Read Shorter Days Online

Authors: Anna Katharina Hahn

Shorter Days (15 page)

BOOK: Shorter Days
3.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Luise can kneel at his feet, fold her hands, and recite the words: “Eternal rest, grant unto him o Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. Amen.” The words feel empty, clunking out of her mouth like a dumb nursery rhyme:

“Lady-bird, Lady-bird, fly away home
the field mouse is gone to her nest
the daisies have shut up their sleepy red eyes
and the birds and the bees are at rest
Lady-bird, Lady-bird, fly away home
the glow worm is lighting her lamp
the dew's falling fast, and your fine speckled wings
will flag with the close clinging damp.”

Leonie

“Feli and Lisa?” Janet's plucked eyebrows rise in her smooth brow. “But Frau Munk, your husband already picked the girls up! There's nobody left here. I was just goin' myself.” Leonie looks from Janet's baby-blue eyes to the empty coat hooks. A sun grins over Lisa's name, and Felicia has a butterfly, its body far too fat for its wings. The pink felt slippers are lined up under the bench in a neat row. Leonie tugs at her earlobes as she stares. The bare flesh between her fingers makes her start. The gold hoop she usually plays with when she's embarrassed is missing. The earrings were a gift from Simon, of course, that first Christmas in the little house in Heumaden. “Baby, I know I'm only a poor boy from Heslach, but . . .”

She feels the other side—the hoop is swinging right where it belongs. Didn't she have them both on at the office this morning? Damn! Meanwhile genuine confusion has spread over Janet's face, which leads Leonie to stick her hands back in her coat pockets. Her fingers keep fidgeting—tissues, candy—that's all. She shakes her hair out from her neck and assures Janet in a firm voice: “Oh of course, Simon was going to pick them up today. I just have too much on my plate right now. Have a nice afternoon, Janet!” Then she throws all her weight against the door decorated with paper dragons and grinning pumpkins and runs to the Volvo.

Her car is the only one left in the parents' parking lot. The sandbox in the garden is covered with a green tarp. The swings and slide are wet with rain; from low in the sky, the sun shines on water droplets sprinkled over trees and bushes. The little seats hang quietly from their cold chains. The sky is a very light blue, as if snow clouds are already lurking just behind it. Wet leaves cling to the windshield. She sits for a few moments behind the steering wheel, her eyes closed.

Her cell phone rings. Leonie lets it go to voicemail. She hasn't checked it once since this morning—she doesn't trust herself to listen to the messages. Conny alone has called four times. She doesn't want to talk to anyone from the party. Simon has not been among the callers. He must have made out all right. Not a single question about where to find tights, or what the girls should bring for snack. Hopefully he didn't put apple juice in their water bottles. She wants to call and scream at him.

She left for Tübingen in the early evening yesterday, white calla lilies and a bottle of champagne on the backseat, hoping, until the moment she pulled out, that Simon would hop into the driver's seat at the last minute. Frau Kienzle sat at the kitchen table with the children, meticulously forming pretzels out of modeling clay. She was supposed to stay until Simon got back. Probably he took that as an excuse to extend his stay at the office even further. There was no redheaded monster to jump on him if he didn't make it back when he said he would. Just the girls, bare-footed and night-gowned. “Papa has work to do,” can silence them almost like magic. They know there's nothing they can do to keep him from disappearing. A short call, another bill in Frau Kienzle's envelope, and it's taken care of. She didn't believe a word of the promise he'd mumbled into the phone. “I'll put Lisa and Feli to bed in any case—not at seven, but I'll be there. You can go on and go to the party, but I'm not going to make it. All hell has broken loose here.” He didn't even say a proper goodbye. She could hear Paula, his assistant, nagging in the background—a coiffed blonde careerist, London School of Economics. Another phone rang; she hung up.

Luckily, her day at the office had been a calm one. She'd corrected proofs of the new edition, mindlessly adding photos, writing proofreading symbols in the margins, and sticking on Post-its for the designer, all without having to think much. No one disturbed her—the end of October is a stressful time for most people, there's all kinds of planning for the end of the year. It's nothing to do with her.

She needs a distraction, since “Conny's party” won't stop running in her head. First scene: Leonie embracing a horrified Connie, fending off Connie's drunken, rapid-fire comments, and kissing her warm cheeks, which glowed red above the rhinestone-studded T-shirt her fellow teachers had given her: “I'm 35! Please help me cross the street!”

