Shorter Days (6 page)

What would Ingrid have said about their new place? Leonie was convinced they would have gotten along. “I'm probably the only woman in the world that actually wants a mother-in-law. Someone to tell me what Simon was like as a baby. When he was potty-trained and how soon he slept through the night. Whether Lisa and Felicia look like him. She would certainly have liked the little house in Heumaden. It was so like hers.” She was sure her mother-in-law would have found Constantinstraße posh and elegant, but too expensive. Ingrid and Simon's mutual life's work, the result of steely frugality and shrewd schoolyard dealings, was easily rented. Simon went there no more than once a year to see that everything was in order. He talked little of his mother. “It's a damn shame you never got to meet her. She was a good one.” Leonie uses Ingrid's best china, a simple white and blue set, and constructs her image of Ingrid from Simon's occasional tidbits.

She swallows the last bites of the already-stale bread and pours herself more wine. There's more activity on the street than usual. The last of the guests from the Wren House Halloween party are on their way home. Small groups of children and teenagers in costumes stand on the sidewalk and in doorways. Amid the turmoil, old Herr Posselt from across the street is taking his dog for a walk—an aged hound with short silver and brown hair and a liver-colored snout. He limps a little, but still pulls so hard on the leash that his owner can barely keep up. Posselt, a middle-sized man with excellent posture, must be nearly eighty, yet he still keeps himself presentable, his white mustache trimmed and his silk scarf fastidiously knotted. When the girls run into Schlamper, usually on the way home from St. Anton, he slackens the leash and exchanges a few words with Leonie; despite his general reserve, these platitudes about the weather somehow convey a certain aura of intimacy. Schlamper patiently tolerates Felicia and Lisa's clumsy caresses and only occasionally lets out a deep breath, which sounds like a sigh.

Leonie looks for sweets in the cabinet over the refrigerator—some costumed kids are sure to come by. She extracts a bag of chocolate bars from the jumble of open packages of cookies, candy necklaces, and stray gumballs and sets them in easy reach next to the stove.

The large windows in the building across the street are filled with yellow light. It's the kind of light that makes one pause during an evening stroll and gaze in, drawn by the foreign warmth, the promise of a kind of privateness one's own four walls can never offer. Leonie steps back and turns off the overhead light. Then she returns to her post, conscious of doing something embarrassing. A round table with a lobster-red tablecloth stands close against the window. Leonie sees a steaming dish, a breadbasket, deep blue plates, candles, a bouquet of asters, and wonders whether she and Simon even own a tablecloth. Yes, she says to herself, there's the Christmas tablecloth with the dancing St. Nicholases. Across the table a slim woman with long black hair fills the bowls as they're passed to her. They're having soup. “Well, we had soup tonight too,” she thinks, continuing to stare in the neighbors' window. Two children are sitting at the table—boys Lisa and Felicia's age. They're wearing pajamas, and they spoon the soup up with great concentration. The father, blond like his sons, passes around a bowl of salad. The whole family is using cloth napkins that match the tablecloth. Leonie looks at the clock: “They can sit still so long. They haven't gotten up or knocked anything over or spilled on themselves. And they're eating salad.” The man is talking about something, and the children listen attentively. A modern lamp with a frosted glass shade hangs over the table; the walls are painted yellow. Tea lights burn on the windowsill alongside large stones and flowers arranged in vases and jars. From this small glimpse, as tiny as the scenes behind the doors of an advent calendar, she can tell that the household across the street is run by a person who spends her whole day at home. In Heumaden most of the mothers had worked, even if only part-time, in order to pay off the little beige houses before they retired. Leonie's five-day workweek was unusual, but not as exotic as it is in Lehenviertel. There's a trend toward three-child families at the girls' kindergarten. Most of the highly-educated full-time mothers seem satisfied with their roles as unpaid cleaning ladies, chefs, and chauffeurs. Simon is proud of his “business babe” and has always been supportive. Sometimes he irons Leonie's blouses when she's too tired. Thanks to Ingrid he can cook simple dishes, and he notices when things get dirty or untidy. Recently, this help has become less frequent, though. He comes home later every day. Compared to the man across the street, he's a macho, a guaranteed absence. The neighbor has broad shoulders, and his good-natured face, which consists mostly of nose, makes him look like Gérard Depardieu's younger brother. He's home at the most unlikely times: he regularly returns for lunch, and when it's the family's turn, he takes care of sweeping and tidying the sidewalk in front of the building, his sons often tottering behind him with miniature brooms and enameled dustpans.

