The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “You see what I see,” Udo said.

  Michael thought again of the bravery he could inhabit if Udo were his brother, though cousin was something, too.

  “I’ll tell your sister,” Udo said, “that I was visiting a friend today.”

  “Where should I say I’ve been?” Michael asked. They passed a house with laundry on the line, a sign for a bank.

  “Where you always are,” Udo said.

  He put a hand on Michael’s arm, then took a nap, sleep a switch Udo could flip, a wish granted as soon as he thought of it.

  * * *

  Seeing her mother at the kitchen table, Adela grew queasy. Though she’d treated her mother’s constant sleep as an annoyance, there was relief that she’d chosen to fall apart behind a closed door. Bringing it out in the open seemed like the next step in her collapse.

  “Why are you up?” Adela asked.

  “I can’t be awake?” the German Lady answered. She wore a cardigan though it was warm out and asked Adela if they had a newspaper. It was seven in the morning.

  “Why do you need the paper?” Adela asked.

  “Help wanted,” Mutti said.

  Adela found one from the day before and handed it to her.

  In their German weeks, her mother had grown thinner. As she flipped pages, Adela saw the bones in her hands, her wrists as small as a child’s. The night before, Adela had been reading about Honecker when she heard the German Lady come back from wherever she was. Adela had looked at her watch, written the time in the book’s margins: 1:18.

  When the German Lady shook her head at each listing, when her performed smile appeared, annoyance became a light for Adela to follow.

  “You didn’t even look!” Adela said, as Mutti pushed the paper aside.

  “Nothing to look at,” the German Lady answered.

  “A driver for a delivery van,” Adela read.

  “What do I know about truck driving?” her mother countered.

  “It’s only a van.”

  Adela read a listing for something called an assistant accountant. The German Lady picked at a stain on her sweater.

  “Dad has a job already,” Adela said.

  Her mother made a toothache face. She exhumed an apple from the bowl, slid it into her pocket, and padded upstairs. Perhaps their mother had inherited enough to keep sleeping, to leave money for food and other necessities on the counter each morning. It was always there when they woke up. Michael said it made him feel as if they were spies, passing secrets.

  “Feels more like a drug deal to me,” Adela had answered.

  She read other possible jobs to the empty room.

  * * *

  An old woman sat inside the phone booth. Had Michael been the Michael of a few months ago, he would have been with Adela, eyes on this lady as he whispered, I wonder if that’s Sigrid.

  The woman left and Adela slipped inside. The booth smelled of her oldness, her perfume.

  Though it was early morning in the States, Adela got Dad and Kate’s machine. But instead of hanging up, she tried to construct a normal-sounding message. New things about Sigrid filled the booth’s walls. And for the first time since they’d found him on their lawn, Udo hadn’t shown up that morning. The machine ran on. Adela wasn’t sure if she should address both her aunt and father, didn’t know if sounding chipper would get his attention better than desperation. Her dad and aunt might have been hiking or drinking, or on some other leg of their reunion tour. Adela finally blurted out, “This is a message for the mayor,” turned horrified, and hung up. A woman passed, a kerchief over her hair. Adela wondered if this city had more women, or if she only imagined it did, these old ladies part of the men-less generation that had to find a way forward after the war.

  As she sat there deciding whether or not to call again, Michael and Udo biked past. Michael smoked a cigarette, passed it to Udo. Breath caught in Adela’s throat.

  When she got home fifteen minutes later, she found Udo sitting in the yard.

  “I was looking for you,” he said.

  “I didn’t know if you were coming today,” Adela answered. She thought to say more, but his arrival brought a relief she couldn’t disturb.

  “Was visiting a friend,” Udo said.

  A cricket hopped onto his leg. He flicked it away. Adela tried to convince herself that he and her brother had simply run into each other. She winced, then smiled, as the German Lady had when Adela told her to call about a job even if she didn’t know what it was.