“Thank you so much, Conny—it was really a great night! But I'm going to sleep elsewhere. I'm going to have some South American literature read to me. I'll call you!” Before Conny could reply she'd turned and waved behind her. Guests were draped on the barstools and couches of The Hexle, in two AM poses. Most clutched Tannenzäpfle beers and drank straight from the bottle with visible enjoyment. “Mystify Me” drifted from the speakers. Some raised a hand to her as she left, others smiled. She felt fantastic: her neon-blue zigzag skirt swung against her boots, and a tight sweater stretched over her beating heart and expectant breasts. Her tweed coat and overnight bag swung casually over her shoulder. Inside the bag was her Snoopy T-shirt—perfect for Conny's fold-out couch. But she had pretty underwear—apricot pink, aprinkot, suited her. She giggled. Then Leonie stepped out of the bar and into the October night: cobblestones, timber frames, students on their way home. A few turned as she passed—
it's a kind of magic
. The bells in the collegiate church tower chimed the hour. The man walked three paces behind her like the English prince consort.

The Volvo's windshield has begun to fog over. Leonie rifles through her purse, finds a dried-out piece of pretzel and a pen, then a paperback. She takes it out. The man on the cover has one hand in his jacket pocket. The other holds his coat, which hangs over his shoulder. He looks pensive, almost sad, but expectant at the same time. Black hair flipped back, dark brows—a real Latin lover. Leonie opens the book. “For Leonie—best of luck! Enchanted to meet you, Tobias.” She smiles, then stuffs it back in her bag. The earring is still missing. “When you lose something, you must pray to St. Anthony.” Even the kindergarten teachers knew that much. Her grandmother had one in her change purse—tiny and black in a little vial, hardly longer than a finger-joint. Leonie shakes her head and lets the magnetic latch of her purse snap closed.

A door bangs outside. Janet leaves the kindergarten, dressed in an eggplant-colored down parka. She puts her fur-trimmed hood up over her dyed-blond hair and struts down Sonnenbergstraße, presumably en route to a weekend of shopping, fucking, and television. She's barely twenty-five, unencumbered, without a care in the world. Leonie is glad she doesn't turn around. She's sweating and her face is pale in the rearview mirror, the corners of her mouth drooping. She sees crow's feet and wrinkles in her forehead, traces of a hangover. It's your own fault, slut. Simon, you asshole, why didn't you come?

The Hexle, in Tübingen's historic district, had a cozy corner table. Leonie sat there with a glass of white wine in front of her, surrounded by Conny's sister and some other women. They toasted and chatted: children, job, vacation spots. The guy who suddenly slid his chair over and began talking to Leonie was wearing a turtleneck sweater and ostentatious glasses. A pseudo-intellectual, all in black. “Who died?” Leonie thought automatically. The ad agency that Leonie's bank sometimes works with employs people like him. Creative types who think they're wildly superior to the suit-wearers, though they probably make half as much.

The man—short, compared to Simon—made a theatrical gesture in the direction of the bar. The second half of the Wednesday match flickered on the TV above it: VfB Stuttgart versus Hannover 96; a group on barstools were watching—moaning and wringing their hands. In the last half hour, Leonie's eyes had also repeatedly wandered in the direction of the screen. She particularly liked Gómez and Cacao and, like Simon, was euphoric over VfB's recent success.

“Soccer bores me to death.” Behind the rectangular glasses, his eyes were brown. He moved slowly and surely, had nice teeth and thinning hair, which was styled without any embarrassing attempts to cover the bald spots. “What would you rather talk about, world literature?” Leonie asked, giving him what she hoped was a scornful look. “What's wrong with soccer?” “Nothing, it just puts me to sleep.” The beginnings of a paunch showed under his soft sweater. Carefully, he set his beer next to Leonie's wine, along with a bowl of bar snacks. He feeds himself well, the little couch potato, she thought, stretching her exercise-toughened legs with satisfaction. “I really shouldn't eat this stuff, but it tastes so good, and the birthday girl did specifically say: Party like there's no tomorrow.” He turned his chair and sat down on it backwards, his legs spread. Always has to be different. Leonie scooted a bit to the side, but he smiled and pushed the pistachios and peanuts toward her: “Have some—you can really afford it.” His admiring look pleased her, she couldn't help it. She smiled back, crossed her legs, and fished a drop of Chardonnay from the corner of her mouth with her tongue. After introducing himself as Tobias, an old friend of Wolfgang's, he really did start in on literature, on a book he thought was so great that he just had to give it to Conny—he had even brought another copy to read in the hotel. “Julio Cortázar is a South American author, and he's written some wonderful stories. I did a big profile on him for his birthday at the end of August, and then I was hooked.” He wore a silver ring with a triangular design on his right hand, which Leonie found every bit as silly and pretentious as his glasses and pointy black leather shoes. She was irritated by the ring's ambiguity. It could be anything: a token of commitment between gay lovers, a memento from a vacation in Mexico, a wedding ring. Everything about Leonie is obvious at first glance: brand-name clothes, designer handbag, wide gold wedding band. Am I too easy to read? Am I simple?