When Leonie looks through the window across the street, she feels like she's opening a picture book in which everything is as it's meant to be. She indulges in a look at the holy family, as she calls her neighbors, almost daily. She suffers pangs of conscience when she turns back to her own life, partly because of her curiosity, partly because she fares so poorly in this undignified competition. Recently she tried to at least put out placemats and serve a salad, but her efforts ended in disaster: Felicia, delighted by the innovation, tugged her setting to the floor—plate, cup, and all—in order to observe it more closely. Lisa refused the dressing-soaked leaves with disgust and fished out the tomato wedges with her fingers. As usual, Simon arrived late, and Leonie congratulated herself by purchasing plastic dinnerware.

Leonie knows that the woman is named Judith, the boys Ulrich and Kilian. She remembers how her heart had beat faster when she first saw the woman coming out of the green-painted front door with the younger child, hand in hand and deep in conversation. In a single glance she registered the boy's brass-colored ringlets, his obviously ironed white and blue summer shirt and light shorts. She saw the bulge of fat at his wrist and his mother's lilac dress, her fair skin, her black hair pinned up over an oval, madonna-like face, a net shopping bag in her hand.

Leonie had put down the moving boxes and took a quick, critical sniff inside her track jacket. Luckily her deodorant hadn't completely worn off yet. She combed through her sweaty hair with splayed fingers and took a deep breath. She left the box with the red logo of the moving company and Simon's giant block lettered handwriting—
CDs: ABBA, ELTON JOHN
—under the streetlamp. She walked over to the two, who looked at her questioningly. Leonie sputtered her name and the story of the move, revealed the names and ages of her daughters, and asked if there was a playground nearby. She was offered a slim brown hand that was surprisingly cool for the hot summer day and a few sentences in the sing-songy upper-class Swabian that was so proudly spoken around here. Simon, whose mother had done everything to hide her Hohenlohisch upbringing once she got to the state capital, forbid the children from adopting even a trace of dialect. “I'm Judith, and this one hiding here—this is Kilian. Kilian, come out and say hey.” The boy peeped out from behind the folds of his mother's skirt, squeaked out his greeting, and then remained beside his mother, his hands still clutching the fabric. This introduction impressed Leonie—at the very most, Felicia would have emitted a piercing “No”. The tiny wrinkles around Judith's mouth and eyes suggested to Leonie that she was about five or six years older. Her thick black eyebrows were only slightly plucked.

Leonie bent down to the child. “My girls will be happy to hear about you, Kilian. When we're all moved in, you can come visit us.” Judith wound one of her son's curls around her index finger and smiled. “We're going on vacation tomorrow, and we have to buy Band-Aids. For me and for Uli.” Leonie climbed up the stairs with her box to tell Simon of her new acquaintance. The stillness of this street, here in the middle of the city, Nâzim's shop, and now kids to play with right across the street were just the puzzle pieces that could fit together and turn the unfamiliar surroundings into a gaily-colored picture, for both her and her girls, who had been loathe to leave the little Heumaden house.

A few weeks later they met on the street again. The neighbor's face was very brown. Her full mouth, whose corners sagged slightly, glowed under bright lipstick. Lisa and the older boy started talking immediately, and invented a game with a long blue plastic tie that had probably once bound a package. Felicia and Kilian had quickly been drawn in. Leonie noticed again how quiet and gentle both boys were in comparison to her unruly girls. Judith talked excitedly of Italian grocery stores and the beauty of Lake Como. She did not extend an invitation for a play-date.

On a late afternoon in September, as she finally wedged the Volvo into a parking spot and was unloading a mountain of shopping bags onto the curb, Leonie saw Judith disappear with her husband and children behind their building. The grownups were carrying a tray of coffee and a basket; Kilian and Ulrich had stilts and a ball. Presumably there was a yard in the back, where one could spend the afternoon without having to lug the whole kit and caboodle to a public park. Leonie grew jealous, as behind their building there was barely enough space for the trash cans and a bike rack. She would have loved to go back there, but she restrained herself: the newcomers would have to be invited. Imposing was not an option.

