Wenzel is completely buried under the covers. Illuminated by the light of the bedside lamp, the down comforter makes a hill over his body. It smells like fabric softener. He’s sleeping so deeply that there’s not even the slightest rustle. Wenzel’s face is hidden, and only the shock of his hair pokes out—a beautiful bluish white, not the tooth-yellow color that always makes Luise think of the tusks of the elephants at the Wilhelma Zoo, the color most men his age have. She’d always loved to tousle Wenzel’s hair, and she had been horrified when she suddenly found it full of white strands. At first he insisted that she pull them out. He’d always been a vain one. Then he gave up, much earlier than she had—up till ten years ago, she’d had hers done “chestnut brown” at Sprenger’s Hair Parlor in Pelargusstraße. But even snow-white, he’s still “purdy Wenzel.” Luise is proud to walk down the street with him. This pride, which straightens her back, puffs out her chest, and lifts her chin, is not the slightest bit different from the pride that forced a grin across her bright-red-painted lips over sixty years ago on the terrace of a hotel in Tübingen, a grin that only got wider the more she tried to suppress it.
A bunch of graduates of the Reichenberg Teacher Training College, all of whom lived in greater-Stuttgart but referred to themselves as Bohemian-Germans or Sudeten Germans, were gathered with her husband at the Neckarmüller tavern. They insistently referred to their diplomas as “Maturas”—what they called it where they were from. As if a “Matura” was somehow worth more than a good Swabian “Abitur,” thought Luise, who’d left school at fourteen to work in a Stuttgart chocolate factory as an assistant clerk. An October sun was shining in Tübingen: the women took off their nice jackets and the men fumbled at their cufflinks. Chestnuts dropped from the glowing yellow treetops and landed amid the coffee settings on the table. In the river below them, ducks and trout waited for crumbs of bread or cake. A student in a fraternity uniform jumped out of a punt into the greenish-brown river after an escaped beer bottle, followed by hoots and cheers from the terrace. Edith Kopka looked at Luise wistfully over her plum cake with whipped cream and said, in her high, sing-song Bohemian dialect: “Nen ef us would ef guessed thet purdy Wenzel would pick a gal who’s net frem hime.” Blonde Kopka-Edith, with her permed head cocked to the side, wasn’t mean. It was years before Jaksch-Hilde and Kretschmer-Liesl even spoke to Luise. But that afternoon she’d narrowed her eyes. Luise knew that Edith was eyeing her new dark blue summer dress—it was just a hair too short. And after stuffing her face with ham, cream, and wirtschaftswunder delicacies, Luise was well on her way to bringing her old figure back. “Fatty,” Kopka-Edith’s eyes said. “However did you pull this one off, Fatty?
She pulls her hand back and refrains from caressing him. He ought to sleep a little. He deserves it after all the monkey business last night. Luise turns onto her right side with a groan. The glowing green numbers on the alarm clock say 6:30 and the radio babbles softly.
Perhaps they should have called the police. But fear had paralyzed her—the old fear had risen, like a sour belch after a meal that should have been long-since digested. It was the noises that did it, of course, the high whistling of the firecrackers, the rattling of the poppers, and then the darkness on top of it. When she rushed out, barefoot, in only her nightgown, she was back in the cellar on Reinsburgstraße, waiting in mortal terror for the whistling of the falling bombs to culminate in a bang that would end everything, tasting the bitterness of the wood that Frau Büschle had stuck between her teeth—she always bit her lips or tongue. And then Frau Büschle had been killed. By a piano, if you can believe it. “A Grotrian-Steinweg!” her husband kept crying at the funeral. She’d had to paw through the ruins. The living room ceiling had fallen down, bringing the piano with it.
Instead, Luise saw Wenzel, pulling aside the heavy curtains on the living room windows. “No, no, the blackout!” she screeched, but he proceeded to unveil the rumpus outside like an enraged theater director. Several boys, gawky figures in sneakers, were tramping through the little garden. They wore masks: a gruesome, stretched face, a leering pumpkin. They moved quickly, nimbly—jeering, dancing through the flowerbeds, pelting each other with fallen fruit. Suddenly something hit the windowpane. Luise screamed and ducked, but nothing came through. The chalky shells cracked, releasing the white and making the wounded yolks run down the glass. Luise clung to Wenzel, who wanted to go out and “read them the riot act good and proper,” while the egg rained down like a grubby curtain. “No, they’ll kill you! You’re old, please stay here, I’m begging you!” The figures disappeared into the night.