“I never read,” she said loudly, hoping the sentence would provoke dismay. But Tobias just grinned, shook his head, and kept talking: “In Cortázar, the fabric of reality tears, as if under some hidden strain. Humans and monsters exist side by side. He often writes about children: how they play, how they dress up, build ant farms. A man turns into a salamander, an Axolotl. Delia, a modern-day witch from an apartment block in Buenos Aires, kills her fiancé with despair and poisoned chocolates. ‘The moon fell flat on the whitish insides of the roach, its body stripped of its leathery shell, and around it, mixed with the mint and marzipan, were bits of its feet and wings, the dust of its ground-up carcass.'” As he spoke she noticed the fullness and darkness of his voice. He sounded like a radio announcer, or an actor. “When you read Cortázar, you feel like you're on vacation—everyone is drinking maté and anise liqueur and reading the
Última Hora
, everyone sits on the patio with watermelon, listening to the cicadas. You'd like it.” Tobias's eyes gleamed, and against her will, Leonie was curious. He talked more about Cortázar, who had a beautiful, intelligent wife named Aurora, before he left her to be a bearded hippie in Paris with another woman.

A roar from the bar told Leonie that her team had won again. She thought briefly of Simon, who had kicked the sideboard after a depressing game against Bayern München a few years ago and bruised his middle toe. Tobias set a new glass of wine in front of her. He looked at her until she lowered her eyes with a laugh. “I haven't flirted in ages, especially not with a woman who admits to not reading.” Leonie pushed the hair off her forehead. “It's not like that. I read. Trade journals, magazines, and
Geo
. Those are interesting. But books, made-up stories—they bore me. They remind me of school.”

St. Anthony fails. Leonie pulls her hand out of the crack between seat cushion and seat back. Crumbs and a pacifier, but no earring. There's no point. She has to go home. She turns on the Volvo and threads the car into the Friday-night traffic, drives down Sonnenbergstraße. At the intersection with Dobelstraße she makes a wrong turn and glides past the laundromat, “estd. 1969,” the Spanish restaurant, and the Bethesda hospital, toward downtown. The orange rectangle of the old orphanage is peaceful in the sun's slowly dwindling light. Behind it the thick towers of the castle and the uneven spires of the collegiate church form a humble skyline.

Tobias is writing a book about Stuttgart. He told her about it yesterday. “I wanted to call it ‘The Faceless City' at first, since the war robbed it of its beautiful face. A brutal sort of facelift. Now it's just a practical place, easy to drive through. On streets that were actually designed by the Nazis. And all the new houses look like blocks—blocks of concrete in every conceivable color and shape—tiny boxes and big boxes piled on top of each other to form towers. But then suddenly there will be something old between them, like a forgotten decoration—a sandstone building with an ornate façade, a castle, a church tower.”

Tobias told her that the city had once been an important center of chocolate manufacture—“So many chocolate factories in one city; imagine how it must have smelled!” He talked of Rudolf Steiner's wild life with the table-turners and necromancers in Berlin, before he used Emil Molt's money to construct cornerless buildings in Uhlandshöhe, of the idyll in Neckarau before it was industrialized. Leonie knew little of what he told her. She contributed a bit about the black-breasted demoness from the church in Heumaden, which he already knew about, of course. She re-applied her lipstick in the bathroom. She wanted to please, and brought up her favorite TV show:
Desperate Housewives
. “Those are stories too. It's not as slapstick and silly as most soaps, and not so conventional. It's much more oblique, sometimes even dark. Anyway, it's really good—I can't exactly say why.”

A solid line of cars rolls down Charlottenstraße. Leonie merges in and crosses Olgaeck. She doesn't want to go home. Maybe she could go to the cleaners? She has no desire to pick up Simon's chemical-smelling suits, she has no desire to do anything for him. She turns around in front of King Wilhelm's Palace and drives back up Charlottenstraße. The lights are all red. Pedestrians crowd through the ugly passages of the Queen Olga building. Discount bakeries, discount pharmacies, discount clothing stores, between which an optician, a framer, and a shop selling crystals fight for survival. People often hold their hands against the shop window, hoping to absorb some of the aura. The number 15 streetcar wheezes out of the tunnel and honks at some pedestrians who are blocking the tracks at the intersection. It always comforts Leonie to see the last of the old Stuttgart streetcars—a wobbly yellow caterpillar with flags on the driver's cab. She doesn't know when it will finally be retired to make room for the box-shaped light rail. She turns on the radio. Madonna's arrogant voice:
Like a virgin, touched for the very first time, and your heart beats, next to mine, like a virgin
. If only Madonna had been playing at The Hexle yesterday—then Leonie would only have gotten aggressive, instead of sentimental.

BOOK: Shorter Days
3.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Vanished in the Dunes by Allan Retzky
Kiro's Emily by Abbi Glines
Dangerous Legacy by Valerie Hansen
The Secret Princess by Rachelle McCalla
A Cage of Roots by Matt Griffin
Hotel Kerobokan by Kathryn Bonella