Shorter Days (12 page)

Luise sits and shakes out her pillow. She'd like to give it a good whack and put a proper crease in it, but that would make too much noise. It's no good thinking about old times in the morning, but memories do tend to creep in. Her bladder aches, she has to go desperately. It's terrible when she can't make it in time, even with the pads. Wenzel should keep sleeping, there's nothing wrong with that.

Schlamper is snoring in the basket by the window. His paws twitch—maybe he's dreaming of the boys from yesterday. The radio's playing something classical—she always likes to have classical on. The English “songs” are too unsettling. She doesn't like the language. They're spewing English everywhere these days: mihting peunt, trolli, ohkei. That would have made the Amis happy. Luise rouses herself carefully, she can't wait much longer and she's getting hungry and thirsty for coffee. A misery, the body, as old Annelies always said—a minor misery. First slide the feet slowly along the edge of the bed, and then carefully down to the floor. It'll hurt no matter what. She grits her teeth and moans quietly. Her back pulls and cramps. More pills. There are so many already: blood pressure, kidneys, osteoporosis, the devil knows. Every day at breakfast time, the plastic box with the windows. Colorful pills gaze out like little heads. She gets dizzy if she moves too fast. It takes her the rest of the piano concerto and all of the news before she's finally sitting upright enough to look down at her feet. Feet that cause her renewed horror each morning—a stranger's feet: crude and claw-like, covered in veins and age spots, bluish toes. Feet that need a clipper now instead of nail scissors, feet whose big toes crisscross over their smaller brothers like fallen fenceposts. Punishment for all the pointy office shoes, starting with that first pair—calfskin, with straps. Mother shook her head when she paid for them. Moaning, one hand on the small of her back, she feels on the floor for the lambskin slippers and hides her disgusting stumps.

Traudl, her sister-in-law, always wore flats. She was tall. Most of the other women Wenzel's age had the same nature-girl style. They used Weleda and swore by mud facial masks, water from special sources, and the healing sun; they won sports prizes, did morning stretches. Most of them were high up in the League of German girls—jocks, naturally. They knew what farm work was like from their mandatory farm-year after school: the loveliest, most wonderful time! Whenever Luise tried to start in on the endless drudgery of life in Uhlbach, she'd quickly fall silent under their indignant looks.

Business school—her whole Stuttgart life, in fact—was thanks to Uncle Theo. Uncle Theo, who countered her parents' anger and shame over abandoned braided loaves and her two left hands: “But doin' sums—she's a quick un at that.” And since there were still two brothers to help with the house and farm, she was allowed to go.

Luise presses her fists into the mattress and heaves herself up. She's seized with pain, it clenches her lower back and doesn't let up. She yelps, falls back onto the bed. Schlamper comes from his basket and lays his cool nose in her hand, which hangs off the edge of the bed, damp with sweat. He whimpers. She strokes him and feels the warmth of his body. His tail thumps the bedside rug impatiently. He sniffs over at Wenzel. Luise grabs his collar. “Good dog, Schlamper. Let your master sleep. I'll letcha out right now, yeah?” She'll lure Wenzel out with a coffee. Coffee and a roll, thick with butter and ham. A breakfast fit for a kaiser. She always keeps rolls in the freezer, and ham and a stick of butter in the refrigerator, so that no one has to run out in the mornings. She can let the dog out in the garden for a bit. He's a tidy one—buries everything, almost like a kitty. Dr. Rapp's two boys from upstairs never step in anything. She'll have a smoke with her coffee. Supposed to be so bad for you. Hard to believe it when you look at her and Wenzel, smokers for seventy years and still here, together.

Luise stands and grips the windowsill. The air trembles in front of the radiator; it feels nice and warm on her bare legs. The closed shutters block her view. Reflected in the black glass, she sees the yellow paper lampshade. She stands next to it in her nightgown. Her hair sticks up from her head, tangled and white. A ghost—an old, old ghost. That's what I am, that's what I look like. Fine. The hill of pillows lies behind her like a silent winter landscape. She takes a few tentative steps toward the door. The dog follows.

That's right, a nice coffee, a good cup can wake the dead. Made with real coffee beans, he'll get up for that. Good coffee made in the porcelain filter. A few grains of salt sprinkled over the grounds to soften the water. That's how they do it in Vienna and Prague. She learned that from her sister-in-law, Traudl. She'd taught her a lot back then, in her new kitchen in Obertürkheim. A sparkling white kitchen with a red linoleum floor and colorful curtains over the glass door that led out to the garden. Her brother-in-law Erich had planted a rowan out there. It was a tiny tree, hardly bigger than Bruni. They grow in the Jizera Mountains. Bruscha-Erich came from Česká Lípa. He was a sweetheart—funny, too—and by thirty he didn't have a hair left on his head. Her brother-in-law loved to eat wieners with lentils and spätzle, but Traudl wouldn't hear of it. Pancreatic cancer, that took care of him fast. He was yellow as a lemon by the end. And a stroke got Traudl, decades later, in her kitchen of all places; she ended up on the linoleum floor, covered in flour, the upside-down enamel bowl covering the dumpling dough like an egg that had been abandoned by the hen.

