The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “A beautiful shadow, then,” he said, and poured flakes into a bowl.

  Other nights, through the vent, he’d whisper, “Miracolo” or “Himalang.”

  “How do you know that word in so many languages?” Adela asked.

  “You want to hear it in Russian?” Michael asked back.

  Though he treated the house as a joke, it did feel like a miracle. Just like Dad’s departure and the end of the Berlin Wall they’d watched on television, some sections crowded with people, other parts keeling over like rotten trees. The stories that suddenly spilled from their mother about her seaside city were a miracle of a different sort. Because as she talked, she turned happy. And her stories reminded them that their mother had had an entire, illustrious life before the one they lived now in freezing, aluminum-sided upstate New York.

  “What if I did want to hear it in Russian?” Adela said.

  “What if I’m not a Communist?” Michael answered. “What if Dad’s actually a Communist? Maybe that’s why he’s such an asshole.”

  As Adela imagined their father in Red Square, in line to wait on bread or other rations, what struck her was how little she actually knew him. He was a presence, a few emotions she either appreciated or avoided. But if someone had asked what his favorite color was, she’d have no idea. If they’d wanted to know what made her father happy, she’d have to guess. If someone wondered if he was as mean as the stories Michael told, she would have answered, Sometimes. But he’s other things, too.

  * * *

  For as long as Adela could remember, she and Michael had been treated as a single entity. Their parents called them “the children.” Said their names so quickly that they sounded like one word. When people asked if they were twins, Michael always answered, “Yes.” On nights their parents fought, Michael slipped into her room and asked Adela to read to him. Soon he’d be asleep and she’d keep reading, stopping only to answer questions he mumbled in his sleep. On days Dad bristled at Michael, Adela reminded him of their father’s asshole qualities. When boys at school called him out for the way he threw or walked or chewed, Adela defended him with her growing repertoire of filth. Cunt bag and dick sweat. Breath that smells like your mother’s asshole.

  Michael paid her back with invention. In summer, when they spent hours at the library for its order and air-conditioning, she’d recite passages from romance books for him to act out, Michael shifting from farmhand to mistress with an adjustment of posture or expression. She’d wander down an aisle to find book spines he’d rearranged, their titles turned into strange sentences. Where the Wild Things Are Housekeeping. A Clockwork Orange Juice Lover’s Best Recipes. At home he snuck notes into the books and magazines Adela couldn’t do without. He wrote single words, or question marks. Scribed fortunes from when they ordered Chinese. “Ordering Chinese” became a joke they shared. When their father was in a mood, they’d talk about its scope and size with code about a sweater. With each joke, each night one stayed up when the other couldn’t sleep, each fight between their parents that they listened to, then treated as entertainment, they didn’t turn into the twins people pegged them as, but rather a system. Her protection for his amusement. Her understanding of the world for his boundless imagination. His jokes about the miracle of their father’s departure in moments Adela worried that she missed him.

  * * *

  A whisper woke Adela up. At first she assumed it was Michael. But as she heard it again, she shifted from asleep to awake and saw the German Lady standing at her door. Her mother slouched. She did that more now that Dad—and his beliefs about good posture—had left them. Adela turned on the light. Something in the color of the German Lady’s face made Adela worry she was ill. When their mother knocked on Michael’s door, Adela said, “He sleeps like a dead person,” went into his room, and flipped on his lights. Michael didn’t have a shirt on. On his chest, a sudden garden of hair. Adela shoved his shoulder.

  “Fuck a duck,” Michael said.

  His face was lined from sleep. With the lilt of his eyes and his chin’s sharp conclusion, she saw the beginnings of handsomeness. Adela picked a shirt off the floor and threw it at him.

