The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  With the flashlight scorching his eyes, Michael couldn’t see her or the room they stood in. He wiggled his fingers through the beam.

  “Aren’t you going to ask what I’m doing?” he asked. When Adela didn’t answer, he pushed his fingers into a beak and said: “Shadow puppets.” Michael hoped she’d laugh or tell him he was an idiot. But the only answer came from a skittering mouse and an overgrown shrub that tapped one of their windows.

  Adela turned the flashlight off and Michael became differently blind, thinking of the short story she’d once read to him in which a dead man felt everything as he lay in his coffin—water dripping on his forehead, the snail’s-pace growth of his fingernails. But, as had happened to Michael a dozen times in this new city, when fear came to claim him, something stood in its way.

  “It was an actual question,” Michael said.

  He stepped out of the living room and, with hands for eyes, walked upstairs.

  He found his room with surprising ease. Lit the candles he’d melted onto his windowsill until the whole place glowed. Lying on his sleeping bag, Michael thought of Maxi’s mouth, Maxi’s hand on his chin. Also how American Adela would have kept the flashlight on his face as she explained to him exactly how he was being an asshole.

  * * *

  The looting had begun five days before the party, their mother asleep, Adela reading on the dust-grayed floor with no interest to see what lay outside. Michael was hungry, so he left in search of a store. Coming back from the grocery store, he found one house after another left behind. The first was a gallery of broken windows. Another had mail crowding its stoop. And the lawns, like their own, were long. Crickets clicked through them. Wind pushed and pulled and parted their blades. Though Adela had told him about this place before they’d moved here, Michael had doubted her when she’d insisted that, with the fall of the wall, Kritzhagen had gone from prom queen to old maid in a single season. But she’d been right. This shouldn’t have surprised him.

  The next house had furniture crowding its lawn. Michael moved across it, tiptoeing past a pile of rain-swollen cookbooks. Also a table, large enough for Michael and Adela and the German Lady. His jeans turned heavy with dew. Garbage flitted across the lawn like birds on water.

  Michael moved toward the house, with curtains in its windows they could use. As he opened its door, his fear lifted to a symphony. He stepped inside.

  Michael moved through the kitchen, where an unplugged refrigerator stood like a sentry. “Empty,” he said as he opened drawers. “Empty,” he repeated as he explored a closet. In one room he found a black-and-white magazine, communism’s toothless equivalent of a tabloid, and read in it about a novelist who’d dedicated his work to a state that no longer existed.

  In a bedroom he discovered a mirror. He removed his pants and underwear to gaze at the hedge of hair that had recently thickened above his dick. Michael turned hard. His dick of late had provided him with a new kind of helplessness, turning hard for small reasons or no reason at all. It also felt like some great invention, rescuing him from bouts of worry and boredom and shame. He masturbated fast and twice, barking out names of men he’d loved from a careful distance. Michael went into another empty house. Its owners had packed with less care. They left plates and pillows that he took, along with bags to transport his booty.

  When he returned home, weighed down with dishes and bedding and groceries, Adela said nothing about the pillows he’d brought with him. And the German Lady, when she finally got up, drank from a stolen water glass as if it had always been there. It was only later that day, Adela walking past a lamp he’d gotten, that she stopped, the dopiness she’d taken on since they’d landed in Germany gone for a moment, her familiar version such a welcome sight that he started to tear up as he did at commercials and award shows and when he watched a dog strain to shit in front of its owner’s audience. He dug his fingers into his pockets, pinched his balls until pain was his only horizon.

  “Why’d you get a lamp?” Adela asked.

  “To light things?” Michael answered.

  She blinked with slow confusion. His sister rarely did things slowly, was confused even less. But as they’d landed in Germany they’d had to wait for minutes while she located her passport. As they got to the house and Michael told her about its bedrooms, she acted as if the word bedroom were a foreign, strong-smelling food. What’s more, on their arrival in this place, Adela abdicated the responsibility that before she’d claimed so certainly it hadn’t seemed like a choice. She’d spent their first morning sitting on the floor, staring at Michael as if he were a window to look through. It left him annoyed or sad or some combination of the two.

