Shorter Days (4 page)

She raised her right hand, as if taking an oath. A speck of dark red polish still clung to her ring finger, but Frau Posselt saw only the heavy gold ring. “Look—this is my engagement ring.” She took the piece of jewelry from her finger and pointed to the inside. “Love, Klaus,” she spelled out solemnly, biting her cheek to keep from giggling aloud. The old lady blinked behind her thick glasses and nodded eagerly. “Oh yeah, that's purty.” Judith, having gotten herself under control, invented an engagement—a candle-light dinner at a hotel by the Schloßgarten. She sighed and smiled as she talked. In that moment, the image she conjured up felt as true as the reality, in which Sören had given her the ring in the drafty train station. It only looked valuable—there was no stamp to certify the quality—and Judith couldn't hide her disappointment. But Sören, already aboard the train, had shoved his luggage into the aisle with his foot and called over his shoulder, “I'm saving the family jewels for Mrs. Right.”

Later, Frau Posselt took Judith's arm and led her resolutely toward the painted green door. “Ya can't just keep sittin' here in yer state. Ya got a responsibility. Me, I ain't got kids. I'll just letcha in. Sometimes we water the professor's flowers. I'll run up and getcha the key. Ya look white as a sheet.”

And so Judith followed Frau Posselt up three flights of stairs to her new home.

A short, stubby sandstone figure grinned above the door—a Hutzelmännle, a Stuttgart folk talisman inspired by one of Mörike's fairy tales. It clutched a shoe and a loaf of bread, which, according to the story, would magically replenish itself after being eaten. She looked up, delighted. Hutzelmännle, melter-away of bad luck, comforter! she thought, thinking of Mörike's lines. Wish me luck! She breathed in the scent of the stairwell, which betrayed meticulous weekly cleaning, and looked at the shiny-leafed bush lilies and araukaria on the windowsills. In the dim light of deep afternoon, they looked to her not like emblems of bourgeois conventionality, but venerable and mysterious, like the flora of a past era.

Judith saw only Klaus's jackets and coats in the hallway, and was relieved not to be greeted by Annett's bright red duffle coat. The little music therapist had often been at Klaus's apartment on Hackstraße. She spoke loudly, enunciated her words too clearly, laughed a lot, and treated Judith with a disrespect that made it clear that Annett saw her as genuine competition. The apartment was bright and clean. There were four large rooms, a kitchen with a balcony, and a spacious bathroom with a window. Judith recognized much of the furniture from Hackstraße: a dark desk, large leather chairs, a colorful, clearly authentic tapestry on the wall, and lots of plants. The clothes and piles of newspapers on the floor argued against a woman's regular presence. The living room looked out on Constantinstraße. The rear side of the apartment opened onto a proper garden with grass, fruit trees, and roses rather than the usual paved courtyard. Judith found only bachelor food in the fridge: bottles of beer, UHT milk, packaged steaks, pickled chilies. She took a glass from the cabinet and drank some tap water. Four equally well-used toothbrushes stood in a glass by the sink in the bathroom. There was no feminine perfume, no bottles of lotion. Klaus used a water pick and dental floss and read Ransmayr's
The Dog King
and
Engineering Weekly
in the evenings. Around five, when it was already dark, the telephone rang. “You've reached Klaus Rapp. Please leave a message after the tone.” A masculine voice with a thick accent, unmistakably from the Swabian Alps, was calling about some exam. Judith stopped listening. Klaus had sounded as he always did—calm and a bit amused, as if he were secretly laughing.

A dark green spread lay on the bed. The fabric was cool and smooth; she nestled her cheek against it. She had purposely ignored the desk, full of papers and files, but she now opened the drawer of the bedside table. Alka-Seltzer, a package of condoms, a photo with a group of people. She fished it out. A party on Hackstraße—empty bottles of Rothaus beer lined up on the window ledge, Judith next to them staring morosely past the camera. She smiled and suddenly felt an overwhelming weariness, like a heavy pillow pressed against her face. She just managed to put the photo back, then fell asleep.