The bright triad of the doorbell makes Leonie jump. The wine glass is nearly empty. She walks down the hallway to the intercom: “Trick or treat!” a scratchy voice comes through. “OK, come on up. Third floor!” she says into the receiver.

Leonie recognizes the four boys from Wren House. One of them has pushed a silent, frozen
Scream
mask back over his thick black hair. Another hides behind the rapacious countenance of a pumpkin-zombie; his neighbor rubs eyes that are smeared with black makeup. The group's spokesman has dirty-blond hair. He isn't dressed up, as if he has more confidence in his pale face, crooked blue eyes, and provocatively twisted mouth than in any costume. He addresses Leonie: “It's cool of you to let us up. You're not scared to be home alone like this? We could come in and have a drink.” The eyes in his entourage widen, and they chew on the insides of their full cheeks. In this moment, there's nothing to distinguish them from Lisa and Felicia's friends from St. Anton. Leonie props her right foot on her left calf and holds on to the doorframe, a ballerina in green tights. She feels at least as old as Mrs. Robinson. What would they do if I actually asked them in? Turn around and flee, most likely. She grins. “I wouldn't do that if I were you. My husband will be home any minute, and he knows karate.” She wishes Simon really would come up the stairs and spout a few of his dumb proletarian Heslach phrases: “Do you have any idea who you're messing with? She's had two children—the four of you together wouldn't be enough for her.” And they'd all break out in baboonish man-laughter. And then Simon would pick her up and take her into the bedroom and they would have sex, more dexterously and more carefully than fifteen years ago, always aware that a cry of “Mami, Papi!” could interrupt them at any moment.

Leonie says goodbye to the boys and returns to the kitchen. Nearly all the windows across the way are dark; there's still a light on at the Posselts', but they have heavy drapes—old school. The little gang continues onward. They punch each other in the ribs, prance around, and tug each other's jackets. One jumps onto another's back and lets himself be carried a little way while the others rush behind. They disappear into the darkness.

A light-yellow envelope lies on the sideboard in the foyer. Leonie removes the invitation. “Even though it's on a weekday, I'll only turn 35 once. Come and celebrate like in the good old days—like there's no tomorrow, with ‘80s tunes and your good friend Conny. Scene of the crime: The Hexle, Tübingen.” Conny was the last survivor from Leonie's old tennis clique. She has her heart set on going to the party, and not just for Conny's sake. She wants to wear her new turquoise zigzag skirt, she wants to dance with Simon and have sex with him in a hotel room in broad daylight. Frau Kienzle, the cleaning lady, will take care of Lisa and Feli and has agreed to stay overnight. Everything is set. Leonie dials the office number.

He picks up immediately and growls a clipped hello. Leonie knows she's interrupting something. She can hear a printer rattling in the background. “It's just me. Will you be long?” “I can't tell. Probably.” His voice sounds tired and annoyed. She knows it won't do any good to keep talking but she does anyway. “I wanted to ask—Conny's party . . . is it going to work out for tomorrow night?”

Simon sighs heavily—not impatiently, but as if he's struggling with some hidden affliction. “Tomorrow's going to be tough. Gündert scheduled a meeting—something to do with the evaluation. I'll do what I can, baby. I have to go now. Ciao.” He hangs up without waiting for her answer. Leonie hears the dial tone. She feels like joining in with the phone's monotone wail. She knows Simon hung up to avoid hearing her repeat her question: Will you be long? She knows she'll be asleep when he gets back to the apartment. The bedside lamp will be on and Leonie will feel him slipping into bed next to her through closed eyes, pressing her to him wearily and without desire. She goes to the kitchen and pours herself another glass of wine.

“Mama, my bucket is full!”

“Mine too!”

Ulrich and Kilian run over to Judith and dump the foliage they've raked into their metal pails onto the mountain of leaves in the middle of the lawn. She looks at her boys and takes pleasure in what she sees. They wear colorful knit caps, felt jackets with wooden buttons, and sturdy leather boots. Their eyes shine and their faces are still tan, enhanced with the redness of excitement, movement, and fresh air.

