Lisa can’t help staring at the boys. Black streaks across their faces, hair orange and stiff as Astroturf. A few wear skeleton gloves. There’s a pumpkin with bared teeth and a monster frozen mid-scream. They tear the plastic masks from each other’s faces and fling them into the cold afternoon air. “Do it, Hassan, tear his mouth out!” “I’ll kill you guys! Marco, Ufuk, over here!” They laugh and jostle each other. Their voices, already becoming brittle and dark, rise as they do so. The eruptions of giggles sound shrill.
Lisa turns to Leonie: “Mama, what are they supposed to be, skeletons or monsters?”
Her small face is covered with chalk-white powder and her lips gleam dark red. Blue eyes sit like glass marbles under black eyebrows. She had wanted to do her own makeup, and she coated the hairs so thickly with grease pencil that they stand straight up, like bristles. Her hands clasp the play-broom. A tulle skirt with embroidered flowers billows over her dirty winter boots. A rhinestone tiara from last year’s Mardi Gras party sits atop the headscarf which Leonie, after much discussion, was made to knot at the back of Lisa’s neck, rather than under her chin: “I want to be a witch, but a pretty one!” She’ll be starting school next fall—it’s unbelievable.
Lisa watches the tussling boys circling around each other, all of them seven or eight years older than her. Leonie is sure she’ll pick up one or another of the words she hears the boys use—“expressions,” as they call them in the kindergarten. Two-year-old Felicia crouches at Leonie’s feet. She gathers pebbles from the sidewalk, inspects them briefly, then flings them away with a whoop. She pays no attention to the swarm of monsters. Her hand-me-down anorak is too loose, and it makes her look fat and greasy—a troll-baby with a red nose and green freckles. “Lisstick too!” she demanded emphatically in the bathroom as Leonie was drawing on Lisa’s witch-mouth. Now her moist lips shine as if freshly painted. Her little tongue creeps out to taste the gummy-bear-flavored lip gloss.
“Come on, Mama—let’s go to the bonfire!” Lisa tugs at Leonie’s coat. Leonie walks carefully, her high heels digging into the wet clay. Hard olive-brown pellets left by the sheep are strewn everywhere. It’s rained a lot in the past few days. Patches of mist crept over the ground at the Wren House children’s farm, wrapping all the way up the trees, and the sheep and chickens loom out of it like bleating and cackling ghosts.
Today the sun is shining again, but the afternoon is chilly despite the blue sky. Leaves spin ceaselessly down from the treetops, gleaming yellow, dark red, and brownish, like worn leather. The hillside is vast and overgrown with bushes and plants that Leonie doesn’t recognize. Leonie saw a rhubarb plant for the first time in the garden of Wren House, which is carefully fenced off to protect it from hungry animals. Leonie wouldn’t survive one day in the great outdoors, even though she grew up in a green-covered row house in Feuerbach. Crooked sandstone steps and narrow trails cut through the vegetation and lead to hand-made huts, a wooden wigwam, the stables. A jungle gym with a slide stands in a sandy hollow that’s edged with boulders. This land belongs to the church: in the seventies they built a flat-roofed building with large rooms, colorful linoleum floors, and spartan furniture where the neighborhood children now meet under the watchful eyes of nursery-school teachers and young men doing their civilian service. Since moving here in the summer, barely a day has gone by that Leonie and her girls haven’t turned up at Wren House. Lisa and Felicia love to pet the sheep, whose dirty wool feels “kind of like greasy hair,” and they make sure that Leonie keeps lettuce and other kitchen scraps to feed to the rabbits. Lisa’s head has been full of the Halloween party for days. Leonie had to read her the card with the grinning pumpkin that’s stuck on the refrigerator over and over: “We’re having a Halloween party. Come in your spookiest clothes and join us for ghost stories, a haunted house, and a relay race!” No one seems to mind that the eve of All Saint’s Day is still a week away. “The kids like Halloween better than Mardi Gras. Too many people are away on the actual day, so we moved it up a bit,” Bernd, one of the teachers, explained.
