Shorter Days (5 page)

Felicia is getting heavy. Darkness falls quickly, and a rumbling comes from the house. The door opens, and a mob of children storms over the grounds. “When you find a ghost, read the number. Then stand in front of the tool shed—that's the haunted house. You can go in order of the numbers on the ghosts. You know how to line up, right?” Bernd calls out. Felicia squirms out of Leonie's arms. Mattis and Lisa appear. “I wasn't scared, Mama!” Lisa yells. Mattis has already scaled the hill with the older kids and is streaking through the brush, eyes fixed on the ground; he soon holds two little green paper ghosts, one of which he generously bestows upon Lisa. Then he runs away with the group. He pays no attention to his mother. “Mama, will you go in with me?” Lisa asks. Her index finger is hooked into her nibbled lower lip. Leonie is sure that Stavros's stories will make for many an uneasy night. Nonetheless, she's proud of Lisa. Felicia has found a candy wrapper and holds it up with a loud crackling sound. A long line has formed in front of the tool shed on the sheep run. Dry-ice fog wafts from the canted window, accompanied by muffled sounds. Lisa's hand is clammy and cold. “Is the haunted house very spooky?” Leonie asks an elementary-age girl-vampire. The girl makes a frantic grimace under her white makeup. Felicia has fallen down. She bit her lip and is bleeding. Leonie picks her up. She bawls shrilly. Leonie casts a glance at the crumpled ghost in Lisa's hand. “Number 27—that'll be another half hour, and we have to get your sister home. I'll ask if any of the big kids will let us go first. Mattis can come too, I'm sure Hanna wants to be getting home as well.”

After some initial grumbling and shrugging, a few older vampires and witches find it in their hearts to let Lisa go first, and even hold the door open for her. Purple and blue beams of light flash over their feet; the piercing smell of the artificial fog mingles with the musty odor of bulbs and bags of peat moss from inside. The drumbeats sound as hollow and regular as the pulse of some hidden creature. Leonie looks down at her eldest daughter. Lisa's eyes are already watering, and she holds her broom tightly. “Can you come, Mama, please?” Leonie shakes her head. Even if she wanted to, she's too big to crawl through the tunnel which forms the entrance. “No, it's just for kids. It's OK if you don't think you can do it. You don't have to.” “But you should come too. I want to go in, just not alone.” “You can go with Mattis.” “No, with Mama!” Lisa's voice wobbles. Tears roll over her little painted cheeks, her jaw sticks out, and the corners of her mouth turn down. She stomps her feet and clenches Leonie's hand. “I want to go in. Come with me.” Felicia has gotten to her feet and is also trying to push Leonie into the shed. Leonie blocks the passage by stretching her right leg across it like a gate. The two-year-old starts bellowing angrily and kicks her clunky winter boots with all her might. The older kids mumble impatiently behind them. Lisa sobs louder and repeats the same sentence over and over: “You have to come!” Mattis stands next to her and contemplates his ghost without looking up. Hanna is nowhere to be seen. Leonie feels the warmth on her neck and cheeks; she's sweating under her thick sweater, and a drop runs down her spine, tickling unbearably. “Damn it Feli, stop it—that hurts!” She stoops down and grabs the little girl by the hood before she can sneak into the shed. Her head is pulled back, her feet kick at the air. Leonie grabs her around the middle and realizes she's gripping her more tightly than necessary. In this moment, Leonie understands how people can hit their children. Dead children in trash cans, tied to beds, buried in cellars. Just to finally get some peace. Felicia throws a fit in her arms. She flounders and screams so hard that lumps of green snot fly from her nose. Lisa is more important right now—Leonie understands her pain, her wounded pride. She manages to lead Lisa away from the shed, even though she's really howling now, shaking with rage and disappointment. “I have a surprise at home that I got especially for you, for the Halloween party. Something really spooky just for you and Feli.” It takes a while; she has to comfort Lisa over the sound of the younger girl's wailing. Words for Lisa, the body-warmth of being held and carried for Felicia. Pain in her knees and back; she treads carefully. Still speaking, holding one child by the hand and jiggling the other upright on her hip, she moves slowly toward the gate. Meanwhile, it's grown dark. The autumn leaves look black, the path looks like a wide river as they climb slowly up it. There's no time to say goodbye to Hanna or the others. Leonie just wants to get away. She turns around once more and sees Mattis crawling out of the monster-adorned door of the haunted house and slowly standing up straight. His face, glowing beneath a string of lights, is full of quiet contentment, as if he had just eaten a bunch of candy.

