Shorter Days (2 page)

In the kitchen, an orange-red pumpkin lies on the countertop next to a bundle of carrots: ingredients for tonight's soup. The colors make her happy, and she can't help sweeping her hand over the warty surface of the pumpkin, rubbing her thumb over an earth-encrusted carrot until she can see the glowing peel. In early spring she wants to plant carrots with the children. She'll find a spot in the little garden where the bushy green tops can shoot up. She imagines the two boys gripping the feathery leaves and yanking the vegetables from the ground, brushing the dirt from their pants, and chomping right into their carrots, in perfect harmony with nature, which grants them this nourishment. Planting potatoes would be nice too—how lovely it would be to watch a sea of tiny buds sprouting from one original tuber, with purple-white flowers above and edible roots below. But at a recent information night at the kindergarten, Judith had learned that Rudolf Steiner rejected potatoes on account of their high starch content. The woman who gave the talk, an anthroposophic doctor, was quite clear: “Potatoes unbalance the nervous system. They weaken meditative-introvertive thinking in favor of intellectual-reflective thinking. This breeds materialism rather than imagination. You'll see that just four weeks after switching from potatoes to grains, roots, and other vegetables, your thinking will be fresher and more flexible—which is good for both children and parents.”

Before, Judith could never have listened to such pronouncements without grimacing. During her studies, she automatically doubted everything she read, criticized every painting, as if there were an organ in her brain that constantly secreted a corrosive substance. Anyone who wasn't critical didn't have a functioning mind. The maxims of Steiner's pedagogy: to trust, accept, not question, to join in and absorb things through intuition and feeling—recommended to children and adults alike—seemed to Judith like a warm bath where her worn-down intellect could recuperate.

The truth is that Judith reads Steiner's work only grudgingly, despite the fact that parents who familiarize themselves with the master's work are looked upon with favor at the kindergarten.
The Philosophy of Freedom
lies on her bedside table, its spine unbroken. She leafs through it when she feels like being lulled to sleep by an endlessly spiraling, dense, and poorly formulated train of thought. For Judith, placing her trust in the superstructure suffices. She knows little about the Akasha Chronicles, Atlantis, karma, elemental beings, or the doctrine of the temperaments. She prefers the helpful booklets put out by anthroposophical presses that offer instructions: what children ought to play with and what they should be given to eat, how to construct a nature table and knit dolls or revive long-forgotten games with marbles or balls. When she reads these, and abides by them, she feels as safe and protected as the mouse in the picture book who crawls into a warm mitten.

It takes Judith a while to clean the vegetables. The pumpkin poses some resistance—its skin is tough and brittle. She pries off piece after piece. She likes being in the kitchen. The full shelves, the jars of spelt, shredded wheat, rolled oats, the colorful canisters filled with herbal teas, the earthenware plates, and the ironed dish towel on its hook, seeing it all makes her happy. It's a place where she feels relaxed. She thinks of the tiny, dark kitchenette on Hackstraße with disgust. There wasn't a proper stove, only two electric hotplates, still encrusted with the previous tenant's filth, that she used only to boil water for coffee or to heat instant meals. She read the newspaper while she ate, talked on the phone, smoked, and sometimes typed work for her seminar, spilling food on the keyboard and getting a stomachache when she imagined what Baumeister would think of her attempts to interpret Dix's works. The image of the filthy kitchen was quickly followed by others, which unfolded with such crude and painful clarity that she grimaced: taking the streetcar through East Stuttgart in the morning on the way to the university, driving past gas boilers which were hunched in a hollow like a giant black Michelin Man and surrounded by the modular elements of the power plant. Every morning, Judith rode from the slaughterhouse to Keplerstraße, past sauna-brothels, Turkish grocers and jewelry stores, the Karl-Olga hospital. She passed the cemetery where dark trees towered behind the shelter of gray plastered walls like in a Böcklin painting, passed Croatian, Greek, and Serbian restaurants, dance halls and tailor shops, the Stöckach employment office, gas stations, discount supermarkets, and the long diagonal of Werastraße rising from the lowlands here to the court district.

