,” her mother answered, and took the opportunity of Vati’s absence to nap on the bed with her shoes on. After lying on the fabric to take crude measurements, Beate sewed herself a brown sack dress that smelled like Frau Eggers, whom Beate had started calling by her first name: Adela.

  The next day, girls at school commented on it. “Are you Russian?” one asked. Another did a dance that had something to do with gypsies. They were in math. A girl with a pig nose leaned in to Beate and sniffed. Another asked if she’d ever met Brezhnev.

  “The little Soviet,” classmates started to say.

  Though Beate knew it was an insult, the truth of it felt good. After girls called her this name, Beate stared at them with the unblinking frown of the soldiers who’d questioned them until those girls blushed into their laps. When a boy from a neighboring school followed her home one afternoon and said, “You like fucking, little Soviet,” Beate stared the same way and answered, “I’m taller than you.” A swallow stuttered down his throat, and the unreal feeling of Cologne slipped away. The next day, the girl with the pig nose walked past and didn’t say anything. Beate stared. “What?” the girl asked. “Adela Eggers,” Beate answered. She walked into literature class and sat at an empty table. Students saw her there, then squeezed into tables that were already full.

  She kept wearing the dress, blotting its stains each night and spraying its armpits with Frau Eggers’s lavender water. And after weeks of wearing it, as the credenza and television were taken to be sold, her father finally noticed. They sat at the kitchen table that would be gone in a week. A crooning from the apartment below may have been Elvis.

  “That dress,” he said. “You look like a Bolshevik.”

  “It’s just a dress,” Beate answered.

  “I think she made it,” Mutti said.

  For the rest of dinner Vati called her “the girl,” as if she were something that had come with the apartment and would also soon be sold.

  * * *

  The next morning, changing in the bathroom as was her custom, Beate put the dress on, took it off, and settled on a cheap blouse and skirt that Mutti had gotten her. At school she turned invisible again. She missed the confused fear of other girls when she stared or finished her math minutes before the rest of them and announced to the room: “I learned this already.”

  She took the dress out each morning and tried it on, put on her Moscow face, worked on her Leningrad walk. After she hadn’t worn it outside of the bathroom for a week, her father spoke to her normally again. One night he asked: “Child. How is school?”

  As she stared at her soft-boiled dinner, Beate realized that the perplexed looks from classmates mattered to her more than Vati’s talking or not talking to her. She wanted students to whisper, Soviet, then say, when she stared, It wasn’t me! As she told Vati about the algebra she was learning—not mentioning that she’d mastered it the year before—she decided to wear the dress again the next day.

  When she snuck out of the apartment in the morning, she thought of girls in her class punished for wearing short skirts. Her sneaking a different subversion. Walking into school, she held down a smile at the looks that at any moment might come.

  She walked up to the girl with the nostrils and said, “Notice anything?”

  Alarmed, the girl answered, “Are you making fun of me?”

  “My dress!” Beate answered.

  The girl found a classroom and slid inside.

  By week’s end, the Soviet comments petered out. When Beate stared at a girl one day, that girl handed her a pencil, then said, “Pencil,” slowly, and people smirked. When another student looked at Beate, then asked a friend, “What’s wrong with her?” the friend answered, “That’s just what she does.”