“You're a good bookkeeper, but Wenzel won't like your
knedliki
.” With the ladle, Traudl fished in the boiling water for the bits of disintegrated dumpling, swollen white and brown breadcrumbs. “It kinnt really bile. Werntcha listening before?” But she grinned as she said it and started telling another story about the neighbors—a mean story, of course. “There they were sittin' outside agin running their mouths: ‘Bruscha never fixes up the house!' I heered ‘im say it. And you know what: I was mint ta hear it!” Traudl was happy, as happy as she could be. She'd succeeded. On top of all their other successes—head schoolteacher, Daimler engineer, Volkswagen, daughter Bruni at the elite Hölderlin school—Bruscha-Traudl and Bruscha-Erich were landlords. The neighbors gaped in jealousy: “Rafugees, naw! Couldn't be!” Traudl and Erich never used a Swabian word in their lives, but among family they could ape the dialect surprisingly well, always with malicious intent. Her round face, with its broad cheekbones, contorted into an ugly grimace, her delicate skin wrinkled up to her meticulously coiffed black hair. Traudl didn't have a single friend among her colleagues at the Obertürkheim primary school. She only really came out of her shell at the Matura gatherings.

Luise fishes her robe off the hook on the door. Getting her arms into sleeves, especially the left one, is an ordeal. She makes a knot but leaves it loose—she doesn't have the strength for more. She beckons Schlamper, who's sitting behind her. It's dark in the hallway. Wenzel likes to leave the lights on, but she can't stand it, and she turns them off whenever she can. “You'll break your neck with your thriftiness.” She goes to the bathroom, freezing, even though the heat in the bathroom is on high. The gas boiler rumbles and she can see the flickering of the little blue flame. The pee just drips out of her. So little comes out, but she'd felt like she had just drunk two bottles of beer. The body she lives in is a dilapidated house, worn down and unsightly. She's hitched her nightgown up over her thighs; they're full of rolls and wrinkles, with a network of bluish veins running beneath the skin like rivers and streams over a map. Breasts, belly, and the flesh of her arms aren't even worth mentioning. They're victims of gravity. Her hands have become claws, but claws with nail polish, at least.

Luise never particularly liked her body. She was prone to putting on weight, and always in the wrong places. Fatty never had a figure like the slender, severe German maidens on the billboards. Eugen had liked that: “You're a good village girl, I could see that straight away. Come on, take them off!” He tugged at her garters like a little boy opening a Christmas present. That's what it was like to be engaged. She liked it when he pinched her bottom or her breasts—not too hard, but firmly. Eugen. They didn't get many nights together, and their sad meetings in the train station hotel—he was so shaken he couldn't get it up—didn't really count. He'd been like a fish, cold and still. No more jokes, just schnapps. He'd puked, and she'd washed his uniform in the sink. He got on the train with wet pants. No gravestone. And the fat behind that he'd so loved to dig his fingers into slowly dwindled while she hid in various cellars and bunkers. She crept under the ground and crept back out, the city changing so much each time that by the end she didn't recognize the place she lived in. No one would have believed that Stuttgart was once one of the most beautiful cities in Germany. Kaputtgart—smashed to ruins. How did Uhland put it: “One lofty pillar only recalls the splendors past; this pillar, cracked already, may fall to-night at last.” Nothing was familiar anymore. Her own body even, her own face, was utterly changed, just like the city: haggard, gaunt, dirty, and yet happy not to have been rubbed out completely.

Groaning, Luise stands and flushes the toilet. Schlamper complains loudly and paws at the door. “Good boy, I'm coming!” She feels her way slowly along the wall. Careful, there's the picture of JeÅ¡tÅ¡d, its snow-covered peak towering above dark-green woods; she pauses before it to catch her breath.

“Where could I find your equal, dear homeland peak of mine?
My heart feels so peculiar, and, humbled, I fall silent,
When I see you from afar.
Faithful, like the eye of God, you guard my peaceful sleep.
And ne'er am I forsaken, though lonely streets I wander,
Your gaze the truest star.”

Traudl's soprano voice always grew shrill with emotion. A few people would even cry when the JeÅ¡tÅ¡d song was sung at the end of their gatherings. It embarrassed Luise and made her jealous at the same time. What would we have sung if we'd been exiled? “On the Train to Swabia,” perhaps?

