* * *
On the bus ride back to school, Beate tried to work up the courage to tell Kate what had happened. But each time she thought to speak, Kate pointed to something out the window. Or she was so buried in her copy of Middlemarch that Beate let her be. Once in a while, Kate read her sentences. “Blameless people are often the most exasperating,” she quoted. “Indeed. B. Not doing any work?”
“I get sick reading on buses.”
“There was a girl at my high school who was like that but pretended she wasn’t. We took a trip to Albany, to see the state senate in action or some such nonsense, and she read for half of the trip and then suddenly, like she’d caught fire or something, she jumps up, right? Opens a window and pukes like mad.”
Beate asked if the girl went back to reading, the relief of benign conversation moving everything hard far away.
The bus moved into Massachusetts, where lit-up windows brightened dingy houses. Some people already had Christmas trees. Mutti considered Christmas trees in November obscene, though Beate understood it was these people’s greed Mutti objected to. On the last night, Paul had stayed on the pullout until four in the morning. They’d slept naked and Beate had woken up shocked and thrilled at his company. Each time she settled back into sleep—his hip pressed into her, his penis warm on her skin—she wanted more of him. She’d known him for three days. Already he felt essential. Beate memorized his smell, how his tongue moved in his mouth when he watched television. She wanted more. She seesawed between wanting something so certainly and the terror that he’d already turned important. Had she stayed in the dorms, befriending an international student, she wouldn’t have met him. Beate lusted after not knowing him. She and the international student, maybe one from South Korea, could have taken the bus to Northampton to see Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which Kate had recently come back devastated from. They might eat at a diner and talk about something from home that made this life seem strange, the student asking Beate about Germany, Beate answering as if she still lived there.
The woman on the cover of Kate’s book wore black and arranged flowers.
“Is that like Jane Eyre?” Beate asked. “Wandering around the moors, serious and … I can’t think of the other word.”
“I don’t remember Jane Eyre,” Kate answered.
Beate had fallen in love with that book, Jane’s sincere obsession both ridiculous and right. Wandering the rainy moors after leaving Mr. Rochester was unreasonable, and a few times Beate had muttered to herself that Jane just needed to have brought an umbrella. But she lusted after Jane’s fear, too, the wanting that came with it. As the bus pulled out of Pittsfield, an itch to move hit Beate and she excused herself.
“That bathroom is the most disgusting one on planet earth,” Kate said. “It’s less than an hour, if you can hold it.”
“I don’t think I can,” Beate answered.
Even the bathroom’s stench and suspect stains couldn’t distract her from picturing Paul asleep with a hand on her hip bone, thoughts that hadn’t existed in her three days before when she’d been on this bus or one just like it, certain staying alone in the dorms would have been better. Pretending she was an international student because that was easier than other answers.
* * *
There are tests, Mutti had written. Her mother only communicated through the mail, which made her feel farther away. So, when Beate’s mother wrote of her father’s possible illness, it carried the distance of history, like the novels Beate read where people said everything and nothing via letters. We are hopeful, and the doctors are kind, Mutti added, writing in simple sentences, as if Beate had forgotten German. Beate read that letter and felt nauseous. She checked her mailbox again to see if she hadn’t missed something from Paul, even as she understood that the tests weren’t a precaution but a confirmation of her father spluttering toward some sad finish.
It was a Saturday. In the dorm, a line of young women waited for the pay phone to dutifully call parents in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. Beate spent it in the library. She used Mutti’s letter as a bookmark. Coming back to her room, she asked Kate if she had any news from home. Her roommate talked about a problem with her dad’s roof, a high school friend who was pregnant, but said nothing about Paul.
