Shorter Days (8 page)

Judith calls up: “Klaus!” The boys rush out of the playhouse and stand next to her, screaming “Papa!” at the top of their lungs. The looks on the girls' faces—a father who comes home while it's still light out! She can act the part for Leonie. Up there, that guy—a dream-guy: broad-shouldered, fair-haired, a professor, by the way—who just popped out of the window like a cuckoo from a clock, that's my husband. My husband who feeds me, even though I'm sick and crazy; I'm good in bed, I'm a supermom. He doesn't know the first part, and of course he likes the second part. I give him regular blow jobs and suck his cock at night, I get on top and moan and then make veggie-spread sandwiches in the morning—why would he ever look in the medicine cabinet? Biotin for hair and nails, to make you even prettier.

Klaus smiles and waves and the boys bounce with excitement: “Come down, Papa, come!” Your husband gets home late, am I right? He's not part of your daily life, he works, just like you do, to pay for your Italian boots, your two cars, and the strangers who care for your children every day. But mine—he's here. In a minute he'll bring me a coffee with steamed milk. Because he loves me, from the heart, we'll never part, I drive him wild, I'll bear his child. And if I squint my eyes a bit in this melting blue twilight, I can imagine it's Sören who's waving—waving down at the beautiful blond sons that we made together. Sören wouldn't laugh and wave, he'd vomit on the whole idyll: garden, kids, housewife with teacups, the obscene lemming-happiness of the bourgeoisie, who smile vapidly while they rub up against each other and multiply. Your horizon is no higher than the rim of a muesli bowl, you're blind to the world's perversions. Child soldiers disembowel women in Namibia while you worry your child might have hammertoes. And the Chinese make SUVs and precision mechanisms for a tenth of what they cost here, while the sea level and health care costs just keep rising.

Judith forms a cup with her hand and mimes drinking. Klaus grins and calls: “It's on its way!” Judith smiles at Leonie. She talks of Klaus's work at the university. “It's a good school. Lots of students come here from far away, which can be fun. Homesick Rhinelanders and Arabs who find us Swabians annoying. Klaus invites them over and they get cheese spätzle, filled dumplings, and Trollinger wine, so they see that we're not all dreary and grumpy.” Leonie laughs and pulls her tweed coat tighter. “And you? Are you a professor too?” Judith shakes her head. She's been waiting for this question to come out of the lipsticked career-mouth. You're nothing: a housewife and a mother. No one cares about you. The only people who stick up for you are old-fashioned Bavarian lederhosen-wearers and mentally deficient news announcers, who just make things worse. She answers quickly. She's said it a hundred times. The words tumble out of her mouth like the golden eggs from the hen's rear. Leonie will snatch them up greedily. There's nothing to add. First career, then children, as it should be. The neighbor will never know that Judith didn't finish her dissertation, that all she ever did in her months at the Dr. Fenchel Gallery was make coffee and take bubble wrap off of paintings. Leonie nods, impressed.

“We've rarely taken on a young person as completely apathetic as you have shown yourself to be. I turned down several dozen of your more qualified colleagues on your behalf. I'll be speaking to Professor Baumeister. He spoke so highly of you!” Frau Dr. Fenchel's blue-black geisha hairdo, her powdered face, painted red mouth, and arrogantly arched eyebrows still sometimes haunt Judith's dreams. And yet the Gesamtkunstwerk, as Judith secretly called her boss, had been completely right. Judith was a horrendous intern. She was always late, used the office phone to call Tübingen and Kirchheim, missed appointments, and generally seemed lost in a fog of disinterest. It was just bad luck that the coveted internship, which was supposed to secure her professional future and catapult her out of destitution, coincided with the Sören-crisis and the related spike in her Tavor usage.

In the last week of her internship, Judith didn't go to the gallery. She didn't even pick up her certificate—it would hardly have been something she could show off, in any case. In fleeing from Hackstraße she wasn't just escaping Sören's voice on the answering machine. She was seeking shelter from the curator's nasally voice as well.