They said no more about it. Wenzel was annoyed that she’d stopped his heroism with her “daft nonsense.” “I could have handled them, easy! What were you thinking? Leave me alone!” The door to the study slammed. Luise knew he was pulling out the Gustav Freytag. Behind the heavy volume stood the Cognac. On cold days he would bring the decanter into the living room to supplement their tea, then slip it secretively back. Luise granted him his hiding place with smug superiority, the same way she used to allow her younger brother to stealthily enjoy a half-licked, empty jam jar in the woodshed. She went through the apartment once more, checking all the locks and window latches. She didn’t trust herself to look outside. What a mess. Doubtless it was the work of those wild boys from the children’s farm. Children—don’t make me laugh. It’s only hoodlums over there, bedraggled riffraff: Turks, Albanians, Greeks, the whole lot of them. By the time she finally came to bed, Wenzel was already asleep.
Advertisements drone from the radio. She likes to leave it on at night, so that she won’t be alone on her frequent trips to the bathroom. Recently Wenzel has been sleeping much more deeply. He seems to need it—he even snores, which he never used to do. Luise misses his commentary when she comes back, wretchedly cold even with the heat cranked up all the way. She doesn’t want to disturb him by trying to cuddle. He’d always been a night owl, correcting essays and dictation, reading his beloved Dehio’s Handbook of German Art History until midnight, or typing out articles for the Reichenburg Town Almanac. Luise, on the other hand, would happily lie on the sofa in the afternoons with the dog and a magazine and drift off. The past few weeks it’s been just the opposite. He lies down after dinner: “I’m going to go relax for a moment with Dehio.” Then when she looks in, the Dehio lies next to the couch, clearly unopened, and Wenzel is asleep, his glasses carefully placed on the glass coffee table.
Luise pulls back the covers and stretches her legs slowly toward the foot of the bed. Huzak will have to take everything off—the sheets are already starting to look wrinkled. She owns only white sheets. She got that from her mother in Uhlbach: a closet stacked full of linens, the edges neatly aligned, all dried in the fresh air. Luise used to hang them from a line in the little garden, haul them all to the laundry on Mozartstraße, re-wet each piece, and then run everything through the hot wringer. Nowadays she just drops everything off at the laundromat—at most she irons Wenzel’s shirts with the steam iron. That magical device had been Huzak’s doing as well. Huzak is all right. Bruni had sent her—better not to even think about how long ago that had been. “It’s starting to smell so funny at your house, Auntie Luise. Don’t be mad, but I really don’t think you can manage alone anymore with the dog and everything.” The cleaning lady got on Wenzel’s nerves: “It’s unbelievable. She’s been here how long, and she still can’t speak proper German. They’re just not capable of understanding the structure, they can’t concentrate. The same was true in Reichenburg—by and large the Czechs weren’t the brightest.”
What would her mother, or old Annelies, have said of steam irons, vacuum cleaners, and now the cell phones that everyone carries around, my God! Probably they would have found it all uncanny: “Makes it too easy, dunno about that.” They had lived for all that miserable drudgery: in the vineyards, in the garden, in the barn. As if something terrible would happen if they ever stopped moving. An endless cycle of toil, interrupted only by Sunday mornings. And then Sundays you nearly died of boredom listening to the sermon. And it started all over again at sunrise on Monday, mercilessly, as if they’d thought up this torture on purpose: picking grapes, skimming disgusting white foam from vats of sauerkraut, mucking out the chicken coop. How she’d hated all the clucking, the pungent, chalky-smelling dung, the dirty, warm eggs that the animals defended with their beaks.
