Hausfrau (32 page)

She couldn’t figure it out.
I know everything about you.
Anna doubted that was true but wasn’t going to ask for specifics. As if he would have given them to her. That’s how he always handled the boys.
You know what you did. Now go to your room.
The wondering was part of the punishment. How much did Bruno actually know? Anna was going to have to live without that answer.

Bruno was the only father Polly Jean had ever known.
And she’s the only daughter he’s ever had.
People parented children who were not their genetic offspring all the time. He loved her. Adored her. Was that so unusual? He would do anything for her. Would maintain every appearance for her. Would swallow his pain for her. For Victor and Charles.

For Anna.

Whom he loved. Truly, deeply loved.

Bruno helped her stand and then wrapped her in a towel and dried her off. She felt like a child. Bruno was neither tender nor rough. He toweled her down noncommittally. He’d brought a nightgown—Anna’s favorite, she noted—into the bathroom with him and instructed her to lift her arms as he dressed her. He pointed past the bathroom’s open door into the bedroom. “Can you walk by yourself? Lie down. I’ll be in soon.” Anna did as Bruno instructed her. She was the queen of compliance.

A few minutes later Anna heard the thin, airy siffle of the teakettle.
I was making tea and then
 … She let the thought wander off. Another minute passed and Bruno was at Anna’s bedside delivering the cup of tea she might have prepared two hours earlier. Bruno set it on the nightstand. Anna sat up weakly. “Here.” Bruno offered an open palm. In it were three small pills.

“Three?” They were the pills Doktor Messerli had most recently prescribed. Anna had only taken a few, and no more than one at a time. But she took the pills from Bruno’s hand, put them in her mouth, and washed them back with a sip of tea. “Bruno,” Anna started.

He shook his head. “We’re not going to talk about this tonight.” And then he left the room and shut the door. Anna set the cup on the nightstand and let her body become the bed.
Help me, help me, help me,
she cried into her pillow. Her eyelids were swollen and sore. She repeated her plea until the pills began to soften her resolve to remain vigilant and her consciousness retreated into a lonely place inside that didn’t have a name.

Then she fell asleep.

T
HE COLOR OF A FLAME WILL TELL YOU ITS TEMPERATURE
. Yellow flames are coolest. The hottest flames are white. They are called dazzling flames. Red fire is not as hot as blue. The record for the hottest on-earth temperature is 3.6 billion degrees. It was reached in a lab. How is that possible? That’s hotter than the center of the sun. Each year, two and a half million Americans report burn injuries. Suttee is the religious suicide of a Hindu widow. Self-immolation is a frequent form of protest. Every ancient culture had a fire god: Pele, Hephaestus, Vulcan, Hestia, Lucifer, Brigid, the Mesopotamian god Gibil, the Aboriginal goddess Bila, Prometheus. Domestic control of fire began 125,000 years ago. No modern country allows execution by burning. Smoldering is the slow, low, flameless form of combustion. God appeared to Moses in a bramble of fire. An intumescent substance swells when it’s exposed to heat. Gretel pushed the witch into the oven where she died. Ash is the solid remains of fire. Incineration is the act of making the ash, and fire, if you’d care
to be poetic about it, is ash’s mother. Under rare conditions, fire will make a tornado of itself, a whirling vortex of flame. When struck against steel, a flint edge will produce sparks. The flame that tortures also purifies. Not all fires can be fought.

A
NNA SNAPPED OUT OF SLEEP
. T
HE TRIO OF PILLS SHE
’
D TAKEN
the night before had all three worn off at once, and in the manner of slices of bread when a toaster’s timer has run down, both eyes blinked open at the same time and Anna was awake.

The house was in a still and somber mood. The floorboards did not speak. The walls didn’t breathe. The house on Rosenweg was made of quiet. This was unusual. Even with the windows closed, mornings were typically noisy with birdsong and cars and people walking up and down the street. But Anna heard nothing that day. The silence was sobering. She figured it for an aftereffect of the pills.

Her eyes found first their focus, and then the clock. It was just before seven. The bells would ring soon.
I will lie here until the bells ring.
Anna’s head thumped. She would wait for the bells, then rise.
What day is it?
It was Friday. She would allow herself the indulgence of waiting on the bells.