Blue smoke rises from the fire pit at Wren House and disperses in the twilight. Charred sticks lie half-buried in sand, like the carcass of an animal in the desert. The civilian service volunteer, a slim young man with a goatee and a cap pulled low over his face, drives the sheep into their stalls. The fur of the animals is thick, a matted brownish-yellow. Clods of dirt and dung dangle from their wide tails like wooden beads on a string. The animals move at a surprisingly fast trot up the muddy path, bleating and jostling into their shelter. The little hooves leave imprints, and a strong, tallowy scent fills Leonie's nose. She breathes in deep. When the wind blows in the right direction, the scent and sound of the sheep can drift all the way up to her third-floor balcony. The young man fills a rack with hay. Only now does Leonie notice the light green cords that rise out of his hoodie towards his face and disappear into his ears. Leonie knows for certain that if she asked the familiar question—What are you listening to?—she wouldn't be able to put a face or a melody to what she'd hear in response. And he would smirk pityingly if she were to name the artists that make her sing along wildly in the bath or fumble excitedly to turn up the volume. She can't get used to the fact that she can only find her favorite songs on stations she used to think were lame—stations for square, conventional older people. Sadly, the songs whose every note and sigh she knows by heart have suddenly become Oldies, and the faces of their singers appear as part of TV revivals or gala shows introduced by graying hosts. Instead of using pushpins, she'd always mounted the posters that used to hang over her teenage bed with frames and glass, like real art.

But now grooves are forming on the bright foreheads of her old idols, and their eyes are wrinkled. Their skinny, wizened arms protrude from leather jackets like sticks from a scarecrow's burlap sacks. They used to be indestructible, wild, unbounded. The way Leonie felt when she moved to their songs on the dance floor, when she yelled at her mother, or practiced French kissing with her best friend in the dead summer quiet of her room until they lay atop each other, breathing heavily. They had gone to get ice cream afterward. They never talked about it, and as exciting as it had been, it remained incidental—not comparable to a first kiss with a boy. Time had no bounds. There seemed to be no limits, or at least she couldn't sense any. Now the days race toward their ends, and she changes the channel if the subject of nursing homes or hospitals comes up on TV. She's depressed when she finds yet another pale blue vein in the hollow of her knee or another notch at the corner of her eyes during her morning self-inspections in front of the mirror. She's sad that she no longer has anything in common with the pimpled boy who's locking up the sheep stall. Leonie's nightmare is to find her eighteen-year-old soul trapped in a wrinkled body—a diaper on her bottom and an IV in her arm; she envisions her girls moving to Australia or China, calling the nursing home from their cell phones, visiting once a year. Old-age Barbie, Daisy and Minnie as wrinkled old prunes.

Felicia yawns and stumbles. Her eyes have gotten small. Leonie knows that it won't be long before cold, hunger, and weariness trigger the first tantrum. Suddenly her little mouth twists into a smile. “There Matti!” Leonie receives a strong kick to the back of the knee and nearly falls over. “Boo! You're dead! You're both dead, I bit you!” A boy of about four, his pale face and spiky blond hair corpse-like above his vampire costume, springs out from behind Leonie, grabs Felicia under the arms, and carries her a few steps before dropping her in front of the chicken coop. Her diaper absorbs the shock. Felicia coos and they both laugh. Slowly, Mattis's mother walks up the path. She looks at her son and shakes her head. “Felicia is much too heavy for you.” The young woman's name is Hanna; she lives a few houses down. Lisa and Felicia go to kindergarten with Mattis. Leonie is glad of the chance for adult conversation, particularly with someone from the neighborhood, since she still feels like a stranger here. The daily race from kindergarten to bank provides little opportunity to put down roots—to learn the names of neighbors, to be greeted with familiarity by the baker or the postman. Leonie dreams of such daily rhythms, and when she's honest with herself, she knows she's woven together a pastel-hued film trailer about her future life from some combination of TV shows and the unnatural cheerfulness of Lisa's picture books.

In reality she hasn't even managed to become a familiar figure in Nâzim's shop. It was clear to Leonie, even on her first shopping trip, that the little store on the corner was the heart of the neighborhood. She and Simon had made this discovery, like most of their discoveries in their new surroundings, during that first August week when they moved in. The two of them together twenty-four hours a day, Adam and Eve in shorts and T-shirts in a hot, dusty garden made of lamps, haphazardly-angled furniture, and crumpled-up newspapers, encircled by a wall of full cardboard boxes. “The coffee machine has to be in here somewhere. And there was half a bag of Hochland beans, too,” Simon said, wiping sweat from his face. His hand left a black streak across his forehead. Leonie, exhausted and frustrated by her unsystematic packing, was captivated by the whiteness of his skin, against which smudge, stubble, and blue eyes stood out clearly. She bent over to him to taste the sweaty coolness with her tongue. “Now you have to buy me a coffee. I won't lift another finger until I've gotten it. There's a little shop downstairs. Maybe they have bottled lattes. Or a Coke.”