They've been working in the little garden for almost two hours. Judith is sitting on the bench near the roses. The bushes are old, with woody stems: even the smallest shoots have thorns. The rosehips hang between them like tiny lanterns. Judith has spread a checked tablecloth over the folding table—a plate of apples and Judith's dented thermos rest on it. In the Hackstraße days it had been filled with strong coffee, and it was her constant companion through long days at the university. Today it's filled with fruit tea. The children run through the leaf-mountain. The foggy morning has yielded to a sunny afternoon. In nine weeks it will be Christmas, and the sky is a translucent bright blue, as if snow clouds are already lurking behind it.

The garden isn't large, perhaps two thousand square feet, situated between the back of the building where Judith and Klaus and the children live and the next row of houses on busy Olgastraße. This garden is the only green place in the gap between the buildings—the rest is concrete courtyards with parking spaces and trash cans. Warmth lingers in the square between the high sandstone walls. In the summer it's cooled by long shadows. Judith feels protected down here, like in the courtyard of a castle. The walls keep her gaze from wandering. She can see only one small section of sky, with clouds, birds, and airplanes. A sky that spreads over everything and betrays nothing. It could just as easily hang over another city, another country. Sometimes Klaus makes fun of the “prison yard.” Judith laughs with him and doesn't let on that a grand plot of land, bordered only by horizon, could never match the sense of security she feels in this city garden enclosed by old five-story buildings. Again she's the mummy from Hackstraße, eager to hole up and close the sarcophagus on herself. Though Klaus has learned much about Judith since then, she's never told him about that. She'd disguised her withdrawal as circulatory collapse, and let Klaus bring her water, camomile tea, and crispbreads in the bed with the shiny green spread, only to emerge pregnant and on a lower dose of Tavor. She keeps the pills in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom with the homeopathic capsules, seawater nose drops, and Band-Aids. She takes some every night—sometimes more, sometimes less. The bottle is labeled Biotin: for hair, skin and nails.

The weak sunbeams warm Judith's face. This is probably the last day they'll be able to sit outside like this. She hears the children's voices. They're acting out a fairy tale they've learned at the kindergarten: “Rumpelstiltskin.” Uli is playing director and Kilian readily complies. “Perhaps your name is Shortribs, or Sheepshank, or Laceleg?” They laugh at the names, try out new variations. The boys go outside even when it's cold and drizzly, hacking up the thin sheets of ice that form on the rain barrel after the first frost, stirring mud soup in old pans with wooden spoons, or digging caves in the sandbox. They could never do such things at the children's farm around the corner. The grounds are nice, but Judith is suspicious of the clientele at Wren House. The garden, on the other hand, is practically an extension of their apartment. Here Kilian and Uli can watch crocuses, snowdrops, and tulip leaves emerge from the earth, pointy as witch's hats; they can watch the leathery knobs unfold into sticky green leaves on trees and bushes; they can wait for the starlings to return. The scrubby lawn is bordered by a narrow flower bed in which veteran roses display their last blossoms. A frail fruit tree stands in each corner: apple, damson, and pear, as well as a magnificent elderberry bush whose black-draped clusters attract an astounding number of blackbirds and other songbirds every September. Their violet droppings make a mess on the wooden rim of the sandbox and the roof of the little hut—the children use it as a playhouse, laughing among the gardening tools and watering cans. There's a faucet on the wall of the building, directly under the Posselts' living room window, where Judith or Klaus can fasten a red hose in the summer to water the plants and let Uli and Kilian splash around. Each child has his own little bed. There are still a few marigolds in Kilian's—thanks to the shelter of the wall, they have escaped the nightly frost.

Judith closes her eyes and tilts her head back. Neighbors come to the windows to look down at her and the children. She waves to the few she knows and ignores the others. She can feel their jealousy, and remembers how she too had once looked down greedily at this walled bit of paradise from the third floor.

She conquered the garden for her children, proceeding strategically from the moment when her belly had begun to swell over the still amphibian-like Uli. She'd sat for hours at the bedroom window, arms propped on pillows, staring down into the greenery and imagining herself swinging in a hammock, the leaves casting green and gold shadows on her face, an infant at her breast. She saw marveling eyes following the flight of bumblebees through blooming ivy, bare feet taking their first steps on grass instead of asphalt and stone.