A week and a half later there was a second letter. The tests were right, Mutti wrote. She wanted to cry, though crying didn’t come, Beate preoccupied instead that she’d heard from Paul just once. Your father will be sleeping a great deal when you’re home for Christmas. By then he might have no hair, Mutti added. Beate thought of the hair on Paul’s chest, thought again that she should cry. She finally found tears by imagining Paul joking to some friend about the German girl he’d had his way with who didn’t even know what a foldout couch was. Because of communism? the imagined friend asked. Because she’s not all that bright, Paul answered, and they laughed in the mean way young men sometimes did, and her tears thickened. Beate wrote Vati in the margins of her notebook, as though to transfer feeling.
* * *
As Beate walked toward her dorm after the last day of finals, a young man got out of a car who looked like Paul. Perhaps it wasn’t him. Perhaps she’d remembered him wrong, or wanted him so badly that a near-miss would do. He waved and she waved, and a smile shattered the scowl of his face.
“Kate told me she wasn’t getting picked up until tomorrow,” Beate said.
It was a cold, brown-grass December, though each morning she woke up to a smell she imagined was incoming snow. Young women passed. Clouds of breath trailed them. The clock tower rang, and branches ticked in the wind.
“Come with me,” Paul answered. Beate didn’t move. She was opening herself to joy, also the weightless falling she’d lived with since Thanksgiving. She knew little about him, yet he’d uncovered something that, in its best moments, turned her giddy, in others left her talking to herself without realizing. He wore a ski cap and a shadow of scruff. She would go with him. The falling felt good then, some spoil of war. They got in his car. Radio commercials wound one into the next.
“The heat in this thing is shit,” he said, and banged a vent with the heel of his hand.
They drove through town, where people moved in and out of glimmering stores. A group of young women passed through a crosswalk. “That sounds like Meredith,” one of them said, and Beate wanted to know what sounded like Meredith, if it was some idiocy or a way Meredith was a thoughtful friend. At each stoplight Beate thought, I could get out here. She could go to her dorm and tell Kate that her brother had come early. Could sit in the library’s stacks and skim tomes about one war or another while Paul drove through campus to look for her. In Mutti’s letter, she’d complained about the cost of the taxi to and from Vati’s treatment and informed her that they wouldn’t get a tree this year. Beate didn’t want to leave the car. But there was something terrifying in being in it with him, in having wanted him badly without understanding why, the two of them unwound by the same sickness. The car traced the Connecticut River. In the late afternoon light, its ice was gas-stove blue.
Passing Hadley’s strip malls, they fell into stop-and-go traffic. The driver in front of them kept pressing on his brakes. “C’mon,” Paul said. “I think they’re looking for something,” Beate answered. Their brakes brightened; his scowl returned. Paul got close enough to the car in front of them that Beate could read the word Massachusetts on its license plate, a word that had taken her a week to learn to spell. He leaned on the horn.
“What’s that?” Paul asked. Beate hadn’t realized that she was talking to herself.
“Oh. That’s just the way to say the name of your town. In German.”
Annoyance tightened Paul’s face. Kate had talked of him as moody, difficult. How he’d thrown tantrums as a child about the wrong sandwich, a perceived slight. The brakes in front of them stuttered off and on. “Jesus Christ,” Paul said. I could get out right here, Beate thought again. She touched his arm, and his face loosened. Beate felt powerful, re
lieved when the car in front of them turned into a place that sold stereo equipment.
When Paul pulled up to a motel, it made perfect sense. When he took a bottle of wine from the trunk, it felt right in a way Beate didn’t trust, because she didn’t know him, though she pretended she did. She lay in bed after he’d fallen asleep, after sex left her not worn out but wired, and felt happy, lucky, afraid to think those thoughts, her feelings a soap bubble—beautiful, bulbous, wobbling toward its end. She avoided thinking about anything beyond this room or the heat coming from Paul. Avoided thinking about a week later, when Beate would be beside her father’s hospital bed. She hadn’t gotten Mutti’s letter that told her he’d been admitted there, a place he’d end up staying. “My letter must have passed you as you came to us,” Mutti said, and leaned against Beate’s shoulder. It felt strange. Vati wheezed and woke from a nap with confused fear. Beate felt him trying to hand her that fear, and thought about Paul, the plan they’d made to meet halfway for New Year’s in Toledo, Ohio.
