This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  Afterward in the early evening, Bettina and Werner retired to her house to share some elderberry wine and become intimate for the first time. The pain was not so great. At first Bettina found herself thinking of Dieter, the sweet boy who had already been dead for years, turning her into a kind of widow even though she’d never been married. But after just a few minutes with her new husband, she was distracted by the sensations she was experiencing, and she stopped caring whether it was Werner or Dieter who was in the bed with her; she knew only that these feelings rising up inside her were unexpected and overpowering—but fleeting too. She soon discovered that relations with her husband were infrequent and unpredictable. Werner seemed to find pleasure in her body, stroking it eagerly, but his desire was so easily sated that she did not have time to figure out what she herself should be thinking or feeling.

  Each night she wonders whether he will touch her again, and while she half wishes to be left alone, part of her wants to reach for him, to try to bind him closer to her—because that is why she married him, to be close to another human being.

  The factory where she spends her days is perched at the edge of a cliff, dark against the piercing midday sun. Bettina stands behind it, eyes screwed shut. The inside of her mouth tastes like a dead animal. Once again she’s been vomiting, and this time it isn’t because she is with child—even though she lost the baby days earlier, the nausea will not go away. A double cruelty.

  Breathing slowly through her nose, she forces herself to open her eyes and look out at the vista in front of her. Twenty meters away, at the bottom of the chalk cliff on which the factory sits, the Baltic Sea spreads as far as the eye can see, up to Finland in the far north and to Poland—now also part of the Soviet Union—to the east. It is the one consolation about working here that she can step outside during her breaks and let the natural beauty of the island comfort her. The land is immutable; man might appear to dominate, but the earth resists stealthily, steadily, relentlessly. At the edge of the factory, snowy hawthorn blossoms cascade in unruly clumps. The grass at her feet is crazed with silvery seed heads. Everywhere she looks, life is pulsing.

  A van inches its way toward the factory and idles for a moment. An officer jumps out to unlatch the gate, and Bettina tucks herself in closer to the side of the building. A police car follows behind the van. As the men disembark and enter the building, Bettina peers through the smeary window to look inside. At the assembly line, the foreman stands with a bunch of Volkspolizei right where, just a few minutes earlier, she was filleting herring. If only she could hear what the police are saying, but her ears roar with the sound of the waves crashing into the chalk cliffs.

  She cups her hands to either side of her eyes to cut the glare. The workers—her friends, colleagues, boss, the new supervisor shipped in from Moscow—merge into one vast, shadowy mass on the factory floor. The assembly lines grind to a halt, and the workers stand at their stations, idle hands dangling at their sides. The Vopo—the local East German police—and a man in an unusual uniform surround a group of women. The foreman, Putzkammer, stands nearby with his hands in his trouser pockets, vast shoulders hunched forward. He will turn a blind eye, no matter what’s going on; of that, at the very least, Bettina is certain.

  Her coworkers Christa, Anne-Marie, and Stefanie huddle together, stiff white aprons smeared with blood and guts, hairnets askew. In a place where the machinery is always clanking, accompanied by the swift, precise flurry of hundreds of moving hands, everything is bizarrely still. The police hover close to the women. The odd man out wears a green-gray tunic with white piping and silver buttons that flash under the fluorescents like coins flipped into a murky pond. He has on a flat cap with a broad front brim that looks somehow familiar to Bettina, but she can’t quite place it.

  She senses a sudden shift in mood and presses in closer to the salt-encrusted glass. One moment, stillness; the next, a sort of trembling of the air currents. There is commotion, heads and limbs shifting this way and that in a mad jumble. Putzkammer lunges forward, and collectively the workers raise their hands as if in some sort of supplication.

  Christa Kellermann has broken away and is making a run for the sliding door that leads to the cargo area. She is a heavyset woman, and in her bulky plastic boots there is no hope of her escaping. In a flash, an officer grabs her and presses against her, cinching her arms behind her. He swings Christa around and barks something at the foreman.

  Bettina’s heart speeds up wildly. They have come to get Christa?