Felicia has calmed down, and Leonie sets her back on her feet. She turns her head, looking for Hanna, to wave goodbye at least. But Hanna walks quickly over to her son and wordlessly takes his hand. The two disappear behind the house. They're probably taking the upper exit. They don't turn around.

Judith and Kilian are the only customers in Nâzim's shop. Nâzim gives Kilian a small apple, which he bites into immediately. He studies the display. “He looks at fruit and vegetables the way other children look at candy! Are you allowed to help your mother carry the groceries, Kili?” The child nods, mouth full. Shopping is a serious business, something special and tremendously thrilling. Judith is pleased. She knows how other children behave. Nâzim divides a head of celery, selects two particularly fat carrots and a leek, pulls a length of twine from the spool on the counter. The glockenspiel over the door chimes sluggishly. The boy who enters, his giant black and silver sneakers untied, brings along a rush of cold evening air, the scent of strong aftershave, and the smoke of the cigarette that he carefully stomped out on the sidewalk. He goes over to Nâzim, kisses him on the cheek, and greets him with a few sentences in Turkish. Nâzim embraces him across the counter, his hands loose on the boy's shoulders. Then he takes a step back and taps his watch. His voice grows louder. The boy's brow furrows. Under the shiny shock of hair, a light red color creeps over his pale face. His reply is detailed and apologetic. Judith recognizes him. He comes from one of the exhaust-blackened, un-renovated buildings near where peaceful Constantinstraße empties into a busy and not particularly respectable major thoroughfare. He often roams around Olgaeck with a group of other boys his age. Even in the mornings they're often to be seen perched on trash cans or loitering around the entrance of the discount supermarket, gobbling from bags of chips and swilling energy drinks. Kilian inspects the Turkish boy, his eyes wide. “Mama, he didden tie his shoes!” he says in an audible whisper. The boy laughs and tousles Kilian's hair, bends down to him: “You're a smart one, you saw that right away—someday when you have cool sneakers, you'll wear them the same way, right?” he says, poking Kilian, who giggles but immediately hides behind Judith. Nâzim puts the bundle of greens aside with a vigorous motion and comes out from behind the counter, gesturing toward the boy: “This is Murat, my cousin's son. He'll be working here for a few weeks. It's something for his school, an internship or something, I don't know. He certainly hasn't learned much there—how not to come half an hour late, for example. But family is family, you help each other out.” Judith just nods. Nâzim turns to Murat and shoos him into the stockroom, now speaking in German: “Judith is a good customer. If you work hard, you can sell too sometime, eventually.” A long lecture in Turkish follows, during which Murat stands before him like a guilty child. Judith sees him through the beaded curtain, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and fiddling with the zipper of his trendy down jacket. In the huge sneakers, his feet look like they belong to a robot. Judith reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out her wallet.

Aside from Nâzim, with whom she often converses at great length about groceries and local politics, Judith doesn't know any Turks. On Hackstraße there had been the Aydin family, whose members she would greet in the stairwell, and there was Stern Kebab in Ostendplatz, where she often got döner kebab. People lived alongside each other in mutual disregard. All the children at Uli's Waldorf kindergarten are German. During one of their rare trips downtown, Uli and Kilian had seen two Turkish women with long cloaks and head scarves in front of the Pretzel Basket on upper Königstraße and had refused to go any further. “They're witches, Mama!” The two women disappeared into a department store without noticing anything.

