“Mama, my bucket is full!”
“Mine too!”
Ulrich and Kilian run over to Judith and dump the foliage they’ve raked into their metal pails onto the mountain of leaves in the middle of the lawn. She looks at her boys and takes pleasure in what she sees. They wear colorful knit caps, felt jackets with wooden buttons, and sturdy leather boots. Their eyes shine and their faces are still tan, enhanced with the redness of excitement, movement, and fresh air.
They’ve been working in the little garden for almost two hours. Judith is sitting on the bench near the roses. The bushes are old, with woody stems: even the smallest shoots have thorns. The rosehips hang between them like tiny lanterns. Judith has spread a checked tablecloth over the folding table—a plate of apples and Judith’s dented thermos rest on it. In the Hackstraße days it had been filled with strong coffee, and it was her constant companion through long days at the university. Today it’s filled with fruit tea. The children run through the leaf-mountain. The foggy morning has yielded to a sunny afternoon. In nine weeks it will be Christmas, and the sky is a translucent bright blue, as if snow clouds are already lurking behind it.
The garden isn’t large, perhaps two thousand square feet, situated between the back of the building where Judith and Klaus and the children live and the next row of houses on busy Olgastraße. This garden is the only green place in the gap between the buildings—the rest is concrete courtyards with parking spaces and trash cans. Warmth lingers in the square between the high sandstone walls. In the summer it’s cooled by long shadows. Judith feels protected down here, like in the courtyard of a castle. The walls keep her gaze from wandering. She can see only one small section of sky, with clouds, birds, and airplanes. A sky that spreads over everything and betrays nothing. It could just as easily hang over another city, another country. Sometimes Klaus makes fun of the “prison yard.” Judith laughs with him and doesn’t let on that a grand plot of land, bordered only by horizon, could never match the sense of security she feels in this city garden enclosed by old five-story buildings. Again she’s the mummy from Hackstraße, eager to hole up and close the sarcophagus on herself. Though Klaus has learned much about Judith since then, she’s never told him about that. She’d disguised her withdrawal as circulatory collapse, and let Klaus bring her water, camomile tea, and crispbreads in the bed with the shiny green spread, only to emerge pregnant and on a lower dose of Tavor. She keeps the pills in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom with the homeopathic capsules, seawater nose drops, and Band-Aids. She takes some every night—sometimes more, sometimes less. The bottle is labeled Biotin: for hair, skin and nails.
The weak sunbeams warm Judith’s face. This is probably the last day they’ll be able to sit outside like this. She hears the children’s voices. They’re acting out a fairy tale they’ve learned at the kindergarten: “Rumpelstiltskin.” Uli is playing director and Kilian readily complies. “Perhaps your name is Shortribs, or Sheepshank, or Laceleg?” They laugh at the names, try out new variations. The boys go outside even when it’s cold and drizzly, hacking up the thin sheets of ice that form on the rain barrel after the first frost, stirring mud soup in old pans with wooden spoons, or digging caves in the sandbox. They could never do such things at the children’s farm around the corner. The grounds are nice, but Judith is suspicious of the clientele at Wren House. The garden, on the other hand, is practically an extension of their apartment. Here Kilian and Uli can watch crocuses, snowdrops, and tulip leaves emerge from the earth, pointy as witch’s hats; they can watch the leathery knobs unfold into sticky green leaves on trees and bushes; they can wait for the starlings to return. The scrubby lawn is bordered by a narrow flower bed in which veteran roses display their last blossoms. A frail fruit tree stands in each corner: apple, damson, and pear, as well as a magnificent elderberry bush whose black-draped clusters attract an astounding number of blackbirds and other songbirds every September. Their violet droppings make a mess on the wooden rim of the sandbox and the roof of the little hut—the children use it as a playhouse, laughing among the gardening tools and watering cans. There’s a faucet on the wall of the building, directly under the Posselts’ living room window, where Judith or Klaus can fasten a red hose in the summer to water the plants and let Uli and Kilian splash around. Each child has his own little bed. There are still a few marigolds in Kilian’s—thanks to the shelter of the wall, they have escaped the nightly frost.
Judith closes her eyes and tilts her head back. Neighbors come to the windows to look down at her and the children. She waves to the few she knows and ignores the others. She can feel their jealousy, and remembers how she too had once looked down greedily at this walled bit of paradise from the third floor.