  The two women have been working side by side since the end of the war. Christa is in her late thirties, almost fifteen years older than Bettina, with an extended family of three children and two nephews orphaned during that last desperate push to keep the Soviets out. Her husband is long gone, killed when his tank overturned in Southern Italy in ’43. Yet every day when Christa comes to work, her face alternates between grimaces of delight and irritation as she recounts her stories of domestic life. Her unfailing optimism takes the edge off Bettina’s tendency to be quiet and withdrawn. Bettina listens to Christa’s tales about her children, the endless foraging for food, for ration cards, for shoes, and then, as the years pass, for male companionship. As a newlywed, Bettina listens especially carefully to her colleague’s stories of how to run a household, and on the weekends she will sometimes go to Christa’s house to learn how to decorate handkerchiefs cut from old bedding. She cannot think of a single thing that her friend might have done to warrant getting arrested.

  Bettina runs to the front of the factory and sees the van doors slamming shut.

  The vehicle heads through the gates and turns sharp right, down the winding road that leads toward the center of Saargen. Bettina starts running after it, sucking in the billows of dust thrown up by the tires, yelling, hoping she can think of something, anything, that might make a difference. Something that will make them stop.

  Finally, the van and the police car disappear from sight. For a long while she stands there, panting. She stares at the hazy spot that marks where the rise of the earth meets the horizon, beyond which the road spills out onto Seestraße. There will be people going to the market in town, picking their children up from the Kindergarten, walking home for their lunches. She wonders whether anyone will even notice the van. It seems as though these things have been happening more and more recently: disappearances, midnight summons, tattling neighbors, and petty-minded colleagues. Can this be right? Everyone was so relieved when the war was over, so eager to start anew, but no one had been equipped to look beyond the violence, to imagine how life would actually look under the Russians. All the mundane details of this new order are cumulative, insidious. It sometimes feels to Bettina as though God is taking revenge on the islanders for their entrenched self-sufficiency all those years under fascism.

  The foreman, Putzkammer, will be looking for her by now. He’ll be barking at everyone to get back to work; the long black conveyor belts will squeal and then clank into action, and she will not be at her position. Her pay will be docked; she must return. As Bettina nears the entrance, she catches one last glimpse of the water. The familiar sight of the sea takes her breath away: It is alive, made up of hundreds of shades of blue, moving and still at the same time. It never looks the same from one moment to the next. Bettina pulls the strings of hair from her face, the sleeve of her dress fluttering wildly. It looks from here as though the entire Baltic Sea is carpeted in dazzling splinters of glass.

  7

  Bettina waits at the house for Werner to return from the town hall. She paces the kitchen, rearranging the plates on the open shelving, scrubbing the two pans that are already spotless. In the corner by the window stands a miniature bust of Wilhelm Pieck, with his prominent nose and flaccid cheeks. Propped up against it, there’s a row of stamps showing the East German leader with Stalin, to celebrate the Month of German-Soviet Friendship. A silly place to put the stamps (she always worries they’ll get splashed when she’s doing the dishes), but these are things Wer
ner brings home from work, and she doesn’t know what to do with them.

  Her breathing has not settled down all afternoon. Moments earlier she was retching again above the toilet, her throat parched, the muscles in her shoulders straining with the effort. Eberle, her old orange tabby, winds himself around her ankles as she sits down at the kitchen table. When the click of the front door finally sounds, she stiffens. She is sure Werner can help her figure out what is going on, but she also knows that she has to get this right; he can be testy about these things. She waits until she knows he will have slipped off his light overcoat and hung his black felt hat on the rack. “Hallo,” he calls out. Footsteps fall on the stairs, laboriously, one foot hitting the treads harder than the other.