Klaus enters the garden. He's carrying a painted wooden tray from Chiavenna with two coffee cups. “For you, mesdames. Cheers.” Klaus presses Judith to him. His grip is strong, as if to assure himself that she'll really stay and not disappear through a knothole, like some enchanted princess in a fairy tale. She smells his aftershave and the familiar Klaus-smell—clean and harmless. Judith closes her eyes for a moment and leans against him. His heart beats slowly and evenly under his scratchy sweater. She wants to crawl into him and live as a tiny animal in his armpit. Klaus shakes Leonie's hand, and they chat a bit. Uli and Kilian come and hang on his legs briefly, only to disappear back into the playhouse with the girls. “I'll go back up and set the table. Grilled cheese was the plan for dinner, right?” Judith nods slowly. “And there's a beet salad in the refrigerator, top left—don't forget to taste it first.” “Kilian will like that—red pee again! Bye, Leonie, see you soon!” Judith gulps down her coffee and watches him leave. No butt in his pants. A baggy nothing where there should be a swelling in his jeans. Not too plump, but just right—like Dürer's Adam, like Michelangelo's David, like Sören. Judith shakes herself. She hates the stubborn physical presence of those memories. It's as if her body remembers things her intellect has long since repressed. Regardless, Klaus's pants don't fit. What could Leonie be thinking, as she gazes after her husband and wipes milk foam from her thin upper lip? Women like Klaus: department secretaries, mommies at the Waldorf kindergarten, even Frau Posselt. He's big and solid, and his hands are always warm.

“He's fun, your Klaus. You've known each other a long time, haven't you? And he's still head over heels in love with you,” Leonie says, closing her eyes briefly, like in some sappy movie. Judith just nods—she doesn't want to spit out more golden eggs. The sunlight will expose her, someone will betray her, eventually. It would be worth telling, the story of Judith and Klaus: the nice boy and the beast, the lunatic in the good man's bed. A sleeping beauty who needed not to be kissed awake but rather to be shaken, to be pulled with clouded eyes from her heavy, drug-induced slumber and yelled at: “You just walk all over me. Now, when things aren't going so well for you, you come crying to me? I have Annett, I'm trying to forget you, and now you pull this shit? How did you get in?”

Judith's silence doesn't bother Leonie. She goes on, as if she's just been waiting for an opportunity to talk about herself. “You know, I'm jealous that your husband comes home so early. Lately Simon's been coming later and later. I feel like a single mother. And it makes the girls sad, too. And bratty. Do you have any idea when we last did something together, just the two of us?” Judith shrugs.

The children have started a game of wild horse with a homemade bridle they've found in the garden shed. It will be the last game of the day—the little brass bells glint in the twilight. “Your boys have so much imagination. Lisa and Feli love that, of course. So many children just don't know how to play.” Judith nods and tells her about the toys they have at the kindergarten: faceless dolls, simple wooden blocks, which have surely helped strengthen Uli and Kilian's imagination. But Leonie doesn't have much to say on this subject, which would have been a comfortable one for Judith. “My best friend is having a birthday party tonight. She lives in Tübingen, it's really not that far. And we have a babysitter—our cleaning lady. I so want to go with Simon, without the kids, like a real couple. Sometimes I feel like all we are anymore is parents.” Judith clears the dishes, stacking the empty cups. She thinks about her evenings sitting in the living room with Klaus after the boys have gone to bed. They listen to music, plan their weekend, talk about the kindergarten, what groceries they need, Klaus's students and his projects. When they make love, it's slow and peaceful. Each time is the same, like swimming on a warm summer day—pleasant, unthrilling ripples.