Simon won’t take part in the festivities. He stands apart from the swarm of dressed-up children like a professional ghostbuster, a Man-in-Black in a suit and overcoat—perhaps he even has a laser gun in his briefcase that turns other-worldly beings into puddles of green slime. The fact that he can be here on a regular Tuesday to admire his daughter’s costume is pure luck; he had a business meeting on the glass-covered veranda at Sole e Luna, a temple for seafood-lovers on nearby Neue Weinsteig. In a moment he’ll get in his car and drive back to the office.
Simon is actually the one who discovered this place for the girls. In the middle of the move, carrying a bag of rolls for the movers under his arm, he opened the wrought-iron gate: the faded inscription CHILDREN'S FARM 'WREN HOUSE' MON-SAT 10AM—6PM awakened the explorer in him. Simon is much more curious than Leonie, who managed to pass by the church with thirteenth-century frescoes in Heumaden, her old neighborhood, hundreds of times without succumbing to the allure of a sign that advertised “the only known representation of a female demon in Würtemburg.” It was only in the week before the move that she, already feeling a bit nostalgic, finally entered the bright room, which smelled curiously of apple pie. She knelt at the entrance automatically and searched along the wall for the basin of holy water—naturally, in this Protestant church it was nowhere to be found. Finally she traced the protective path from forehead over breastbone and shoulders with dry fingers. She lowered her head under the mild gaze of the Jesus who seemed to dangle effortlessly above her. Fascinated, she contemplated the black nails that passed through palms and feet and the wound that discreetly bled from Christ’s side and quietly murmured, “Please protect Simon and my girls, keep them healthy, Amen.” The whispered words were almost a sacrifice—not like the inscrutable transformation of the pale wafers, more like an incantation that belonged to another era: Give me this and I will give you that, I will scatter grains of frankincense in the altar flames, I will burn a fatted calf. This crude metaphysics came from a time when people prayed every night before bed; it had traveled down through the years unchanged, along with fragments of the rosary, whose “fruit of thy womb” was for Leonie always a Granny Smith, and images from a children’s bible—Adam and Eve clothed in furs, cowering under the angel’s flaming sword. Leonie’s mother had Sudeten German roots, and nurturing Catholic traditions in the Swabian diaspora was important to her; Leonie served as an acolyte for years.
Only after the ritual of crossing herself did Leonie allow herself to take a brochure from the foyer and follow its guidance, head tilted back, in search of the demoness. She quickly discovered a blackish-brown figure amid the throng of faded shapes. Leonie was disappointed by the sexless body of the demon, dumpy and inchoate. A barely visible bulge was the only hint of a breast; the clumsy figure, without bosom or buttocks, looked like a silhouette pasted on the wall. “What were you expecting, a pin-up?” Simon teased her when she gave him her indignant report. She wasn’t able to put what disturbed her so much into words. Simon saw right through her, of course: for breaking her usual routine, departing from the regular path between office, kindergarten, playground, and supermarket to do something unusual, something pointless that had nothing to do with her job or family, she felt she deserved to be rewarded. With a full-breasted devil with a big butt, for example, one she could tell Simon about that night in bed as they drifted off together side by side, face to face, while she held his soft penis, disappointed that it didn’t budge, and then almost equally disappointed when it hardened in her hand, cutting into her precious and far-too-brief sleep time by at least half an hour.
Lisa’s fingers, moist and hot with excitement, lead Leonie across the yard in front of the building. Her eyes search out the bigger girls, who have already secured prized places by the bonfire. A thick yellow soup simmers in a kettle over the fire, smelling of garlic. The circle contains pointy witch's hats, necklaces of plastic bones, long rustling skirts, and green-painted faces. Only on close inspection does Leonie recognize the teenagers, who usually spend their time playing ball or practicing dance moves from music videos, but have now been transformed into witches, vampires, and dead princesses. She’s proud of Lisa, who marches right up to the fire and sits down quietly among the older kids without hesitation. Leonie and Simon exchange a parental look. Felicia examines a lump of dirt. Before she can stick her discovery into her mouth, Leonie shouts, “Simon!”, and he bends down as if he had all the time in the world and brushes some dirt from the corner of her mouth. But he doesn’t get any closer. Leonie has the feeling that he doesn’t want her sticky fingers to endanger his office clothes.