  As the German Lady stared at them, Adela wondered if Dad had found someone new or if she’d been fired from one of her jobs. She imagined the three of them sharing a single can of soup, the one bath they’d run and take turns using, as if they were pioneers. Adela flicked through other tragedies. There were no grandparents left to die. Their only aunt lived in California, and they hardly knew her. Adela’s former fear of nuclear war had vanished several years before, after America and Russia had chosen to play nice. She felt dumb as to what might be happening.

  “What time is it?” Michael asked.

  “Late,” Adela said.

  “That wasn’t a question,” he answered.

  “I want to say,” their mother said, then stopped.

  Adela grew frightened for the second time in a week and worried that fear—like her brother’s chest hair—was a sudden, certain part of her.

  “We should go there,” the German Lady said finally.

  She pulled the letter from her pocket, its text framed in her handwritten notes.

  “A house with so many rooms,” Michael said. The German Lady cupped her elbows.

  Michael marched into the kitchen, where pictures of the house hung. He pointed to a window, asked the German Lady what lived beyond its shimmer.

  “That was an office, I think,” she said.

  When he pointed to another, Mutti answered, “That’s one of the guest rooms.”

  “One of the guest rooms?” Michael balked. “So many rooms, yes, Dela?”

  She nodded, thinking of the German the three of them spoke to complain about prices at the grocery store or when Dad wasn’t home. As the worry in the German Lady’s face began to fade, she kissed Michael’s forehead and went for her daughter next, though that sort of affection didn’t bring Adela comfort but felt as if someone had walked into the bathroom with her to see what she might do there. But as Adela let her, she wondered what it would be like to give and get hugs easily, to feel a hand on her shoulder and know she’d gotten something good.

  * * *

  Adela liked to think later that she was wooed by Michael’s newfound excitement, so overblown that, the next time their neighbor Darren Cross called him a sissy faggot as he often did, Michael didn’t run or look at the ground but smiled until Darren said, “What?” over and over. Without Dad to contend with, the three of them switched exclusively to German. Their mother filled their walls with lists of words they didn’t know. Michael studied them as if in a museum. “Ich empfange, du emfängst, er emfängt,” he mumbled. “Er log, wir logen,” he repeated as they walked to school. Letters came each week about the house and the savings account that would be returned to her, about how to get their water turned on. The German Lady read those out loud, too. German turned so natural that one afternoon in history class—the only one they shared—Michael raised his hand and answered a question in a long German sentence. Even the sleepiest members of the class perked up with interested confusion.

  “We’re not reading Mein Kampf,” Mr. Hart said.

  Michael reddened. But the tears this might have led to in the past didn’t come. Instead, the red that filled his cheeks and ears vanished, and Michael stared at Mr. Hart until their teacher turned uncomfortable and gave the class notes to write down.

  There were days when the German Lady’s certainty was the biggest thing in the room, and she’d talked about the house’s extra rooms and the friends from elementary school she’d find phone numbers for. Other times, she mumbled about the move as if they’d been forced into it, and she enrolled them in school in the States for the following year. When Adela asked about the enrollment, Mutti answered, “Just in case.”

  “Just in case what?” Michael asked.

  “You never know,” Mutti said, Adela answering back, “That’s just another way to say just in case.”

/>   Even then, Michael smiled at his sister with an unworried prescience, and Adela wondered if he knew something she didn’t, if he finally decided to embrace his role as a knowing older brother.

  But really, Adela wanted to believe that Germany would be different for them. She listened to stories Michael invented about the house’s dozen rooms, the sea they’d swim in until their stomachs were corseted in muscle. And she chose to believe him. Perhaps that was the beginning of it, that she pretended she could know things as good or terrible without seeing or hearing or touching them.

  * * *

  Landing in Germany on a mid-June morning, eyes burning from the sleep they hadn’t gotten, the three of them boarded a bus. German summer was foggy and cool. They passed squares of farmland; village structures clustered together like gossips. The bus crossed into what had recently been East. Buildings were skirted in graffiti. People there squinted at the bus with resigned annoyance, communism a disease they might never recover from.

