The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  * * *

  Two blocks from their house sat a phone booth, marred in graffiti. Particularly about Sigrid, an expert in all things mouth-related. Adela dropped in coins, listened to the phone’s clicks and pauses. It rang. Her heart hurried. The booth was warm, the receiver cool against her ear.

  “You’ve reached Kate and Paul,” the machine’s message began, aunt and father speaking in unison. “We’re either out hiking in Stanislaus,” Kate said, “or taste-testing margaritas,” her father added. “But when we get back from wherever we are,” Kate chimed in, “we’ll call you back.” As had happened the last few times she’d called, Adela breathed in to leave a message, but stopped. She had no number to give. And in the recording her father sounded like a moron.

  She hung up, sat in the glowing booth, and counted her change. More terrible things about Sigrid were written on the floor.

  Adela had started coming to this booth the first night she realized Michael and the German Lady had left her alone. Dad had written twice already, Adela the only one who’d bothered with his letters. When his second letter signaled his arrival at his sister’s, when he sent along a picture of the house, small but neatly inhabited, and a phone number to boot, Adela started scouring their house for change so she could call. Each night she sat in the booth, waiting for her brother to pass. She wanted his surprise that she was out at night, too, though part of her worried that he’d look at her in the booth as if she were funny and sad and keep going.

  Adela called again twenty minutes later, the machine interrupted by her aunt’s breathless hello.

  “It’s Adela. Your brother’s daughter.”

  “I know who you are,” Kate answered.

  “Hello,” Adela said again, though she wasn’t sure why.

  Sigrid likes it on all fours. Or with her legs wrapped around Joachim’s waist.

  Her aunt talked about a concert she and Dad had gone to, seafood they’d eaten. As she moved to stories of his landscaping job and other ways he was thriving, Adela’s feeling of missing him gathered steam.

  “We just got electricity,” Adela said.

  “Progress,” Kate answered.

  The underwater feeling returned. An operator interrupted to tell her to add more change.

  “Dad’s working?” Adela asked.

  “Saturday,” Aunt Kate answered. Adela hadn’t known what day it was. “But he’s out. He’s like the mayor.”

  Sigrid is ready for you.

  Adela wanted to call Sigrid and warn her. Wanted her to become a friend who’d rely on Adela for her truthfulness and clear thinking.

  “I heard you’re living in a mansion,” Kate said.

  “It’s awful here,” Adela answered.

  Aunt Kate lived in a house with a garden of succulents, the sky above it the blue of a warmer place. As Adela tried to picture that house, and Dad inside of it, she began to cry.

  Her aunt made noise as if to speak but did not. Next came the sound of movement, as if Kate went from sitting to standing, outside to in.

  “I imagine it’s an adjustment,” Kate said finally, followed by more quiet in California, where Dad was some sort of mayor.

  “I’ll tell him you called,” Kate said. When she asked for a number, Adela answered that they didn’t have a phone. Kate sighed, as if she were being difficult.

  Adela hung up and started crossing out Sigrid’s number. In its place she scrawled, Sigrid thinks you’re full of shit. Then, Sigrid hates you.

  * * *

  No one else had made it back to the house. Towels Michael had stolen filled a closet. Adela pulled one out, left it draped across the floor. “Look what the boys did,” she said, thinking of how she’d been Michael’s lodestar until something shinier had come along.

  She stayed up reading. Michael eventually came home. He marched to the toilet with a speed and noise of midday. Adela waited outside. When he opened the door and saw her, he looked amused, and certainly stoned.

  “All yours,” he said, though he didn’t move.

  Adela’s stomach cramped. For a moment she wondered if she was getting her period, but it had finished just a week before. And this ache had a different insistence.

  “The middle of the night,” she said.

  “Thanks for the time check,” Michael answered.

  Adela stomped her foot, embarrassed to have let her feelings fly out. Stoned delight filled Michael’s face.

