Sixty people moved in and out of her house. They brought presents and took drinks and wore perfume. Beate greeted them all. She listened as people spoke of knowing her as a child, as strangers said she looked like a great-aunt she’d never heard of. When any conversation lasted too long, Josef was at her side, inventing a crisis in the kitchen. She kissed his cheek, his hand rested on her back, the doorbell kept ringing. When she and her children had gotten to this house two years before, Beate could no more have imagined this party than she could have pictured a boyfriend or a promotion, Paul remarrying and her life continuing rather than slipping off a cliff.
After the backyard ceremony, Josef signaled to the caterer that the show was about to begin. Josef had been there since six that morning. He’d secured the backyard tent and placed tables and chairs. When he’d gone to her room to shower and change, Beate had wrapped herself around him, his bald head blotched from the shower’s heat, and allowed certainty to settle in. He moved his mouth down her throat and she told him that there wasn’t time. She pressed her hands against his chest until they left marks.
Josef directed people to food and bathrooms. Michael and Udo moved through the crowd with drinks in hand and cigarettes behind their ears. Adela hovered on the staircase.
“Adela, come down,” Beate said.
Her daughter wore the dress they’d gotten the week before. Her hair was up, showing off her long neck. The ring in her nose glinted, and she had on the cheap digital watch she’d owned since fifth grade.
“How long have you been hiding up there?”
Adela shrugged. A trio of women who worked at the Pflegeheim hugged Beate as if they hadn’t seen her two days before. They exchanged pleasantries about weddings and Liesl, who looked lovely, her dress giving special weight to her pregnant cleavage.
“I know them from work,” Beate said to Adela, as the women continued on. “I always thought one of them hated me.”
“Which one?” Adela asked, taking two steps down.
“I was going to say the one with the terrible lipstick. But that’s mean.”
“Their lipstick is terrible,” Adela said.
“Child, why are you hiding up there?”
The band started to play, and the crowd inside moved toward the door with a herd’s stolid impatience. Adela’s watchband was held together with electrical tape.
“I wasn’t hiding,” she said. “I just needed to use the bathroom.”
Adela allowed Beate to hook an arm into hers as they walked into the backyard, where the band lurched into a song that might have been disco.
“Liesl did insist on a band,” Beate said.
“And Liesl got one,” Adela answered.
“Mother and daughter together,” Josef said. “Don’t move.” He went to find his camera.
A woman Beate didn’t recognize grabbed her hand. “It’s Andrea Holst!” she said.
“Andrea!” Beate answered. She’d learned to feign recognition in the city, where each week more people claimed to remember a class they’d shared, a neighborhood game they’d once played.
“I haven’t seen you in forever,” Andrea went on. “Was it when Liesl was babysitting and I stopped by to visit?”
“Possibly!” Beate answered.
Josef scurried over.
“There might be dancing,” he said, and the feeling of wanting him returned. She touched his tie. Tables in the backyard had been moved out of the way, and the band turned up its amps. Liesl and Heinz stepped onto the makeshift dance floor. As the crowd circled them, as Michael and Udo smoked behind a tree too small to hide what they were doing, Adela stayed next to Beate. Josef lifted his camera, told them to smile. A fast song ended, a slow one taking its place. Liesl and Heinz were in the center of it, dancing belly to belly.
Adela watched as the middle-aged tried to twist. Liesl’s dress slid across her nascent baby belly. Josef held Mutti’s hands, his forehead folded with effort. He seemed kind. The few times he’d been over for dinner, Adela walked a fine line between polite and dismissive. Now he couldn’t stop smiling at the good fortune he saw in her mother. The singer reached for a high note and made it. Someone handed Adela a glass of champagne.
“I don’t want this,” Adela said, though the person had already moved on.
The music stopped. People filled tables. Heinz’s brother began a toast.