Judith calls to her children. They trot over immediately, while Leonie eventually has to physically drag Lisa and Felicia out of the playhouse. She makes “If . . . then” threats—no television, no jumping on the bed—which leaves her out of breath. Judith instructs Kilian and Uli to clean up the sand toys and close the playhouse. They're tired and hungry, but they comply without whining. Another little triumph over the other woman, who's more than happy to concede defeat, thereby diminishing the value of the victory: “Your children are so much calmer and more sensible than mine.” The boys' shouts of farewell are drowned by Lisa and Felicia's howls of rage: “We don't want to go home! Mama, you're a dummy!” Leonie waves one last time, then crosses the street and conducts the crying girls into the house. The carved oak door closes with a dull bang. Ulrich and Kilian trot behind while Judith carries the basket. Hanna's windows are dark, her Renault is nowhere to be seen. The boys didn't even ask about Mattis. Dinner will already be on the table, followed by the familiar evening rituals: teeth-brushing, face-washing, the story of the dwarf in the land of the trolls, all the stanzas of “The Moon Has Risen.” She'll glide through the end of the day as if on a slow, gently-lit slide with sleep waiting at the bottom. And Tavor before it, swallowed with minty breath as she brushes her teeth.

A group of boys is walking on the other side of the street. They kick an empty can, which rattles against doors and basement windows. “Look out, dumbass!” “Fuck you, dickhead!” Judith recognizes Nâzim's relative, Murat, with the silver sneakers, along with Marco and the two others. Murat turns his head away, but the beautiful one puts his foot on the can, fixes his eyes on Judith, and calls: “Hey, mommy, you're hot, you know that? I can give you what you need. Wanna give me your number? I'll call when daddy's at work!” As earlier, his cronies just giggle in the background. She pushes the children in front of her, “Hurry, Papa has dinner waiting.” Her cheeks burn.

Uli and Kilian don't move. They stare at the boys. “Hey, ya little fuckers, does your mommy give good head?” Marco's voice cracks, he practically yodels the last word. Judith pushes the kids onto the sidewalk and fumbles for her keys; she can't find them and rings the doorbell over and over. Klaus's voice comes reluctantly over the intercom: “Cut the crap, boys—I've had enough!” Then the green door opens.

As soon as he opens the apartment door, Marco can smell that he's not there. His breath slackens, and his pulse slows from machine gun tempo to a more moderate beat. The sweet-smelling stuff that he dumps on by the gallon still hangs in the air, infecting the whole apartment. But the smell isn't fresh—it's not mixed with his body heat and the sweat that drips constantly from his cadaverous body, which he's managed to bring to life by cleaning buildings and pumping iron. His hands are always hot. Not warm, but hot, as if his insides are boiling. When he hits Marco, it feels like being slapped by two hot schnitzels, straight out of the pan.

Marco stands in the doorway and looks around. He holds the key in his hands with the tip forward like a tiny pistol. Their keys aren't on the hooks. Both are gone, Anita's stupid cartoon key chain and his shitty tiger tooth charm with the whole jangling collection: a bazillion offices and apartments. None of them belong to him, he just cleans up their crap. More keys equals more responsibility—so you can tell right off he's made something of himself. But then look who drives an old car and lives like Siamese triplets squished into 375 square feet of a high-rise on Olgaeck. Marco checked Pornstar's wallet just last night. Dry as a bone. Nothing to take, as usual. He buys sneakers with air cushions and ankle support, breathable track jackets, protein shakes for eight euros a bottle. When Marco needs something there's no point in asking Pornstar.

Marco doesn't hang up his key. He wears it around his neck on a cord with skulls—white on black. Anita gave it to him. He'll take the cord with him when he leaves, to remember her by. Not to remember the new Anita—the skinny one whose tanning salon skin is as brown and wrinkly as the paper Grandma Bine slides under frozen pizza before she puts it in the oven—but the other one, the one who's disappeared. Skinny Anita is blonde, so blonde that her hair looks white. She sprays it and blows it out from her head: puffy like a dandelion. Skinny Anita looks good, no doubt about it. That's your mother? Daaamn! She's only fat in the right places, not all over like she used to be. “It's good when women are a little plump, we like that, right
karu
?” Eino had said, hugging Fat Anita. First she made a face, but then Eino pushed Marco into her arms. She pressed him to her and laughed. Fat Anita. Flabby Anita.