“Mama, look! What do they want?” Kilian tugs at her sleeve, and Judith turns around. She looks over the sumptuous bouquet of lilies and through the window, which echoes dully from blows from outside. The faces are so unexpectedly close that she flinches. Hazy circles of breath from grinning mouths; dark caps, muffled shouts: “What's up, Murat? Bring us out something to drink, dude! The till, get the till!” One of them presses against the window, the others hang further back on the sidewalk. Judith can see every pore of his tender, pimple-free skin, winter-pale and clear. The boy's straight, narrow nose, ice-blue eyes, and full, scornful mouth are surprising. His dirty-blond hair pours out from under a cap and hangs to his chin. He notices Judith and grins. His knuckles beat the glass in rhythm. “Murat, bring the chick, she's hot!” The other two boys, both clearly Turkish—none of them is over fourteen—have stopped laughing. They gesticulate in the background. One of them notices Kilian, who's dared to come a bit closer, still holding fast to Judith's sleeve, and he taps the beautiful one on the shoulder. “Come on Marco, there's a kid! And Murat's uncle, man!” Marco—the name sounds like vacation packages and celebrity crushes—returns to his cronies, making a contemptuous gesture. Judith stares at the hair, sticky with spray-on color, the black streaks on foreheads and cheeks. They fidget before the window, their long, narrow limbs in constant motion, prancing right, then left, turning and jostling each other, almost as if some dull beat was thudding inside of them, forcing them to dance and flop around. They were raised on morning television, Judith thinks. Then she watches as Kilian heedlessly lets the gnawed apple fall to the ground and takes a step away from her, up to the glass. Marco grabs a limp, dirt-colored mask from one of the Turks and stuffs it over his head. Huge eyes stare from the pumpkin-face, and the familiar, vertically-striped fruit displays a tangle of angrily bared teeth, all made of Chinese plastic. Even though the other boy immediately tears the mask back off, yelling, “Quit it with the bullshit, man!” in Marco's face, Kilian flees into Judith's arms with a soft cry of terror and begins to whimper. She picks Kilian up, presses her face into his warm neck, and murmurs, “Boo-boo go away,” even though he hasn't actually been hurt. She feels like smashing her fist through the glass and sending a shower of glass shards down on them. “Hey kiddo, it's only Hassan. It's just for fun, see? Just Halloween.” Murat slinks over from the side, visibly embarrassed, and waves a banana. Kilian's face remains buried in Judith's jacket. Nâzim opens the door: “Murat's busy! Take your nonsense somewhere else, people are trying to work here. Beat it!” The boys are visibly shaken by the stream of Turkish that follows. Nâzim closes the door forcefully, to the accompaniment of the glockenspiel's frenzied tinkle. Judith wipes Kilian's nose, shows him the embroidered rose on her handkerchief, and he begins to smile again. Judith catches a final glance of Marco through the window. He walks slowly, not rattled in the slightest, straightens his cap, shakes out the legs of his pants. His tongue pokes around his mouth, pushing out his fuzzy cheeks; he grins and calls over his shoulder: “Just wait an hour, man—then we'll have a real party.” Murat looks out from behind the counter with a sheep-like expression. Nâzim hands Judith the greens for the soup, which he's wrapped in brown paper. “I'm so sorry. They're just dumb kids.” Kilian grips his basket tight. Judith lays a few coins by the old-fashioned cash register and leaves the shop.