No, there won’t be eggs for breakfast today. But she’ll have to go to the Turk in any case—she’s out of practically everything for lunch, and then Huzak’s coming the day after tomorrow. She should probably do the dining room, but instead she’ll have to clean the windows—now, at the end of October—because of those dumb yahoos yesterday.
Luise had always detested dirt, even at home in Uhlbach. Her mother and her aunts were so proud of their perfectly braided sweet breads, homemade sausages, jars full of jam. But Luise always saw the flies wriggling on the flypaper that hung over the table and noticed that the china cupboard held not only plates and glasses, but also cans of milking grease, flea and tick powder, and forceps for castrating piglets. The fluid border between stable and parlor meant that there was always a pair of muddy boots or dung-spattered pants walking around, stinking everything up. In summer, the house was barely used except for sleeping. Outside the insects hummed and sucked, the grass stung and made everyone sneeze, sunlight tanned everyone’s faces. Worked into the ground—that’s what had happened to her mother and her nana: both of them had been as bent as sickles by the end.
Luise hadn’t wanted that to happen to her. She wanted an apartment in the city with a gas stove and an indoor bathroom. She wanted blinds, colorful carpets, polished furniture. And stalks of flowers only on the balcony, if anywhere. They’d always laughed at her, thrown her lavender soap in the sow’s trough. White bubbles would cling to the pig’s snout. Her brothers laughed when she put on clean aprons, spread out fresh stockings, and protected her face from the sun with a wide-brimmed hat. They weren’t poor, at that. Her parents owned a vineyard, orchards, and pigs, not to mention the house with its blood-red, half-timbered balcony and huge cellar doors.
Luise was rarely able to wheedle her parents into taking a stroll, let alone into visiting a café, when they went to the Saturday market and sold their fruit and vegetables to stuck-up Stuttgart women. When it is allowed she feels like running so fast that her skirt flies out behind her, but they always rein her in. Her father points to the profile of the prince of poets on the old Schloßplatz—Schillerplatz it’s called now—and she has to rattle off the poem: “The tyrant Dionys to seek, stern Moerus with his poniard crept. The watchful guard upon him swept,” and on and on until they reach the King’s Building. Mother begins to smile. She doesn’t find it all so very horrible. One needs a few more yards of fabric for pants, and buttons, and so they end up walking down almost all of Königstraße to the tower of the train station. Father grumbles, but it doesn’t matter, because most of the fruits and vegetables had been bought up, quick as a wink, by half past eleven. They never sell the squished strawberries in the bottom of the basket, their cucumbers are never bitter, and the roses are fresh as the dew. They come back laden with goods: Breslauer’s is closing, so they’re having a clearance sale. Luise saw all the film posters and lots of stylish ladies in suits and hats, gloves, and high heels, with no dirt under their nails. Women from offices and department stores who had no idea how a pig stall stank or what it felt like to see a chicken’s ass stick up like a little mouth to let out a warm, sticky egg.
Funny—Eugen never liked eggs either. He knew the healthy country life just as well as she did. Eugen was from Rohracker, but they’d met in Stuttgart. Eugen was in the Schutzstaffel, but he wasn’t a Nazi like you see in the books. He was dark, squarish, with shoulders you could lean on and the beginnings of a belly. He was a funny one, always making jokes: “The Katzes aren’t meowing anymore.” And he was generous. He brought her a silver fox fur coat, coral earrings, a silver compact and matching vials filled with French perfume. The fox was lined with green silk that shimmered red in the light. Inside on the left, just at the height of her heart, was a little label. Helene Seligmann, West Stuttgart. She cut it out with nail scissors. The little holes where the thread had been stared at her when she pushed back the fur to cross her legs. Eugen and his boys were heaps of fun, she always had a good time with them. Who wanted to spoil that by asking questions? Everyone knew where the things came from. The Jews had enough anyway. Better for them to go to America, like Breslauer. They could do their crooked business elsewhere while Germany built itself anew.
Luise feels for her glasses—the stupid things must have fallen behind the nightstand again. She looks like a fat owl with them on. The lenses are dirty, and she can’t find the cloth to wipe them with. She groans and opens the drawer. Tissues, earplugs, hand cream. She rolls herself back onto the bed to catch her breath.