She conquered the garden for her children, proceeding strategically from the moment when her belly had begun to swell over the still amphibian-like Uli. She’d sat for hours at the bedroom window, arms propped on pillows, staring down into the greenery and imagining herself swinging in a hammock, the leaves casting green and gold shadows on her face, an infant at her breast. She saw marveling eyes following the flight of bumblebees through blooming ivy, bare feet taking their first steps on grass instead of asphalt and stone.
Judith’s idyll was disrupted by Herr Posselt, who made regular attempts to pare the knee-high grass with a mechanical mower. He wore light Bermuda shorts and braided sandals on his callused yellow feet. Varicose veins crawled over his scrawny calves like blue earthworms and tangled into nests in the hollows of his knees. It was disrupted by Frau Posselt’s birthmark-blotched, limp flesh hanging out of her sleeveless summer dress, and by her phlegmy coughing over a tray of cookies and mugs of Nescafé. The worst was when they fell asleep in their deck chairs. Their heads would sink to the side or flop on their necks like crash victims, their limbs hung slack, their mouths gaped and drool dripped. The background hum of traffic on Olgastraße absorbed the garden’s subtler noises, but Judith was sure they both snored.
Frau Posselt’s complaints about the arduousness of gardening found a sympathetic ear with Judith. Klaus’s sporadic help mowing and weeding turned into regular garden duties. When the old woman criticized contemporary society—“The way kids grow up these days, there ain’t a solitary corner fer ‘em ta romp around in. ‘Twas better in ma day”—Judith enthusiastically concurred. Finally Frau Posselt said: “Frau Rapp, when yer wee babe comes, we’ll make a deal, you’n me. If ya don’t bring half the neighborhood ta holler around ma winda, then I says, and the mister agrees, ya can use the garden fer yer family.”
Judith kept her promise to the old woman and invited other children to play in the garden once a week at most. The only exception was for Ulrich’s and Kilian’s birthdays, both of which fell at the beginning of September. Then they threw a party in the garden. They borrowed long benches, hung paper lanterns from the trees, and invited grandparents, godparents, and siblings, who all came in delighted droves. Judith cooked and baked. There was fruit punch, apple pies, and huge trays of quiche and pizza. From the windows above, one could see white tablecloths, balloons, and colorful lights among the shrubbery. Schlamper and the Posselts came too, wandering through the swarm of partiers and looking a bit lost. They felt their way hesitantly among the once-familiar things—“Look, Luise, the russet is finally bearing!”—like emigrants returning to their homeland after half a century to find it strange and foreign.
“Mama, Mama! Look what I found!” Uli emerges from the bushes with a bottle in his hand. A dragon snarls from the half-peeled paper label: Flavored vodka, bright red. The dregs of the gleaming liquid slosh around the convex bottom, and before Judith can stop him, Uli has unscrewed the top and stuck his nose in. “It smells like gummy bears!” Kilian bounces over, “What is it, Uli, can I have some too?” “Stop it—hands off!” Judith shrieks. The boy drops the bottle, eyes wide. She jumps up so quickly, tearing his discovery away and plunging it into the recycling, that his bottom lip trembles. Judith’s heart pounds in her throat—she feels only anger, not least of all at herself. How could she have missed it?
Uli stretches his arms toward it: “Mama, was it poison? Can I see it, just for a second? I won’t drink it, I know what happens, like in ‘Snow White,’ how the evil queen put poison in the apple and . . .” Judith shakes her head, her hair flying. “I threw it away and that’s that. It’s not for you. Go back to your brother. You shouldn’t be crawling around in the bushes like that. Look at your pants.” Her voice is loud and shrill. She hates the way she’s behaving, she hates herself for the incomprehension she sees in Uli’s eyes. He’s wearing garden pants—he’s allowed to get them dirty. Kilian looks despondent as well, and hangs his head like his older brother. They can tell something’s amiss, Judith thinks. She’s ashamed of herself, but her mind is made up. And so she stands up, takes their hands, and walks over to the flower bed and picks a few asters. “Look, Uli. Here’s a pretty bouquet for your room. Here’s some phlox, and rosehips would be nice too.” She cuts a bit of ivy and binds the bunch with a long yellow blade of grass. Uli takes a deep breath.
Just before lunch Judith had quietly done away with a number of rain-soaked firecrackers and the ten or so smashed eggs she’d found on the wall and on the Posselts’ living room window, cleaned up several squeezed-out tubes of mustard and toothpaste, and scrubbed the old couple’s window with ammonia. She’d noticed the devastation while she was airing out the bedsheets on the window seat. Slimy egg white dripped down the Posselts’ picture window onto the path. A few intact yolks stared up at her from the moist grass, reminding her of her mother’s “bullseyes”: when Judith was a child, she would fry eggs for lunch, and Judith was supposed to stab them with her fork. They made her nauseous.