  “We don’t have electricity,” Adela finally answered.

  “We will someday,” Michael said, and left.

  * * *

  On the flight over, while Mutti kept getting up to use the bathroom, Adela had read to Michael from her scrapbook of articles about their new city. One showed pictures of the Volksmarine shining on its shore. Another talked about the lengths its now-defunct government had gone to, to keep people from defecting. The one Michael remembered most explained that, with the falling of the wall, people who’d been kept in for decades began to leave. But it was the city’s emptiness that Michael now loved, streets he could walk down without a single car parked on them, houses as breathless as graves; the clerks at this or that store who greeted him with an overeager hello, this city a shelter dog ready to roll over and follow you forever if you approached with a soft voice and gentle hand.

  * * *

  On his second day of looting, Michael found a flat, rolling dolly. He rested a pair of chairs on it, also mixing bowls. At another house, he added a poster for a movie called Disco Story as well as a desk for Adela, who in their time in Kritzhagen still hadn’t left the house. He rolled the dolly down the street. A woman passed, walking her dog. When the dog sniffed the dolly’s contents, the woman apologized.

  “My things can handle a sniff,” he said, and she answered with a Samaritan smile that Michael added to his love for this city along with its rinky-dink cars and empty houses and old people always weeding their gardens.

  And the day after that, he slipped into a house and smelled spray paint’s sharp bouquet. A young woman, who turned out to be Lena, defiled a wall.

  “That word is crooked,” Michael said.

  She turned, with the slow resignation that she’d been caught.

  “You a cop?” she asked.

  “You an artist?” Michael answered.

  Lena lit a cigarette. Paint darkened her fingers.

  “What’s that accent?” she asked.

  “I’m from America,” he said.

  “I’m from Africa,” she answered.

  “I figured.”

  Amusement slipped across her face before she righted it. Michael repeated that the word was crooked. Lena told him to fix it. As he did, she talked about how she’d lived in Kritzhagen since birth, the biggest change in her life being when her family moved to an apartment three stories higher. Paint fumes burned Michael’s throat.

  They left the house and walked to the beach. Like everything in this city, it sat uninhabited. Its sand was pale, dunes walled by wind-sculpted trees. When Lena suggested a swim, she took off all her clothes. Mimicking her indifference, Michael undressed, too. They marched into the freezing water, negotiating jellyfish and food wrappers. They got out and toweled off with their T-shirts, went to a park where they smoked cigarettes and split a large can of beer.

  “My sister has that disorder when you stay inside all the time,” Michael said as they climbed onto side-by-side swings. “It’s not claustrophobia.”

  “The opposite of claustrophobia,” Lena answered.

  As their swings met, she handed him her cigarette, which Michael somehow grabbed, though when he tried to hand it back, it flitted to the ground. They moved onto their hands and knees until they found it, lying in the grass and lighting it again. Smoking felt like somethi
ng Michael had always done, as had exploring houses. When Lena invited him to a party, that, too, felt part of Michael’s most trusted routine.

  * * *

  In a house on Osloer Straße, Michael found andirons. The one on Rosenhof, a rack to dry dishes. There was the trio of houses that held a bounty of trashy magazines, also trash bags and a garden hose. The Werftallee place had nothing but carpet so sun-kissed that he went there several mornings in a row for naps and masturbation. Mine, Michael thought as he touched the walls of the Sonnenweg house. “Mine,” he said as he found a place that still had electricity.