Eugen was killed at Stalingrad, of course. There was nothing left of him, only a postcard. Later some man named Herbert brought her Eugen’s watch. Told her something about his last hours. He had shown her picture to everyone: “My sweetheart.” Maybe that was true. But mostly Herbert told her a pack of lies—he just wanted to get something out of her. Guys from the war made up all kinds of things to tell women. It was lucky, really, that she could start over again with Wenzel. What would they have done, two people who hadn’t seen each other for years, who were completely different than they’d been before? It would never have worked.
Luise sits and shakes out her pillow. She’d like to give it a good whack and put a proper crease in it, but that would make too much noise. It’s no good thinking about old times in the morning, but memories do tend to creep in. Her bladder aches, she has to go desperately. It’s terrible when she can’t make it in time, even with the pads. Wenzel should keep sleeping, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Schlamper is snoring in the basket by the window. His paws twitch—maybe he’s dreaming of the boys from yesterday. The radio’s playing something classical—she always likes to have classical on. The English “songs” are too unsettling. She doesn’t like the language. They’re spewing English everywhere these days: mihting peunt, trolli, ohkei. That would have made the Amis happy. Luise rouses herself carefully, she can’t wait much longer and she’s getting hungry and thirsty for coffee. A misery, the body, as old Annelies always said—a minor misery. First slide the feet slowly along the edge of the bed, and then carefully down to the floor. It’ll hurt no matter what. She grits her teeth and moans quietly. Her back pulls and cramps. More pills. There are so many already: blood pressure, kidneys, osteoporosis, the devil knows. Every day at breakfast time, the plastic box with the windows. Colorful pills gaze out like little heads. She gets dizzy if she moves too fast. It takes her the rest of the piano concerto and all of the news before she’s finally sitting upright enough to look down at her feet. Feet that cause her renewed horror each morning—a stranger’s feet: crude and claw-like, covered in veins and age spots, bluish toes. Feet that need a clipper now instead of nail scissors, feet whose big toes crisscross over their smaller brothers like fallen fenceposts. Punishment for all the pointy office shoes, starting with that first pair—calfskin, with straps. Mother shook her head when she paid for them. Moaning, one hand on the small of her back, she feels on the floor for the lambskin slippers and hides her disgusting stumps.
Traudl, her sister-in-law, always wore flats. She was tall. Most of the other women Wenzel’s age had the same nature-girl style. They used Weleda and swore by mud facial masks, water from special sources, and the healing sun; they won sports prizes, did morning stretches. Most of them were high up in the League of German girls—jocks, naturally. They knew what farm work was like from their mandatory farm-year after school: the loveliest, most wonderful time! Whenever Luise tried to start in on the endless drudgery of life in Uhlbach, she’d quickly fall silent under their indignant looks.
Business school—her whole Stuttgart life, in fact—was thanks to Uncle Theo. Uncle Theo, who countered her parents’ anger and shame over abandoned braided loaves and her two left hands: “But doin’ sums—she’s a quick un at that.” And since there were still two brothers to help with the house and farm, she was allowed to go.
Luise presses her fists into the mattress and heaves herself up. She’s seized with pain, it clenches her lower back and doesn’t let up. She yelps, falls back onto the bed. Schlamper comes from his basket and lays his cool nose in her hand, which hangs off the edge of the bed, damp with sweat. He whimpers. She strokes him and feels the warmth of his body. His tail thumps the bedside rug impatiently. He sniffs over at Wenzel. Luise grabs his collar. “Good dog, Schlamper. Let your master sleep. I’ll letcha out right now, yeah?” She’ll lure Wenzel out with a coffee. Coffee and a roll, thick with butter and ham. A breakfast fit for a kaiser. She always keeps rolls in the freezer, and ham and a stick of butter in the refrigerator, so that no one has to run out in the mornings. She can let the dog out in the garden for a bit. He’s a tidy one—buries everything, almost like a kitty. Dr. Rapp’s two boys from upstairs never step in anything. She’ll have a smoke with her coffee. Supposed to be so bad for you. Hard to believe it when you look at her and Wenzel, smokers for seventy years and still here, together.