“I'm so fat now, I'll never get rid of this. Damn baby fat.” But then she'd bought soft-serve that crinkled out of the cone like a greasy curl of hair, one for herself and one for Marco. He'd traipsed up the dusty Königstraße with the tip of his tongue stuck in the cold mass, always a step or two behind Anita so that he didn't bump into her rustling shopping bags: C&A, H&M. Fat Anita liked colorful getups and hated getting them dirty. She screeched at him at least a hundred times a day—“Marco, you retard!”; “Marco, you make me sick!”; “I'd have a great life, if it wasn't for you!” When he wet the bed she'd twist the sheets into a hard sausage and smack him with it. But she also rubbed her knobby little nose against his, which tickled like crazy. She bought him pretzels, stickers, a water pistol, and when she was in a good mood, she'd read to him from an old Mickey Mouse book. And one Saturday, in line at the discount supermarket—small, blonde, rhinestone bellybutton ring—she'd attracted Eino. Eino, the Estonian, who really wanted nothing more than to buy a case of
vesi
, shuffle back to the construction site, quietly spread out some newspapers, and solder wires together.

No, Marco doesn't hang up his key with Porno's and Skinny Anita's. He wipes his moist palms on his pants. It's annoying that this happens every time. It starts as soon as he steps into the stairwell, and he can't do anything about it. It's just like the dog that Laupp the biology teacher told them about once, the one who starts to drool whenever a bell rings. He doesn't want to be like some dumb mutt. And definitely not like Mini-Marco, the little nine-year-old squirt who sometimes shat his pants in fear, who pissed his bed on the regular. A little crybaby who's too dumb to just kick the bucket, can't do anything, doesn't know anything, a little snot-nosed brat. That was the Russian's fault, according to Porno—he brought him up all wrong. He was a lost cause, should have been drowned at birth. Mini-Marco, Anita's retard, Pornstar's Russian rat, Grandma Bine's brat, Eino's
karu
. Mini-Marco disappeared. He ended up dissolving into thin air, just like everyone wanted.

In his place is Marco, almost thirteen. And not four feet tall, but five foot five and a half. No one checks his clothes before he leaves the house anymore, no one checks his book bag, no one checks for drops of piss on the toilet. He's grown some hair—on his chest, on his arms, on his balls. All of him has grown. Not long ago Pornstar cut his daily ration, as if he could sense that Marco wasn't a baby anymore. Of course he still hits, but it's not like it used to be. Maybe he just can't throw punches like he used to, maybe he's gotten weaker, older, smaller. It doesn't really hurt anymore. And so now there's more peace and quiet inside Marco's head. Things occur to him that he hasn't thought about in forever. Eino's note, for example, stuffed way down deep in the stuffing of the mattress. Even if you turn it over, you can't tell there's a hiding place. Marco took the stitches out very carefully with a nail clippers He tries not to fumble around in there too much, so that the stuffing doesn't fall out and get noticed. He's thought this over. He's not dumb—he even manages to bullshit through school somehow. Unlike Murat, Hassan, and Ufuk, who are real fuck-ups.