When she looked into the Posselts’ living room, she understood that she was cleaning up not as a favor to the old neighbors, but to restore a disrupted order. She saw rubber plants and philodendron pressing against the windowpanes next to a tarnished brass watering can; farther back she saw the darkness of the embossed wallpaper, the brown velveteen armchairs, and intricately patterned oriental rugs. Schlamper lay sleeping in his basket, his snout propped on crossed forelegs. The animal’s long back rose and fell regularly. It was just before twelve. Doubtless the Posselts were eating in the dining room, which looked out on Olgastraße. Today was Wednesday, so they’d be having poppy seed sweet buns. Like Herr Posselt, the recipe came from the Sudetenland. Judith was very familiar with the long and tortuous history of Wenzel Posselt’s odyssey from Bohemia to Stuttgart. As well as the hostility his wife had faced when she had exchanged her old Swabian surname, Läpple, for the name of a refugee. “He was just the most charmin’, no Swabian could deny that.” Judith knew of Frau Posselt’s struggles with the finer points of Bohemian cuisine. “I’d never made that kinda stuff, nobody could shew me how, no mother-in-law, no nothin’. Wenzel, he tried. Agin and agin he tried ta shew me. Shook his head and laughed, he did. And now we take it in turns, one day Swabian, the next Bohemian: Mondee stewed beef’n horseradish sauce, Tuesdee lentils’n spätzle, Wednesdee buns, Thursdee Gaisburger stew . . .” Judith doesn’t know why she burdens her mind with such trivia. And yet this information nestles in her mind, displacing other things. Remembering Frau Posselt’s menu and paddling endlessly about in an ocean of murky chatter is still more pleasant than thinking about her own past. Angrily, Judith tears paper towels off a roll and scrubs away the contaminants. It was her garden that had been invaded, her children’s space that some depraved, television-addled monsters had defiled.
“Mama, can we have sweets now please?” Kilian asks, cocking his head. His right foot scuffs at the ground. Uli stands a few feet behind him, grinning. Judith knows he put his younger brother up to it. She marvels at the two of them—how quickly they fix on something else and forget the bottle of poison. She hopes that her own genes have mostly been eradicated from the chiseled, finely turned strands of their DNA, which she imagines as glowing purple and black rods, like the lighting in a club. “You can have them when Mattis comes, as I told you. Look and make sure that there’s nothing missing in the playhouse! Is there a cup and saucer for everyone?” The brothers run to the hut to check the table settings, since Mattis and his mother Hanna are supposed to arrive in a quarter of an hour.
They live next door, in a four-story, smooth-plastered, utilitarian building from the fifties with small windows—the kind of building that was so often constructed to fill bombed-out spaces. It fits the rest of the street like a rotten tooth in a healthy mouth. Judith has known Hanna and her lively son for a while now. They often run into each other on the street, where Judith hears all the latest horror stories about Mattis’s hospital visits and treatments. Mattis goes to the Catholic kindergarten on Sonnenbergstraße, but he is nonetheless a regular guest in the little garden; he’s even allowed to wreak havoc on the Ostheimer toy farm in the playroom, to the surprise and delight of Judith’s sons: “Come on, we’ll shoot the oxen, that one’s dead. Now a bomb falls through the roof and explodes on the pigs, and the farmer keels over—and then the pigs and the cow . . .”
Hanna is obviously grateful and in need of the help. On top of that, Uli and Kilian like the wild Jack-in-the-Box, as Judith secretly calls him. And so now and then she sticks a note in the neighboring mailbox: “Stop by the garden this afternoon. We’ll be there.” The fact that Mattis, whose small playroom harbors Playmobil and countless oversized stuffed animals, in addition to the usual wooden toys, is allowed to play the role of guest but never host is a tacit agreement that Hanna has never questioned. Regardless, Mattis’s health ensures that only every third playdate actually comes to pass.
