The Recent East: A Novel

PART ONE

1

1968

Everyone talked about the West as if it were a secret. They leaned in to share stories of its grocery stores that carried fresh oranges, its cars with built-in radios. Covered their mouths to mention a Düsseldorf boulevard that catered to movie stars and dictators, whole Eastern month’s salaries spent on face cream. There were entire, whispered conversations about its large houses and overstuffed stores, its borders crossed with a smile and a flick of one’s passport. Some talked about it as if it were the most boring thing. Others like it was an uppity friend. But everyone talked about it, also pretended it never crossed their minds. Whenever Beate heard these stories, she felt frightened. Because its freedoms seemed vast, because each story said something different. The West a puzzle she couldn’t begin to solve. Now Beate’s mother stood in her doorway—coat on, pulled-back hair turning her face peevish and alert, like a nun’s—and told her they were going there.

West West? Beate asked.

Saying it once will do, Mutti answered.

Beate tried to decide if this was information or a joke, though her mother rarely joked. She finally settled on, We never go anywhere.

A sigh lifted her mother’s chest. You’re just an old woman, Beate thought. At twelve Beate was already taller than her, close to the height of her father, who when she stood next to him often said, I used to be tall, too, as if height were something—like keys—to lose track of.

Mutti fussed with her coat’s buttons.

I should pack something, Beate said.

I’ve packed for you already, her mother answered. We’re leaving in five minutes. Wear something warm.

On their one trip to Berlin, Beate had glimpsed the wall guarded by soldiers and barbed wire. At home in Kritzhagen, radio stations sometimes came in from Lübeck, talking about the same weather but advertising brands she’d never heard of. She rifled through her closet. Three minutes, Mutti called, then, One. Beate’s stomach ached. She put on her favorite shoes, though they were a size too small.

In the bus to the station, Beate sat wedged between her parents. She felt sick from its diesel smell and from the cobbles jostling her body. As their city smeared past, as her nausea rose and receded, Beate conjured the West—streets with identically shaped trees, wares shimmering in shops. Its alleys boys at school talked about, filled with blow jobs and people so drunk they had no pupils. Beate wore a hand-me-down jacket, a fake broach for its top button. She lifted the broach to her mouth; it tasted bitter. Neither of her parents noticed what she was doing.

Soldiers gathered in the train station where Beate and her parents sat. A pigeon strutted across the floor, pecking at crumbs and garbage. Beate’s father looked even older that day, his thinning hair a dazzle of pomade, his stomach a spongy ornament. Her parents were professors, always dressed as if they were off to teach a class. That day Vati wore a tie and cardigan, Mutti a mud-colored dress that seemed both disappointing and right.

I will sit with the luggage, Vati said.

I’ll take the girl to the toilet, Mutti answered.

I don’t need to use the toilet, Beate said.

She moved her hands through her hair, making sure her ears were covered. Beate had ears like the leaves of a houseplant, thin and large and loath to hide from the sun.

The toilets on the train will be terrible, Mutti said, and slid a hand under Beate’s arm.

Inside the bathroom, Mutti crouched to look under the stalls. Her tights bunched at her ankles.

Mutti, Beate said.

You need to learn to be quiet, her mother answered.

Water plinked into a sink’s basin.

Taking Beate’s arm again, her mother brought her into the last stall. Its toilet was old. A tank crowded the wall behind it. Beate stared at the pores on Mutti’s neck, the lipstick clumped at her mouth’s corners. Her mother lifted something from her pocket and handed it over, then pulled on the toilet’s chain. It was a passport. The tank burst into action.

We live in Cologne, thirty-four Wevelinghovenerstraße, she whispered. You attend the Ursulinenschule. We were here visiting a cousin who is sick.

We don’t have any sick cousins, Beate answered.

Whisper.

We don’t have any sick cousins, she whispered.

Mutti answered that she did, that his name was Peter Bergmann.

Is he young or old? Beate asked.

Her mother flushed again. Of course he’s old. We’re visiting an old cousin. Your father’s.

Is it because Vati’s old?

Your father isn’t that old.

But Mutti—

Child. When they ask, your father and I will talk. Unless they ask you in particular.