  At home, Vati went on about his terrible students. Being in a free country, according to him, meant it was their right not to know things. She tugged at the dress as she sat down to dinner, a muddy soup with fists of floating potato. She tried to get each swallow down before its taste registered. Vati complained about a student who’d confused Plato with a self-help book. Beate closed her eyes so as not to look at what she was eating. It had a fetid, toilet quality, and she was sure it would reverse course and pummel her tongue and nose. Beate lifted her spoon. As it veered toward her chin, soup slipped onto her lap. And her parents laughed. Beate dreamed of soup spilling on them instead. Imagined the soldiers arresting them rather than letting them cross to Germany’s democratic side, her parents in jail, Beate living with her aunt and her cousin Liesl, who taunted Beate but also made her laugh, Liesl, who knew when she needed an extra blanket or to be told to stop talking. “It’s nothing,” Beate said, and her parents tried to hold in their laughter, which turned their faces grotesque. She could tell them she hated this place, but they’d answer with pity. Could throw her bowl against the wall, but that would turn her into a culprit. Also, the bowls were being sold. As Beate went to the bathroom to rinse the dress in the sink, she thought of the other dresses she’d make in the week and a half they had left in Adela Eggers’s apartment. Mutti had found them a new place to live. Beate would have her own room, though it would take her an hour to get to school. As she scrubbed, more dresses became her singular remedy. Brown and gray and sweetly scented in Adela Eggers’s perfume. Sacks so shapeless that her classmates would have to react to them.

  * * *

  People outside bellowed as they left a bar. Vati snored in the other room. Beate lay on the sofa and tried to remember her bedroom in Kritzhagen, alarmed as parts of it already started to fuzz over. She would forget this place, too. The dresses she made would stick with her longer than anything about Frau Eggers, whose picture Beate still hadn’t seen, whose furniture was being plucked from the apartment each day, like ripened vegetables. Beate tried to memorize the ceiling she stared at each night as sleep hovered but refused to land.

  The bedroom door opened. Mutti tiptoed to the living room window. Her hair, usually up, tumbled past her shoulders in a way that felt girlish and strange. Streetlamps deepened her wrinkles.

  “Hi, Mutti,” Beate said.

  “You’re awake,” Mutti answered. Her shadow crowded the ceiling. Adela Eggers must have stared at this ceiling, too, must have fallen asleep on this sofa while reading or watching television. Maybe she’d died there.

  “My bed is not a real bed,” Beate said.

  “I sleep on some cushions,” Mutti answered. Perhaps she came out here most nights and stood next to Beate, moving hair from her sleeping daughter’s face. Or she stared out the window, trying to make sense of this city’s crowded streets and loud people.

  “I was here once years before,” Mutti said.

  “This apartment?” Beate asked.

  Her mother’s consternation was, in its familiarity, relieving.

  “I was close to your age and we were in Cologne, though I don’t remember why. We spent some time near the river.”

  “Did you like it?” Beate asked. Mutti didn’t answer.

  In those moments of near-sleep Beate sometimes imagined Adela Eggers walking into the room, seeing Beate there. Stop using my fabric, imaginary Adela would say. You’re dead, Beate would answer, waiting to see if the woman would turn angry or stare out the window as Mutti did, talking to Beate without looking at her.

  “Why did we leave Kritzhagen?” Beate asked.

  Outside, a car door closed. Beate hoped it was the woman she’d watched parking weeks before.

  “You know your father,” Mutti said.

  “Vati made the decision?” Beate asked.

  “Not only Vati.”

  “Did he say? Why?”

  “It was more than your father,” she repeated, though perhaps he’d declared one day that it was time—declarations his favorite form of talking—Mutti too afraid to challenge him.

  “Sleep, child,” her mother said.r />
  “I want to know,” Beate answered.

  Her mother’s shrug told her to sleep anyway.

  That day, Mutti had worn the same brown dress she’d had on when they’d defected. So Eastern-looking Beate couldn’t imagine their luck in getting to the other side. Unless Mutti hadn’t wanted luck, her mother won over by stories of the West as a dangerous animal. Her annoyance at Beate in the train station not about the fake street her daughter forgot, but about decisions others made. Maybe Mutti had worn that dress in hopes of being found out. Perhaps she tried and failed to find a way to stay. Maybe Mutti had gone into Beate’s room the day before they’d left and packed useless things for her daughter, certain they’d never make it across the border.

  2

  1990

  Michael and Adela got home to find their father gone. His books swept off shelves. Closet empty apart from a button-down and a pair of fancy shoes, remnants of the teaching job from which he’d been fired. Dust lined the closet floor.