  Their bedroom is at the front of the house, with a window overlooking the square. It is the room her grandmother occupied as a newlywed, where her mother started her family, and it is where her father died. Now it is Bettina’s domain. The windows are small, as they are in all these fisherman’s cottages, but the thatch that hangs over the window creates a jagged shadow that makes her think of mountain ranges. Places she has never been. Werner is standing at the armoire, the back of his shirt dark with sweat. He bends down to remove his shoes and begins stripping off his clothes. One leg is slightly shorter than the other, and he has to twist his torso awkwardly to keep his balance. Looking at him, Bettina struggles to reconcile her fear about what happened at the factory earlier with the habitual tenderness she feels when she sees her husband unclothed. They make some small talk.

  “The police were at the factory today,” she says finally. “The Vopo.”

  “Yes?” He rises, slipping on his house shoes.

  “They took Christa.”

  His pale eyes are weary. From the very beginning of their courtship, his eyes had the power to disarm her: they are heavy lidded with bags under them, very light blue and set a little too far apart. “I see,” he says, noticing her agitation for the first time. “That must have been upsetting.”

  “Werner, do you know what’s going on? Christa, she . . .” Bettina bites at her nail and then puts her hand down. Werner does not like it when she is fiddly and distracted. “She’s such a good person. A good worker, reliable. And she’s so cheerful! She makes it bearable for the rest of us. I . . . it’s . . . I just can’t imagine what—”

  “Dearest. These things happen. There must be some reason.”

  She sits down on the bed, which is covered in a quilt her mother stitched together long ago. Once, when her mother and grandmother were out one afternoon, she lay on this same quilt with Dieter. She runs her hand over the tidy rows of stitches, bumpy and soft under her calloused, fine-boned fingers. “You can tell me, Werner. If you know something? You can trust me.”

  He swipes his hands along either side of his head, patting down his hair. “What I can say is this. We are living under different circumstances now that the Russians are here to stay. The rules have changed, and we are still learning what the new ones are. It’s imperative that we have patience, that we listen and learn. At least we’re done with National Socialism—we can be thankful for that, don’t you think?”

  What can she say to this? Her father had never liked to talk of politics or war—as though by not talking about it with his daughters, he could will it to not impact their world. He had been such a gentle man, so simple. He trusted commerce, routine, the joys of his household; he used to love telling the girls, “Fire in the heart sends smoke into the head.” When she was a teenager, this irritated Bettina to no end, and she’d sometimes secretly tune in to political broadcasts on the radio after school when he was still at work. But then came the war and the bombing, memories of the soldier who had died because of her. The smell of alcohol and misery. When the Russians came flooding into town with their sallow complexions and searching eyes, the columns of men in shredded boots and belted jackets, she had continued her steady retreat from public life.

  Maybe Werner is right. Are they not pawns in someone else’s vast strategic game? And they are better off than they were under Hitler—that’s for sure.

  This morning as she was tying on her freshly starched apron, Christa was joyous. “Finally some sun!” she exclaimed. “Let’s run away, play in the sand . . .” Her lighthearted commentary always managed to elicit a smile from Bettina no matter how deeply she was lost in her own world. And then Bettina thinks of the awkward tango she witnessed, the officer with his body pressed against Christa’s, shoving her through the door and into the van. The fraught stillness on the factory floor. All those eyes, staring. And yet no one dared intervene.

  Werner sits next to her on the bed. Their shoulders are touching. “What do you really know about Christa?” he asks. “Is it possible there are things about her that you don’t know?”

  “What could she possibly have done?”

  “I’ll ask around, yes? But I want you to keep out of this. No nosing around, getting yourself in trouble. I’m a functionary in the government; you can’t be meddling.”

  She plays with the gold wedding band of his mother’s on her finger.

  He puts a hand over hers, the skin warm and slightly damp. “Don’t you worry. I want to make you happy.”

  “I just—”

  “You’re a woman now, with responsibilities. Be sensible, dear. I promise I’ll look into it.”

  Werner pulls her face around toward his and looks in her dark eyes, his smile tentative but honest. Then he rises to go to the bathroom.