Whenever she sees Hanna and her pale son rushing frantically down the street, or heaving the weekly groceries from the trunk of the Renault with the help of Hanna’s mother—under whose stream of words Hanna cowers as if under a cold shower—Judith is reminded of how cozy and secure her own life is. The fact that this woman has to do everything herself, that she can call on no one to share the burden of responsibility, fills Judith with fear and awe. She knows very well that she would never be able to raise the children, or even feed them, without Klaus; she knows that their lifestyle—sole wage earner and housewife—is on the verge of extinction. When she allows Mattis and Hanna into her world for an hour or two, she feels as if she’s making a sacrifice to angry gods. And it really is a sacrifice to hear TV-inflected battle cries coming from the otherwise peaceful playroom, and to hear her boys joining in as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It’s a sacrifice to Hanna, who sits at Judith’s table letting her tea get cold, for Judith to let herself be dragged so deep into the life of a broken family. Judith slides the plate of cake toward Hanna, hoping she’ll take some, that she’ll stuff her mouth with homemade cake and that the shredded carrots, hazelnuts, and cinnamon will form a bulwark that will halt the flow of news from Hanna’s dreary world. Of course, it doesn’t work. Hanna talks of lactose-free yogurt and soy milk, of torrents of vomit and watery stools. Judith nods and murmurs, then inserts some praise, since she doesn’t know what else to say. Hanna’s pale face reddens slightly, she smiles—a rare look for her: “Yes, that’s what everyone says, that we mothers work the hardest. My mom doesn’t quite believe that, though.” Perhaps she should jump in and draw Hanna out. Perhaps Hanna wants to pour out her heart about her mother—she clearly does much for her grandchild but seems to cause problems for her daughter. But then Mattis emerges from the playroom with a giant gun he’s hammered together from a Matador building set, his cheeks red and the hair on his neck dark with sweat. He sets his handiwork in his mother’s lap: “Look what Uli and I made!” Judith is horrified by the precision of the weapon her son has constructed with the old-fashioned building kit, which he usually turns into animals and all manner of buildings. She’s horrified by the trigger and magazine that Mattis is so expertly illustrating, so horrified that she barely registers the way Hanna turns from her son and begins to eat her cake and drink her tea without any comment aside from a single “Hm,” her whole body facing away from Mattis, until Kilian and Uli come to drag their guest back to the playroom.
Judith has an aversion to Mattis’s grandma, a chubby woman with rosacea who loudly bemoans her only grandson’s fate and takes responsibility for his alternative diet. Judith’s own mother-in-law had to be convinced not to give plastic cranes or Teletubby dolls as Christmas presents, but she’s helpful and friendly and doesn’t interfere too much. She admires Judith’s dedication to her household and is impressed by the children’s health: “There must be something to that Waldorf upbringing.” Judith is grateful that her children manage fine with homeopathic cures from the medicine chest. The question of stronger substances, antibiotics or cortisone, has never arisen. What would she do if their little bodies rebelled with pain, if their fevers worsened, changing from necessary and healthy bodily functions into life-threatening afflictions?
Judith looks at her watch. It’s already half past four. The walls turn dark yellow, then reddish. Soon it will be dark. Five is cleanup time in the garden. Klaus will come home and they’ll have dinner. She allows the boys another handful of cookies and thinks. Hanna must have been held up at work. Mattis’s kindergarten is open until five. The boys will be disappointed. Just as she’s thinking about starting a ball game with Uli and Killian, she hears excited voices—high chirping sounds that could only belong to little girls. And then they’re there, running around the corner of the building, rushing across the lawn to the sandbox. They’re wearing identical jean skirts with embroidered flowers, patent leather boots with pink fur lining, and glowing down jackets. A multitude of pompons dances from their hats and scarves. The outfits would be more appropriate for sixteen-year-olds. The skirts end far above their knees and display legs in pink cotton tights. The girls immediately set about opening a restaurant. Thrilled, they pluck spoons, pans, and sieves from the wooden play box while the older girl provides commentary: “That’s the blender! And this is the fryer—we can make french fries!” They holler from the house to the astonished Ulrich, who hesitates at first, but then grins and joins in, dragging his brother by the hand.
Leonie’s red hair glows against the backdrop of the ivy-covered wall. She’s wearing a suit, a light-colored tweed coat, and high-heeled boots. A leather briefcase swings from her shoulder. She walks quickly through the grass toward Judith. Judith is curious to see if she’ll sink into the wet ground, but she treads so skillfully that she reaches the bench and sits down beside Judith without the slightest mishap. “I always wanted to call you up, but somehow it never happened. And so I thought we’d just look in and see if you were here. The garden is beautiful, you’d never expect something like this back here. It’s fantastic—right in the middle of the city! And you even have a sandbox!”