They immediately saw that Nâzim was anything but the typical Turkish grocer. A green-and-cream-colored awning shaded the scorching sidewalk. The display window, scrubbed clean, and free of lettering, was empty save a plain round vase with sunflowers and zinnias. It was cool inside the shop. The scent of the flowers mingled with the smells from pots of herbs, strawberries, and fresh espresso. Leonie marveled at the appealing arrangement, and at the prices. “It's at least as expensive as the train station, maybe even the airport,” she whispered to Simon. And then there was Nâzim himself. He wore light Bermuda shorts with a lily-white polo shirt, plaited leather sandals, and a beret—he seemed to have attired himself like a Frenchman from a song by Trenet or Brel in order to break the grocery-Turk stereotype. In addition to the slew of women who greeted him by name, a pair of kindergarten-age brothers appeared: two blond boys in tunics and sandals who read out their requests from a doodle-filled slip of paper in melodic Swabian: “A bunch of parsley, yellow beets . . .” Leonie and Simon stood and drank espressos at the single high table by the window, and then had some fruit, ciabatta, and salami packed up to take home. Nâzim waved from behind the counter, so Leonie did the same. She longed to exchanged cheek-kisses and neighborhood gossip with him as well. Sadly, Nâzim's opening hours were not chosen with Leonie's work schedule in mind. She continued to purchase fruit for the girls' breakfast at the supermarket. Leonie rushed past the store in the mornings long before the awnings were even cranked out.

She'd expected more opportunities for socializing from the kindergarten, too. When she sees the other mothers standing together in the courtyard and catches bits of conversations about maids and babysitters, afternoons and even weekends spent together, she feels jealous. She has no time, and so she remains the new girl—the one who's always in a hurry, always dressed in pinstripes and makeup, like a predator circling a colony of cuddly penguins. As much as she wants to pull out their feathers and strangle the jeans-and-sweater-wearers who waddle around in tennis shoes, quacking about organic vegetables and Triple P parenting, she also desperately wants to belong, to jostle her way into the middle of the herd. The children have an easier time. Lisa immediately fell in with a few kids who boss each other around in games of “house” and show off their freshly-pierced ears. Felicia scurries between the older kids and enjoys the privilege of being the youngest; meals, sleep, and physical contact are the pillars of her existence, and she's completely at peace.

Leonie had chosen the kindergarten at St. Anton deliberately. It was clear to her that her girls belonged there, with the saint's wooden arm raised in blessing over the hallway, where the activities included helping plant the traditional bee-covered floral “tapestry” for the feast of Corpus Christi. Simon, the heathen, was fine with it. “As long as you spare me the whole business! Those people were awful to my mother. A child out of wedlock with an unknown father—they never let her forget it.” There were certainly more sophisticated places to send one's offspring: songs in English, “nature weeks,” or even toy-free hours were not on offer at St. Anton. The director wore her gray hair in a perm and let the kids call her “auntie.” The girls were happy there, and in addition to the Catholic sentimentality, the long hours—7:30 to 5:00—clinched it.

All Leonie knows about Hanna, who watches with stoic composure as Mattis climbs up the slide and then vaults himself onto its roof, is that she's a single mother who works as a dental assistant. Her dirty-blonde hair is held back from her face with a wide band, and rimless glasses, visible only on second glance, sit humbly atop her narrow nose. Hanna wears cheap sneakers, jeans, and a brown wool poncho with a knitted animal design. She's known at the kindergarten as a “Supermom,” bustling in every day at lunchtime to administer her son's many medications. Janet, Lisa's favorite teacher, widens her eyes when she praises Hanna's hard work, and Leonie has the distinct feeling that the young woman never sings such laudatory odes about her. Regardless, Leonie is impressed by Hanna's situation and by her quiet manner. At the same time, she's not sure they have much to say to each other. In particular, Hanna's makeup-free face, the amber teething necklace around Mattis's neck, and her collection of cotton tote bags, emblazoned with the logos of various health food stores, arouse suspicion.