When they came, Anna rose. She moved at an invalid’s pace; each step made her wince. It took a full minute to shuffle into the bathroom. The absoluteness of the morning had been
her imagination. Dietlikon was as busy as Dietlikon ever was. A man walking three sheepdogs passed by the house on his way up the hill. The postman was awake and at work. He zipped down Dorfstrasse on his yellow motorbike. He was a light-complexioned man in his upper twenties with a shaved head and a wide, silly mouth. For the first few months he’d worked this route, he’d been under the impression that Bruno and Anna were siblings, not spouses. In lumbering English he would flirt with her, ask where would she be that weekend, what she would be doing. Then, he would detail his own plans and end their interaction by mentioning how nice it would be if they happened to run into each other some evening out. Bruno eventually corrected him.
Why didn’t you tell him I was your husband?
Bruno asked.
Why did you let him flirt with you?
Anna told him she hadn’t realized he’d been flirting. Since then he’d kept a proper Swiss distance: ruthlessly polite but tediously reserved. He’d been their postman for five years. Anna learned his name once but she’d subsequently forgotten it and was too embarrassed to ask for it again.

Anna forced herself to look at her face. The area between her cheek and her nose had begun to purple; the socket of her eye—the entire eye, from beneath the lower lashes to above the brow—was a pale yellow green, awful as bile. Her finger was raw where Bruno had wrenched off the ring. Her arms and legs were sore but otherwise unharmed. Her face, though. She’d wear these bruises for a month.

This is my face,
she thought. It was undeniable. That was she. She was that. It was the truest reflection she’d ever seen. Her perfect twin. Her doppelgänger.

Hello, Anna. Nice to meet you.

Bruno called her name from his office. When she didn’t answer
he came into the bathroom. He made a generous amount of noise as he approached in an effort not to spook her as he had the night before (but really, what more could be dropped, cracked, broken?). When he saw Anna’s face in the mirror his own face fell. Anna had no reaction to this. Bruno patted her shoulder. “Get dressed. Come into the living room.” His mouth was dry and his words scratched his lips as he spoke them.

“Okay,” Anna said. Bruno returned to his office as Anna hobbled the several steps from bathroom to bedroom.

The day was gray. Pants would have been most practical, but Anna felt prettiest in skirts and rare was the occasion that dressing well didn’t make her feel at least a little better.
Such frippery.
The question was not irrelevant. Is it wise to dose oneself with the medicine of foolish vanities?
Yes,
she thought. Then,
No,
when she rethought it.
A dress, a man, whatever. They cover you, you hide in them.
Then Anna shook all philosophies from her head and began to rifle through the Kleiderschrank.
I will take what comfort I can get.

The blurry details of the night before began to sharpen at their edges and a picture came into focus.
Bruno beat me,
she thought plainly as if this were a fact she’d only just then realized.
He beat me badly.
Anna looked at herself in the bedroom mirror to see if anything in the last minute had changed.
Oh, Anna. You had this coming,
she thought. Anna knew there was something broken in her line of reasoning. No one ever has it coming, of course.
But
 … she wasn’t the textbook example of a battered wife. She hadn’t been victimized into believing she deserved what she got. She decided it all on her own. In a violent, complicated world, Anna thought, it was a quick, lucid solution to a problem of have and lack.
I had this coming and I got what I deserved.
He’d never hit her before and he would
never hit her again. Bruno wasn’t a violent man. There was no pattern of abuse.
I brought this to myself. Myself, I provoked this.
Her face throbbed. She held on to these thoughts until she chose her clothes, setting the former to the side and picking up the latter.
There’s only so much I can carry.
She dressed in a dark skirt, navy turtleneck, and gray tights. As she slipped on a pair of stylish flats she looked to the mirror yet again. Excepting the bruises, Anna looked pretty.

She was fastening her hair in an updo as she walked into the living room. She’d considered leaving it shaggy that she might better hide behind it.
What good would that do?
she decided in the end.
I’ve nothing left to conceal.
Bruno stared through the window at Hans and Margrith, who stood in front of their barn talking to the man with the sheepdogs, who had by then returned from his walk up the hill. Bruno turned around when Anna entered the room. He cleared his throat. “You look nice.”