The brains probably come from his father, Tobi. That little punk kid, as Grandma Bine always calls him. No one ever talks about Tobi anymore, besides Grandma Bine. Nowadays Skinny Anita barely says anything to Marco anyway. Fat Anita liked to rant to Mini-Marco: “Who needs fathers—we can do fine, just us!” Just what Fat Anita did he wasn't so sure about at the time. She liked to slump in front of the tube, watching shows and soap operas, or sometimes cartoons with Mini-Marco. She called her friends or fought with Grandma Bine. “How am I supposed to work if I have Marco hanging around my neck? Who's gonna help me with that? You're not, that's for sure. Who's gonna hire me to come with a kid?” Sometimes she did hair or nails in the kitchen for women she knew from the playground or the building. She went out at night—“If I don't dance a little, I'll forget I'm still alive.”—sprayed herself with perfume, painted gloss on her lips, and hung huge earrings from her fleshy earlobes: peacock feathers, golden suns, silver birds. Mini-Marco stayed home alone on his mattress near the sleeper sofa, unable to sleep. He knew she always came back eventually, poking around forever with the key until she found the lock, stinking of smoke and beer, and that she'd be in a foul mood the next day. She never brought anyone home. In those days Eino would come by in the afternoon with a case of water and a family-size box of popsicles—bright yellow orange-flavored ones—stuck between the bottles. The wet wrapping came off without a sound.

Everyone in Marbach calls Tobi, Marco's natural father, Electro-Breining, since he owns an electronics shop. Aside from Grandma Bine. “Don't make me laugh,” she says, “that little punk kid! I still call him Tobi whenever I run into him. So, Tobi, how's your family? He gets real red and runs away. Just like he did with Anita back then.” Tobi got Anita pregnant. At sixteen, for Pete's sake. Since the seventeen-year-old Tobi was still a mama's boy and had no interest in playing house with Anita, he cleared off one day, after a few tears in front of the ice cream shop downtown. Marco has never seen Tobi. But any guy who knows about mechanical stuff can't be a total dimwit. And if Marco manages to pass into the next grade, even though he always has other things on his mind, it must be because of Tobi, because Anita is dumb. She let Eino go and took up with Pornstar, so she has to be dumb. Dead from the neck up. A little beetle who totters around all night, attracting vermin with the battery light in her ass. Porno flew after her and sank his teeth in—a fat, stinking dung beetle with pincer teeth.

Twelve minus nine is three. Marco can do that in his head easy. That means the asshole has been around for three years. Marco giggles. Happy three-year anniversary. Marco forces himself to breathe slowly. There's no one in the apartment. He's out cleaning and Anita is too. Porno got her the job. That way he can keep her under his thumb all day. It's already dark by the time they come home. They'll think he's just hiding behind the curtains, out of the line of fire. But he'll be long gone, over the hills and far away. Now he finally he has time, plenty of time, just for himself.

Marco walks down the narrow hallway. The bathroom door is open, the toilet cover and seat left open like a giant mouth with swollen lips. Blue cleaner foams in its white maw. Everything always has to be open—proper ventilation, good air. The toilet seat used to be made of wood, before Porno tore it out. Plastic is more hygienic. Eino had brought the wooden one with him. Marco has forgotten what the kind of wood was called, he's not great at that kind of thing. It had dark whirls in it, like bird's eyes. “Of course the boy wets the bed when the toilet's so cold. This is good wood like we have in
Eestimaa
, warm on the bum. He'll love sitting on it, right
karu
?” Fat Anita had whined that it was ridiculous to waste more money on the little pisser. It was a lost cause—he'd wet the bed at least once every week, every single week, for as long as she could remember. Here or at Grandma Bine's, it didn't make any difference, he probably did it on purpose. Just like he had to show up right when she least wanted him. Her whole life had been shit from that day on. He never slept through the night, he was always sick, one thing after another: bronchitis, pneumonia, angina. He had it all. At fifteen months he still couldn't walk and hadn't said a peep. Eino had no right to act like he knew better. But Eino just shook his head:
Pea suu, kallis
. That's what he always said when Fat Anita yelled at Mini-Marco. Eino let Mini-Marco hand him screws when he installed the toilet seat, and told him he was doing a good job.