Judith examines Leonie’s face—her lipstick, her bright makeup, and the delicate pink freckles on her neck. She can tell that her neighbor doesn’t feel quite as comfortable as she pretends. Unlike her children, she doesn’t take it for granted that she can just burst in. I purposely didn’t invite them, yet they showed up anyway. Judith takes a deep breath. She hates surprises. Mattis and Hanna still aren’t here. She looks surreptitiously at her watch. It’s too late now—they’re not coming. There’s great hustle and bustle between the sandbox and the hut. Uli and Leonie’s eldest have taken the reins, and they are sending the two younger children back and forth, as both waiters and customers. Rosehips, mud pies, and stones are on the menu. Uli makes ivy and grass dumplings filled with mud and Lisa does her best to imitate him. Judith is proud to see how sweetly Kilian treats the younger Felicia. “We were expecting visitors, actually—a neighbor’s son,” Judith says, purposely not mentioning any names, “but it seems they’ve been held up. Would you care for some tea?” Opening the wicker basket at her feet, pulling out the thermos, saucers, spoons, paper napkins, and the can with cubes of barley malt, and setting it all on the table restores Judith’s sense of security—the more so as she can sense Leonie’s admiration for her ability to spontaneously conjure up the makings of a tea party.
Felicia and Kilian have gotten into an altercation in the sandbox. Both are howling. Judith can’t tell what the trouble is. Leonie stands up immediately. “Feli, what’s wrong?” She translates her daughter’s wails. Kilian stands sullenly at her side. “You don’t want to be the customer? What do you want to be? The chef? And Kilian?” He mumbles something. “You want to be the chef too?” Leonie squats down with them, heedless of boots or coat. “You know what? I’ll be the customer. I’m super hungry. You guys cook me something! What do you serve here?” Kilian is already laughing again. “Dumplings and spätzle and bread pudding!” Felicia chimes in: “And cu’tard!” She doesn’t let go of her mother’s hand. The two older children join in. “I want to cook something too!” Uli cries. “Me too!” Lisa adds. Leonie takes the bucket that Uli is holding out to her. She fills the molds with the big wooden spoon. Her nose shines, she laughs. Uli chatters away eagerly, showing her the sand toys. It’s a new experience for Judith’s children, having a grown-up take part in a game, acting with them and following their directions. They like it—they laugh and talk excitedly. At the same time, they look wary, as if the situation could turn at any moment, as if the visitor might suddenly transform into a shadowy creature. At home Judith does crafts with the boys. They press flowers, braid, and weave. She lets them help her with the housework too, when they want to, but she doesn’t play with them. The world of childhood, where a fantasy land made from a few pillows and sticks can provide a whole day’s entertainment, is sacred. It shouldn’t be disturbed by a grown-up’s influence. At the Waldorf kindergarten, too, the teachers serve only as models to be imitated, working like nineteenth-century mothers in the house and garden with flour mills, mixing bowls, and washboards. The children are allowed to participate when they feel like it.
“Mmm, yummy! You’re good cooks. I want more!” Leonie cries, patting her stomach. The children bring her sand-filled containers, they pick leaves and flowers and lay them at Leonie’s feet. It reminds Judith of natives making offerings to an idol. Nonetheless, she likes the way Leonie sits on the rim of the sandbox with legs outstretched, how she closes her eyes and sniffs appreciatively when Uli holds fat mud balls served on an ivy leaf under her nose. At the same time, she knows this unwanted visit will upset things. Lisa and Felicia have temporary glitter tattoos on the backs of their hands and chewing gum in their cheeks. Now and then they fish long red gummy worms from the pockets of their jackets and share them with the boys. They chew delightedly, exuding the smell of artificial strawberry. Kilian tugs on Leonie’s bracelet: silver and multi-colored Ernie, Bert, Cookie Monster, and Grover charms jingle from Leonie’s freckled wrist. “Who are they?” With support from her girls, Leonie tells them about Sesame Street. They’re stunned when Uli exclaims: “We don’t have a television!” Tonight there will be questions: between bites of bread, called from behind the bathroom door, and whispered from under the blankets. Questions that will take energy to answer and that will bring uncertainty and confusion, maybe even awaken doubts about the fact that Judith wants to keep certain things from her children for as long as possible. Judith tosses back the now-cold fruit tea. It’s sour and makes her mouth water. She wishes she could spit it out. She’s annoyed at Hanna. Why couldn’t the stupid cow get here on time? Then she could have gotten rid of Leonie gracefully. “I’m sorry, we have visitors—maybe some other time.” Instead, this redhead is sitting here letting the children ogle her, totally oblivious. Uli touches her shimmering pantyhose tentatively: “How come you’re so pretty?” She’s upset everything—she doesn’t even ask whether the children are allowed to eat sweets.