  Back in her room, Adela tried to read, but could only remember Michael’s expression. Also Dad’s popularity Aunt Kate kept talking about. She couldn’t imagine their father with a slew of friends and wondered if, in leaving his family behind, he’d also left behind his version that scowled when Michael crossed his legs or told the German Lady she wouldn’t need to smoke if she’d figured things out. “What things?” the German Lady had asked once. Dad’s expression told her that that question was part of her problem.

  Adela went back to the hall closet, took the rest of the towels Michael had stolen. She folded them under her sleeping bag until they formed a sort of mattress. Lying down, she was lulled to sleep by this new softness. And when she woke up the next morning, she was confused for a moment as to where she was, though she soon remembered and wished for the confusion again and picked up her plastic bag of coins. Adela returned to the telephone booth, where someone had commented on her graffiti with crude drawings and German slang she didn’t know.

  * * *

  After weeks of wet coolness, the heat that arrived at the end of July seemed suspect. Adela and Udo lay on the beach, sun turning them sweaty. Adela pulled a book from her rucksack.

  “I’m reading about the Bitch of Buchenwald,” she said, using Ilse Koch’s nickname.

  “I’ve never been to Buchenwald,” Udo answered.

  The hair on his stomach was pale and feathery.

  “We call her a witch, actually,” he went on. “And not every story about her is true. Like she didn’t make lampshades from Jewish skin.”

  “Right,” Adela answered, though she’d read exactly that the night before and turned indignantly horrified.

  As with every other book she read, Adela hoped this one would explain how people’s meanness could metastasize. The sun was strong. Breath lifted Udo’s chest. Turning the page, Adela found a slip of paper. Michael. This is what I want, he’d written. There was a joke from the States that this line connected to, but Adela couldn’t call up its particulars.

  Jellyfish washed up onto the sand, shining like lollipops. She couldn’t see Kritzhagen’s forgotten streets, only sand and birds and fast-moving clouds. This is what I want, Adela thought, listening to water that could have been water anywhere, the wind’s universal itch.

  “What about you?” Udo asked.

  When it seemed he might not clarify, Adela asked, “What about me?” and smiled. A stick sat just beyond her. She picked it up, poked Udo’s shoulder.

  “You had slavery. Killed all the Indians,” he said.

  “That wasn’t where I’m from exactly.”

  “You have all these books about here.”

  “I’m trying to learn,” Adela answered.

  “To be clear, I never met Goebbels.”

  “You’re too young,” Adela added, trying to hold on to the lightness from a moment before.

  Udo moved to his knees and began to dig. She smelled his sweat, heard his digging fingers. A family arrived, planting their towels close to them, though the beach was mostly empty. Adela snapped the stick she’d been holding in two.

  “You’re digging,” she said, but he didn’t look up. Muscle moved across his shoulder.

  Udo grabbed her book, threw it into the hole, and covered it in sand.

  “That’s mine,” Adela said.

  “You read the wrong books,” Udo answered.

  The night before, Adela had read how Koch liked the lampshades best when she could tell which part had come from someone’s back, what skin once wound around a knee.

  “I’ll get y
ou books,” he said. “About things that actually happened.”

  Adela worried that he’d leave her behind as her brother had, Udo climbing onto the dolly, rolling away. Adela stood, wished she hadn’t. Sweat stuck to her bathing suit.

  The nearby family played paddleball. Their small, matted-looking dog barked at the surf. Adela thought of the German Lady and Michael sneaking out at night. The weight of each day without Udo to lighten it.

  Udo grabbed Adela’s toes until they cracked. She said that it tickled and he stopped, though it hadn’t tickled but felt as if he were taking something from her.

  * * *

  The next morning, Adela biked back to the beach. She dug a hole, certain she’d picked the right spot, but found only damp earth. She dug a second, a third. No book appeared. Sand burned under her nails.

  An old man, dressed as if for an office job, moved across the sand with a metal detector. He got close to her, sighed, and kept going.

  At home there was a new table inside the front door. A letter from Dad on it. Adela opened it. She was reading about the promotion he’d gotten when Udo appeared at their front door. She’d pictured him gone for good, her books and misstatements leaving him tired or bored.