  “Ein Wunder,” Michael said. A miracle. Because after years of Dad’s sulky pronouncements, after fights with their mother where he howled that he was leaving but never did, he finally took action. Michael grinned. He grabbed Dad’s shirt, pointed to the shoes with his chin. Adela picked them up and followed.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, annoyed, as she usually had a say on their wheres and whys.

  “Can’t it be a surprise?” Michael asked back.

  They walked to the lot behind the Grand Union. The rumor for as long as they could remember was that it was going to be turned into a park. But no park appeared, only collages of bottle caps and cigarette butts, and a car left there so long squirrels now lived in its engine. Michael—thirteen, Adela underneath him by a year and change—moved past all this. Stopping at a patch of dirt, he tried to dig a hole.

  “Isn’t the ground a block of ice?” Adela asked.

  “Don’t they bury dead people in winter, too?” Michael answered.

  A game of theirs was to speak only in questions. Their record was thirty-eight.

  When hacking at the ground did nothing, Michael covered Dad’s shirt and shoes with swathes of leaves, reminding Adela of the story they’d been obsessed with a year before about a dental hygienist who’d left her office late one night and disappeared. It had become a staple on the evening news. Search parties scouring forests. A befuddled sheriff who leaned too close to any microphone he talked into. When the woman’s body was found, in a spot like the one they stood in now, she was covered in what Michael had called a bikini of leaves.

  “Janet DeMarco,” he said, invoking her name. For a minute, Adela worried he could read her mind.

  They left the vacant lot and Michael turned quiet. Passing the convenience store where their mother sometimes worked, he blew into his fists. Two blocks more, and his ears brightened to bologna-pink. Michael stopped. He pulled on Adela’s sleeve.

  “He’s not coming back?” he asked.

  Dad’s most muscular annoyance was reserved for Michael, whom he saw as too girlie and afraid, too confused by what should have been easy.

  “Why didn’t you wear gloves?” Adela said.

  “Maybe Dad took those, too?” he answered.

  When she asked Michael if he wanted to head home, he shook his head. He was short and scrawny, with large eyes that were often tearing up, or bugged out for comic effect. Wild hair that the various gels failed to tame.

  “Come,” Adela said.

  They moved out of town, into the woods where they’d taught themselves to climb trees and once were certain they’d spotted a bear. Branches scraped their shoulders.

  Michael lifted himself into a towering pine, moving up the tree with the ease of climbing a ladder. Adela kept track of him via the whites of his sneakers, his hands stung with sun. Then he was gone. Branches he’d stepped on shivered. No other sign of him existed. After saying Michael’s name twice without an answer, Adela hoisted herself into the tree, kept going until she could see sky. She imagined him gone, not as Dad was—sleeping on his friend Raymond’s pull-out—but like Janet DeMarco or their recently dead grandfather in the open casket Dad had forced them to linger in front of at the wake, telling them over and over, “Wish him a proper goodbye.”

  “Michael,” Adela repeated.

  She pushed a bough from her face, her stomach hot and knotted. From her perch Adela saw roofs, the frozen river.

  “Janet DeMarco,” she said.

  “Again?” a voice whispered.

  “Janet,” she said again. “DeMarco.”

  “Polo,” the voice answered.

  “What?”

  “DeMarco Polo,” Michael said, and she heard him laugh, saw him folded into a crook of the tree like another of its branches. Sap stuck to Adela’s gloves.

  “You’re an asshole.” Her brother nodded, his laughter so loud it echoed.

  As Michael moved to stand, his feet slipped and he began to fall, pinballing past branches he’d just climbed. His feet kicked, arms flailed. Boughs hissed as he flew past them. Adela stared at the ground, waiting for him to slam against it, her brother dead or paralyzed, either state her doing.

  But then his hand caught a branch, stopping him as abruptly as he’d begun. His feet swung back and forth. The ground that might have ended him only a few feet away.

  “Fuck a duck.” Michael smiled, coughing and grinning and scratching his nose.