“My brother,” he said. “My brother, Heinz.” On the yard’s far side, Michael and Udo bit the insides of their cheeks. Adela hadn’t studied with Udo in days. The brother, Karl, told a tedious story about the two of them swimming as boys, meanness masked as remembrance. As Karl waxed predictably about brothers, Michael whispered to Udo. “The little thing shrieked like a ninny as he got into the water,” Karl said, and shifted into a drunken ramble about the women who hadn’t wanted to marry Heinz. “There was the one who—Helga, Heidrun. Now, what was her name again, Heinz?” When Karl paused to ask to have his drink refreshed, Michael’s head fell forward. Udo held his shoulder, as if keeping her brother from lifting off the ground. Karl wrapped up. Despite the lively applause, he looked ashamed. Adela was about to walk over and tell her brother and cousin they’d been rude when Karl moved back to the microphone.
“And now,” he said, “we’ll have a few words from the son. From Udo.”
Udo moved his jaw as if chewing, which he did when angry or bored. Our Barbarian Cousin, Michael used to call him. Glasses clanged. In the windows, the sun’s reflection was a melting lozenge. Udo moved to the microphone. Leaning down, he said hello. “Hello,” he repeated. Some in the audience answered. “Liesl,” he said. “Mother. You look beautiful.” Liesl smiled. “And happy.” His cheeks burned.
Udo’s gentleness from their evenings studying together returned. Adela wanted to rescue him, though that would only acknowledge his faltering. And in the last days he’d barely talked to her. Michael sipped, he and Udo in some contest for greater drunkenness. Udo closed his eyes and Adela wondered if he’d even known he was meant to speak. The drummer’s cymbal shushed in the wind. When Udo had stumbled on Adela in only a towel, he’d looked at it as if it were a blunt instrument she meant to hit him with.
“Congrats,” Udo said, and walked back to Michael.
For a moment no one moved. Then someone laughed. Others clapped to drown that laughter out. As Michael and Udo slid behind the trees, the music started again. Liesl spun on the dance floor, a cloud of cleavage and lace. Mutti and Josef danced, too. Josef held her close and Adela realized he was shorter than Mutti. The same was true with her father. Adela picked up the champagne she hadn’t wanted.
As Adela moved toward them, she thought of jokes she and Udo had about Michael as Tobias’s shadow, calling him goldfish shit and Tonto.
“Udo Behm!” Tobias cooed.
He followed close behind Adela, in a tie infected with dots. Next to him was a young man Michael quickly seemed to recognize.
“Thank you,” Tobias said to Adela, “for helping me find Michael.”
When she turned to leave, Tobias insisted that she stay.
“This is Emil,” Tobias said.
Udo grabbed a branch and swung from it.
“Champagne?” the waiter interrupted. Udo nabbed two.
Michael settled on, “You’re here,” adding something about architecture.
The band switched to a Supremes song. “Look at them!” Tobias oohed, watching the guests dance. For a moment, Adela understood his appeal, how he tinged everything with playful amusement.
Someone congratulated Udo, who went back to swinging. “Thank you,” Michael answered.
There was a stubbornness Udo used when he’d insisted on living with them. When his father had called after several absent years and Udo wouldn’t talk to him. More people congratulated him. Udo acted as if he were alone. He and Michael passed a bottle of whiskey back and forth. “Disgusting,” Michael said, after each sip.
“I’m excited to be here,” Tobias said. “I used to be close with Liesl when Udo and I were friends.”
Michael flipped from one uncertain expression to the next. He lifted his champagne but forgot to drink it. Liesl spotted Tobias and gave him a hug.
“The bride in white!” Tobias said.
“Shut up.” Liesl smiled, she and Heinz off again in a flurry of matrimonial activity.
Tobias and Emil went to find something stronger to drink. Michael watched the path they left in the crowd.
“Did you know he was bringing a date?” Adela asked. She tried to soften her voice, though it sounded like she was talking to a slow person.
“It’s a wedding,” Michael said. She touched his shoulder, but he didn’t respond. Mutti and Josef danced close to each other.
“Josef is a terrible dancer,” Michael said.
“That’s mean,” Adela answered.
“Sissy faggot,” he said, the two of them most similar in the slights they didn’t let go of.
“You really aren’t going to Dad’s wedding?” Adela asked.
Maria had called a few times that week to tell them that airfare was getting pricey. When she asked if Michael was home, Adela said no, even when it wasn’t true.
