IN THE BEETLES’ CLASSROOM, THE chairs were up on the tables, the floor had been swept and mopped and had dried again, and Marion was now in the baby changing room folding towels, which was absolutely not her job. She wasn’t the cleaning lady around here, she was the lead teacher of the Beetle group, and as she pulled a little harder than required at the blameless towels, she kept an eye on Leon, who was sitting in the play corner all by himself. It didn’t seem to be bothering him though. He was concentrating on building a tower, which by this point was almost as tall as he was.
It was always the same parents who arrived panting, way too late, then wanted to stage a big show of apology. But she’d gotten them out of that habit by now.
When Anne came rushing into the room, Leon gave his tower a kick and the building blocks scattered across the floor, which Marion didn’t think was all that great, especially since it was eight minutes past five.
In fact, she even turned off the lights while Anne was still bustling around, gathering up the blocks. The keys were jangling in Marion’s hand.
Anne grabbed hold of Leon, said, “Have a nice evening, Marion,” then fished around in the hallway for his boots and stormed out. She had already stuffed his hat, scarf, and gloves into the hood of his snowsuit. Out in the vestibule, she stood Leon next to his stroller so she could finish getting him ready.
The mothers from Hamburg-Ottensen were invariably in a hurry. They pushed their strollers like luggage carts, as though they were travelers at an airport, needing to get to their gates urgently, so as not to miss their connecting flights.
Anne watched the other mothers march past her. For a while, she’d run along with them to baby massage appointments, Gymboree, and baby swimming lessons, but she felt as foreign and out of place as an atheist in a prayer group.
After once spending two torturous hours at baby swimming lessons, she had started sending Christoph instead. He didn’t mind singing in a paddle pool and jumping up and down with a dozen parents and small children who held hands at all times. He did this just as uncomplainingly, in fact, as he made waffles during parties at the day care center or bought diapers at Budnikowsky’s.
Christoph lived with them like a good-natured guest. He never seemed to grasp that he belonged to this family, that family life actually concerned him.
When the three of them walked through the town, a man and a woman with a small child in a stroller, Anne would sometimes catch their reflection in a store window and try to figure out what made them different from other families.
It wasn’t their clothes or their hairstyles. Their reflections looked absolutely fine. Their kid was cute and Christoph placed his hand on Anne’s shoulder whenever she was pushing the stroller.
But there was always a momentary hesitation if Leon spat his pacifier onto the sidewalk or began crying because he didn’t want to sit in the stroller anymore. What they lacked was the spontaneity that she thought she saw in all other families. The bending down to retrieve the fallen pacifier, couples continuing to talk as the child was lifted out of the stroller, in passing almost. Breast-feeding scenes in the café, the mother drinking caffeine-free coffee, relaxed to the point where she lacked any will whatsoever, and beside her the father with his laptop in front of him, the dribble cloth over his shoulder, and his hand on her back, stroking it slowly and gently.
The family still lifes in the cafés and parks of Ottensen made it obvious to Anne what they were not: a tightly wrapped package, father-mother-child, woven into a stable family fabric.
They were two people with a child, loosely crocheted—three chain stitches.
Compared to all the couples walking casually through the neighborhood, she and Christoph always seemed to be walking on tiptoe.
* * *
These days she was no longer certain that Christoph had really buttoned his shirt incorrectly by accident on the day they met. Perhaps he had done it on purpose. A white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Indeed, the fact that his shirt was buttoned the wrong way was the first thing she’d noticed about him. He sat with his laptop in front of him, one of the many wordsmiths in the café, at a table next to the big window. The entire man was a bit unironed. Two creases ran handsomely from his nose to his lips, his blond hair hadn’t been combed, his fingers were quite fast on the keys, until the small collision when a kid ran into his table. The tables always got in the way when kids were romping around the café . “Whoa there, sweetie,” said the mother, “be careful you don’t hurt yourself.”
The organic soft drink slopped out of his glass, his notebook started to foam, and Anne threw her cotton scarf over the pool of soda.
The laptop was shot nonetheless, but the evening turned out to be very nice.
And then the summer.
She got pregnant right away.
* * *
Christoph wrote his crime novels in the same way that engineers build bridges. The books were well conceived, sound, straightforward. He’d heard of but not experienced the anguish of writer’s block and tuned out the bitchiness of his fellow authors, who could only dream of his sales figures. They suffered on account of their thin volumes, which they wrested from themselves in torment at night, and they despised Christoph’s mainstream publisher, who always courteously turned down their complicated tales that were light on plot. They called him our writer of the people and smiled with tight lips when he was celebrated as a local hero at readings in local bars and cultural centers.
Christoph’s readership was loyal and mainly female. Anne would watch the women’s faces during his readings. They cocked their heads to one side and smiled, sipped their wine and saw what Anne had also seen: the beautiful, slightly disheveled man in the white shirt.
Absentminded as writers often are, he sometimes even buttoned his shirt the wrong way. They loved that about him—his boyishness, the fact that he was slightly chaotic—and Anne felt embarrassed that she had fallen into the same trap.