Luise stands and grips the windowsill. The air trembles in front of the radiator; it feels nice and warm on her bare legs. The closed shutters block her view. Reflected in the black glass, she sees the yellow paper lampshade. She stands next to it in her nightgown. Her hair sticks up from her head, tangled and white. A ghost—an old, old ghost. That’s what I am, that’s what I look like. Fine. The hill of pillows lies behind her like a silent winter landscape. She takes a few tentative steps toward the door. The dog follows.
That’s right, a nice coffee, a good cup can wake the dead. Made with real coffee beans, he’ll get up for that. Good coffee made in the porcelain filter. A few grains of salt sprinkled over the grounds to soften the water. That’s how they do it in Vienna and Prague. She learned that from her sister-in-law, Traudl. She’d taught her a lot back then, in her new kitchen in Obertürkheim. A sparkling white kitchen with a red linoleum floor and colorful curtains over the glass door that led out to the garden. Her brother-in-law Erich had planted a rowan out there. It was a tiny tree, hardly bigger than Bruni. They grow in the Jizera Mountains. Bruscha-Erich came from Česká Lípa. He was a sweetheart—funny, too—and by thirty he didn’t have a hair left on his head. Her brother-in-law loved to eat wieners with lentils and spätzle, but Traudl wouldn’t hear of it. Pancreatic cancer, that took care of him fast. He was yellow as a lemon by the end. And a stroke got Traudl, decades later, in her kitchen of all places; she ended up on the linoleum floor, covered in flour, the upside-down enamel bowl covering the dumpling dough like an egg that had been abandoned by the hen.
“You’re a good bookkeeper, but Wenzel won’t like your knedliki.” With the ladle, Traudl fished in the boiling water for the bits of disintegrated dumpling, swollen white and brown breadcrumbs. “It kinnt really bile. Werntcha listening before?” But she grinned as she said it and started telling another story about the neighbors—a mean story, of course. “There they were sittin’ outside agin running their mouths: ‘Bruscha never fixes up the house!’ I heered ‘im say it. And you know what: I was mint ta hear it!” Traudl was happy, as happy as she could be. She’d succeeded. On top of all their other successes—head schoolteacher, Daimler engineer, Volkswagen, daughter Bruni at the elite Hölderlin school—Bruscha-Traudl and Bruscha-Erich were landlords. The neighbors gaped in jealousy: “Rafugees, naw! Couldn’t be!” Traudl and Erich never used a Swabian word in their lives, but among family they could ape the dialect surprisingly well, always with malicious intent. Her round face, with its broad cheekbones, contorted into an ugly grimace, her delicate skin wrinkled up to her meticulously coiffed black hair. Traudl didn’t have a single friend among her colleagues at the Obertürkheim primary school. She only really came out of her shell at the Matura gatherings.
Luise fishes her robe off the hook on the door. Getting her arms into sleeves, especially the left one, is an ordeal. She makes a knot but leaves it loose—she doesn’t have the strength for more. She beckons Schlamper, who’s sitting behind her. It’s dark in the hallway. Wenzel likes to leave the lights on, but she can’t stand it, and she turns them off whenever she can. “You’ll break your neck with your thriftiness.” She goes to the bathroom, freezing, even though the heat in the bathroom is on high. The gas boiler rumbles and she can see the flickering of the little blue flame. The pee just drips out of her. So little comes out, but she’d felt like she had just drunk two bottles of beer. The body she lives in is a dilapidated house, worn down and unsightly. She’s hitched her nightgown up over her thighs; they’re full of rolls and wrinkles, with a network of bluish veins running beneath the skin like rivers and streams over a map. Breasts, belly, and the flesh of her arms aren’t even worth mentioning. They’re victims of gravity. Her hands have become claws, but claws with nail polish, at least.