  “Udo,” she said, and felt lucky.

  “Good cousin,” he answered, “the library opens in fifteen minutes.”

  They arrived and found swaths of empty shelves. Watched a team of people stack new books onto them, the history the GDR had invented replaced with something closer to real. This is what I want, Adela thought. They walked down an aisle.

  “Michael and I used to go to the library back home,” she said. Her voice echoed in the high-ceilinged room.

  “I’ve never,” Udo answered, “imagined your brother as someone who likes to read.”

  “He went for other reasons,” she said.

  “Other library reasons,” Udo answered.

  As they examined books so new their spines cracked, Adela realized that Udo had only known Germany as East, so aligned with communism that he saw the Nazis as awful, too, also outside of him.

  “This one,” Udo answered, handing her a book on Koch’s different history.

  Part of Koch’s story was familiar. The book took no pains to excuse her. Yet the details were less salacious, the adjectives fewer and plainer.

  They sat by a window. Adela looked up from time to time to see Udo’s eyebrows shift as he read. More books were added to a shelf that a minute before had held nothing.

  “What’s that?” Udo asked, and pointed to her legs.

  Looking down at them, Adela realized there was still sand on them from that morning.

  * * *

  The next time Michael saw Maxi was at an intersection. Michael on his bike, Maxi in a car. He looked so skeletal that Michael turned more certain that he was sick, certainty something he began to see in degrees—very certain, completely certain, more certain than the certain I’d felt before. For a moment he imagined him and Maxi sick together and thought of an opera he’d watched on TV where people were in love and ill. Also the time he and Adela had visited their grandfather in a hospital, a place both orderly and full of people capable of helping.

  “Hi,” Michael said just as the light changed.

  He got closer to the house, where the German Lady pretended sleeping all day was the best way to look for a job, where his sister’s only concerns were books and Udo. Blood had blotted the tissues Michael used after he and Maxi were done. The red riddling Maxi’s face screamed of infection. With Maxi right in front of him, sickness felt—like love or a small apartment—shared. With distance, his alarm grew. Michael tried to swallow, but it stuck halfway down his throat. He dropped his bike in the yard, found Udo on their living room floor.

  “Fuck a duck,” Michael said.

  “Your sister says that, too,” Udo answered.

  “Where is my sister?” Michael asked.

  Udo told him she was in the shower and asked how Michael’s wrist was healing.

  Michael stammered out a sigh. Udo unwound his bandage, which again felt like seduction. Maxi hadn’t seduced him, but blurted out instructions as if he were teaching Michael a game in gym class.

  Udo moved Michael’s wrist from side to side. The bruises were paler, the swelling a shrunken geography.

  “It hurts?” Udo asked.

  “Less,” Michael answered, thinking of the men he’d never sleep with, the seduction he wouldn’t experience. He closed his eyes to keep from crying.

  “I’m guessing,” Udo said, pausing so long that Michael wondered if he’d imagined those words, “that this is not about the wrist.”

  Michael lay on the floor next to Udo, his cousin so large he didn’t seem like a person, but a landmark.

  “I did something stupid,” Michael said. Udo nodded for him to continue.

  “Please don’t call me disgusting or perverted,” Michael added. His stomach shivered, his body no longer his to control.

  “I wouldn’t,” Udo answered. “Unless you asked me to.”

  Udo had never joked with him before. Michael needed it then. He began his story. Occasionally, Udo asked a clarifying question. But nothing in his face changed when Michael said he was schwul or that he’d followed Maxi into a bathroom.

  “You’ll come with me tomorrow,” Udo said. He touched the top of Michael’s head, his hand so large it covered it like a hat. Michael wanted to be touched all the time, by himself or other people. “To take care of it.”

  “Adela’s coming, too?” Michael asked.

  “You only told me,” Udo answered.

  In the dim light of the house, Michael could only see the line of Udo’s mouth, his nose as round as a heel. He teared up at the unexpected comfort of their sort-of cousin.