Marco walks past the bathroom and into the tiny kitchen. The window is open here, too. The Olgaeck noise roars in through it: streetcars, four lines, chug up the hill or into the tunnel, cars squeal and honk up and down the four-lane Hohenheimer Straße. Busses drive over the wide surface of the main road that goes downtown, and stop in front of the distant castles. They're fairly high up. You can see the old orange orphanage and the beer garden behind the huge iron gate, the towers, some church, who knows. Marco looks down into the courtyard. A couple benches next to a sandbox full of cat shit, a rusted-out jungle gym, swingset, and slide, overflowing trash cans against the wall. Nobody down there. The high-rise has fifteen floors. He moved here with Fat Anita when he was two, their first real apartment. One main room, a kitchen, bathroom, narrow hallways, and a windowless storage closet behind a curtain. Eino ripped out the shelves and made space for Marco's mattress, his Mickey Mouse lamp and the banana carton that held all his crap. “
Karu
needs his own den—a little hiding place.” Eino got out Anita's bedsheets and flipped through the pile with his big hands as if it were a kiddie book with thick cardboard pages—pink flowered, light blue, tiger print, black. Marco couldn't decide, so Eino chose for him: “Take the blue one—it's the best color, it'll be like sleeping in heaven.”

Marco yanks open the refrigerator. There's nothing to eat. There's never any grub around here. “No cooking, it just makes a mess. The little bastard already ate at school, what are we paying those bills for every month?”

Eino had cooked a lot in the evenings, mostly potatoes. And then yelled “Sööma!” when it was ready. He was really into potatoes, he made
kartulipuder
—mashed potatoes with chunks of bacon—and
frikadellisupp
from carrots, potatoes, and little meatballs. He brought weird stuff that made Anita shake her head, but Mini-Marco was curious and tried everything: hard slices of black bread baked in fat that looked like strips of bark, canned fish, beets, dried mushrooms.

There's a bottle of Pornstar's disgusting cranberry-flavored gin and a package of margarine in the door. Marco screws open the bottle and drinks until he can't breathe. The fake sweetness makes his mouth water and his teeth ache, then the stuff flows down his gullet, burning slightly and coating his empty belly with warmth. He turns on the radio. Robbie Williams is howling. He finds a can of ravioli in the cabinet over the stove. He eats it straight from the can, stopping just before he gets to the bottom. If Anita and Pornstar were here, he'd let out a quiet tomato-sauce-and-fatty-meat-scented burp. But here, alone with Robbie's voice and the weak afternoon sunlight, he really lets it rip. He feels stuffed but not satisfied. A few gulps from the tap, which tastes like fake lemon. White traces of scouring powder cling to the sides of the sink. Pornstar cleaned. The drainboard gleams. Marco catches sight of his silhouette, his hat still on; he tosses it on a chair. Then some more gin. The bottle's fluted glass belly is noticeably emptier. Pornstar will definitely notice. Suddenly Marco grins. He unscrews the top again and unbuttons his cargo pants. With a quick motion he takes his penis out of his boxers. It's small and floppy, like an uncooked rope of dough. When he did the vocational class at the bakery, rolling pretzels felt a lot like this. The dough was warm, limp, and almost felt alive. Marco holds his dick in his hands. It weighs practically nothing. A harmless little thing. He can't imagine that a girl wouldn't want to laugh if she had to mess around with it, even if it can also look way different than this. Hey man, there's work to do. It's not really fun work, but at least the
location
is pretty dope. He pulls back the foreskin and presses the head into the smooth bulge of the bottle's opening. It feels good, cool and sticky—he tries to piss, but then suddenly the bottle is hanging off his boner. He doesn't get boners very often. The others seem to jerk off so much their dongs almost fall off. They won't shut up about it: how long, how big, christ almighty. And women, they're always going on about the women from school. As if you needed more trouble. Another slut who would probably just bitch like Anita and stress you out. Better to steer clear. Not that that's easy. Marco knows that the girls—Aysel, Sinem, and Aliki, or whatever their names are—call him Georg, because he looks a little like the bassist from Tokyo Hotel. It feels good to hear them giggle when he walks by, but he can't deal with that right now.