Luise never particularly liked her body. She was prone to putting on weight, and always in the wrong places. Fatty never had a figure like the slender, severe German maidens on the billboards. Eugen had liked that: “You’re a good village girl, I could see that straight away. Come on, take them off!” He tugged at her garters like a little boy opening a Christmas present. That’s what it was like to be engaged. She liked it when he pinched her bottom or her breasts—not too hard, but firmly. Eugen. They didn’t get many nights together, and their sad meetings in the train station hotel—he was so shaken he couldn’t get it up—didn’t really count. He’d been like a fish, cold and still. No more jokes, just schnapps. He’d puked, and she’d washed his uniform in the sink. He got on the train with wet pants. No gravestone. And the fat behind that he’d so loved to dig his fingers into slowly dwindled while she hid in various cellars and bunkers. She crept under the ground and crept back out, the city changing so much each time that by the end she didn’t recognize the place she lived in. No one would have believed that Stuttgart was once one of the most beautiful cities in Germany. Kaputtgart—smashed to ruins. How did Uhland put it: “One lofty pillar only recalls the splendors past; this pillar, cracked already, may fall to-night at last.” Nothing was familiar anymore. Her own body even, her own face, was utterly changed, just like the city: haggard, gaunt, dirty, and yet happy not to have been rubbed out completely.
Groaning, Luise stands and flushes the toilet. Schlamper complains loudly and paws at the door. “Good boy, I’m coming!” She feels her way slowly along the wall. Careful, there’s the picture of Ještšd, its snow-covered peak towering above dark-green woods; she pauses before it to catch her breath.
“Where could I find your equal, dear homeland peak of mine?
My heart feels so peculiar, and, humbled, I fall silent,
When I see you from afar.
Faithful, like the eye of God, you guard my peaceful sleep.
And ne’er am I forsaken, though lonely streets I wander,
Your gaze the truest star.”
Traudl’s soprano voice always grew shrill with emotion. A few people would even cry when the Ještšd song was sung at the end of their gatherings. It embarrassed Luise and made her jealous at the same time. What would we have sung if we’d been exiled? “On the Train to Swabia,” perhaps?
It’s getting light outside. In the living room, she cracks open the glass door to the little garden. The cold morning air spills over her slippered feet like ice water. Schlamper slips out, gives the mess by the window a leisurely sniff, then scampers off behind the elderberry bush with a snarl. Luise goes back to the bathroom, lets warm water run into the sink. Keeping her robe on, she wipes a washcloth over face and throat, under the armpits, down there, bum-bum. She stops at her feet. Bending over is such agony that she lets herself fall onto the edge of the tub. Morning showers are a thing of the past, long since. She’s too afraid of slipping. Neck fracture—straight to a nursing home, the classic scenario. Even Wenzel is afraid. He can’t hold her to step out of the tub anymore. They never said a word about it, but one like the other, they both started up with the washcloths. Washcloths and sink-baths, just like in the bad times. Yet somehow she had managed to keep cleaner then. No one was excused: ice cold water over the whole body, every nook and cranny scrubbed. In those days she could even lay her hands flat on the floor when she bent over to touch her toes, her knees pressed tight together. And how happy they’d been just to have a bar of curd soap, my goodness! Now she has cologne by the bottle, she can dab it on to cover up any disturbing smells. Maybe she should call up the Hospitallers. It would be nice to take a real bath again. Point is, Wenzel can still smell me and I can smell him. And it doesn’t bother Schlamper. If it gets too bad, Bruni will complain, but what does she know about it? “Auntie Luise, you can’t wear that sweater anymore, it’s full of coffee stains. Can’t you see that?” No, darling girl. When you get this old you’ll see for yourself that your eyes don’t get sharper with each passing day. But I got the sweater on, by myself, and I put on my stockings, by myself, and my hair’s all fixed, and I’m proud of that. Even if it’s something you can’t understand. And I hope the day when you think to yourself, “Ah, that’s what Auntie Luise was talking about,” is still a long, long way off. She’s not mad at Bruni, she’s always there in a pinch. That’s a good feeling. Because otherwise there’d be no one. Her wide hips, big breasts, the whole country maid figure was nature’s joke. No children had popped out of this fertile landscape, though both Eugen and Wenzel had done ample plowing. An empty shell filled with dead eggs that dripped from her womb every month. Wenzel never blamed her. They had the dog. And they’d traveled plenty—stalked slowly over the continent: Switzerland, Austria, the South Tyrol, then later Florence, Rome, on down to Sicily, and finally they’d found the courage for an airplane to Greece, Spain, Turkey. They’d seen everything together.