Leonie opens the dishwasher and puts in the two soup bowls. Little pasta ghosts still cling to the sides, the remains of a bag of instant Halloween soup: a consolation prize for Lisa, who was in fact delighted to fish ghosts out of the much-too-tomatoey-smelling liquid, and thereby gradually forgot her defeat. Leonie threw in a package of colorful plastic spiders she'd gotten at the discount store as a bonus. With the distribution of the creepy animals, the washing off of makeup in the bathtub, and dinnertime, the night passes quickly. Felicia's swollen lips shine under a layer of ointment; she wheezes, open-mouthed, her breath warm and smelling of children's toothpaste. Lisa is completely exposed—her nightgown has ridden up to her chest, showing her skinny legs, which are long and tight with muscles. Blue and purple bruises, the marks of monkey bars and bike crashes, dot the fair skin of her legs. A pair of underpants with cat faces covers her hairless crotch. It would be so easy to destroy her, Leonie thinks—it wouldn't take much strength, her bones would break easily, her flesh is tender. She'd follow anyone for a bag of gummy bears. She straightens the blankets and kisses Lisa, who sighs and turns over. “I'll protect you, I'm with you always.” Leonie has tears in her eyes. At the same time she's embarrassed by her unconditional infatuation with her children, the merest banalities an excuse for adoration: a scribbled drawing, a head movement. She can reason away the fears planted by the news and talk-shows, but the panic continues to throb in the pit of her stomach. Leonie is an eager and meticulous reader of newspapers. She tolerates invention only on television, where she can sit for hours watching the cheesiest soaps. Her daily reading is hindered, however, by the fact that she immediately turns the page on any article that deals with possible threats to Lisa and Felicia: assassins and sleeper cells, oil crises, atomic bombs, sugary beverages, pension cuts, climate change.

Leonie goes back into the kitchen, which, like everything else in the apartment, is oversized: sky-high ceiling, black-and-white tiled floor, a hulking island in the middle shimmering like a chrome altar. She turns on the radio: though she's grateful for a bit of peace and quiet, she doesn't like to be alone. The host's artificially high voice softly permeates the room, followed by an eighties ballad. Colorful plastic cups, half-drunk mugs of hot chocolate, and her own soup, now cold, still stand on the wooden table by the window, and a nibbled slice of bread leans against the edge of the bowl like a miniature buttered slide.

She gathers the dishes and wipes off the kitchen table. The rag and the wet streaks it leaves behind give off a sour smell, like towels left too long in the washing machine. She throws the rag away and washes her hands. The bright highchairs are full of crumbs. Leonie gets the hand broom from under the sink. It has a worn wooden handle and shaggy black bristles that remind her of a wild horse's mane. Sometimes Felicia clamps it between her chubby legs, runs through the apartment, and yells, “Witch, witch!” Though Leonie gets down on her knees with the witch's mount every day, she still finds sticky gray-black islands of spilled juice or milk that has mixed with the dust and crumbs and hardened on the floor.

Her briefcase lies in the hallway, tossed amid a pile of children's jackets. She takes out a green folder. She scans the papers with a furrowed brow. Her little office is a rugged landscape with stacks of paper clustered on the desk around a softly humming PC. There, unlike at home, she always finds what she's looking for.

At the same time, this is the largest and most beautiful apartment she's ever lived in: six rooms with herringbone parquet, a huge bathroom with bulbous white faucets, a claw-foot tub, a guest bathroom with a shower, and a balcony whose sandstone columns and octagonal terracotta tiles really deserve the grandiose name “loggia.” The best part is the plaster ceiling decorations: cherries in the living room, apples in the bedroom, strawberries and raspberries in the two rooms that the girls use for their bedroom and playroom, lemons in the dining room, and bunches of grapes in the room that Simon doggedly calls the library, even though it contains only one half-full bookshelf. The realtor claimed that these were the only moldings of their kind in southern Germany, perhaps in the whole world. Supposedly it had been decorated according to the taste of Baden-Württemburg's first manufacturer of canned goods, a former fruit farmer from Remstal. Though Leonie loves the round-cheeked apples over her marriage bed, she also knows that the apartment is really a bit too big for them.