Judith stands and goes over to the sandbox. “Uli, Kilian, get the apples and the sweets. You can eat with Lisa and Felicia in the playhouse.” The prospect of cookies ends the game. Uli carries the cookie tin proudly and carefully; Lisa walks at his side, while her sister and Kilian follow slowly behind, each hand wrapped around a yellow apple. There’s a clattering from inside the hut, and Uli’s forceful voice giving orders for the seating arrangement and cookie distribution. “You even baked! I can’t bake at all. Sometimes I buy those muffin mixes. I let the girls decorate them with smarties and sprinkles.” Leonie laughs and cleans her dirty fingers with a perfumed towelette. “We think carefully about what we eat in our household,” Judith says quietly. She tries to draw a line. It would be easier to be alone again—sun on her face, walled in, just her and the children, Klaus perhaps when he comes home, briefcase under his arm, eyes shining, his joy mirrored in the children’s faces and shining back on her as well.
Meanwhile, Leonie has sensed something; she twists her towelette into a sausage and stuffs it into her coat pocket, takes two steps back, her body tilted toward the playhouse, listening: “They’re playing so nicely in there—so peacefully.”
Judith just nods and puts the tea dishes back in the basket. Leonie takes the empty thermos to the faucet in the wall. How did she find it so easily? She’s smart—she washes the thermos and hands it back to Judith. She’s the kind of woman who would be easy to get close to: test lipstick, buy shoes, maybe even a second charm bracelet for Judith. From the Hackstraße days onward, it had been women, not men, who were in short supply. Judith finds most women trying and wearisome. As rivals they’d been irritating, now as mothers, members of this underprivileged and idealistic caste, they’re tolerable only in small doses. Klaus has a large circle of friends: colleagues from the university, guys from his band, even old school friends he’s kept in touch with. Judith is happy to cook for company, but when they put out feelers or extend invitations—“How about a barbecue next weekend at the Bärenschlößle . . .?”—she pulls back.
Leonie has turned away; her drooping shoulders convey her sense of helplessness. One more peep from the house and she’ll call the girls and leave. Judith feels bad. She doesn’t want to be a bitch. And the children really did play so nicely together. A window opens above. She touches Leonie’s arm. “Look, Klaus is home. Maybe he’ll make us coffee.” The other woman’s face brightens, and her smile returns, wide and exuberant. Sören wouldn’t have liked her: narrow sporty figure, red hair, too-small tits, a strong chin. She’d never have wasted years on a Hackstraße lover, popped pills, spread her legs on command. She’s normal. There’s no Tavor-fog behind her smooth brow. This “working girl” with her bag and elegant office clothes contributes a not-insignificant amount to the household income. She hires a cleaning lady, of course. When she looks in the mirror, she doesn’t see a loser staring back at her. All that education, all the slaving away for Baumeister/Canetti, just to cook spelt dumplings and sew patches on torn pants? She doesn’t have the slightest clue about the foul swill that sloshes around inside your skull. Give her a hot, caffeinated drink and let her go in peace. She won’t make any horrifying discoveries about you, and you can go your merry way. Too bad it isn’t a private way, with big NO TRESPASSING signs. You lack the courage to really take the plunge, as the Amish do: white bonnets and horse-drawn buggies, kneading bread and fetching water from the well, marrying only among themselves, defending their own plots of land with a shotgun.
Judith calls up: “Klaus!” The boys rush out of the playhouse and stand next to her, screaming “Papa!” at the top of their lungs. The looks on the girls’ faces—a father who comes home while it’s still light out! She can act the part for Leonie. Up there, that guy—a dream-guy: broad-shouldered, fair-haired, a professor, by the way—who just popped out of the window like a cuckoo from a clock, that’s my husband. My husband who feeds me, even though I’m sick and crazy; I’m good in bed, I’m a supermom. He doesn’t know the first part, and of course he likes the second part. I give him regular blow jobs and suck his cock at night, I get on top and moan and then make veggie-spread sandwiches in the morning—why would he ever look in the medicine cabinet? Biotin for hair and nails, to make you even prettier.