But Traudl, Traudl of all people, got to have a child. A dark-haired girl with dark eyes, a little doll baby to kiss, to call Bunny when she wasn’t being beaten. Bruni, punished with a name that showed everyone where her mother’s sympathies lay, a name that showed off her Aryan roots: Brunhilde. It was common then. You ran into Erdmutes, Ortrudes, and Winifreds everywhere. No one was better at abbreviating and putting the dialect to use: Brunile for Brunhilde, Mutle for Erdmute, Trudele for Ortrude.
It’s cold in the kitchen. Luise turns up the thermostat. It doesn’t go any further, it’s already at its upper limit, yet she shivers. She looks out through the window at Olgastraße—the traffic is already rumbling. She fills the kettle, lights the gas, and flips the match into the sink, where it burns out with a hiss. One day Bruni was just there, standing on their doorstep on Constantinstraße. It was a Friday, clearly not a day for a visit to Auntie. The smell of boiled fish hovered in the hallway when Luise opened the apartment door, greatly surprised. Rain-drenched braids hung to the left and right of Bruni’s tear-stained face. Her schoolbag swung from her shoulder, threadbare and spotted with ink; the unfastened top flapped. Her kneecaps shone bluish white between brown wool knee socks and a plaid dress that was far too short for her. Thirteen years old—other girls were wearing nylons by that age. Erich and Traudl had the house to pay off. Bruni breathed heavily, and then the words came out between sobs that turned into hiccups: “Auntie Luise, can I live with you? I won’t be any trouble, and I’ll hardly eat anything and I’m in school all day anyway. I can iron and cook, too—everything that Uncle Wenzel likes: Knedliki, Schkubanki, Palačinky. You have the pull-out sofa in the study, I could sleep there, please, oh please! Mom’s so unfair, I can’t go back there . . .” Kasper slipped between Luise’s legs and jumped up on Bruni. With concern, Luise noted that the child didn’t kneel and return the dog’s caresses as she usually did. Soon she was settled in the living room with cocoa and flaky rolls. Visits to Auntie were rare, even though the school up on Hölderlinplatz wasn’t terribly far from Constantinstraße. “She’ll come every first Wednesday. She can eat with you. You send her back at five sharp. Just think of all the homework she has to do—she doesn’t need an excuse to be sloppy.” This was a barefaced lie on Traudl’s part. Bruni’s notebooks were testaments to conscientiousness and ambition; she was always first in her class. But there had been bad blood between her and Traudl from the beginning. This child! Three years old and already a beast, in Reichenberg she even hammered roofing nails, long as your finger, into the good elmwood table. Not one, no, God forbid, not two, but three! The stubborn thing, wouldn’t do as she was told in Stuttgart either, always talking back, a real millstone around my neck.
Traudl burst in around nightfall. Her brown eyes flashed under her veiled hat. Though there was no hitting in the apartment, Luise heard slaps and tears from outside in the stairwell. She rushed out to pull her sister-in-law away, which only made things worse. Wenzel got angry: “It’s not your place to interfere! It’s their life, not yours. It’s been so hard for Traudl—she never got over the fact that we lost everything. She’s never really fit in here.” And there it was again—that strange solidarity that went far beyond the bounds of sibling loyalty, the mysterious ties to the cold realm across the mountains, which meant that anyone who said “C’mon aiver!” and crossed himself took a shortcut to sainthood in their eyes.
The water boils. Luise pours a bit into the dog’s bowl to rinse it out, then spoons in some oats and a package of Cesar dog food. It’s hard to pull the lid off. For a while now they’ve just bought the small portions. It smells and looks like liver pâté. In the old days she would have gobbled it up herself and sung hallelujah to boot, but nowadays it’s food for Schlamper. The little golden plastic bowls with colorful logos are much more expensive than the cans, but she can’t get the lid off the cans anymore, not even with a can opener—it takes more strength than she can muster. Wenzel doesn’t ask about such things. She knows it’s the same for him. There was the carton of orange juice that he’d ended up hurling on the kitchen floor. “God damned piece of shit, I’ll show you!” They’ve given up cans and drinks with certain closures—they cut and bore new openings to get to their milk or their juice.