  In another, Michael discovered an unused notebook. He wrote Kritzhagen on its cover. On its first page he mapped their street, marking the houses he’d gone to, what he’d gotten there. Each day he added more, peppering its margins with comments about bakeries or his favorite scraps of graffiti: Honecker is Your Boyfriend … This City is on Deep Discount. He piled his dolly with furniture, learned how to pack it so that it was aerodynamic and balanced. He brought home two wingback chairs and angled them in front of their fireplace, turning the living room from some anonymous room to his own. After days of sleeping on the floor (in her one venture out of the house, the German Lady hadn’t returned with beds or someone to turn on the electricity, but with sleeping bags), the chair’s cushions felt like what he imagined a massage might be. Fingers digging into his back, the smells of different lotions. Michael climbed up to his room and closed the door.

  * * *

  As he got home one afternoon, Michael found the desk he’d gotten Adela had been moved instead into his room. He stepped to her doorway. As usual, Adela sat on the floor, reading.

  “Good book?” Michael asked. His sister turned a page.

  A mouse moved into the room with a police officer’s impunity. Michael lobbed a pillow at it, watched it scamper away.

  “Don’t,” Adela said.

  It felt good to scare the mouse. Michael listened to their traffic through the walls at night, felt them crackle around his sleeping bag.

  “Are you a lover of mice now?” Michael asked.

  “Why’d you throw a pillow at it?”

  “Isn’t it a problem that they aren’t afraid of us?”

  “Afraid of us,” Adela repeated.

  “That was only three questions,” Michael said, and stepped toward his sister.

  He yanked the book from her hands. Slid the author’s photo to his crotch, cooing out the man’s name. Adela’s eyes—which had always seemed foxlike—reverted to round. “Elie,” Michael moaned. Adela put her hand out. “Elie,” he hissed, shoving the book toward his zipper.

  Prying the book away from him, Adela spun through a series of ugly faces to keep from crying. She began listing the family members Elie lost in the camps, along with the awful ways each of them died. Michael reddened at the details of a father’s slow starving, more as she told him about the gas chamber that ended his mother and sister.

  “I get it,” Michael said. Adela kept going.

  “Fuck a duck!” he added. She read passages out loud.

  Michael spun out of her room. He stomped down the stairs, landing in their vestibule with such force that the mousetraps he’d set there snapped. Upstairs, Adela’s voice kept droning.

  Michael ran outside, grabbed his dolly, and rolled it to one of the city’s more substantial hills. He lay across its wood, pushing against the ground until he picked up speed. Houses flew past. Wind cheered in his ears. Michael felt each bump in his hips, remembered Adela’s face as she talked about a woman Wiesel had seen shot by Nazis for walking too slowly. The dolly veered to one side. Michael shifted his weight to right it. Wiesel had witnessed infants hurled into furnaces, more thrown in the air for target practice. Michael’s face was inches from the pavement. “It’s centimeters now,” he mumbled just as a wheel caught in a gap left from a missing cobble. The dolly stopped, but Michael skidded across the pavement. Blood darkened his knees.

  “Fucking ass Elie!” he shouted. The dolly stopped in a gutter.

  As Michael lay on the pavement trying to catch his breath, the pain hit him. His left wrist burned. Flexing his fingers brought agony. In a nearby house, he found a bandanna to use as a bandage. As he used his good hand to bind the injured one, the ache rose to his elbow.

  Michael winced, trying to move his hand from side to side.

  At the grocery store, the clerk saw Michael and said what he always did: “How is my favorite customer?”

  Michael unwrapped the bandanna, showing off his wrist’s bracelet of bruises.

  “That’s something,” the man said.

  “It is,” Michael answered, a croak in his voice he couldn’t stave off. “And it needs some ice.”

  The man left, returned with a cup of ice. Michael spread it across the unwound bandanna, placed his wrist in the center of it, and tied it up again. He thought of the years when the German Lady took them to the ER with every fever, the taxis she paid for in quarters. Part of him wanted to find a hospital, its waiting rooms unoccupied, doctors doing crosswords as they dreamed of patients. But the ice, the bandanna, felt like enough. This city tugged self-sufficiency out of Michael, like a magician pulling an endless scarf from his mouth.