  When they got to the house, its bricks weren’t bright, as they’d been in the photos, but the crumbling pink of a scab. Its long lawn slapped their knees. Adela walked into one room where mouse shit crowded its corners like blown snow. Discovered a pigeon flapping through another one and rushed to open a window. The bird flew out. Michael came in and said, “That bird’s a lucky fuck,” before he called the house a mansion and disappeared. There was none of the ornate wallpaper he’d whispered to her about, no friends from the German Lady’s childhood waiting to greet them. There wasn’t even electricity. The rotten smells of this half-emptied city, its cars small and old, left Adela feeling as if the plane had flown them into an earlier decade.

  At the first signs of evening, the German Lady, without saying good night, slipped into a bedroom and fell asleep on its floor. Michael kept exploring, kept calling Adela’s name. He found a second staircase and let out a pleased yelp, showed Adela which room he’d picked with a glee that left her feeling underwater.

  Adela went to sleep using a towel for a blanket, a balled-up sweater as her pillow. Mice skittered close to her. She took out the flashlight she’d brought, the books on Germany she’d taken from the Glens Falls library. She opened one about Goebbels. It included pictures of him at his high school graduation. More of his children that he’d killed. As she stared at his eyes and batwing ears, wondering if she could see kernels of murder in his features, Adela imagined now was then, this country in the midst of the campaign that became its undoing. She and Michael, with their father’s darker features, might have been mistaken for Jews, taken from the German Lady no matter how hysterically she’d fought for them. Adela felt a sluicing in her gut and moved her flashlight toward a noise. A mouse froze in its beam. Its eyes were black, its tail a fleshy pink.

  “Fuck this,” Adela said.

  She slipped past the room where the German Lady had been asleep for hours, toward the one Michael had chosen. Adela hoped he was awake, that the pitch-black strangeness of this place left him too terrified to move from where he lay on the floor. Hoped to take on the burden of having to comfort him.

  But as she knocked and walked in, when she tiptoed through the room until she found his shoulder, it was clear he was asleep. She pushed her toes into his arm, harder when he didn’t stir.

  “You awake?” she asked, and shone her flashlight at him. Michael was shirtless again. He squinted, then smiled, not knowing a smile was the last thing she wanted from him. He slept with a towel over his middle. Adela worried he might be naked underneath. He seemed disgusting then, with his sprouting hair and guileless smile and the towel that, with the smallest shift, would have shown her everything.

  “Flashlight,” Michael said, as if it were another gift the house had given them.

  “Remember when we sort of buried Dad’s clothes?” he asked.

  Michael propped himself on an elbow. His biceps flexed with the weight it held. Adela thought of Janet DeMarco in her killer’s trunk, the rocks and roots pushing into her back as he strangled her.

  “That was like five minutes ago,” Adela said.

  Michael’s smile grew and Adela understood he could not help her. She went back to her room, pulled another book from her luggage, and began to read about Elie Wiesel’s arrival in Auschwitz. She read as mice moved through the walls. She read and imagined the ache of hunger and cold and fear Wiesel felt as he was pushed from one place to the next, all the while smelling burning bodies. She read and thought of Dad, who’d decided to move to his sister’s in California, traveling without a change in language or currency. Burying Dad’s things felt stupid then. Perhaps he’d just forgotten them and wondered where they were.

  Adela stayed up reading until the sun rose. She heard water slide through their pipes, the chatty back-and-forth of birds. Listened to their stairs crack as someone walked down them. From her window, she saw Michael move out of their house and into the street. He stared left and right as if making some large decision. He chose left. Adela watched as he moved past the lot next door that must have once been a house, though now it was rubble, home to a dozen stray cats, also shrubs growing out of what used to be a wall.