Then she sees herself: coughing violently, her mascara smudged and one of her huge silver hoop earrings caught in her undone hair. The coughing was provoked by her attempt to suck Sören's penis into an erection. She retched and mutely turned her head. “Dude! Not on my jacket!” he hollered, snatching the old US Army jacket punctiliously out from under her. Sören studied medicine in Tübingen and came to Stuttgart only on weekends. He was big, pale, and blond. His face—hooked nose, full mouth, and cold blue eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses—had a disdainful look, even when he was asleep. Usually Judith took a few shots of schnapps before she started her nightly bar-tour—before she talked to men, it was necessary to reach the appropriate level of indifference. “You look like a Nazi,” she'd said to Sören. She took him back to Hackstraße, and as he pulled on his jeans the next morning, she was appalled to realize how much she wanted some sign of commitment from him. But Sören refused to be pinned down. He came when he felt like it, called when he was in the city, or summoned Judith to his dorm in Tübingen. He spoke openly about his other relationships, of which there must have been at least two. Judith forbid herself to ask for specifics. Naturally, she wanted to know every detail, but she didn't want to forget her place. One time he showed up at her apartment in the middle of the night, covered in blood and reeking of beer. He stitched up the long gash in his forehead in her windowless, stinking bathroom without any explanation. He was writing a dissertation on penicillin and raved constantly about the wonders of antibiotics. But Sören also brought her champagne and kissed her on the balcony of his fraternity house in full view of various irate blond women. His rough fingers had linked with hers while the sun-warmed columns of the sandstone balustrade pressed into her back like the ribs of some giant prehistoric animal. Sören's face was close, his glasses glittering before her eyes. Carefully, she took them off and put them in her pocket. He was extremely nearsighted, and for the rest of the evening he was forced to let her lead him around by the hand.

Judith squints and shakes herself to stop the film that's playing in her mind. She forces herself to think about Kilian's snack—it will be a while until dinner. After saying goodbye to his father and brother, the three-year-old had retreated to the playroom. He can keep himself amused for long stretches and, unlike the garrulous Uli, doesn't always depend on a companion.

She puts dried apple rings and raisins in a small bowl, spoons herbal tea into the porcelain tea ball with the forget-me-not design, turns on the tap, holds the kettle under it, and strikes a match—on Hackstraße she had used a hot pink lighter emblazoned with the name of a pizza place. She lights the gas. The water quickly comes to a boil. The kettle whistles, the tea ball sinks, trailing a string of silver bubbles behind it, and the smell of mint and lemon balm fills the air, just as it does every day. The order of things is fixed by Judith and by Waldorf: no disturbances, no television, not too many visitors, days ruled by ritual and the cycles of nature. It's a predictable life, both at home and at the kindergarten: muesli on Monday, oatmeal on Tuesday, watercolors on Wednesday, clay on Thursday, the same fairy tale told for weeks on end. Haste has disappeared from her life. She often leaves the city, passing through Degerloch up to the villages on the plains of Filderstadt. She keeps an eye out for signs:
PICK YOUR OWN FLOWERS
. She schleps bushels home: peonies, gladiolas, and sunflowers, asters in the fall, along with ivy, fir branches, and then, finally, Christmas roses, pale greenish with waxy petals full of frost crystals. The nature table in the apartment is filled with miniature felt figures of woodland spirits that she made herself—the fact that her hands can produce such things constantly astounds her. She and her family swing rhythmically across time inside a giant bell, back and forth from winter into spring, from spring into summer, into fall and through Advent, in a constant, calming repetition.

A soft humming comes from the nursery: “Fox, you stole the goose,” interspersed with the child's whispering. Kilian crouches on the bright woolen carpet, his blond head bent over a basket made of irregularly cut twigs. “And now Imma put you in, you're going in and if you bite, you gotta stay outside.” For weeks Kilian's favorite game has been to put his wooden animals in a pen, all side by side, farm animals next to forest creatures, just like in Noah's ark. Today he makes a distinction for the first time, using the song as an excuse to exclude the fox. Judith holds her breath in the doorway, looking at the sturdy little legs in brown corduroy, the back of the head with the same blond curls as Klaus and Uli, the strong hands with black rims under the fingernails. The wooden bowl with crayon blocks is on the table, and the paper next to it displays a composition in red, orange, and yellow—wild circles with coronas: flowers, perhaps. He'll explain it to her: “Look Mama, here's Papa and Uli, and here's me, and that's you.” And she'll take a pencil and write the name of her youngest on the back—noting the name and date in the upper righthand corner as carefully as, a few years ago, working at the gallery in Killesberg as an unpaid intern, she had written each painting's title and price.