  Her brother was afraid of the wrong things. A perceived slight left him uneasy for days, though he treated near-injury as a joke. As his laughter rose to a whinny, as he swung back and forth and clicked his heels, Adela worried he’d turn dumber now that Dad had left them. She climbed down the tree, darted out of the woods and onto the frozen Hudson. She slid across its ice until frigid wind erased any thought of Michael dead or stupid.

  As Adela glided under a railroad bridge, Michael caught up with her. She tried to move faster, but he stayed in the periphery. He pointed a leg behind him, grabbed her scarf to steer her to a stop. After a comically bad spin, Michael lay supine on the ice. He folded his hands behind his head as if it were the most pleasant experience.

  “Aren’t you going to join me?” Michael asked.

  Though he presented himself as a joke, there was worry he tried to cover. Maybe it hit him that he’d come close to real injury. Michael afraid that he hadn’t been afraid. His brow tilted toward her.

  “Isn’t your ass freezing?” Adela asked.

  Michael listed other frozen body parts. Adela lay down next to him.

  Michael scooched until their shoulders touched. And Adela understood then that he knew he’d been stupid, that he was asking her to forgive him. She pushed her shoulder into his until he pushed back and leaning against each other turned into a game.

  * * *

  They got home to the German Lady making dinner. They called their mother that behind her back, or when she wasn’t paying attention.

  “Thought you were working tonight,” Adela said.

  “You can’t just scare a person,” the German Lady answered. She leaned in to the stove, which took up much of their tiny, grease-marred kitchen.

  The German Lady was tall and meatless, a mirror to Adela except for the straightness, the blondness of her hair. Steam dampened her face. She looked younger than her thirty-four years.

  Sitting down, their mother moved food around her plate in lieu of eating. She asked questions about school, only to interrupt with a story about Dad’s cousin she’d seen at the supermarket who’d asked about their father as if he still lived with them. Michael asked how she’d answered. Their mother moved to the window, lit a cigarette, and said, “Is it Wednesday?”

  They finished eating, and the German Lady sent them to bed. It was 7:15.

  “You can’t just scare a person,” Michael whispered through the vent connecting his room to Adela’s. It glowed on her wall like a tiny hearth.

  “He’s not coming back,” Michael added, and Adela could tell h
e was happy.

  She thought of Dad teaching her complicated words, or asleep in his friend’s living room. Also of Michael, had he not found a branch to stop his fall. But as her brother kept talking, Adela remembered his excitement when he’d buried Dad’s clothes and lay on the ice listing parts of him that were certainly frostbit. Adela tried to put that feeling on, as if it were a sweater to borrow.

  * * *

  In that same week—along with Dad’s retreat and an ice storm that reduced Glens Falls to a skating rink—came the next miracle. A registered letter telling the German Lady that the house she and her parents had left decades before was hers again. She spent days scouring that letter. Read parts of it out loud. Sometimes she talked to it, saying, “Yes” or “No” or “I don’t know what you’re telling me.”

  Ice thickened until they couldn’t see through their windows; branches shattered on the sidewalk. And in those handful of days when they ate everything in their pantry, when the German Lady reread the letter’s most complicated sentences a dozen times, Adela and Michael learned a whole set of words they hadn’t known in either English or German: Notary and collateral. Indefeasible.

  Weeks passed. Ice lost out to a thin sunshine. The German Lady went to her jobs at the Laundromat and as a crossing guard with the letter in her pocket, folding and unfolding it so often its creases softened to fabric. She taped pictures of the house from when she was young onto their refrigerator. When Adela asked what she planned to do with it, the German Lady answered, “I’m still thinking.”

  Michael stopped in front of the photos, to point out some detail he noticed or invented.

  “I think that’s the shadow of our grandmother in that window,” he said one night as they ate cereal for dinner.

  “I think that’s the shadow of your ass,” Adela answered, and Michael laughed in the girlish way she’d expected their year and a half of junior high to have strangled. (Years before, Adela had bypassed an academic year to join Michael’s grade.)