The zipper on Leon’s snowsuit was catching again. She had zipped it up wrong and it got stuck halfway up. “I’ll get that,” said Marion, who had locked the door of the day care center and was heading home at last. She took her gloves off, yanked the zipper down a bit, then pulled it back up. “There you go, little man, see you tomorrow.”
If it wasn’t too wet and windy, Anne would walk through the green spaces along the Elbe with Leon, and they’d watch the dogs, the big long-haired ones that stumbled through the bushes like juveniles, and the worldly-wise dachshunds belonging to the Altona widows, lying under the park benches, waiting patiently while their mistresses smoked.
Sometimes she let Leon ride a blue rocking horse for fifty cents in front of the organic supermarket on the main street of Ottensen, but it was broken half the time. Then he’d sit for a bit on the motionless plastic animal and jerk it back and forth until he realized that it was pointless.
Anne would stand next to it, aimless and weak willed. The days were too long and it seemed to be raining most of the time.
At night, though, everything was different. When Leon was asleep, she’d lie in his room in front of the crib and stroke his dreaming face, his narrow shoulders, his chubby little hands. He smelled of milk and warm sand and undeserved happiness.
Then the daytime would arrive again with all its diapers and bottles, with pacifier chains, gloves and hats, which she could never find, with pediatrician appointments, sand molds, muddy pants, and diaper bags, and suddenly the joy of motherhood as well as her gratitude were nowhere to be seen. They slipped deep beneath the packets of wet wipes, and drowned in the kiddie pool and the baby cereal.
Sometimes when she was sitting at the playground with all the strange women, she noticed the dark circles under their eyes and wondered whether there were others like her, night mothers, who wished another life for themselves by day. But if there were, she knew they wouldn’t admit it even if you tortured them. It was all right to sit exhausted on a bench in Ottensen, stressed and unkempt, without any makeup on—all that was okay—but to lack the joy of motherhood was unacceptable.
* * *
It had been a little cold the past couple of days. The sandy path in Fischers Park was hard and free of mud—a perfect racetrack, in other words. Anne lifted Leon’s balance bike from the carrier rack of the stroller, and he jumped on it. He rode off with the wild enthusiasm of a child who could finally outpace his parents and all other impediments. Leon was “Easy Rider” in a ladybug helmet. He didn’t brake for mothers.
Not much could happen in the park, though. The pedestrians managed to get out of his way most of the time, and if he fell over, his snowsuit cushioned him against the worst scrapes and scratches. The problem was the road home, after they left the pedestrian zone and had to go through the dark, smelly Lessing tunnel—where pigeons met a miserable end—and Leon raced his balance bike between four lanes of traffic, slaloming rapidly around crushed soda cans and old hamburger boxes. Anne galloped after him, shouting for him to stop, as if she were on the heels of a purse snatcher. It was pointless, of course. No one could rein in a four-year-old boy’s thrill of speed.
This afternoon it was clear and cold and much too bright for early February.
As she turned onto their street ten meters behind Leon and out of breath, Anne realized she’d forgotten all about their pediatrician appointment.
She noticed a white Fiat in front of their building, yet again, once too often, and then the penny finally dropped. She unlocked the door, left Leon just inside the entranceway, climbed the four flights of stairs, and stood like a burglar in her own hallway, where she saw a pair of black boots that weren’t hers.
Christoph and Carola always sat in the kitchen whenever they were discussing a new book project. She was the best copy editor he’d ever had. Today they were sitting at the kitchen table drinking white wine and tea, and everything was the same as usual except that they were both naked. The first thing Anne noticed were the bare feet with red toenails. Carola dropped her cigarette into her wineglass when she caught sight of Anne.
Leon was shouting from the stairwell. His ego had become as big as a dictator’s after his triumphant afternoon in the saddle of his balance bike, and he wanted to be carried up. “I’ll get him,” Anne said, and Christoph slumped back in his chair with his eyes closed, as though she’d just executed him.
Anne went downstairs and lifted Leon. He stopped screaming instantly and then let himself be dragged upstairs reproachfully.
Carola’s hair was black and reached all the way down to her hips. She was standing in the hallway and was having some difficulty zipping up her skirt. I’m no use with zippers either, Anne thought as she pushed away the hand that Carola was intending to place on her arm in a pseudosisterly way and went into the kitchen, where Christoph was standing only half-naked by this point, but still as pale as a ghost. Anne tore open the balcony door, threw Carola’s cigarette butts, her half-full packet of cigarettes, and her silver lighter over the railing, then flopped down into a chair.
Leon, who was happy that Carola had come to visit again, wanted to look at a storybook with her. Occasionally they did that, but not today, so he marched off to his room, wound himself out of his snowsuit, turned on the CD player, and danced a bit to “I’m a Little Teapot,” his favorite song.
Anne sat down at the kitchen table. She still had her coat on and was digging around with a large spoon in a jar of hazelnut cream from the organic supermarket. And she didn’t stop when Christoph sat down next to her, she just kept shoveling the expensive full-cane-sugar goo into her mouth until he took the spoon out of her hand and screwed the lid back on the jar. Then she lay her head on the table and closed her eyes, as though she were listening to the scarred wood and no longer needed to pay attention to him when he took her hand because she’d seen the toes with the red nails and the black hip-length hair.
Snow White in her white car, and here she sat: Anne, the little teapot.