Lisa can't help staring at the boys. Black streaks across their faces, hair orange and stiff as Astroturf. A few wear skeleton gloves. There's a pumpkin with bared teeth and a monster frozen mid-scream. They tear the plastic masks from each other's faces and fling them into the cold afternoon air. “Do it, Hassan, tear his mouth out!” “I'll kill you guys! Marco, Ufuk, over here!” They laugh and jostle each other. Their voices, already becoming brittle and dark, rise as they do so. The eruptions of giggles sound shrill.

Lisa turns to Leonie: “Mama, what are they supposed to be, skeletons or monsters?”

Her small face is covered with chalk-white powder and her lips gleam dark red. Blue eyes sit like glass marbles under black eyebrows. She had wanted to do her own makeup, and she coated the hairs so thickly with grease pencil that they stand straight up, like bristles. Her hands clasp the play-broom. A tulle skirt with embroidered flowers billows over her dirty winter boots. A rhinestone tiara from last year's Mardi Gras party sits atop the headscarf which Leonie, after much discussion, was made to knot at the back of Lisa's neck, rather than under her chin: “I want to be a witch, but a pretty one!” She'll be starting school next fall—it's unbelievable.

Lisa watches the tussling boys circling around each other, all of them seven or eight years older than her. Leonie is sure she'll pick up one or another of the words she hears the boys use—“expressions,” as they call them in the kindergarten. Two-year-old Felicia crouches at Leonie's feet. She gathers pebbles from the sidewalk, inspects them briefly, then flings them away with a whoop. She pays no attention to the swarm of monsters. Her hand-me-down anorak is too loose, and it makes her look fat and greasy—a troll-baby with a red nose and green freckles. “Lisstick too!” she demanded emphatically in the bathroom as Leonie was drawing on Lisa's witch-mouth. Now her moist lips shine as if freshly painted. Her little tongue creeps out to taste the gummy-bear-flavored lip gloss.

“Come on, Mama—let's go to the bonfire!” Lisa tugs at Leonie's coat. Leonie walks carefully, her high heels digging into the wet clay. Hard olive-brown pellets left by the sheep are strewn everywhere. It's rained a lot in the past few days. Patches of mist crept over the ground at the Wren House children's farm, wrapping all the way up the trees, and the sheep and chickens loom out of it like bleating and cackling ghosts.

Today the sun is shining again, but the afternoon is chilly despite the blue sky. Leaves spin ceaselessly down from the treetops, gleaming yellow, dark red, and brownish, like worn leather. The hillside is vast and overgrown with bushes and plants that Leonie doesn't recognize. Leonie saw a rhubarb plant for the first time in the garden of Wren House, which is carefully fenced off to protect it from hungry animals. Leonie wouldn't survive one day in the great outdoors, even though she grew up in a green-covered row house in Feuerbach. Crooked sandstone steps and narrow trails cut through the vegetation and lead to hand-made huts, a wooden wigwam, the stables. A jungle gym with a slide stands in a sandy hollow that's edged with boulders. This land belongs to the church: in the seventies they built a flat-roofed building with large rooms, colorful linoleum floors, and spartan furniture where the neighborhood children now meet under the watchful eyes of nursery-school teachers and young men doing their civilian service. Since moving here in the summer, barely a day has gone by that Leonie and her girls haven't turned up at Wren House. Lisa and Felicia love to pet the sheep, whose dirty wool feels “kind of like greasy hair,” and they make sure that Leonie keeps lettuce and other kitchen scraps to feed to the rabbits. Lisa's head has been full of the Halloween party for days. Leonie had to read her the card with the grinning pumpkin that's stuck on the refrigerator over and over: “We're having a Halloween party. Come in your spookiest clothes and join us for ghost stories, a haunted house, and a relay race!” No one seems to mind that the eve of All Saint's Day is still a week away. “The kids like Halloween better than Mardi Gras. Too many people are away on the actual day, so we moved it up a bit,” Bernd, one of the teachers, explained.