Klaus smiles and waves and the boys bounce with excitement: “Come down, Papa, come!” Your husband gets home late, am I right? He’s not part of your daily life, he works, just like you do, to pay for your Italian boots, your two cars, and the strangers who care for your children every day. But mine—he’s here. In a minute he’ll bring me a coffee with steamed milk. Because he loves me, from the heart, we’ll never part, I drive him wild, I’ll bear his child. And if I squint my eyes a bit in this melting blue twilight, I can imagine it’s Sören who’s waving—waving down at the beautiful blond sons that we made together. Sören wouldn’t laugh and wave, he’d vomit on the whole idyll: garden, kids, housewife with teacups, the obscene lemming-happiness of the bourgeoisie, who smile vapidly while they rub up against each other and multiply. Your horizon is no higher than the rim of a muesli bowl, you’re blind to the world’s perversions. Child soldiers disembowel women in Namibia while you worry your child might have hammertoes. And the Chinese make SUVs and precision mechanisms for a tenth of what they cost here, while the sea level and health care costs just keep rising.
Judith forms a cup with her hand and mimes drinking. Klaus grins and calls: “It’s on its way!” Judith smiles at Leonie. She talks of Klaus’s work at the university. “It’s a good school. Lots of students come here from far away, which can be fun. Homesick Rhinelanders and Arabs who find us Swabians annoying. Klaus invites them over and they get cheese spätzle, filled dumplings, and Trollinger wine, so they see that we’re not all dreary and grumpy.” Leonie laughs and pulls her tweed coat tighter. “And you? Are you a professor too?” Judith shakes her head. She’s been waiting for this question to come out of the lipsticked career-mouth. You’re nothing: a housewife and a mother. No one cares about you. The only people who stick up for you are old-fashioned Bavarian lederhosen-wearers and mentally deficient news announcers, who just make things worse. She answers quickly. She’s said it a hundred times. The words tumble out of her mouth like the golden eggs from the hen’s rear. Leonie will snatch them up greedily. There’s nothing to add. First career, then children, as it should be. The neighbor will never know that Judith didn’t finish her dissertation, that all she ever did in her months at the Dr. Fenchel Gallery was make coffee and take bubble wrap off of paintings. Leonie nods, impressed.
“We’ve rarely taken on a young person as completely apathetic as you have shown yourself to be. I turned down several dozen of your more qualified colleagues on your behalf. I’ll be speaking to Professor Baumeister. He spoke so highly of you!” Frau Dr. Fenchel’s blue-black geisha hairdo, her powdered face, painted red mouth, and arrogantly arched eyebrows still sometimes haunt Judith’s dreams. And yet the Gesamtkunstwerk, as Judith secretly called her boss, had been completely right. Judith was a horrendous intern. She was always late, used the office phone to call Tübingen and Kirchheim, missed appointments, and generally seemed lost in a fog of disinterest. It was just bad luck that the coveted internship, which was supposed to secure her professional future and catapult her out of destitution, coincided with the Sören-crisis and the related spike in her Tavor usage.
In the last week of her internship, Judith didn’t go to the gallery. She didn’t even pick up her certificate—it would hardly have been something she could show off, in any case. In fleeing from Hackstraße she wasn’t just escaping Sören’s voice on the answering machine. She was seeking shelter from the curator’s nasally voice as well.
Klaus enters the garden. He’s carrying a painted wooden tray from Chiavenna with two coffee cups. “For you, mesdames. Cheers.” Klaus presses Judith to him. His grip is strong, as if to assure himself that she’ll really stay and not disappear through a knothole, like some enchanted princess in a fairy tale. She smells his aftershave and the familiar Klaus-smell—clean and harmless. Judith closes her eyes for a moment and leans against him. His heart beats slowly and evenly under his scratchy sweater. She wants to crawl into him and live as a tiny animal in his armpit. Klaus shakes Leonie’s hand, and they chat a bit. Uli and Kilian come and hang on his legs briefly, only to disappear back into the playhouse with the girls. “I’ll go back up and set the table. Grilled cheese was the plan for dinner, right?” Judith nods slowly. “And there’s a beet salad in the refrigerator, top left—don’t forget to taste it first.” “Kilian will like that—red pee again! Bye, Leonie, see you soon!” Judith gulps down her coffee and watches him leave. No butt in his pants. A baggy nothing where there should be a swelling in his jeans. Not too plump, but just right—like Dürer’s Adam, like Michelangelo’s David, like Sören. Judith shakes herself. She hates the stubborn physical presence of those memories. It’s as if her body remembers things her intellect has long since repressed. Regardless, Klaus’s pants don’t fit. What could Leonie be thinking, as she gazes after her husband and wipes milk foam from her thin upper lip? Women like Klaus: department secretaries, mommies at the Waldorf kindergarten, even Frau Posselt. He’s big and solid, and his hands are always warm.