“I always found Dad scary,” Michael answered.
“Maybe he isn’t scary anymore,” Adela said.
“You’ll have to let me know.”
“I never found him scary,” Adela lied.
Tobias and Emil moved past a window. “I’m an asshole,” Michael said. “Like how we used to use it to mean someone was dumb or late or wearing an awful sweater.”
“We used it for everything,” Adela answered.
She tried to catch his eye, to tell him with a look that Tobias was a fever that would pass. But he kept watching people as they tumbled out of the door, then a stray cat perched on their garden wall.
“I wasn’t trying to be mean about Josef,” he said. “Though I guess I sounded mean. Maybe the German Lady likes him.”
Michael went to see what Tobias and his date were up to. The band’s singer shook a tambourine. When Adela turned around, Udo was gone.
Michael kept close to Tobias and Emil. Whenever they whispered to each other for too long, he interrupted with some fact about the wedding. There are more than three hundred tulips in the house. Liesl and Heinz are honeymooning in Spain, though neither of them speaks a word of Spanish. Maybe taco. So one word.
After an endless bout of whispering, Tobias came up for air. He tapped Michael’s sleeve.
“You look fancy, Flöhchen,” Tobias said.
“Flöhchen,” Emil echoed. “This is a nice house. Are you rich?”
“My mother is an ass-wiper.”
“Funny,” Emil said, in lieu of laughing.
As if she knew she was being talked about, Mutti sidled up to them.
“You aren’t drinking too much, now?” she asked.
“Another sister?” Emil asked.
“The mother, Emil!”
Mutti blushed. Seeing her happy reminded Michael of the weeks when the closest thing to her being happy was a stretch of uninterrupted sleep.
Adela appeared to tell Mutti that she was needed.
“This is the sister,” Tobias said.
“I let you in,” Adela said. “Who are you again?”
“Emil,” Tobias answered.
“Make sure Emil has a drink?” Mutti said as she left. Her dress gave her the illusion of floating. Udo stumbled toward them without taking in who they were.
“Blotto,” Michael said.
“Blotto,” Udo mumbled.
“I think you need to lie down,” Adela added.
Udo took a slug of beer. Tobias beamed, as if watching a farce on television.
“I think you need to lie down,” Udo said. “You and you and you,” eyes on Michael, Tobias, and Emil. “Faggots together.”
“That’s a terrible word,” Adela said.
“Michael thinks it’s funny,” Udo answered.
“My brother finds strange things funny.”
“Your brother is right here,” Michael said.
An older girl at school once told Michael about Udo’s drunken eccentricities—at one party singing “We Are the World” to anyone who’d listen, at another sitting in a corner where he lined up empty beer bottles and ignored everyone.
Udo staggered up the stairs. Halfway up, he stopped.
“You gonna make it?” Michael asked.
“Are you gonna make it?” Udo answered. His left foot hung in the air, like those giant horses from beer commercials, their hooves bulky furniture.
“He’s like a lumberjack,” Emil said.
“Michael thinks he looks like a cow from a children’s book,” Adela answered.
“That’s sweet,” Emil said.
Michael wanted to stick his fingers hard and fast up Emil’s nose.
Gum stuck to the bottom of Udo’s shoe. Outside, the dancers moved in a routine that involved clapping on cue. A shimmy and a lean. A toe pointed forward.
Mutti announced that it was time for the cake. The crowd funneled into the living room, and Udo made it all the way up the stairs.
“I can’t believe you’re the mother,” Emil said, and Mutti blushed again.
Sitting on the stairs, Emil and Tobias shared a piece of cake. Their fork went into one mouth, then the other.
“Give us a minute, Flöhchen?” Tobias asked.
“Little flea,” Emil said, in a tone that made Michael’s sweet nuisance plain.
“Please,” Tobias said, he and Emil walking up the stairs before Michael answered. They got to Michael’s room and closed the door.
Then Udo was back. In his five-minute reprieve, his stumbling was replaced with an impish lightness. He wrapped a giant arm around Michael’s shoulder, held a bottle of whiskey above him as if it were a torch.