Judith's idyll was disrupted by Herr Posselt, who made regular attempts to pare the knee-high grass with a mechanical mower. He wore light Bermuda shorts and braided sandals on his callused yellow feet. Varicose veins crawled over his scrawny calves like blue earthworms and tangled into nests in the hollows of his knees. It was disrupted by Frau Posselt's birthmark-blotched, limp flesh hanging out of her sleeveless summer dress, and by her phlegmy coughing over a tray of cookies and mugs of Nescafé. The worst was when they fell asleep in their deck chairs. Their heads would sink to the side or flop on their necks like crash victims, their limbs hung slack, their mouths gaped and drool dripped. The background hum of traffic on Olgastraße absorbed the garden's subtler noises, but Judith was sure they both snored.

Frau Posselt's complaints about the arduousness of gardening found a sympathetic ear with Judith. Klaus's sporadic help mowing and weeding turned into regular garden duties. When the old woman criticized contemporary society—“The way kids grow up these days, there ain't a solitary corner fer ‘em ta romp around in. ‘Twas better in ma day”—Judith enthusiastically concurred. Finally Frau Posselt said: “Frau Rapp, when yer wee babe comes, we'll make a deal, you'n me. If ya don't bring half the neighborhood ta holler around ma winda, then I says, and the mister agrees, ya can use the garden fer yer family.”

Judith kept her promise to the old woman and invited other children to play in the garden once a week at most. The only exception was for Ulrich's and Kilian's birthdays, both of which fell at the beginning of September. Then they threw a party in the garden. They borrowed long benches, hung paper lanterns from the trees, and invited grandparents, godparents, and siblings, who all came in delighted droves. Judith cooked and baked. There was fruit punch, apple pies, and huge trays of quiche and pizza. From the windows above, one could see white tablecloths, balloons, and colorful lights among the shrubbery. Schlamper and the Posselts came too, wandering through the swarm of partiers and looking a bit lost. They felt their way hesitantly among the once-familiar things—“Look, Luise, the russet is finally bearing!”—like emigrants returning to their homeland after half a century to find it strange and foreign.

“Mama, Mama! Look what I found!” Uli emerges from the bushes with a bottle in his hand. A dragon snarls from the half-peeled paper label: Flavored vodka, bright red. The dregs of the gleaming liquid slosh around the convex bottom, and before Judith can stop him, Uli has unscrewed the top and stuck his nose in. “It smells like gummy bears!” Kilian bounces over, “What is it, Uli, can I have some too?” “Stop it—hands off!” Judith shrieks. The boy drops the bottle, eyes wide. She jumps up so quickly, tearing his discovery away and plunging it into the recycling, that his bottom lip trembles. Judith's heart pounds in her throat—she feels only anger, not least of all at herself. How could she have missed it?

Uli stretches his arms toward it: “Mama, was it poison? Can I see it, just for a second? I won't drink it, I know what happens, like in ‘Snow White,' how the evil queen put poison in the apple and . . .” Judith shakes her head, her hair flying. “I threw it away and that's that. It's not for you. Go back to your brother. You shouldn't be crawling around in the bushes like that. Look at your pants.” Her voice is loud and shrill. She hates the way she's behaving, she hates herself for the incomprehension she sees in Uli's eyes. He's wearing garden pants—he's allowed to get them dirty. Kilian looks despondent as well, and hangs his head like his older brother. They can tell something's amiss, Judith thinks. She's ashamed of herself, but her mind is made up. And so she stands up, takes their hands, and walks over to the flower bed and picks a few asters. “Look, Uli. Here's a pretty bouquet for your room. Here's some phlox, and rosehips would be nice too.” She cuts a bit of ivy and binds the bunch with a long yellow blade of grass. Uli takes a deep breath.