“He’s fun, your Klaus. You’ve known each other a long time, haven’t you? And he’s still head over heels in love with you,” Leonie says, closing her eyes briefly, like in some sappy movie. Judith just nods—she doesn’t want to spit out more golden eggs. The sunlight will expose her, someone will betray her, eventually. It would be worth telling, the story of Judith and Klaus: the nice boy and the beast, the lunatic in the good man’s bed. A sleeping beauty who needed not to be kissed awake but rather to be shaken, to be pulled with clouded eyes from her heavy, drug-induced slumber and yelled at: “You just walk all over me. Now, when things aren’t going so well for you, you come crying to me? I have Annett, I’m trying to forget you, and now you pull this shit? How did you get in?”
Judith’s silence doesn’t bother Leonie. She goes on, as if she’s just been waiting for an opportunity to talk about herself. “You know, I’m jealous that your husband comes home so early. Lately Simon’s been coming later and later. I feel like a single mother. And it makes the girls sad, too. And bratty. Do you have any idea when we last did something together, just the two of us?” Judith shrugs.
The children have started a game of wild horse with a homemade bridle they’ve found in the garden shed. It will be the last game of the day—the little brass bells glint in the twilight. “Your boys have so much imagination. Lisa and Feli love that, of course. So many children just don’t know how to play.” Judith nods and tells her about the toys they have at the kindergarten: faceless dolls, simple wooden blocks, which have surely helped strengthen Uli and Kilian’s imagination. But Leonie doesn’t have much to say on this subject, which would have been a comfortable one for Judith. “My best friend is having a birthday party tonight. She lives in Tübingen, it’s really not that far. And we have a babysitter—our cleaning lady. I so want to go with Simon, without the kids, like a real couple. Sometimes I feel like all we are anymore is parents.” Judith clears the dishes, stacking the empty cups. She thinks about her evenings sitting in the living room with Klaus after the boys have gone to bed. They listen to music, plan their weekend, talk about the kindergarten, what groceries they need, Klaus’s students and his projects. When they make love, it’s slow and peaceful. Each time is the same, like swimming on a warm summer day—pleasant, unthrilling ripples.
Judith calls to her children. They trot over immediately, while Leonie eventually has to physically drag Lisa and Felicia out of the playhouse. She makes “If . . . then” threats—no television, no jumping on the bed—which leaves her out of breath. Judith instructs Kilian and Uli to clean up the sand toys and close the playhouse. They’re tired and hungry, but they comply without whining. Another little triumph over the other woman, who’s more than happy to concede defeat, thereby diminishing the value of the victory: “Your children are so much calmer and more sensible than mine.” The boys’ shouts of farewell are drowned by Lisa and Felicia’s howls of rage: “We don’t want to go home! Mama, you’re a dummy!” Leonie waves one last time, then crosses the street and conducts the crying girls into the house. The carved oak door closes with a dull bang. Ulrich and Kilian trot behind while Judith carries the basket. Hanna’s windows are dark, her Renault is nowhere to be seen. The boys didn’t even ask about Mattis. Dinner will already be on the table, followed by the familiar evening rituals: teeth-brushing, face-washing, the story of the dwarf in the land of the trolls, all the stanzas of “The Moon Has Risen.” She’ll glide through the end of the day as if on a slow, gently-lit slide with sleep waiting at the bottom. And Tavor before it, swallowed with minty breath as she brushes her teeth.
A group of boys is walking on the other side of the street. They kick an empty can, which rattles against doors and basement windows. “Look out, dumbass!” “Fuck you, dickhead!” Judith recognizes Nâzim’s relative, Murat, with the silver sneakers, along with Marco and the two others. Murat turns his head away, but the beautiful one puts his foot on the can, fixes his eyes on Judith, and calls: “Hey, mommy, you’re hot, you know that? I can give you what you need. Wanna give me your number? I’ll call when daddy’s at work!” As earlier, his cronies just giggle in the background. She pushes the children in front of her, “Hurry, Papa has dinner waiting.” Her cheeks burn.
Uli and Kilian don’t move. They stare at the boys. “Hey, ya little fuckers, does your mommy give good head?” Marco’s voice cracks, he practically yodels the last word. Judith pushes the kids onto the sidewalk and fumbles for her keys; she can’t find them and rings the doorbell over and over. Klaus’s voice comes reluctantly over the intercom: “Cut the crap, boys—I’ve had enough!” Then the green door opens.