“Has it already started? Where are the others?” Mattis springs to the ground from a considerable height, spreads his arms under his black cape, and careers around Leonie. The fabric waves behind him like a huge silken wing while he makes high-pitched whistling sounds. For a moment Leonie thinks he really could be a vampire—bloodthirsty, quick, his little lower jaw with its angular teeth jutting forward in a bestial grimace. He inhabits his costume much more fully than the other children Leonie has seen today. Each gesture flows into the next so that his whole way of moving, the expression on his face, and the screech of his voice become part of the costume. Finally he stops, breathing heavily, and reaches into his pocket to bring out a pair of plastic fangs, which he sets expertly over his front teeth. He's skinny, and his deep-set brown eyes are surrounded by violet rings. He looks very much like his mother; the childish face hasn't yet become decisively masculine. Mattis tugs on the fringe of Hanna's poncho. “I'm going in. I know where the door is, I'm not scared—I'm Dracula, the fearsome vampire!” He dashes toward the house but turns on his heels when his mother calls. “Mattis, teeth please.” She puts out her hand: a soft, white hand with dimples where Leonie has jutting bones. Mattis shakes his head and stomps both feet: “No, I don't want to. I can't be a vampire without teeth!” Hanna's voice is soft and firm: “If you don't give me your teeth, you'll lose them inside. Then they'll be gone forever. Give them to me, I'll look after them.” Mattis's eyes are moist. He swallows hard, then takes out the fangs and shoves them into his mother's hand. A long thread of saliva hangs off them and drips to the ground. The boy runs into the house without even turning around. Felicia looks after him, disappointed. Hanna cleans the teeth with a tissue. “He'll choke himself—the saliva can't flow properly when he wears them, and besides, he has asthma. I shouldn't have let him bring the silly things in the first place.” Hanna pulls her poncho tighter. “He's overexerting himself. He was so sick last week. It was the diarrhea again, twice an hour. I took him to Olgäle—to the clinic at the children's hospital—but they couldn't find anything. I think he's probably allergic to something, they just haven't figured it out yet.”

The conversation had found its groove. Hanna recounted Mattis's first weeks, when he refused her breast and threw up milk from the bottle—they decided it was a protein intolerance and fed him intravenously. She told of the inflammation he got from the insertion of the catheter and the endless chain of infections. Leonie confined herself to the role of a nodding listener.

Her girls rarely get sick. She ascribes this to the cocktail of athletic blood from her side and proletarian blood from Simon's. But she also knows how children can suffer from a mild fever or an earache. She marvels at Mattis's bulldog energy all the more, for the way he keeps returning to the group despite all the interruptions, and then plays twice as hard, as if to make up for all the time he's missed. His wildness is of a different variety than Lisa's and Felicia's fits of energy. The sisters marvel at his fearlessness and often recount his antics and heroic exploits. Once he climbed a tree and then sprang down into the sandbox, to Janet's dismay; once he built a pyramid out of chairs and balanced for an astonishingly long time at its shaky summit. He often hurls himself into combat with significantly older children. Leonie has never seen him cry. He seems to seek out and enjoy such challenges. She has little to add to the conversation. “It's great that your mother is so dependable.”

Then she asks about Mattis's father out of pure, empathy-free curiosity. She can't even imagine Hanna with a man. Presumably he's another tote-carrier, an acquaintance from the health food store. Or a patient from the dentist's office. Hanna doesn't react. She shakes her head. “Yes, mother is a help. But I'm really the one he needs.”

Leonie met Mattis's grandma briefly, when she was picking the kids up from St. Anton—a corpulent woman with short gray hair, red veins in her full cheeks, a cardigan, and jeans stretched over a protruding rear. When Leonie walks around the city with her mother, she has the feeling that more men turn to look at the slim, tanned woman with the high heels and form-fitting dresses than at her: pale, bumbling laboriously alongside, and starting to pull the first white hairs from her carrot-red head under the neon light of the bathroom mirror in the mornings. Leonie's parents spend a lot of time traveling, and though they find their grandchildren enchanting, they rarely seem to find time to see them. Leonie doesn't like thinking about the telephone calls with her mother, twice a year at most, which usually come from southern Europe and attempt to cram in enough information to make up for the time that's passed. Her parents were always lovers first and foremost, rather than progenitors or raisers of the little redheaded brat who tried to escape their cuddling, smooching, and hand-holding whenever possible.