Leonie still gets a bit of a thrill from seeing Simon dressed in a suit. The greenish-gray fabric shimmers under his short black coat. The white shirt and bright orange tie are chosen with taste—his, not hers. She’s glad he no longer needs her advice. They first went shopping together after he finished business school and officially joined the company where he’d been freelancing. Since she was a child, she had gone to the same venerable department store downtown, standing behind the dressing room curtains year after year as her mother carried over piles of clothes: from her first miniskirt to the gown for her graduation ball. Leonie let Simon sit in his boxer shorts under the neon light, wordlessly hanging her selections on the rod from outside the dressing room: solid-colored shirts in classic cuts and inconspicuous fabrics, ties and socks that didn’t have cartoon figures romping all over them. Only the clanging of the wire hangers betrayed her anger at the world Simon came from, a world that would stand in his way whenever he failed to completely abandon its habits. It was the world of No-Name sneakers and the flip-flops they called “rubber slippers” in the eighties, the emblems not of casual summers in the city but of aggressive proletarianism, the world of cheap synthetic pants, flower-print leisure shirts, “Drinking Team” T-shirts, and self-drawn tattoos inked by friends. These were the insignia of a contemptible, wayward background that Leonie took care never to get any closer to in all the years of their life together.
Yet Simon had escaped, naked and ready to be civilized, like Robinson’s Friday. The illegitimate son of a perfume store salesclerk from Hohenlohe had the fierce desire to make money, which even in his school days made him tougher and more determined than the kids in Leonie’s milieu. Her set planned as far as civilian service or the next Interrail trip, at best. Only when they fight—when their screaming pushes them away from each other, when he grabs her arm and leaves a mark that’s still visible hours later, or insults her with words that are as crude as the exhaust-blackened concrete blocks on the main roads of the “Bronx of Swabia” where he grew up—does she sense that Simon will never fully belong to her.
Leonie literally ran into Simon’s arms on one of her last days of school, dizzy from sweet champagne and slightly hysterical over a graduation prank that had gotten out of control—the school building stuffed up to the ceiling with balloons, finger-painted graffiti on the teachers’ cars, strawberry-flavored condoms passed out to freshmen. She had seen him crossing the schoolyard. He walked through the undulating crowd of furious, excited teachers and bellowing teens like a grinning Moses parting the Red Sea: six-foot-three, unshaven, his slapping flip-flops exuding devil-may-care charm.
Simon’s bad reputation had various sources. Teachers at the high school on Schillerstraße, which boasted of once counting the famous poet Eduard Mörike among the faculty, had a hard time with the truant and class clown who, despite all his capers, managed never to seriously endanger his GPA. Among the students he was known as a dealer of various wares, from illegally copied computer games to soft drugs. There were a couple of chic, confident girls who often hung around the schoolyard and smoked with him. He didn’t seem to have serious relationships. He lived alone with his mother, and his contact with Leonie had never gone past a snarled “Hello.”
Leonie—red-haired, pale, and wiry—was studying physical education and French. She despised coffee, cigarettes, and the sexual promiscuity of the popular cliques. She was content with her giggling circle of girlfriends who wore their blonde hair in ponytails, accompanied her to the swanky disco in the Killesberg Höhenpark on Friday nights, and had brothers named Marc or Oliver who tried to pick Leonie up after tennis practice.
To this day Leonie isn’t sure what had made her bob sluggishly over to Simon like a little rudderless boat. At the time it seemed quite natural. He towered above almost everyone else and provided her with an attainable goal. She stood directly before him, looking every bit the team captain in her white jeans and sleeveless plaid blouse, groaned, “I can’t stand this anymore!”, and let herself topple off her tiptoes into him, throwing her arms around his neck, closing her eyes, and breathing in his scent. After-shave, with something wild underneath it that was nothing like the stink of old socks and beer-sweat that she knew from her other admirers. She heard his surprised “Hey!”, felt his lips on her neck, the scratch of his stubble, and an electric shock that ran from the soft skin of her throat to the pit of her stomach. The next evening she slept with him in the backseat of his old Fiat, then frantically tried to rub the blood out of the upholstery with Kleenex while he climbed into the front seat, shaking his head: “I never would have believed that this was your first time. But I’m glad the tennis guys didn’t get to you first.”