  “Have you seen Michael?” Adela asked.

  Udo’s eyes stayed glued to the spot where the cricket had been.

  “Michael?” Udo said. “I haven’t seen him in days.”

  * * *

  The peace between them in the States would sometimes break. Adela would announce a plan, and the part of Michael that usually craved her guidance revolted. Once, in history class, Adela had gotten into an argument with her nemesis Kevin Bartholomew after he’d posited that women’s suffrage hadn’t been that important because, as he said, “at least they weren’t slaves.”

  “It’s not crappiness by degrees,” Adela had answered.

  Two rows away, Michael scribbled on his notebook’s cover. Mr. Hart asked her to refrain from using crappy.

  After class, Michael left with a girl who wore a sleeve of plastic bracelets. As they walked down the hall, Adela heard him say, “My sister can be such a bitch sometimes.” Adela turned incredulous, frightened by his easy mutiny. She waited until dinner that night—Dad who knows where, the German Lady pulling pickles from a jar and smoking out the window—and said, “At school today, Michael called me a bitch.”

  Michael jabbed food with his fork and answered, “Well, sometimes Adela is a bitch.” Then he coughed.

  “Michael,” the German Lady said, shooing smoke out the window.

  “Mutti,” he answered, “you’ve honestly never thought Adela was mean?”

  The German Lady could agree. The two of them might gang up, offer a list. The food Adela had been eager for a moment ago looked congealed.

  “Everyone is everything at one point or another,” the German Lady answered.

  “So you agree,” Michael said. Their mother’s face folded, as if she’d stubbed her toe. The jar she’d been eating from sat balanced between her knees.

  “Did I say I agreed?” she answered, and went into the other room, where she turned on the television. Adela didn’t get up from the table, Michael either. They stayed as a new TV show began, as their food cooled and hardened. Stayed until Dad walked in, said, “What?” and Michael slipped into his room.

  Each day, when Adela expected an apology, Michael stayed quiet, and she wondered if, in some elemental way, he was done with her. And even as she grew mad, she understood that this anger was a veneer, underneath it the surprise that he could hurt her.

  * * *

  A week after Udo had lied to her, Adela watched through her window as Michael left without his dolly. Morning turned to afternoon. Udo didn’t appear. The German Lady slunk downstairs and ate a sleeve of crackers. She asked Adela what she was reading; Adela told her.

  “All that’s happened already,” her mother said, scanning the book’s cover.

  “So I shouldn’t read about it?” Adela countered.

  Mutti brushed salt from a cracker. The sadness she’d tried to foist onto Adela a week before returned.

  “I got into the Gymnasium,” Adela said. Two weeks earlier, Udo had taken her for a placement test. And just the afternoon before, a letter arrived telling her she’d been accepted. Adela had only told Udo, who’d taken her out for an ice cream so large that it leaned each time she licked.

  The German Lady put a hand on top of Adela’s, removing it fast, as if she’d touched a too-hot thing.

  “Child,” Mutti said, “we should celebrate.”

  “Where do you go, when you go out at night?” Adela asked.

  “I didn’t know you noticed,” she answered.

  Adel
a’s look told her to stop playing dumb. The German Lady nodded. Adela sometimes hated her mother, felt ashamed of this hatred, too. She wanted to tell her to snap out of it, that she was flailing as well. Adela understood Michael’s impulse to vanish then.

  Mutti mumbled.

  “What’s that?” Adela asked.

  “I said I just walk. I can’t sleep, so I walk.”

  “Maybe if you didn’t sleep during the day,” Adela answered.

  The German Lady scraped more salt off her cracker, the sound a mouse making a home in their walls. “That’s when I can sleep.”

  “That’s stupid,” Adela answered.

  Her mother continued to nod. To agree instead of doing anything about it. Adela opened the paper to the jobs she’d circled, left it on the table, and walked upstairs, though she knew she’d be cited as difficult, as if her difficulty weren’t an answer to one of the many questions the German Lady treated as impossible.