She goes to the refrigerator, pulls out an open bottle of Riesling, and pours some wine directly into her water glass, even though it's not quite empty. Leonie drinks quickly and waits for the relaxing effect of the alcohol, which sets in quickly after the forced abstinence of pregnancy and the baby years. She walks to the window, buttered bread in hand. The orange glow of the streetlamps lights up the street. Wilheminian-era standstone buildings, which look like little knight's castles with their turrets and opulent ornamentation, alternate with post-war concrete buildings, hastily constructed to fill in the holes that the bombs had left behind, which fortunately aren't too numerous. Almost all the buildings have generous backyards—there are bushes and trees here, even in the middle of the city. On her new street, Leonie can see traces of the last World War only in the details: there are bullet holes in a few of the walls, the iron cellar doors are still marked
AIR RAID SHELTER
. The whole city is marked by the war and the hurried construction of the economic boom years. Leonie is unmoved by Stuttgart's homeliness, and she hasn't left the city for an extended period since her time in Montpellier. She has plenty of favorite places, including the Bopser woods, where she and Simon like to jog; Penguin Ice Cream on Eugenplatz; “Monte Scherbelino,” the hill that's made of war rubble, where lizards are always scurrying around; and since August, Constantinstraße.

At the same time, Leonie had been loathe to move out of the Heumaden row house: a thousand square feet split between two floors, the beige carpeting, all tossed away like the cardboard boxes she'd once set up for her dolls. She wanted neither to part with the handkerchief-sized garden, where she could hear the neighbors' phone conversations through their open doors, nor to leave the new development, which had been quite stylish in the eighties, with façades painted olive and cream. It had been their first house together—the Ostendplatz co-op didn't really count. But it was in Heumaden that Lisa and Felicia had taken their first steps; there had been barbecues with the neighbors and bike rides through nearby fields on the weekends. It had been a good house: friendly, practical, and unspectacular. No one gasped when they came in, the way practically every visitor to her new apartment does—including her parents, who had walked through the rooms wide-eyed and enthralled. Her father had clapped Simon on the shoulder and said, “It's fantastic, son. We didn't start out with this much. Do you remember our first apartment, Heidrun?” Leonie had tried to point out that it was their third apartment rather than their first, but to no avail.

Simon is strategic. He wants to make the stages of his success visible on the map of the city. Little red flags identify each conquered territory: from Heslach to the hip student co-op in East Stuttgart, then the row house surrounded by greenery and finally, as the crowning achievement, the historic building in coveted Lehenviertel. Actors, singers, and dancers who work at the nearby opera house live here. It's also teeming with architects that the architecture school spits out, rapid-fire—Leonie wonders how Lehenviertel can support so many. It's a bourgeois neighborhood that does without front gardens or wreaths of dried flowers on the doors. The balconies are planted with climbing roses, lavender, and kitchen herbs, like mini-Provences. In other respects people project a studied casualness and proudly identify themselves with the stony neighborhood. Children play in the courtyards. The residents go to the Staatsgalerie, the library, and the black-and-white breakfast café on Hauptstätter Straße. Cravings for nature are satisfied at the Schloßgarten or in the nearby woods. The neighborhood's inhabitants find themselves at the heart of a city which, despite its best efforts, will never be a metropolis, and which therefore exudes a certain contented peace. The proximity to the little red-light district, with its African immigrants buying shriveled yams in tiny, crammed shops and trying to call home as cheaply as possible, and to the wild South—Simon's old home of Heslach with its housing projects, döner stalls and 99-cent stores—is a subtle reminder that other, harsher worlds exist. For this reason Leonie is sure that Lehenviertel won't be their last stop. Simon will never rest until he lives in his dream apartment: one with the right size and style, and also the most prestigious location—Killesberg, maybe, or the area around Uhlandshöhe.

She too had gasped when Simon first showed her the apartment and named the rent, with satisfaction, rather than horror, in his voice. It was more than her total monthly income. Nonetheless, she abstained from counterproposals, didn't suggest that one could rent or buy a bigger house in Rohr, Vaihingen, or Red Stuttgart for less money. It was clear to her that Simon wanted to move here. When he slid open the door that divided the living and dining rooms, Leonie saw the twin of this apartment reflected in the polished oak floor that shone like spilled honey. It must have been at least fifteen years ago. They had been at a party together, at the house of a school friend whose parents were away for the weekend. It took place on the first floor of a villa that was elegantly situated on the side of a hill. Simon had roamed briskly through the rooms, throwing open doors even when something was clearly going on behind them, like in the dim, pot-suffused parental bedroom. That evening, Leonie, who loved to test Simon's distractibility with her body, had no power over him. “Crazy! It never ends.”

