Shorter Days (11 page)

It would be fun to fuck shit up, until even the redhead got a different look on her face. A look of fear. A shit-your-pants look. Making a mess where everything was clean, that really got them—Marco had figured that out quickly. It was easy to shake them up over there. He thought of the old lady. She had just stood on the sidewalk and shook her head over and over. At him, of course, when he had brushed past Nâzim's shop yesterday to make sure everything was cool. There was nothing to see. The guy had just rolled down the shutters: lunch break. And so Marco saw only the old lady, who kept shaking her head like it was going to fall off, giving him a crazy look. She had a rickety old mutt on a leash who yelped and tugged, and she held an old-fashioned net shopping bag, in which a single lemon swung like a fat, dead goldfish.

Going around after the the Wren House Halloween party had been Hassan's idea. Murat and Ufuk had been into it too, though. They had some firecrackers, a carton of eggs, and a few tubes of toothpaste. “For the assholes who won't give us anything. That's how they do it in America, Halloween's a huge party there, the old fogies are too scared to even open their doors!” Murat suggested that they go up Constantinstraße, instead of just trick-or-treating in the high-rise. “It's only Germans up there—ones with plenty of cash.” Marco sighs and ties his shoes. This thing with the can is going to be different—tougher. He has to gear up, just in case.

Marco rummages in the broom closet in the kitchen. Porno has a bottle of crap for every little thing: oven cleaner, air freshener, cooktop cleaner. But what Marco's looking for isn't there. He pulls out everything and the stuff clatters around on the floor, a few bottles roll under the oven. They can pick it up themselves when they get home. Finally he has it in his clutches—the thing he's been searching for. Window cleaner. Pro-Home. Pure denatured alcohol. On the back there's an orange symbol with a little black fire sign. Highly flammable. That's the one. I'm coming, Eino. I'll pack up my stuff and be gone. He stashes the glass bottle in a crumpled plastic bag. What else does he need? When's the last time he packed his things to go anywhere? Mini-Marco, in Waldheim, a thousand years ago. The backpack will have to do, plenty will fit in there: it's an Eastpack, a cool brand—he took it from some blubbering dumbass third grader in the Charlottenplatz underpass. Warm clothes: it's cold by the sea. And the fleece hat. Have to take socks and underwear, too. His eyes scan the tiny room. The Game Boy, in case he gets bored. It'll probably take a few hours. Too bad he pissed in the booze, he could have done with another sip. But maybe it's better this way. At least he won't have any bullshit clogging his head. A gun would be good—a nice piece, Rambo style. Just shoot his way out. Marco drops the backpack and runs into the living room. That's it! He tears open the closet and pulls out Anita and Porno's clothes. Porno's shit is down under everything else. “My personal papers. If you go in there you're a dead man.” Marco dumps out the little box. Credit score, tax documents, nasty shit. DVDs, dirty stuff, fucking, obviously. But there—there it is. Finally. The ultimate blaster. Porno had talked it up like it was the crown jewels. “It's from Berlin, I got it at the Brandenburg Gate. I went up there right after the wall fell, wanted to see it for myself. They had old army stockpiles, from the Soviets. I bargained them down—Polacks always try to screw you.” The gun lies big and black in Marco's hand. It feels heavy, and somehow almost alive. He feels the ribbed grip. He sticks it down the waistband of his pants. He feels goosebumps run over his belly.

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.