Simon won't take part in the festivities. He stands apart from the swarm of dressed-up children like a professional ghostbuster, a Man-in-Black in a suit and overcoat—perhaps he even has a laser gun in his briefcase that turns other-worldly beings into puddles of green slime. The fact that he can be here on a regular Tuesday to admire his daughter's costume is pure luck; he had a business meeting on the glass-covered veranda at Sole e Luna, a temple for seafood-lovers on nearby Neue Weinsteig. In a moment he'll get in his car and drive back to the office.

Simon is actually the one who discovered this place for the girls. In the middle of the move, carrying a bag of rolls for the movers under his arm, he opened the wrought-iron gate: the faded inscription
CHILDREN'S FARM 'WREN HOUSE' MON-SAT 10AM—6PM
awakened the explorer in him. Simon is much more curious than Leonie, who managed to pass by the church with thirteenth-century frescoes in Heumaden, her old neighborhood, hundreds of times without succumbing to the allure of a sign that advertised “the only known representation of a female demon in Würtemburg.” It was only in the week before the move that she, already feeling a bit nostalgic, finally entered the bright room, which smelled curiously of apple pie. She knelt at the entrance automatically and searched along the wall for the basin of holy water—naturally, in this Protestant church it was nowhere to be found. Finally she traced the protective path from forehead over breastbone and shoulders with dry fingers. She lowered her head under the mild gaze of the Jesus who seemed to dangle effortlessly above her. Fascinated, she contemplated the black nails that passed through palms and feet and the wound that discreetly bled from Christ's side and quietly murmured, “Please protect Simon and my girls, keep them healthy, Amen.” The whispered words were almost a sacrifice—not like the inscrutable transformation of the pale wafers, more like an incantation that belonged to another era: Give me this and I will give you that, I will scatter grains of frankincense in the altar flames, I will burn a fatted calf. This crude metaphysics came from a time when people prayed every night before bed; it had traveled down through the years unchanged, along with fragments of the rosary, whose “fruit of thy womb” was for Leonie always a Granny Smith, and images from a children's bible—Adam and Eve clothed in furs, cowering under the angel's flaming sword. Leonie's mother had Sudeten German roots, and nurturing Catholic traditions in the Swabian diaspora was important to her; Leonie served as an acolyte for years.

Only after the ritual of crossing herself did Leonie allow herself to take a brochure from the foyer and follow its guidance, head tilted back, in search of the demoness. She quickly discovered a blackish-brown figure amid the throng of faded shapes. Leonie was disappointed by the sexless body of the demon, dumpy and inchoate. A barely visible bulge was the only hint of a breast; the clumsy figure, without bosom or buttocks, looked like a silhouette pasted on the wall. “What were you expecting, a pin-up?” Simon teased her when she gave him her indignant report. She wasn't able to put what disturbed her so much into words. Simon saw right through her, of course: for breaking her usual routine, departing from the regular path between office, kindergarten, playground, and supermarket to do something unusual, something pointless that had nothing to do with her job or family, she felt she deserved to be rewarded. With a full-breasted devil with a big butt, for example, one she could tell Simon about that night in bed as they drifted off together side by side, face to face, while she held his soft penis, disappointed that it didn't budge, and then almost equally disappointed when it hardened in her hand, cutting into her precious and far-too-brief sleep time by at least half an hour.

Lisa's fingers, moist and hot with excitement, lead Leonie across the yard in front of the building. Her eyes search out the bigger girls, who have already secured prized places by the bonfire. A thick yellow soup simmers in a kettle over the fire, smelling of garlic. The circle contains pointy witch's hats, necklaces of plastic bones, long rustling skirts, and green-painted faces. Only on close inspection does Leonie recognize the teenagers, who usually spend their time playing ball or practicing dance moves from music videos, but have now been transformed into witches, vampires, and dead princesses. She's proud of Lisa, who marches right up to the fire and sits down quietly among the older kids without hesitation. Leonie and Simon exchange a parental look. Felicia examines a lump of dirt. Before she can stick her discovery into her mouth, Leonie shouts, “Simon!”, and he bends down as if he had all the time in the world and brushes some dirt from the corner of her mouth. But he doesn't get any closer. Leonie has the feeling that he doesn't want her sticky fingers to endanger his office clothes.