The apartment building where the nineteen-year-old Simon had lived with his mother lay on one of the main roads that ran from Marienplatz to Heslach. A wholesale meat distributor, whose bright orange sign beckoned garishly from afar, was on the ground floor. In the immediate vicinity there was a laundromat, a Portuguese restaurant with greenish bullseye-glass windows, and a newspaper stand that was permanently barricaded behind a folding grate. The stairwell, with its artificial stone steps, smelled putrid. The elevator door closed behind Leonie with a metallic creak, like the dented lid of a cookie tin. She saw her face in the mirror under the brownish-yellow light—too heavily made-up for her first visit to Simon's parent-free digs. She was freezing in her calf-length denim coat. Every button was done up, since underneath she was naked, apart from a garnish of red-and-black polyester underwear. Ingrid, Simon's mother, was in the perfume store on Königstraße, selling soap and body lotion. Leonie was glad not to have to meet her. She was greeted in the hallway by a pleased and excited Simon, as well as by a folding laundry rack where Simon's boxer shorts hung next to Ingrid's size-fourteen leopard-print slips. A vase with dusty silk flowers stood near the telephone. In the living room two threadbare faux leather armchairs were arranged around a mosaic table, upon which a clean ashtray stood at the ready. A single narrow bookshelf towered next to the television. The middlebrow paperbacks and magazines were propped up by a depressed-looking porcelain Pierrot. A mirrored closet reflected the worn sleeper sofa; an alarm clock and a half-full bottle of mineral water stood on the floor next to it. In the kitchen, a meat grinder was clamped to the cracked countertop. Simon's room was an oasis of normalcy, with an impressive Hi-Fi system and a huge poster of Luc Besson's
Le Grand Bleu
.

Later, dressed in one of Simon's sweatshirts, Leonie wandered curiously through the apartment. The sweatshirt was stiffly ironed and smelled like fabric softener. A single framed black-and-white photograph hung over Ingrid's sleeper sofa: an aerial view of a landscape. Hills, woods, a small river, the scattered cubes of a little village in Hohenlohe. Simon commented from the couch. His mother had been wild, got pregnant too early, longed for the big city. Her family had kicked her out of the house. Nonetheless she had later inherited a run-down single-family house in which she invested every penny, with help from Simon. A new roof, new plumbing, a first-rate kitchenette—all paid for by the two of them; she was planning to move in as soon as she retired.

Despite the fact that Leonie's father had a lucrative job as an accountant, money was never mentioned in her house. Simon's forwardness in such matters astonished her. Furthermore, it became clear that his close relationship with his mother would pose an obstacle to their relationship. She could never make plans with him on Sunday afternoons because he always met his mother for coffee, and he seemed to see this not as a burdensome duty but a sacred ritual. On the subject of contraception, he was downright obsessive. He brought it up before they even left the parking lot of the observatory, where they often went late at night: “If you get pregnant now, you have to get an abortion. I can't pay for a kid. I owe it to my mother not to fuck up.” Though Leonie felt like she belonged with Simon more than with any other man she'd been close to, it was speeches like this one that ultimately spurred her decision to apply for the foundation courses in France.

Ingrid never got to cook so much as an egg in her new kitchenette, never got to enjoy the view of her childhood fields through the insulated glass windows that she'd picked out with her son. While Leonie was in Montpellier trying to get over Simon, his mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage. “She was already cold by the time I tried to wake her.”

A few months after Ingrid's funeral, Simon got in his car and drove to Leonie's dorm in Montpellier. The two hadn't exchanged even a postcard for three-quarters of a year. Yet when they saw each other, nothing seemed to have changed. She caught the train from Montpellier as soon as she had finished her last exam and moved right into his co-op on Ostendplatz.