Schlamper returns from the garden with dirt on his snout and paws. He walks unhurriedly over to his bowl. “You’re a good boy. The calmest we’ve ever had.” The coffee smells strong and stimulating. She takes the butter out of the refrigerator. They need to go shopping. They’ll eat sweet buns today, it’s Wenzel’s day. The things she used to be able to do with one hand tied behind her back have now become full-day ordeals. They really only go to the Turk now. Bruni brings the heavier things with the car. They haven’t gone downtown in ages. It’s too far, too exhausting. It’s not even fun anymore—everything is so ugly now, just döner kebab shops and fast-food restaurants, dirt and cars and swarms of people, shuttered storefronts, One-euro stores—they don’t even use deutsch marks anymore. Better just to stay on Constantinstraße, they can manage fine here.
She pulls back the curtains—study, dining room—and checks the thermostat: twenty-five degrees Celsius. “Auntie Luise, Uncle Wenzel, I have to open a window or we’ll all suffocate!” She sets the table in the kitchen, avoiding the living room for today—she doesn’t want to sit by the dirty window. Maybe the Rapp woman from upstairs can help. She’ll be coming to the little garden with the children later anyway. It’s going to be a pretty day, you can see the sun hiding behind the fog. The world still rests amid the fog, the woods and fields still dreaming: You’ll see soon when it’s all unveiled, when azure sky is undisguised, autumn-strong the muted world, now golden-toned, lies gleaming. It’s going like clockwork now. She puts the cozy Bruni knit over the coffeepot. Surely Wenzel will be up soon. Luise sips at her coffee. Wake up, I have to wake up.
A short bark comes from the bedroom, then a long, drawn-out yelp that repeats again and again, slowly growing softer, almost like the crying of a tired child. Luise starts—she must have fallen asleep. It can’t be, honestly, it’s already eight-thirty! She could smack herself for acting like such an old woman. Your head nods and off you go in broad daylight, Luise, it’s been sixty years since you were getting catcalls on the street. She feels the belly of the coffeepot under the cozy. The porcelain is only lukewarm. Slowly, she raises herself and goes into the hall.
Broad strips of autumn sunlight fall through the doors on the right and left across the carpet and wallpaper—darkened yellow lilies on a green background. Luise loves the darkness of the hallway that splits her apartment in two, and the dark, heavy furniture that lines it: grandfather clock, coat closet, trumeau. They border the carpeted pathway like mighty trees. She walks softly over the mossy ground. There’s Ještšd, and Dürer’s rabbit, and two squirrels looking down at her from their gold frames. Schlamper howls once more from behind the half-open door. Luise is reminded of old Baumannskarle—Karl Baumann, her old history teacher in Uhlbach. He was crazy about the ancient Romans. She can still repeat a few of the mnemonics: 753—The year Rome came to be. She thinks of the picture in her history book: Varus, who sent the Roman legions goosestepping through the dark Teutoburg Forest: red plumes nodding atop helmets, the eagle on its perch buffeted by gnarled oak branches. The young soldiers freezing in the damp cold. They have dark eyes, brown skin, they’re meant for more southerly shores. Their sandaled feet tread carefully, they sense that nothing good is in store for them. Jays screech, then the shortswords flash; there’s a terrible clamor as they meet the Teutons.
She lays her hand on the knob—tarnished brass, almost green and so cold. The door opens wide. It’s dark in the room, but she can see Schlamper sitting in front of the bed. He turns his head to her. His brown eyes shine. He wags his tail, gives a short yelp. “We’ll wake your master now. Come here, we’ll roll up the shutters.” She pulls the grimy old belt and the shutters clatter open. The belt snaps back into place. She walks to the bed and gently pulls back the covers. Wenzel lies on his side. His mouth is open, his eyes closed. His face looks yellowish under the wild white hair. Luise sits on the mattress and takes his hand. It’s cold.