Field Study (5 page)

They walk together. Near the water’s edge, where the sand is hard and rippled and the last soft reaches of the waves wash over their steps. The boy fishes seaweed from the shallows and his sister pops its leathery bulges for him with her fingernails. He finds long, flat stripes floating a little further along, yellow-brown and tough as plastic, which he drags back up onto the beach to where his sister is sitting, arms wrapped round her knees.

She curls the long stripes round to form her initials against the sand.

Her brother recognises the letters.

– Kuh, Suh.

– Yes. CS. That’s me.

He laughs and runs back to the water for more stripes, which she forms into more letters, and then decorates both sets of initials with a few pebbles and shells.

– Is that me?

The boy points at the second pair. A P and a D, carefully laid. His sister laughs.

– No!

– Oh.

Her brother looks down at the letters and blinks, surprised. His sister sighs. Kneels down and lays the rubbery stripes out new. She smiles at him.

– Buh Suh. That’s you.

They walk on, dune and pine on their left, sea on their right, specks of parents and brothers far behind. Ahead of them the beach is cut in two by a stream, a dark strip of sand and silt mixed. Mossy stones sit wet in the shallow flow.

– Will we go across?

The boy’s sister wrinkles her nose. Beyond lies the headland and grey rock. A wide sandbank out in the water.

– Nah.

She gets out her cigarettes again, and her brother squats down next to her, looks out at the low rise of the sandbank, almost level with the sea.

– What are those dark things?

He points out to the sandbank.

– Rocks.

– They’re moving.

– No.

– They are so.

Some of the dark shapes on the sandbank move, others are still. The brother and sister watch silently for a while, and then the little boy stands.

– Look!

He runs down towards the water, to a small mound on the bank of the stream, a small shape lying there, out of reach of the sea. He gestures to his sister as he runs.

– Come on!

But when he gets there he recoils. Small hands fly to his face. Stock still and silent by the shape by the stream. His sister frowns and stands, walks down the sand to her brother, to the thing he is looking at.

It is a young seal. Lying almost on one side, soft belly facing out to sea, sand built up in a drift against its back.

– Dead, kiddo.

His sister smokes and squints, crinkling up the skin around her eyes. Spaces between her freckles pink from sun and wind. The boy looks down at the seal again. Wet ends of his father’s shirt blowing against his legs, small rounds of his knees showing through the greying cotton. He turns his back to the sea, and stands so the young seal is protected from the wind. Looks round, over his shoulder,
searching out the dark shapes on the sandbank, their slow, distant movements.

– Shit.

His sister drives the end of her cigarette deep into the sand at her feet, cups her hands over her mouth and tests her breath. The boy follows her gaze and sees his mother. Advancing slowly, belly first towards them across the wide beach. She calls something to them, but he can’t make it out, and her hair is whipped across her mouth.

When she gets to them, she is out of breath and the hair at her neck sweat-damp. She stops.

– Oh.

Then takes the last couple of steps to her children, the dead seal next to them.

– Oh dear.

She puts a hand on her son’s head, but he can’t take his gaze off the place where the seal’s eye used to be. Tattered hole in the side of its head. Pelt still fuzzy. Flipper and belly dusted with fine white grains.

His mother hugs the boy to her legs, draws her daughter towards her and kisses her hair. Then frowns.

The boy pulls away from his mother, turns his attention out to sea. His mother takes hold of his sister’s hand, sniffs it and then drops it again, eyes turned hard. Her daughter
blinks and pulls her lips into a tight line. Flush creeping from below her T-shirt to her neck. She pulls the cigarette packet out of her shorts and lays it on her mother’s outstretched palm.

The boy is watching the dark shapes again. The creatures roll on the far bank, their noise, somewhere between bark and wail, carries in snatches across the wind-broken surface of the water to the beach. One or two are swimming. Camoflaged; brown-dark skins against grey-dark sea, but the boy can just about make them out. Heads reaching up out of the water, slanted shoulders. Snouts turned to one side to allow closer scrutiny of the figures on the shore with one eye. They are still. Like they are standing. Rising and falling gently with the waves.