  From her bedroom window, Adela watched a cat pull a mouse from some rubble. A carful of young men with Mohawks passed. Their hair scratched the ceiling.

  Adela held her breath until it hurt. She tried it again, this time setting her watch so she would know how long she could hold it for.

  Moving between looking outside and circling unfamiliar words in the newspaper, the sun low in the trees, Adela spied Udo and Michael biking side by side. Again, they shared a cigarette. When they got close to the house, Udo put a hand on Michael’s shoulder and biked away. Everything in Adela that had wobbled underwater congealed into action. She slammed down the stairs and into the driveway. Michael pulled in and smiled. He wore Udo’s rain jacket. When she said as much, he told her he’d found it in a house and then picked up mail from the stoop.

  “From the California Father,” Michael said, handing her a letter.

  She pulled back the jacket’s hood, saw the name Behm on its tag.

  “You’re a shit-fucker liar,” Adela said.

  “And also with you,” he answered.

  “Not everything is a joke.”

  Michael lifted his hands in amused surrender.

  Leaning down, Adela pushed his dolly onto the street. She rolled it past their yard, through the intersection at the end of their block. Michael strolled behind her. The dolly ached against her palms.

  “Dela,” he called.

  Udo’s raincoat looked—on Michael—like a dress. He repeated her name, his voice high with jokey pleading.

  “It’s okay,” he said. She didn’t even know what the “it” was.

  Getting to the river, she stopped. A minute later, Michael appeared.

  “What is it you do?” Michael asked, his smile dopey and mean.

  “I’m not playing,” Adela answered.

  “With Udo, I mean. When he picks you up, when you bike here and there. Does he swim naked in the ocean? Get naked in front of you?”

  “It’s a sea,” Adela corrected.

  “Naked like a barbarian? Showing you his barbarian dick?”

  “What is it you do?” Adela answered, angry and embarrassed, as if Michael had located something perverted and true about her. She muscled the dolly over the small stone wall separating sidewalk from river. The dolly flipped into the water, floating briefly before it gurgled under.

  “Oh, sister,” Michael said. “I don’t think you’re ready to know.” There was so much pity and glee in his voice that Adela couldn’t help but fling out the first insult that came to her, one their neighbor back in Glens Falls had loved: sissy faggot.

  Michael’s look of pity remained. Adela couldn’t touch him.

  He took off Udo’s jacket. Slipped off his shirt, shoes, and shorts. There was more hair on his chest, his soft stomach replaced with muscle. Soon Michael was naked. In his undressing in front of her, it turned plain that he did not care. She might find him gross or an embarrassment and his day would continue, unbothered, like a smooth lake. Adela tried not to look, but disgust and curiosity battled. Hair darkened his thighs, his penis jiggled.

  “Put on some fucki—”

  “Let’s see what the sissy faggot will do,” Michael interrupted, and launched himself over the stone wall, landing in the water with the smallest splash.

  He was under for ten seconds when Adela began to grow frightened; longer, and she looked for a car to flag down. She tried to calculate how long it would take her to run to Udo’s, the only person in this place who might fix things.

  “Long live the sissy faggot,” Michael said as he emerged, dolly in hand before he lost it. Michael followed it back under. She stared at the dimple he’d left in the water, part of her hoping the dolly would pull him to the river’s muddy floor. What is it you do? Adela thought. She picked up Michael’s clothes and walked away.

  * * *

  The woman who answered had a voice of indeterminate age.

  “Is this Sigrid?” Adela asked.

  The woman paused. Michael’s clothes rested against the booth—a purple T-shirt he may have stolen. Jean shorts filled with holes.

  “What do you want?” she said finally.

  “There are things written about you.”

  The woman asked Adela who put her up to this.

  “No one. I wanted you to know,” Adela answered, though it was clear she did already. “I’ve been crossing them out.”