“You like that nickname they call you?” Udo asked.
“It’s just Tobias, really.”
“Blachh,” Udo answered.
Liesl placed cake on Heinz’s tongue. The room was warm and smelled of candles.
“Your mother is married,” Michael said.
Udo answered with an exaggerated shrug.
“You happy?” Michael asked. He shrugged again.
“You want to get out of here?” Udo said.
“What about all this?” Michael answered, hand spanning the crowd like a game show hostess.
“All this, that, and the other,” Udo said, and walked out the front door. Michael looked back to see if anyone noticed. But they were too busy eating or dancing or having sex in a bed Michael had never had sex in, taking what for a time had been his alone.
When Heinz told Liesl it was time to go, she acted like he was spoiling the party rather than doing what she’d planned. Guests stood in the driveway, ready to wave goodbye as the couple climbed into a taxi.
“It’s all gone too fast,” Liesl said. She cried as she hugged Beate.
“You’re crazy, cousin.”
“We’re crazy together,” Liesl answered.
“I’ll see you tomorrow!”
Liesl answered that tomorrow seemed far away. She made a joke that she was drunk, though she’d nursed the same glass of champagne all night. Two years ago it had been her and Udo in a tiny apartment. She had Heinz now, barraged with contracts, and a house they’d bought for nothing and gutted so the inside was like new. Liesl had come over one day with a catalog full of dishwashers and refrigerators. She’d seemed terrified of them, her greatest worry in marrying Heinz that the dishwasher would clean things too well. They hugged again and Beate saw the next day turn far away, too, the taxi taking her cousin to a different hemisphere. Liesl’s chest pushed against Beate. Her breath hit Beate’s ear. The wedding was over and her house would have to be put back together, the coming days brutally the same.
“Come now!” Heinz said. The guests laughed, sadness sold as comedy.
He and Liesl climbed into the taxi, and the band left. Someone found a boom box—one of Michael’s endless spoils—and tuned it to a sixties station. Josef spun Beate awkwardly, gleefully, and she pulled him in close. Adela watched with crossed arms. A breeze shook the lights in the trees and a distant siren bleated.
“The toolshed,” Josef said, his hand on Beate’s back.
“It’s just back there,” she answered.
“I know.”
“I mean, there are people here.”
“Somewhere, please,” Josef whispered. Beate took his hand and they moved up the back stairs.
“Two staircases,” he said. “I didn’t even know.”
“This house,” Beate answered, as if it had always felt like her greatest piece of luck.
In her room, Josef kissed Beate’s shoulder. Just before he curled down her bra, he asked if it was all right. Beate nodded. His hand moved across the outside, then inside of her knee. Then came a knock, Adela saying, “Mutti?” Beate threw a pillow over her face. “Mutti, I’m sorry.”
“I’ll be down soon,” she said.
Josef’s fingers moved between her legs.
“Something’s happening with the immigrants,” Adela went on. “Refugees. Something bad.”
“I’ll be down,” Beate answered. “Just a minute.”
“The skinheads,” Adela said. Beate remembered the young men who’d followed her off the bus and looked meanly amused when she’d hopped back on.
“They’re outside the camp,” Adela added.
Beate removed Josef’s hand. She pulled down her dress and opened the door.
“I need to go there,” Adela said.
“I don’t know that that’s a good idea,” Beate answered.
Adela moved her lips, though no sound came out. In the yard, a Rolling Stones song played. Beate’s underwear was somewhere on the floor.
“I need you to go with me,” Adela said.
Beate wanted to take her daughter’s hand, but sensed it would be too much. She’d held Beate’s arm that evening, sat next to her during dinner, and asked who this or that person was, if she was supposed to say hello to them.
The crowd of skinheads was larger than any Beate had seen before. A dozen first, then four times as many. Their pockets bulged with rocks, their laughs sharp and loud. Just before Adela and Beate got to the camp, a skinhead stepped in their way.
“You’re dressed up,” he said.