After the year-long break that he demanded—“I don’t have time for a girlfriend. I’m going to go to business school and build my mother a house!”—during which time Leonie went to Montpellier for a semester to make the acquaintance of three more penises, they stayed together.
She doesn’t like to calculate how long she and Simon have been together. Sometimes she’s embarrassed to think that she’s been sleeping with the same man for more than ten years. When talking to women she doesn’t know well, Leonie invents affairs and lovers: professors, taxi drivers, bartenders. She’d even chalked up the elevator sex—with Simon, of course—at an all-inclusive hotel on the Costa del Sol, to an encounter with a native waiter.
The children holler. Bernd and Stavros, the two teachers, emerge from inside wearing flowered oven mitts. The men carry big trays with toasted cubes of bread. They expertly tear the aluminum foil from tubs of sour cream, distribute spoons, and serve the soup. Most of the children are hungry. As their colorful plastic bowls are filled, they pile on the croutons and eat greedily. “I’m sure this is the first warm meal some of them have eaten today,” Simon whispers to Leonie. He steps behind her, and Feli immediately switches from his hand to Leonie’s. The little paw is as sticky and soft as dough, the bones slim and flexible. Leonie strokes her fingers and feels their regularity, the skin’s tenderness. Every day she’s newly amazed by the bodies of her children, just as she’s amazed by the cruel fact that her own constantly moisturized hands look spotty and old when compared to those of the girls.
“Our spoiled brats are the only picky ones. Look at the girls fussing again!” Lisa hesitates when Bernd offers her a ladleful, and Leonie knows it isn’t because of his red and black hangman costume. “I don’t really like soup that much.” Feli nibbles a few croutons and clings to Leonie’s leg. “I have to go. It’s getting late.” Simon waves to Lisa, who’s beaming at him, then squats and rubs noses with Feli. She gives a deep, throaty giggle—the dirty laugh of a cartoon character. Then he touches Leonie’s chin and turns her face toward him. It’s a macho gesture that he’s cultivated, the same as smacking her ass or standing to pee. But it lacks the element of invitation—the dimpled grin, the naughty whisper. His eyes are cloudy and tired, his hand limp. Leonie can see clearly that he’s long gone, already mentally back at the office. Simon was recently made sales manager at the company. They manufacture gaskets for the automotive industry. It’s not going so well at the moment, what with the increasing competition from Eastern Europe and China.
“Can I get a kiss?” Simon gives her a quick kiss with no tongue, a new habit she finds as disappointing as the fact that he didn’t spare a word for her short skirt and high boots. They’re hardly playground clothes. She knows he doesn’t like her work clothes, the dark outfits and pantsuits: “That’s what the girls at work wear too. It’s like a uniform.” She’s his preppy straight-A student from an end-terrace house, and he’s as proud of his conquest of her as he is of his Saab, or the fact that people with doctorates work under him.
Simon goes down the rocky sandstone steps, waves one more time, then doesn’t look back. Pumpkin-zombies and their chaperones run around him, hooting and jostling each other. The heavy iron gate rattles shut. Feli starts to whine and refuses to be comforted; she stretches up toward Leonie and hangs on her belt. Even if it means dirty streaks on her bright corduroy skirt and greasy breadcrumbs on her coat, Leonie picks up her youngest and looks into her face. “What’s wrong, Mouse? Don’t you want to run around anymore?” Feli hides her face in Leonie’s neck, her hair soft as precious fur. She’s heavy, much heavier than Lisa was at two. A burning in the tendons of her knees and shoulder blades warns Leonie against carrying this much weight. She knows that she ought to encourage Feli to walk, and especially to climb the stairs, but she can’t resist the temptation to press this little creature to her body, this tiny being who was breastfeeding only a year ago, to listen to her garbled words that still can’t convey complexities or malice. She often carries Feli—not just to enjoy the warmth and flexibility of her child’s round body, but also to assuage her guilty conscience. Leonie, who loves her work, would never admit that it also troubles her. But now, with Feli in her arms, the truth is obvious: It does, every day. Every day, when she sees her girls wave at her from behind the kindergarten windows that are decorated with paper cut-outs. Every day, when Lisa gripes, “I want to finish playing here, I never get to be at home.” Every day that she packs Feli off to kindergarten despite her cough, every time Leonie has to shake her awake—gently, of course, only her fingertips betraying a touch of frenzy. Is there traffic today? What time does the meeting start? She hears about how other parents spend their afternoons, and compares their visits to the Wilhelma Zoo or nature parks with her frantic trips to the supermarket and the cleaners.