Vati cleared his throat. His eyes watered.
“Do you remember our house?” he asked.
“In Cologne?” Beate asked back.
“That was an apartment,” he answered. He was asking about Kritzhagen. With her finger, Beate traced Paul’s name on her jeans.
“I remember it first thing in the morning,” Beate said.
“What it looked like?” he asked.
“I remember the trees in rows. How vines crawled up the back of it.”
Beate traced the P, the A.
“The house itself?” Vati asked.
The U and L. The P again.
“Sure,” she said.
A few days later, Beate took a bus to Toledo. She tried to distract herself with signs she saw but kept wondering if Paul had cut his hair as he’d threatened to. When thoughts of Vati took over, she opened a novel and read until nausea wiped thinking away. The novel’s narrator had moved from a warm island to England, where she was always cold. She was some sort of dancer, though dancing brought her no joy. Thoughts of Vati swatted at her; she reread paragraphs until she had them memorized. And as the bus moved close to Toledo—her parents with no idea or interest as to where she was—Beate realized that Vati had been asking about their house in Kritzhagen because he didn’t remember what it looked like and was hoping she could tell him.
But in that motel in Hadley, Beate didn’t know about Toledo or the house her father no longer remembered.
A clock ticked on the motel room’s wall. Paul breathed out and in and Beate pretended that this was the only place, felt terrified at the thought of the next day, Paul going one way, her another. Paul woke up. He smiled so sweetly that her worry felt dumb. “You’re here,” he said, tracing her hip bone with a finger.
Paul slid on top of her. She kissed him hard when he suggested they stay at the motel an extra night. Smiling into his neck, Beate thought, then forgot, to call her parents and let them know she’d be delayed in her return to Winona, where Vati was asleep in its hospital more and more each day until, six weeks later, Beate back at school after winter break, she walked into her room to find Kate standing just inside the door.
“There was a call for you,” Kate said. And before her roommate said anything else, Beate understood that Vati was gone.
16
2009
Ines slipped her head onto Beate’s desk. Her scalp—like her face and arms—screamed with sunburn. Ines had worked at the Pflegeheim for a few months, her basic competence making her largely forgettable. But the week before, she’d called in sick for four days and gone to Majorca with her boyfriend, trying to cover her sunburn with makeup, but somehow forgetting about her arms and hands. Now Ines sat with her forehead on the desk. Beate had just fired her.
Beate hated firing. She disliked its meanness, hated even more the stunts people thought they’d get away with. She looked out onto Linzer Straße’s refurbished buildings, hoping to visit Ingo’s office and dissuade him from adding a fourth kind of ornamental grass to his garden. But Ines kept her head on the desk. Beate touched Ines’s shoulder.
“Ow,” Ines said, without urgency.
“You’re burned there, too?” Beate asked.
Ines sat up. She picked up the picture Beate had on her desk, one of Adela and Michael as children at an Adirondack lake. They squinted toward the camera, their shoulders pressed against each other.
“Grandchildren?” Ines asked.
“My children, but long ago,” Beate answered.
Ines showed no signs of leaving, and all the obligation of being in charge rushed in. Beate wanted to put her hands up, to abdicate. Anything to distract her from Adela’s return, which left Michael petulant and both him and Beate up in the middle of the night. She passed through her living room at two in the morning and saw him through the alley of space between their houses. This led her to Udo. Beate had always found him strange. Though he made good money, he’d lived with her until he was twenty-four. When Josef moved out, he’d taken care of her as if she were infirm. But as strange as Udo was, she’d found comfort in the way he took up half her sofa when they watched a movie, bringing his own popcorn and beer. A month after he died, she and the dentist split. Beate kept the breakup a secret. Then one afternoon Michael mentioned that he’d seen the dentist out to dinner with an overly tanned woman and she felt angry, mostly with her son. She avoided him for days, seeing him only through the windows of Udo’s former house, including one evening when he had a young man over. Each time she passed a window, more of their clothing had found its way to the floor.