– Mum. Do they know he’s dead?

His mother looks out at the water.

– I don’t know, love. Maybe.

– Are they sad?

– I suppose they might be.

He looks down again at the half-buried seal body.

– Will I die before you, Mum?

– Oh sweetheart, I shouldn’t think so.

– What about Celie?

His sister frowns under his mother’s eyes.

– No, I hope she will live longer than me.

– But one of us will die first?

– Yes, I suppose one of us will.

– And the rest of us will be sad?

– Yes, I’m afraid so.

The boy frowns, his eyes dark now, looking out at the watching seals, the sandbank being claimed by the encroaching tide.

– Can’t we just die all together?

His mother blinks. She strokes his hair.

– Well, no. I’m afraid that’s very unlikely.

The rest of the afternoon is spent building castles. Big enough for the boy to stand in, with turrets made by his father and mother and shell and seaweed adornments collected by his sister. His brothers dig a moat, which fills with foaming water when the tide reaches them. Smoothing the castle walls, washing off one or two of the lower shells that decorate the family’s fortress. Their father takes a picture of them all, kneeling in order of height in front of their creation, their mother smiling, standing to one side. The low sun throws long shadows in front of them, and turns the sea behind them gold-white.

It is cold now and they pack up, walk back over the dune together, out of the wind into the silent pines and the car. The hatchback hisses open and the boy climbs inside.

First the dunes disappear and then the trees. It grows dark
and they are back on the big road. The tyres roar below the boy on the tarmac and he rests his head on the pile of towels beside him, still damp, still smelling of sun. His skin feels tight and warm, and he listens to his brothers and sister murmuring on the back seat behind him.

There is sand inside his shoes, between his toes, in the pockets of his clothes. Small white dustings of it in the grey carpet of the car boot. A crunch in the sandwich his mother gave him for the journey home.

He sees the dead seal when he closes his eyes: at night now, but the sand is still pale and the wind still blowing. The eyes blinking at him over the water are large and black and wet, and the noise from the sandbank sounds like crying.

– My father is not part of my life.

Her husband is silent a moment, then continues:

– The man is not a father. He is an irrelevance.

And she says:

– If he’s so irrelevant, why do you get so worked up about him?

And her husband sighs and lies still on the sofa next to her, and she feels the breath move his chest up and down, up and down, and his heart beating faster than normal.

__

Hannah has met her father-in-law only once, eight years ago. Before the heart problems started and the strokes. He came over for their wedding in his customary black beret and coat. His first trip abroad since the wall came down. His first time beyond the now-tattered iron curtain. Opposed, he announced at the reception, to what he called Jochen’s American Dream; disappointed, he continued, that his son should have been so taken in.

– West Germany was bad enough, but the USA. I don’t think I will ever understand.

He smiled while he said it, but nobody laughed because it was not at all clear whether he was joking.

The first stroke happened two years later and Jochen flew
to Berlin. When his father was well enough, he drove him across Germany to Karl’s place, Jochen’s older brother. To Frankfurt am Main: temple of West German commerce. It was supposed to be a temporary solution, a period of convalescence. Six years later he is still there, and now the situation is critical.

__

– He never lifted a finger for us, Hannah. My mother did everything.

Jochen repeats this phrase like a mantra. Most mornings, and sometimes also when they get into bed. A defensive reaction, Hannah thinks, to his father’s descent into old age, his neediness. Not necessarily representative of Jochen’s underlying feelings. Her own parents are both still young, not even retired yet, and she knows she cannot predict how well she will respond when their time comes. But still, Hannah is unsettled by this new, bitter side to her husband.

It is a time of many phone calls. Long-distance brothers talking Brooklyn to Frankfurt. Diagnoses, updates, endless debates. Safety first or dignity, home care or nursing home, where will the money come from, what do you mean his insurance won’t pay for that, so why didn’t he get private cover, damn him?