Adela and Beate were still in their wedding outfits, everyone else in jeans and leather. Skinheads stood in the street, ringing the camp. Observers filled the far sidewalk, lining its edge as if in preparation for a parade. More shaved heads moved into the street. Some held sticks. Some smoked. They ignored cars that tried to pass, standing directly in their headlights and flicking cigarette butts at their windshields. In the camp, a Roma popped up from behind a tent. Comments firecrackered about rodents in human clothes, new breeds of syphilis. As Adela tried to step forward, the neo stopped her. “You go there,” he said, pointing to the sidewalk where the spectators stood. Adela wouldn’t move.
Just over the skinhead’s shoulder, Roma held boards as weapons. The place stank, like the Port Authority in July, where Beate and her children had once waited for a bus while a man in plastic-bag shoes mumbled things about Jesus and the mayor.
“Where are the police?” Beate whispered to Adela.
“They never do anything,” Adela answered.
“You go there,” the skinhead repeated. When they didn’t move, he sniffed Beate’s neck.
“Don’t,” Beate said.
His scalp shone like waxed fruit. It would have been easy to lift something, to smash it. Police sat in their cruisers a block away, waiting for something to happen.
“Adela,” Beate said. “Why are we here?”
Her daughter’s look told her to quit being stupid. In the camp just beyond them, flashlights blinked off and on in Morse code. A car tried to drive down the street, retreating when skinheads lifted their sticks toward the driver. Adela tried again to take a step forward. The skinhead blocked her.
Then a rock flew. Another. Beate pulled Adela back just before one landed where they’d stood. Skinheads pushed past them, closing in on the camp. Shouts grew to a wall. A Roma ran out, was hit with a sailing stone. Blood covered a neo’s forehead. One of the camp’s tents waved with flames.
Beate dragged her daughter back into the crowd of spectators, watching as shaved heads and winging shoulders made it to the tents. Beate tried to put an arm around her, but Adela resisted. Beate felt hurt, then chastened by the violence in front of them that her daughter had seen coming with the inevitable result of a recipe. Another tent caught fire; a sandstorm of smoke followed. Refugees ran, some stumbling as rocks reached them. A few spectators joined the skinheads. They wore street clothes, their hair short and long. A young immigrant moved between the remaining tents.
“Do you know him?” Beate asked.
“We have to do something,” Adela shouted.
“The police are coming now.”
Adela tried to step forward, but Beate grabbed her arm.
“Mutti,” Adela hissed.
“No,” Beate answered.
She held Adela in place with the other spectators, the neos turning the street in front of them into a battleground. Some threw rocks while others lobbed Molotov cocktails toward the tents, which burst into flames. The thickening smoke singed Beate’s eyes. The neos shouted and threw. Adela pulled again, trying to free herself from her mother’s hold.
“Fucking German Lady,” Adela hissed. Beate held on to her more tightly.
Then Beate saw them. Among the hundred or so young men squeezing closer to the camp, some neo-Nazis, others having joined in for one foul reason or another, was Udo. Michael just behind him. A rock flew from Udo’s hand. In the thickening haze, Beate couldn’t see where it landed. He pulled another from his pocket, unfazed by the sirens or the spectators beginning to boo. Each time a rock landed near him, Michael covered his head. When he finally let go of the one he’d been holding, he dropped it at his feet. He looked mortified. Beate tried to figure out why he didn’t leave. She shouted his name. Michael looked up with the confused fear of his younger version, afraid of dark halls and public bathrooms and the tree that used to tap his window. A neo next to him lunged at an immigrant who’d tried to make a break for it. A rock landed by Michael’s feet. He covered his head in delayed response. Beate shouted his name again. He looked around, glancing at his wrist for a watch that wasn’t there. Then he ran. In a few steps, the smoke had swallowed him. “Michael,” Beate shouted, so distracted by his escape that she didn’t see the rock Udo threw until it skimmed an immigrant’s forehead. The man crouched down. Udo launched another one, which sailed into his target’s abdomen. A third rock unfurled from his fingers. But before it reached the man, a young woman ran in its path, shielding herself with a frying pan. Adela yanked herself free from her mother’s hold and ran toward Udo. The girl did the same. Udo was looking for something else to throw just as Adela drew close to him, just as the girl lifted her pan, swinging it with the same angry athleticism with which she’d stopped the rock, though this time it crashed into Udo’s nose.