Leonie still gets a bit of a thrill from seeing Simon dressed in a suit. The greenish-gray fabric shimmers under his short black coat. The white shirt and bright orange tie are chosen with taste—his, not hers. She's glad he no longer needs her advice. They first went shopping together after he finished business school and officially joined the company where he'd been freelancing. Since she was a child, she had gone to the same venerable department store downtown, standing behind the dressing room curtains year after year as her mother carried over piles of clothes: from her first miniskirt to the gown for her graduation ball. Leonie let Simon sit in his boxer shorts under the neon light, wordlessly hanging her selections on the rod from outside the dressing room: solid-colored shirts in classic cuts and inconspicuous fabrics, ties and socks that didn't have cartoon figures romping all over them. Only the clanging of the wire hangers betrayed her anger at the world Simon came from, a world that would stand in his way whenever he failed to completely abandon its habits. It was the world of No-Name sneakers and the flip-flops they called “rubber slippers” in the eighties, the emblems not of casual summers in the city but of aggressive proletarianism, the world of cheap synthetic pants, flower-print leisure shirts, “Drinking Team” T-shirts, and self-drawn tattoos inked by friends. These were the insignia of a contemptible, wayward background that Leonie took care never to get any closer to in all the years of their life together.

Yet Simon had escaped, naked and ready to be civilized, like Robinson's Friday. The illegitimate son of a perfume store salesclerk from Hohenlohe had the fierce desire to make money, which even in his school days made him tougher and more determined than the kids in Leonie's milieu. Her set planned as far as civilian service or the next Interrail trip, at best. Only when they fight—when their screaming pushes them away from each other, when he grabs her arm and leaves a mark that's still visible hours later, or insults her with words that are as crude as the exhaust-blackened concrete blocks on the main roads of the “Bronx of Swabia” where he grew up—does she sense that Simon will never fully belong to her.

Leonie literally ran into Simon's arms on one of her last days of school, dizzy from sweet champagne and slightly hysterical over a graduation prank that had gotten out of control—the school building stuffed up to the ceiling with balloons, finger-painted graffiti on the teachers' cars, strawberry-flavored condoms passed out to freshmen. She had seen him crossing the schoolyard. He walked through the undulating crowd of furious, excited teachers and bellowing teens like a grinning Moses parting the Red Sea: six-foot-three, unshaven, his slapping flip-flops exuding devil-may-care charm.

Simon's bad reputation had various sources. Teachers at the high school on Schillerstraße, which boasted of once counting the famous poet Eduard Mörike among the faculty, had a hard time with the truant and class clown who, despite all his capers, managed never to seriously endanger his GPA. Among the students he was known as a dealer of various wares, from illegally copied computer games to soft drugs. There were a couple of chic, confident girls who often hung around the schoolyard and smoked with him. He didn't seem to have serious relationships. He lived alone with his mother, and his contact with Leonie had never gone past a snarled “Hello.”

Leonie—red-haired, pale, and wiry—was studying physical education and French. She despised coffee, cigarettes, and the sexual promiscuity of the popular cliques. She was content with her giggling circle of girlfriends who wore their blonde hair in ponytails, accompanied her to the swanky disco in the Killesberg Höhenpark on Friday nights, and had brothers named Marc or Oliver who tried to pick Leonie up after tennis practice.

To this day Leonie isn't sure what had made her bob sluggishly over to Simon like a little rudderless boat. At the time it seemed quite natural. He towered above almost everyone else and provided her with an attainable goal. She stood directly before him, looking every bit the team captain in her white jeans and sleeveless plaid blouse, groaned, “I can't stand this anymore!”, and let herself topple off her tiptoes into him, throwing her arms around his neck, closing her eyes, and breathing in his scent. After-shave, with something wild underneath it that was nothing like the stink of old socks and beer-sweat that she knew from her other admirers. She heard his surprised “Hey!”, felt his lips on her neck, the scratch of his stubble, and an electric shock that ran from the soft skin of her throat to the pit of her stomach. The next evening she slept with him in the backseat of his old Fiat, then frantically tried to rub the blood out of the upholstery with Kleenex while he climbed into the front seat, shaking his head: “I never would have believed that this was your first time. But I'm glad the tennis guys didn't get to you first.”

After the year-long break that he demanded—“I don't have time for a girlfriend. I'm going to go to business school and build my mother a house!”—during which time Leonie went to Montpellier for a semester to make the acquaintance of three more penises, they stayed together.