“Ines,” Beate said, and stood up, hoping movement might provoke her former employee’s exit. “There is a week’s severance. I know it isn’t large.”
Ines lifted her head, her eyes as red as her face. The coffee smell grew stronger, probably from Frau Sonntag’s office, the woman in charge of admissions who, on most days, wore yellow. Beate regretted standing’s illusion of certainty. But her standing seemed to startle Ines, who gathered her purse, wincing as she placed it on her shoulder.
* * *
Children’s clothes hung everywhere. Shirts lined the banister like prayer flags. In eight days, the house Beate carefully curated had gone to shit. “Shit, Cindy,” she said as she walked into the living room, peering into the carrying crate where her cat spent most of its time. Beate pulled a sneaker out from under her. “Shitty, shit, shit.”
Beate had adopted Cindy a year before. She’d gone to the shelter and said she’d wanted a small dog, but the clerk walked her through a room of cats instead and Beate wondered if she’d said cat, if this was the beginning of the aphasia that left so many people at the home talking to pictures on walls. Some of the cats were fluffy, some wild. Then came Cindy. She was old, “Probably dying,” the clerk said. Cindy looked sad and angry, and in that moment—a hundred animals mewling under harsh lighting—Beate felt sad and angry, too. She took Cindy; the clerk appeared relieved. And Cindy kept living. Her fur fell off in swaths. Teeth tumbled out as easily as eyelashes. She ate and slept in her crate, or on a shelf in Beate’s closet, swatting at her once when she tried to grab a turtleneck. Beate knelt in front of the carrier, the cat’s smell stronger than she’d remembered. Perhaps the death the woman at the shelter had predicted was now upon her. The thought of Cindy—mean and hermetic—dying crept up Beate’s throat.
The door opened; Adela and Peter gusted in. Her daughter dropped shopping bags on the floor. Her grandson stared at Beate with a librarian’s impunity.
“Oma,” Peter said.
“What’s all this?” Beate asked.
“Things,” Peter said in German. In one week, he’d picked up words and phrases with unsurprised ease. From the shopping bag he pulled out a tiny bathing suit, pint-sized shirts. Adela had gotten herself a sweater. She was always freezing.
“Why are you on the floor, Oma?”
“Visiting Cindy.”
“Cindy!” Peter squawked. The cat attempted a hiss.
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“I can’t believe everything here now,” Adela said. “Almost like America.”
“It hasn’t changed that much,” Beate answered, though hotels replaced the barracks and forgotten houses were occupied. The oldest people living there had died; the young recovered enough from the surveilled socialism of their early decades. Boarded-up boulevards became restaurants and a furniture store where Beate bought the dresser for the guest room that Peter was the first person to use.
“You have to remember, we’ve been living in South Africa,” Adela went on, a dash of Paul’s condescension let off its leash.
“I was born there,” Peter said, and asked how to say born in German.
He pulled out his drawing pad, on which he’d scrawled something that may have been the sky or the sea.
Adela had followed Taro from one diplomatic post to the next, getting a nursing degree, working at rural clinics. Every conversation Beate had had with her seemed to boil down to this: millions of people are dying and no one cares. A year before, Taro’s diplomatic climb moved him to Ghana, and Adela didn’t go with him. She’d cited work, the life Peter had, speaking Afrikaans and Sesotho, the neighborhood friends he called cousins. Also an end she and Taro had been moving toward. When Beate asked about this end, Adela told her about families who’d lost breadwinners with the speed of a changing season. When she asked about Taro, Adela spouted out a trite phrase about people changing and switched the subject. When she asked if Adela and Peter were going back to Pretoria, she answered that the clinic had a new, terrible director.
Peter wore flip-flops, the price tag still on. Sliding one off the boy’s foot, Beate tried to remove it. The tag was tough; she broke it off with her teeth. “My feet were there!” Peter said, with soprano delight. “Meine Füße!” Then he announced he was hungry.
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