It's getting light outside. In the living room, she cracks open the glass door to the little garden. The cold morning air spills over her slippered feet like ice water. Schlamper slips out, gives the mess by the window a leisurely sniff, then scampers off behind the elderberry bush with a snarl. Luise goes back to the bathroom, lets warm water run into the sink. Keeping her robe on, she wipes a washcloth over face and throat, under the armpits, down there, bum-bum. She stops at her feet. Bending over is such agony that she lets herself fall onto the edge of the tub. Morning showers are a thing of the past, long since. She's too afraid of slipping. Neck fracture—straight to a nursing home, the classic scenario. Even Wenzel is afraid. He can't hold her to step out of the tub anymore. They never said a word about it, but one like the other, they both started up with the washcloths. Washcloths and sink-baths, just like in the bad times. Yet somehow she had managed to keep cleaner then. No one was excused: ice cold water over the whole body, every nook and cranny scrubbed. In those days she could even lay her hands flat on the floor when she bent over to touch her toes, her knees pressed tight together. And how happy they'd been just to have a bar of curd soap, my goodness! Now she has cologne by the bottle, she can dab it on to cover up any disturbing smells. Maybe she should call up the Hospitallers. It would be nice to take a real bath again. Point is, Wenzel can still smell me and I can smell him. And it doesn't bother Schlamper. If it gets too bad, Bruni will complain, but what does she know about it? “Auntie Luise, you can't wear that sweater anymore, it's full of coffee stains. Can't you see that?” No, darling girl. When you get this old you'll see for yourself that your eyes don't get sharper with each passing day. But I got the sweater on, by myself, and I put on my stockings, by myself, and my hair's all fixed, and I'm proud of that. Even if it's something you can't understand. And I hope the day when you think to yourself, “Ah, that's what Auntie Luise was talking about,” is still a long, long way off. She's not mad at Bruni, she's always there in a pinch. That's a good feeling. Because otherwise there'd be no one. Her wide hips, big breasts, the whole country maid figure was nature's joke. No children had popped out of this fertile landscape, though both Eugen and Wenzel had done ample plowing. An empty shell filled with dead eggs that dripped from her womb every month. Wenzel never blamed her. They had the dog. And they'd traveled plenty—stalked slowly over the continent: Switzerland, Austria, the South Tyrol, then later Florence, Rome, on down to Sicily, and finally they'd found the courage for an airplane to Greece, Spain, Turkey. They'd seen everything together.

But Traudl, Traudl of all people, got to have a child. A dark-haired girl with dark eyes, a little doll baby to kiss, to call Bunny when she wasn't being beaten. Bruni, punished with a name that showed everyone where her mother's sympathies lay, a name that showed off her Aryan roots: Brunhilde. It was common then. You ran into Erdmutes, Ortrudes, and Winifreds everywhere. No one was better at abbreviating and putting the dialect to use: Brunile for Brunhilde, Mutle for Erdmute, Trudele for Ortrude.

It's cold in the kitchen. Luise turns up the thermostat. It doesn't go any further, it's already at its upper limit, yet she shivers. She looks out through the window at Olgastraße—the traffic is already rumbling. She fills the kettle, lights the gas, and flips the match into the sink, where it burns out with a hiss. One day Bruni was just there, standing on their doorstep on Constantinstraße. It was a Friday, clearly not a day for a visit to Auntie. The smell of boiled fish hovered in the hallway when Luise opened the apartment door, greatly surprised. Rain-drenched braids hung to the left and right of Bruni's tear-stained face. Her schoolbag swung from her shoulder, threadbare and spotted with ink; the unfastened top flapped. Her kneecaps shone bluish white between brown wool knee socks and a plaid dress that was far too short for her. Thirteen years old—other girls were wearing nylons by that age. Erich and Traudl had the house to pay off. Bruni breathed heavily, and then the words came out between sobs that turned into hiccups: “Auntie Luise, can I live with you? I won't be any trouble, and I'll hardly eat anything and I'm in school all day anyway. I can iron and cook, too—everything that Uncle Wenzel likes:
Knedliki
,
Schkubanki
,
Palačinky
. You have the pull-out sofa in the study, I could sleep there, please, oh please! Mom's so unfair, I can't go back there . . .” Kasper slipped between Luise's legs and jumped up on Bruni. With concern, Luise noted that the child didn't kneel and return the dog's caresses as she usually did. Soon she was settled in the living room with cocoa and flaky rolls. Visits to Auntie were rare, even though the school up on Hölderlinplatz wasn't terribly far from Constantinstraße. “She'll come every first Wednesday. She can eat with you. You send her back at five sharp. Just think of all the homework she has to do—she doesn't need an excuse to be sloppy.” This was a barefaced lie on Traudl's part. Bruni's notebooks were testaments to conscientiousness and ambition; she was always first in her class. But there had been bad blood between her and Traudl from the beginning. This child! Three years old and already a beast, in Reichenberg she even hammered roofing nails, long as your finger, into the good elmwood table. Not one, no, God forbid, not two, but three! The stubborn thing, wouldn't do as she was told in Stuttgart either, always talking back, a real millstone around my neck.