  3

  In that first German week, Michael experienced more new things than he could keep track of, though vandalism and drinking until his center of gravity shifted topped the list. He leaned against a wall at a party held in a barracks that a year before had required security clearance. A place that had housed the Soviet troops that no longer existed, in a country that no longer existed, either. A dozen of his new friends moved through its halls, decorating every clean surface with spray paint. Michael was in the midst of a message about George Bush when Lena turned to ask if he was schwul.

  He’d known Lena for four days. Already, she felt as essential as a kidney.

  “Schwul is gay?” Michael asked.

  Lena was his first cool friend. His friends back in the States loved novels about the prairie; they joined clubs about government and French. Lena nodded. Behind them, someone filled a wall with a message about the fascist who worked at the grocery store.

  “Yes,” Michael answered. Lena put a hand on his arm and squeezed.

  He asked Lena how to say kidney in German, and they both started laughing, Michael so stoned his cheeks felt numb. Lena was striking, mean-looking. She wore large shirts that failed to hide the fact that she had an enormous chest. Michael spray-painted a kidney on the wall and her face returned to the flat expression Michael most associated with communism, along with the cheap cabinets he found in the empty houses he went into, the shapes of people’s glasses.

  In the next week, each of them would spray-paint kidneys on buildings for the other to find. When Michael passed one on his way to the store or the sea, breath thrummed against his ribs like the beating of wings.

  Lena found a room that was once a bathroom—toilets pulled from it like rotten teeth, only holes left. She crouched over one of those holes and peed.

  “Still schwul,” Michael said, when she returned.

  They wandered into a room bisected by candles. It carried the same musty coolness Michael used to associate with basements, though now it brought to mind the house the German Lady had inherited where she was hibernating at that very moment, where Adela read by flashlight.

  Someone brought a boom box. With the antenna angled just so, a university station from Lübeck came through. A song started. People tried and failed to sing along. Michael found this funny. His sister often accused him of finding too many things funny, as if it were something to monitor, like binge-eating or a tropical storm.

  “Now that you’re schwul, we can mess with them,” Lena said, eyeing a crew of young men standing against the opposite wall. Lena leaned on his shoulder, combed her fingers through his hair. Being touched felt amazing and Michael worried that he wasn’t schwul after all but just needed to be touched a certain way. But then he thought of Darren Cross, their neighbor back in Glens Falls, the cutoff shorts he always wore loose across his h
ips. Michael stopped that train of thought when he started to get hard.

  “Kidney,” Lena whispered.

  “Still schwul,” Michael said.

  His Glens Falls version would have thrown up had someone asked if he were gay, would have been too afraid of these barracks to have slipped inside. Michael tried to consider what had changed, grew bored with considering, and asked the room for a cigarette. One of the young men who’d been watching them was happy to oblige.

  * * *

  Michael walked home from the party with a teenager nicknamed Maxi Pad, who looked dubious when Michael told him what his English nickname meant. Maxi was tall, skeletal. He asked questions about places in New York Michael had never heard of. In the driveway, when Michael went to say goodbye, Maxi kissed him. His jaw unhinged. His tongue moved over and under Michael’s. The shock of what was happening was quickly replaced with a scraped-out feeling in Michael’s stomach. Maxi grabbed his hair. Michael pulled on Maxi’s earlobes.

  Then Maxi stepped back. He let out a single, hacking laugh. Michael wondered if he was being laughed at, realized he didn’t care. He kissed Maxi again. Some part of Michael thought of his father, though he wasn’t sure why. Probably because Dad would have found this kiss disgusting, or because he was too far away to know about Michael and the houses and the party he’d gone to. Or about the boy he’d just kissed, whose Adam’s apple was identical to his nose.

  Walking inside, Michael was blinded by a flashlight’s beam. For a moment he was certain he was being robbed. But then he remembered Adela’s newly hermetic existence and asked her, “What did you see?”

  “I’m not playing,” Adela answered.

  “An actual question,” he said, part of him hoping she’d seen that kiss, that she found him disgusting or unrecognizable.