  * * *

  Later that night, after another party with Lena, Michael lay on their front lawn deciding whether or not to go inside. The flashlight glow of Adela’s window meant she was reading still, probably about Elie Wiesel. Perhaps, after he’d left, she’d allowed herself to cry, his sister who held certain emotions in as if that were the same as not feeling them; who read about their new city rather than walking outside to see and feel and smell the place.

  He finished a cigarette. Grass swayed past his chin. And as Michael contemplated standing, which in his stoned state was a marathon he hadn’t trained for, he heard the shush of footsteps. Under a nearby streetlamp, the German Lady appeared. She moved through its light and into their driveway. Since their arrival in Germany her uniform had been the same sweater, a mascara of crud. Mutti looked back to the street.

  “Not far,” a man’s voice said to her.

  The German Lady waved, then walked down the path Michael had cut through their yard. His mother had been out with a man.

  The drinks Michael had guzzled with Lena suddenly turned a corner, and he grew certain he’d throw up. As he lay there, stomach spinning, he thought of Adela’s hand on his back when he’d been sick before. His nausea thickened. Michael had humped her book. Adela had answered with a terrified expression, as if her new, strange self were something he’d done to her.

  Michael slid behind a shrub and quietly threw up. He pulled out a sheaf of grass, chewing on it in hopes of getting sick’s vinegary burn from his throat. It only made it worse.

  After standing outside their front door for close to a minute, the German Lady slipped inside. And as the house swallowed her, the sick in his stomach again gathering steam, Michael realized that this was the first time he’d seen his mother in days.

  4

  Adela stood in their vestibule. She wore ill-fitting jeans and a T-shirt from a race Dad had run. She smiled, and Michael veered between fear and excitement. Since he’d assaulted her book three days before, she hadn’t talked to him.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Can’t a guy buy groceries?” Michael answered.

  “Can’t his sister keep him company?”

  On their walk to the store they passed the house where Michael had gotten their kitchen table, another where he’d found all their cutlery.

  “This is it?” Adela asked, when Michael stopped outside the local grocery store.

  “You were expecting the Shangri-la?” Michael said.

  “You don’t even know what that is,” she answered.

  As they walked into the store, whose insides carried the muggy confinement of an attic, passing a box fan that flung detritus across the floor, Adela seemed to return to him.

  “What the fuck is this du
ng?” she said, picking up a dark brick of bread.

  “What the fuck is this feces?” Michael held up a jar of pickled fish.

  “This excrement?” Adela asked and translated ingredients. “Number one: goose giblets. Number four: blood.”

  They whispered in English. When Adela wanted his attention, she touched Michael’s sleeve. He wanted to welcome her back, but felt afraid that, like watching some wild animal, her former self might notice him noticing and dart away.

  On the walk back home, her quiet returned. He pointed out the department store where everything was practically free. Adela answered by telling him about Elie marching barefoot through a blizzard, this story more real to her than the church they passed, graffiti rising to its steeple.

  * * *

  At home, they found a large teenage boy lying on their lawn. He was white-blond and white-skinned, with a small, pink mouth. A bike lay on the grass beside him.

  “Is he dead?” Michael asked.

  “Not dead,” the boy answered. His mitt of a hand gave a thumbs-up. “A lot of cats here,” he said, eyeing the gaggle that lay in their sun-streaked garden.

  “Mengele loved cats,” Michael made up. He hoped Adela would correct him.

  The boy stood, yanked a plum from a branch, and ate it in a few bites. “My mother asked me to come.”

  “Who’s your mother?” Michael asked.

  “Your aunt Liesl.”

  “We don’t have an aunt. Not here, at any rate.”

  This large boy-man reminded Michael of the Stasi minions Adela had talked about, strong and quiet and open to murder.

  “She’s not, technically,” the boy went on. “But related. Me, too. Udo Behm. Your cousin.”

  “We don’t have any cousins.”

  He answered that he was there to get them bikes and be their tour guide.