  The pipes start clanking as he washes his hands. Bettina walks over to the window and, pushing aside the pale-yellow curtains, stares out onto the cobblestones. The lights in her neighbors’ houses cast long, rippling stripes over the stones. In each of those homes, people sleep and eat, make love and argue. They have babies, or they don’t. They deal with their shame and with their corrosive secrets. Perhaps they lost loved ones and are lonely, or they are never alone and dream only of the peace of a quiet room. All those people, all those dreams. And what will happen to Christa, to her dreams? How can it be that you wake up in the morning, happy about the sunshine, and then by nightfall you are gone?

  The next day Christa does not return to work, nor the next. On the weekend while Werner is planting red geraniums in the flowerpots, Bettina takes a walk to the hamlet of Bobbin. By the time she arrives, she has broken into a full sweat. She mounts the small hill from which she will be able to look over the fields into the far distance and, if she is lucky, catch sight of the steely glimmer of water. At the top of the hill is a small fieldstone church, the oldest on the island. It has two steeply sloping angled roofs of bright-orange tile and a small turret that glints bluish in the sun. From afar, the stones of varying sizes look like seashells, mixed hues of cream and brown. Speckled and undulating and ancient. Brick in chevron patterns cover various add-ons, and there are windows and arches and openings of all sizes, indiscriminate and jaunty.

  A small dog is sitting at the gates of the churchyard, tied up to the ironwork with a piece of frayed string. His gray-and-black fur is ragged, but he has lively eyes that study Bettina as she makes her way along the path. When she notices the yellow tufts coming from his ears, she stops in midstride. Something strikes her about this animal. The mutt sits up on his hind legs in a rote, practiced manner, pawing at the air. He is not doing tricks. It almost seems as though he’s been waiting for her.

  Bettina crouches down to pat him. His fur is like wire, stiff and scratchy under her fingers. He appears to be quite old. A deep unease courses through her. Does she know this animal from somewhere?

  That’s when she remembers. Her father had just died—she was a teenager. Running either toward something or away from something on the beach. She pretended to take a picture, and there was laughter and a young man. A soldier with talk of the future.

  She stands up and straightens out her skirt, homemade from checked army bedding given to her by her neighbor, Irmgard. The womenfolk and a few old men are milling about
the double doors of the church, looking at her curiously and greeting the priest as they enter. There is no sign of the soldier she saw all those years ago. Did he survive? she wonders.

  As she looks around her from the top of the hill by the gates, she sees an old graveyard on a gentle hill to her left and a cluster of towering chestnuts and oak trees bordering on a meadow. On her right, the hill drops off, and hundreds of hectares covered in sea buckthorn and rape flowers spread across the valley. It is a vast and seemingly endless carpet of yellow, blindingly bright even in the muted daylight.

  This is a moment she wishes she could capture with her camera. The dog, who represents something ineffable—she can’t tell what exactly, but it makes her feel hopeful. And the bobbing heads of the flowers, luminous where the sun caresses them with its hot touch.

  8

  They have a new routine. Almost every Sunday, Bettina and Werner meet up with her sister, Clara, and Herbert for a walk on the promenade by the beach in nearby Binz. They’ve been doing this for the past few weeks, and it has brought the sisters together in a way they haven’t experienced since Clara was a teenager. Clara hooks her arm under Bettina’s and tucks her body close to hers. Bettina’s sister is tall, almost ungainly, with narrow hips like a boy’s and hair that grows dark in the winter and light in the summer sun. Today her face is drawn, the circles under her eyes like bruises. They are talking in hushed tones.

  Ahead of them, the two men walk side by side, trailing smoke behind them like kite tails. It is such an unseasonably warm day that both men have taken off their jackets and are strolling in their shirtsleeves. They keep some distance from each other, puffing on small cigarillos they bought from a Polish girl at the bus stop. Werner is much broader and shorter than Herbert, who is lanky and tends to stoop. As usual, Werner wears a black felt hat, which he holds on to as the wind blows over them, pulling and snapping and strafing every loose thread. Herbert is bareheaded, his hair already beginning to thin at the top. When he came courting Clara before the war, he liked a stiff drink and a good joke. But during the worst of the fighting on the front, he was shot at close range through the forearm, and the wound became so infected the arm eventually had to be amputated from the elbow down. He has never been the same again.