For her, the greatest betrayal is her feeling of relief when she gets to the office and sits down at her desk. Leonie works in the communications department of a mid-level bank. She’s in charge of the employee magazine and the newsletter. Leonie never much liked school. The world outside of university, where tasks were swiftly accomplished and new ones immediately begun, where she was paid in money and not with honors and pretty words, suited her immediately. She enjoys phone calls and meetings, often simply because they allow her to forget about her children. She loves going to the black-tiled department bathroom between meetings, peeing in peace and retouching her lipstick without anyone screaming or banging on the door. She doesn’t really want to believe that the standards she’s held to have become much higher since she’s had kids, that any distraction or failure is noted more quickly, met with incomprehension instead of assistance; rather than complain, she works more conscientiously than ever. “We working mothers get shafted—we have to be twice as good as the others to achieve less,” a drunken colleague once ranted to her on a business trip. Since she had only Simon to take care of at the time, she’d turned away in disgust. Nowadays she’d heartily agree.
Stavros puts out the fire with a bucket of sand and straightens the dagger that’s sticking out of the middle of his belly like the crank of a windup toy. The tip, appropriately painted with fake blood, reemerges near his kidneys. He wears leather pants that are scarred with age, like the skin of some animal he shot himself. He’s at least ten years younger than Leonie, and probably lives in some Kreuzberg co-op. Leonie knows he smokes hand-rolled cigarettes when the kids aren’t watching. He has tattoos too, of course: she spent all summer observing his muscled biceps and shoulders when he played ball with the kids. He’s obviously good in bed. He makes his hands into a funnel and yells: “Everyone who wants to hear ghost stories come stand quietly by the door. Shoes off in the coat-room. No talking or yelling!” The older kids rush into the house, kicking off sneakers and boots, “Shhh, Stavros said . . .” The mass of monsters bottlenecks at the spiderweb- and ghost-covered door to the common room. Lisa hangs back, shifting from one foot to the other. “Mama, are you coming?” Leonie props Feli’s diapered bottom on her hip. “I can’t go in with Feli, sweetheart. I’ll stay right outside, and if you get scared you can just come out.” Lisa chews on her index finger—a habit that Leonie hates but decides to allow, given the circumstances.
The room is completely dark. Paper monsters swing from the ceiling. A few candles flicker. An older girl hits the boy next to her—he’s trying to shove ahead—“Hey, let the little ones in first or they won’t be able to see anything.” “That’s right, the littlest all the way up front!” Lisa gets lifted up like a doll and passed through the crowd to a place in the circle up front. She’s too surprised and excited to say anything. Her eyes are huge in the dim room. It smells like chewing gum, fabric softener, and sweat. Stavros comes in last, leaving the door open just a crack. Leonie tries to divert Felicia, who’s still cooing and trying to get to her sister. The teacher hunches in the middle of the circle, legs folded like a big insect. His voice rumbles through the room, where forty children are breathing fast. The story begins. A king and queen want a child so badly that they don’t care where it comes from: “Even if it comes from the devil!” The princess is born. On the night of her fifteenth birthday she goes to her father: “Father, I shall die tomorrow.” Twelve days vigil must be held over her deathbed. Leonie sits Felicia on the ground and casts a final glance at Lisa, who sits in the glow of the rhythmically flickering red light. She has the same vacant look as she does in front of the television. The other children clap out the tolling bell that signals the witching hour, and Leonie closes the door.