  In the quiet on the other end, she hoped Sigrid was deciding to trust her. And though it felt as foolish as the miracles Michael made up, Adela wished Sigrid would join her, the two of them erasing slurs while Adela told her how she’d been brought to this country, then abandoned. In the building across the street, the old woman from the pay phone sat in her window. Adela wondered if they’d ever have a phone, or furniture that belonged to them.

  She spotted a new drawing of Sigrid in a foul, flexible position. And she understood that, even if Sigrid came, even if they drew over every word and drawing that depicted some sadist’s version of penetration, more things would show up, the booth no more Adela’s than it belonged to the people who wrote these things, or her father, who was never home to talk to her.

  Sigrid breathed in. In that breath Adela could sense what was coming next, could have recited in tandem when the woman on the other end answered. “You have? Well, good for you.”

  Adela picked up Michael’s clothes, returned to the river where she’d left him. But he was gone, her brother running naked through this city, people calling the police about a streaker darting down the middle of the street or hopping in and out of their gardens.

  * * *

  A few years before the move to Germany, Michael had woken in the middle of the night, desperate to pee. He’d moved down the dark hall to find the bathroom door closed, a blade of light underneath it.

  “Mutti’s in there.”

  His father appeared in the hall.

  “Oh,” Michael said. “I need to pee.”

  Dishes from dinner filled the kitchen. Something sat on the floor. As his eyes adjusted, Michael realized it was a potato.

  In his lifetime, Michael had seen Dad throw a coffee mug, a stack of books, and dozens of shoes. Now he imagined his parents fighting after dinner and his father, seized by something only movement could subdue, taking a potato and hurling it to the floor.

  “There’s a potato on the floor,” Michael said.

  Dad didn’t answer. Michael knocked on the bathroom door.

  “I’m in here,” Mutti said.

  “I told you,” his father answered. “She wants to be alone.”

  Michael wanted to be alone, too.

  “But I need to,” Michael said.

  “I see that,” Dad answered. “In the sink, then.”

  “What?”

  “The kitchen sink.”

  “What?”

  “Michael,” his father rasped. “Do you really not understand what I’m saying?”

  Dad moved aside pots and bowls. He pulled a chair to the sink. Michael creaked onto it. Out on Route 4, streetlamps rose in a zippe
r of light. Michael undid his fly. After fluttering in near-ready agony, he peed.

  He finished and rinsed the sink, slid the chair under the table. Dad moved to the sink’s basin.

  “I cleaned it,” Michael said.

  Dad switched on the overhead light, wincing as he checked for yellow that wasn’t there. I cleaned it, Michael wanted to say again, though he did not. There was always more food to throw.

  As Dad stared at the sink, in a room that reeked of cooled food, Michael realized that the hard certainty their father held, something Adela carried, too, was a quality he hated. It was this certainty Dad had leaned on when he told Michael to stop talking with his hands, or when he’d forced him to play on a basketball team, then got angry when Michael—nine and in shorts too big for him—began to cry during practice. “Has anyone ever told you that there are times when you’re meant to be embarrassed?” Dad had asked. They’d stood on the sideline. Michael afraid but also confused as to whether he or his father was meant to be embarrassed, if embarrassment was supposed to keep a person from doing something or was an afterthought. Dad’s hands stayed on his arm; his underbite an opened drawer. But more than angry, Michael sensed that his father was ashamed. It was Dad’s shame a student had located on what turned out to be his last day of teaching, their father exploding and pushing that young man into a bulletin board. Michael wanted a shirt that Dad said was for girls, and his father answered: “Don’t you know?” A question he asked Michael as regularly as he said hello to him.

  For a long time, Michael mistook his father’s shame for his own. It became a habit, something he almost craved. But in Kritzhagen, when he sought it out, other feelings appeared. And when Adela rolled his dolly into the river, Michael undressed in front of her, partly to see if this shame would come back for him.

  * * *