Adela pushed past skinheads being pressed to the pavement by police officers, crouching to protect herself from rocks hurtling through the air. She heard screams in foreign languages, covered her mouth with her hand to stave off the smoke’s choking taste. Getting to Udo, she watched blood gush from his nose. And though Adela winced at the sight of it, there was a relief, too, that Miri had stopped him. Dazed and grimacing, Udo tried and failed to swat at the pan. A rock smacked his stomach, another hit his shoulder. Udo slipped onto his knees. When he waved a hand in the air, his palm was crimson. Miri lifted the pan again.
“Miri,” Adela said, standing between her and injured Udo. Miri tried to step around her. A skinhead ran close to them, was yanked back by a police officer.
As Adela repeated her name and put a hand on the girl’s forearm, Miri hit her with a withering look. Of course you’re protecting him, it said. You’re the one who showed him where we were. Miri’s pan stayed in the air. Udo crouched, hissing with anger or pain. Miri moved the pan farther back, face red from flashing sirens. You or him. You and him. The same to me.
Udo stumbled to standing. You or him, Miri’s eyebrows repeated. And as Udo reached for the pan, Adela stepped out of Miri’s way.
Udo’s arm took the brunt of the second blow and he hissed out terrible words: bitch and garbage picker and terrorist. Words Miri didn’t understand. Words that might have been meant for both of them.
Two officers rushed toward them.
“She was only defending herself,” Adela shouted, but the officers dove on top of Udo, who, as he lay on the pavement, turned his head to the side and threw up.
A third officer appeared and tried to pry the pan from Miri.
“She needs that,” Adela said.
Adela felt Udo’s eyes on her. She tried to stare at the burning camp, but the pull of his look won out, anything angry in him suddenly doused by fear. Adela didn’t want his camaraderie or the blindness with which she’d moved when Udo had said the camp wasn’t safe, when Michael told a story he’d surely invented about a gypsy leaving the grocery store with a loaf of bread in his pants. A puddle of sick sat next to Udo. His forehead was bloody. He stared at Adela with the scared regret of a scolded dog.
Then Miri started shouting. She pointed to Udo, barking out a stream of glottal words. Her voice grew so loud that one of the officers stepped between them.
The man Udo had hit, Miri’s father, perhaps, said something. Miri turned, nodded, and walked to him. At the edge of the camp, the last of the refugees began to run. Miri and the man joined them, their shoulders rounded in preparation for whatever came next, their footfalls rain on a roof.
A fire truck arrived and began spraying down the camp. A man moved close to the tents to take pictures of its hissing remains.
As Udo stared at Adela, asking for help he didn’t deserve, she realized, despite the last two years she’d treated him as a life jacket, that she hated him.
Udo repeated her name. When she ignored him, he followed it up with, “Good cousin.” Adela shook her head. The police pulled Udo toward their car and his voice turned urgent. And as Udo began to pull against the officers’ grip, Adela said, “No,” not even sure what she was saying no to.
Adela didn’t know then that she’d never see Udo again, that when she called Dad in the morning he’d stop her halfway through her story to say he’d change her ticket so that she’d come in a day rather than a week. Once in California, the awfulness of Kritzhagen turned obvious, became the story everyone told at Dad and Maria’s wedding. A great-uncle told her she was brave. When he said that, Adela remembered Udo’s bleeding face, how she moved out of the way so Miri could continue to injure him. She thought also of coming down for dinner the day after Liesl’s wedding, greeted by Michael’s scowl. “You were there with him,” Adela had said. But Michael only shook his head as if she were an idiot, as if what Adela had just said to him were something she’d invented.
“You were,” she’d repeated, and went upstairs to pack. When her suitcase turned full, Adela found boxes in the attic and filled them with the rest of the clothes, leaving nothing in her dresser or closet for her brother to find or bury. On the top of each box she wrote Dad’s address, labeling the side of one Fall, another Winter, though she’d heard California didn’t have proper seasons, that it never got cold there at all.