  Adela arrived downstairs, told Udo she was ready. Michael turned on the black-and-white television he’d found. A news program showed Iraq invading Kuwait, the latter country one Michael hadn’t known existed. For a moment he wished he’d told Adela instead. But his behavior would have been a confirmation of one of her long-held suspicions, while Udo told Michael he’d take him somewhere to deal with it. As the television showed men in a desert, hands high in surrender, Michael remembered the hospital where his grandfather had died, the quiet with which everyone talked, the clean brightness of its walls, and the nurses who showed up at each bedside with the click of a button.

  6

  Lübeck was Kritzhagen’s well-married sibling. Its ornate buildings were brightly painted. Its stores loaded with towers of marzipan and tablecloths for four hundred marks. Udo and Michael passed young people smoking in cafés, but without Maxi or Lena’s hard-shelled boredom. Michael understood then why they’d taken a train an hour west for his appointment, picturing Kritzhagen’s windowless hospital, its Eastern protocols and equipment.

  “Why doesn’t everybody live here?” Michael asked.

  “Everybody does,” Udo answered.

  Michael smoked a cigarette. Udo put out his hand for a drag.

  On a cobblestone street that appeared polished, a cello from a nearby music school humming through an open window, they got to the clinic and stepped inside. Michael was lulled by its clean light, the fan of magazines on its table. Also the woman behind its desk who wore the benevolently wise expression of a television mother. But the waiting room was populated mostly by men. Sickness in their cheeks and eyes. Michael went to the bathroom, scrubbing his face to a riled-up pink. Kept the cold water running until his fingers ached in its stream. When he returned, Udo said, “They just called your name.” Michael stopped as if he’d forgotten something, though he was considering what it would be like to walk out, to not know until his body one day fell apart or continued.

  Udo touched Michael’s back. Michael imagined, then dismissed, the idea of kissing him. Udo crammed into a chair that was too small for him.

  The nurse who greeted Michael had a bland face and voice. He talked about how the test would proceed, the follow-up, all wi
th a smile as benign as the rest of him. Michael wondered what the nurse looked like naked, if there was such a thing as a benign dick. It felt important then that he know this.

  As the nurse asked about his sexual history, Michael began to harden, certain what was wrong with him was larger than the sex he’d had. When Michael said unprotected, the nurse handed him a pamphlet, a paper bag round with condoms and lube.

  “It just happened,” Michael said.

  “But you mentioned earlier,” the nurse answered, mild smile on his face as he referred to his notes, “alcohol and drugs.”

  Michael would have done it had he been sober, had it been behind a tree instead of in a bathroom that locked. He knew not to say this, though. Part of coming to a place like this meant it was his role to atone.

  The nurse put on gloves and took blood. Amazed by its color, Michael asked if it was normal.

  “The color of blood, yes,” the nurse said. He kept his gloves on as he wrote Michael’s name on a vial.

  “Haas,” Michael interrupted. The nurse’s pen stilled.

  “My parents are divorced. I’ve changed my last name along with my mother,” Michael said, though the German Lady hadn’t said anything about her name.

  “Hass is certainly easier to pronounce,” the nurse answered. He gave Michael a card with the date and time of his next appointment. “You’re heading back to Kritzhagen alone?”

  “My brother is with me,” Michael said, and wished Udo were his brother, imagining a life with someone so substantial-looking in his lineage, the things he’d get away with, the kindness others would offer him because they were afraid.

  * * *

  On the train back, Michael asked Udo if he knew Maxi Pad. Orange-roofed towns slid by, Michael amazed at how easy it was to get to the West. When the German Lady had made this trip decades before, she’d barely made it past the border.

  “When this is all done,” Udo said, “I’ll tell you how he got his nickname.”

  “This?” Michael said. Udo nodded, sure his cousin was fine, that Maxi hadn’t given him anything other than some junior version of heartache. Michael pulled on a strand of his own hair until it ached. He listed things he saw through the window.