Just before lunch Judith had quietly done away with a number of rain-soaked firecrackers and the ten or so smashed eggs she'd found on the wall and on the Posselts' living room window, cleaned up several squeezed-out tubes of mustard and toothpaste, and scrubbed the old couple's window with ammonia. She'd noticed the devastation while she was airing out the bedsheets on the window seat. Slimy egg white dripped down the Posselts' picture window onto the path. A few intact yolks stared up at her from the moist grass, reminding her of her mother's “bullseyes”: when Judith was a child, she would fry eggs for lunch, and Judith was supposed to stab them with her fork. They made her nauseous.

When she looked into the Posselts' living room, she understood that she was cleaning up not as a favor to the old neighbors, but to restore a disrupted order. She saw rubber plants and philodendron pressing against the windowpanes next to a tarnished brass watering can; farther back she saw the darkness of the embossed wallpaper, the brown velveteen armchairs, and intricately patterned oriental rugs. Schlamper lay sleeping in his basket, his snout propped on crossed forelegs. The animal's long back rose and fell regularly. It was just before twelve. Doubtless the Posselts were eating in the dining room, which looked out on Olgastraße. Today was Wednesday, so they'd be having poppy seed sweet buns. Like Herr Posselt, the recipe came from the Sudetenland. Judith was very familiar with the long and tortuous history of Wenzel Posselt's odyssey from Bohemia to Stuttgart. As well as the hostility his wife had faced when she had exchanged her old Swabian surname, Läpple, for the name of a refugee. “He was just the most charmin', no Swabian could deny that.” Judith knew of Frau Posselt's struggles with the finer points of Bohemian cuisine. “I'd never made that kinda stuff, nobody could shew me how, no mother-in-law, no nothin'. Wenzel, he tried. Agin and agin he tried ta shew me. Shook his head and laughed, he did. And now we take it in turns, one day Swabian, the next Bohemian: Mondee stewed beef'n horseradish sauce, Tuesdee lentils'n spätzle, Wednesdee buns, Thursdee Gaisburger stew . . .” Judith doesn't know why she burdens her mind with such trivia. And yet this information nestles in her mind, displacing other things. Remembering Frau Posselt's menu and paddling endlessly about in an ocean of murky chatter is still more pleasant than thinking about her own past. Angrily, Judith tears paper towels off a roll and scrubs away the contaminants. It was her garden that had been invaded, her children's space that some depraved, television-addled monsters had defiled.

“Mama, can we have sweets now please?” Kilian asks, cocking his head. His right foot scuffs at the ground. Uli stands a few feet behind him, grinning. Judith knows he put his younger brother up to it. She marvels at the two of them—how quickly they fix on something else and forget the bottle of poison. She hopes that her own genes have mostly been eradicated from the chiseled, finely turned strands of their DNA, which she imagines as glowing purple and black rods, like the lighting in a club. “You can have them when Mattis comes, as I told you. Look and make sure that there's nothing missing in the playhouse! Is there a cup and saucer for everyone?” The brothers run to the hut to check the table settings, since Mattis and his mother Hanna are supposed to arrive in a quarter of an hour.

They live next door, in a four-story, smooth-plastered, utilitarian building from the fifties with small windows—the kind of building that was so often constructed to fill bombed-out spaces. It fits the rest of the street like a rotten tooth in a healthy mouth. Judith has known Hanna and her lively son for a while now. They often run into each other on the street, where Judith hears all the latest horror stories about Mattis's hospital visits and treatments. Mattis goes to the Catholic kindergarten on Sonnenbergstraße, but he is nonetheless a regular guest in the little garden; he's even allowed to wreak havoc on the Ostheimer toy farm in the playroom, to the surprise and delight of Judith's sons: “Come on, we'll shoot the oxen, that one's dead. Now a bomb falls through the roof and explodes on the pigs, and the farmer keels over—and then the pigs and the cow . . .”

Hanna is obviously grateful and in need of the help. On top of that, Uli and Kilian like the wild Jack-in-the-Box, as Judith secretly calls him. And so now and then she sticks a note in the neighboring mailbox: “Stop by the garden this afternoon. We'll be there.” The fact that Mattis, whose small playroom harbors Playmobil and countless oversized stuffed animals, in addition to the usual wooden toys, is allowed to play the role of guest but never host is a tacit agreement that Hanna has never questioned. Regardless, Mattis's health ensures that only every third playdate actually comes to pass.