– But we have money, Jochen. Karl has money. It’s not a problem.

– Jesus Christ, Hannah. It’s not about the fucking money.

Jochen swears like an American, only sounds like a German when he gets annoyed. Flat vowels, sharp consonants. It makes Hannah want to smile, but she is shocked, too. Almost a decade together, and she has never seen him so angry.

__

They go upstate for the weekend, get away from the phone.

– My mother left him. A couple of years later we left East Germany.

Jochen drives, and Hannah sits in the back with the twins sleeping one on either side of her, strapped into their bright and padded seats. There are long silences, just the engine, the tyres on the road, and Hannah waits for Jochen to talk again, watching the freeway stretch off in front of them, the back of her husband’s head.

– I was five. So Karl was nine or ten.

Part of Hannah is glad this is happening. Not that her father-in-law is ill, and that her husband is unhappy, but that she is hearing Jochen talk about it all. That life before she know him, which never seemed hidden until now, when so much is being revealed.

– I’m glad she did it, you know. Took us with her.

Bad enough with him as a father-at-a-distance; life would have been intolerable with him as a father-close-up.

– He wasn’t interested in us. What we liked doing, what we thought about things. We just didn’t exist like that for him.

Jochen’s harsh tones are not always easy to bear, but Hannah persists, hoping he might tell her something that will help her understand where this rawness comes from.

– Maybe that’s because you didn’t live with him?

– No. Ask Karl. He’s older, remembers more. No, It was like that even before we left.

That they had no problems leaving the East is final proof for Jochen. Of his father’s lack of love. He had his connections, her husband insists, he was not unimportant. Thousands of people put in applications to visit relatives in the West every year, only a fraction were granted. Pensioners were allowed to go: no longer useful, and Jochen thinks they fell into that category. The authorities were paranoid, controlling, but they were not stupid, he says. His mother’s application was approved very quickly, although it was obvious to all that she would never return. Hannah stares out at the New York roadscape, listening, not questioning or interjecting, but if she is honest, she finds Jochen’s logic a little difficult to follow.

– You always say you’re glad to have grown up in the West.

– That’s not the point, Hannah. He didn’t care. He didn’t want us.

It is this aspect that Hannah finds most implausible. After his speech at their wedding, her new father-in-law asked
her to dance. Jochen had warned her that he would be difficult, had not told her that he could also be so nice. He spoke with her for a long time about her work, her family, her hopes for the future. Made it clear that he liked her, found her interesting.

– As a person, you know. Not just as his son’s wife.

Hannah says that to her husband, watches his reaction in the rear-view mirror. The sad eyes, the shrug.

__

What little she knows of her husband’s father is that he is a communist.

– Old. Even when I was young. Fifty when I was born.

1965. Hannah counts backwards to 1915 and then upwards again. Eighteen in 1933. She doesn’t ask what happened to him under Hitler, knows only two things: that it was probably bad and that he survived.

__

– Oh enough now, boring, let’s change the subject.

– Christ, J. Why do you always say that? What is that all about?

They used to argue like this a lot, when they first started living together. Whenever they talked about Germany, which they used to do frequently because reunification
was in all the newspapers and Hannah was interested and often brought it up.

– I mean it’s complicated. Not really interesting unless you’re German, I guess.

– No. No, that’s just it. The conversation will just be getting really interesting, and then you kill it with your lame this-is-getting-boring excuse.

– It’s not an excuse.

– Yes it is. It is. You say you can’t explain it, but really you mean you don’t want to. And because I’m not German and won’t understand anyway, it means you don’t have to. Period.

And most of the time, Hannah would succeed in making her own full stop in the argument that way, and what she took to be thoughtful silence would follow. Until the evening Jochen called her bluff.

– I don’t want to talk about Nazis with you, Hannah.

He said it calmly, matter of fact.

– We talk about Germany. We start with reunification, or with my parents, and within five minutes we’re talking about Nazis. I just don’t want to do it. Enough.