“Thank you.” The mood was marked with politesse and grace. Both were nervous. Like blind dates at a prom. He had complimented her appearance and she thanked him.
Will he offer me a wrist corsage? Will we ride to the dance in a limousine?
But Bruno was not her date; he was her husband and she was his wife, and what Anna wanted most in that moment was to apologize, to explain, then to apologize again. For everything. And she did mean everything: every snide or damaged thought she’d had since the moment she stepped from the airplane into terminal E nine years ago. Every grudge she’d nursed while traipsing the hill behind their house in the middle of the night. Every lonesomeness, every terror. Every petty wound. Every social fear. Every desire. Everything, everything, everything. Every inevitability. Every mistake. The trouble
with mistakes is that they rarely seem like mistakes when they are made. Sleep had set her right. She was prepared to name names. What use were secrets now? All had been knocked down. She stood in the rubble, ready to rebuild.

Bruno read this in her posture. “No.” He interrupted before she even spoke. It was a sad, smooth no. “You have to leave.”

Anna heard but didn’t hear.

“You have to leave now.” Bruno was calm and sad. His face was red, his expression complicated. He looked as if he’d cried all night. Anna turned her own face away. Next to the table was a small overnight bag that Anna only ever used when she’d be gone a day or two. She’d brought it to the hospital when the children were born. She hadn’t gone anywhere since. It was zipped closed. Bruno had packed it.

“Oh.”

Bruno took a step toward the bag and picked it up and handed it to his wife. It was light.
He doesn’t want me gone for long. That’s what this means.
For nine years Anna had fought against calling this house home. That morning the very last thing she wanted to do was to leave it. Irony of ironies. Neither Bruno nor Anna knew what to say next. Anna’s window of apology had closed, and it seemed pointless to ask him to narrate his side of the story, from the general suspicions to the absolute facts. Anna broke the strained silence. “Are we … done?” “Done” wasn’t really the right word. But it was the only one she could find.

Bruno answered truthfully. “I don’t know.” His voice was clothed in neutrality.

“The children?” Victor must have gone to school straight from Ursula’s. But Polly Jean.

Bruno shook his head. “They don’t need to see your face.”

“Where will I go?”

Bruno sighed in a that’s-for-you-to-decide way. It was a candid reaction. There was no flippancy here. The paradox of Bruno’s frankness confused her. Everything about this moment was yielding and humane. This was the Bruno she’d wanted all along. But she had to betray him to get it.

“Oh,” she said again but with less surety.

A second time Bruno cleared his throat. “Now, Anna.” He moved toward her, put his hand on her shoulder, and guided her with slow ceremony to the door. He helped her with her coat and handed Anna her purse. And then he took her busted face cautiously in his hands and leaned into her and gave her a kiss. It was tender, meaningful, and it overbrimmed with grief. Anna didn’t—somehow couldn’t—kiss back. “Goodbye, Anna.” His farewell landed with a heavy thud. A steel door closed behind it. He said he didn’t know if they were done. But Anna knew. The kiss told her.

They were.

Bruno stepped back into the house and shut the door without locking it. He didn’t look back.

G
ERMAN NOUNS ARE CAPITALIZED
. W
HY
? I don’t know. They just are. Zürich is not the capital of Switzerland, Bern is. Bern and burn are near homophones. Capital also means money. Bruno works with money. You can’t write Bruno without a capital B. The German alphabet has an extra letter called an Eszett. It looks like a capital B and sometimes it replaces a double s. In 1945 Germany’s SS was banned, though this hardly has to do with grammar. Or does it? What, after all, is a grammar
but a governing law? Order upon order, rule upon rule. Switzerland is so clean it even launders its money. Knock knock. Who’s there? Alpine. Alpine who? When you’re gone, Alpine for you. Said Wagner of Zürich’s Grossmünster’s towers: They look like peppermills. Wagner left Zürich when he fell in love with a woman who wasn’t his wife. The Nazis loved Wagner. The Zürich Polizei wear their rifles like Gestapo. The standard issue Swiss Army rifle is a SIG SG 550. Dietlikon’s standard, its coat of arms, is a six-point star on a banner of blue. The German word for star is der Stern. A star is stern, a moon is strict, the sky is serious business. Heaven is often unkind. You should never rely on the kindness of strangers. The kind-ness of strangers. They come in all sorts, like licorice. Das Kind. The German word for child.