Beate had no memory of the passport’s picture being taken, the name on it so fake-sounding they’d surely see through its disguise and arrest them. Arrest was everywhere in Kritzhagen, like traffic or rain. Mutti pushed her lips together and Beate felt a sadness for her that she couldn’t explain. The two of them were rarely this close, though they’d been very close once. Beate had just learned about reproduction in science class and felt embarrassed for her former tenancy inside Mutti, like a kidney.

We live in Cologne. Thirty-four Wevelinghovenerstraße, her mother repeated. You attend the Ursulinenschule. We were visiting a sick cousin. Please repeat.

We live in Cologne.

Whisper.

We live in Cologne, thirty-four Wevel—

Wevelinghovenerstraße.

Wevelinghovenerstraße. I attend Ursulinenschule and I love art.

Don’t add, Mutti said. You don’t even love art.

The bathroom door opened and Mutti grabbed her daughter’s cheeks. Beate wanted to laugh but did not. Though not a relic like her father, her mother was old, too. People regularly mistook her for a grandmother or spinster aunt, in part because of the stiff discomfort that spread across Mutti’s face when Beate cried in public or made up dumb songs. Or when Beate adjusted her skirt and Mutti growled that she looked like she was fiddling with her private places.

Open the door, her mother said, flushing for a third time.

The woman who’d come in reminded Beate of a painting she’d seen once, one in a room of long-faced portraits. It had been warm that day and the museum had opened its windows. Stray leaves crackled over the floor that Mutti had stopped to pick up over and over.

She gets nervous with traveling, Mutti said to the woman. Beate, wash your hands.

Beate turned the water on. It was freezing. She wanted the woman to say something about how nice it was for a grandmother and granddaughter to travel together, though she did not.

I’m not nervous, Beate mumbled. I didn’t even have to go to the bathroom.

The women exchanged looks, as if they knew everything and she knew nothing, though the opposite felt true. Beate could tell the station’s soldiers that she and her family lived in Kritzhagen, that these passports were fake, West not home but a mystery. There was no cousin or street she couldn’t remember; she liked art despite what Mutti had decided was true. Her mother turned off the faucet and ushered Beate outside, where her father sagged next to the luggage.

They called our train, he said.

Wevelinghovenerstraße, Beate whispered, and picked up the suitcase her mother had packed for her.

Her father shuffled more than usual. Perhaps this—along with the new, reedy quality in his voice—was part of their scheme. It hit Beate then that this was dangerous, that they hadn’t told her about the trip or the passports as a protection. Love for her parents rose with the surprise of a sneeze. Beate walked close to them. She talked loudly about going home, in case anyone was listening.

When soldiers examined and reexamined their passports, when at the border crossing outside Lübeck they were taken into a room and asked questions, all of them directed at her father, Beate itched. She wondered what the GDR would steal from her suitcase. Felt sure her mother had packed sweaters Beate no longer fit into and left behind the pants she’d had to finagle for five months to get. Beate’s hands itched, also her arms. Vati touched her shoulder. This display felt as fake as the opera they’d once gone to, where everyone sang with faces of extreme constipation. They weren’t going back home, Beate realized. Both soldiers had acne.

Your cousin, the first soldier said, his chin a suggestion. Quite sick, you say.

I almost didn’t recognize him, Vati answered.

Close?

I’m sorry?

So close you all came to see him?

I wanted him to meet our girl, he said, squeezing Beate’s shoulder. Beate smiled. She touched the back of her teeth with her tongue and worked to blink slowly.

And she was happy to meet him? the soldier asked.

I believe she was, her father answered.

Beate’s itching grew, as it did after coming in from the cold.

The room had no windows. In Kritzhagen, Beate’s cousin Liesl had talked about her fear of small spaces so exuberantly that Beate assumed she was making it up. She understood it now. The walls leaned. Smells of coffee and ashtrays left little room for the rest of them.

But seeing someone so close to death? Was that not hard for her?

Life is sometimes hard, her father answered.

Beate had never heard anyone question him, let alone someone the age of his students. Though her father didn’t yell, though he was hunched and slow, he was always in charge. A cluster of stubble sat below his ear. He held letters filled with their fake last name, which had something to do with the sea. The itching spread to Beate’s knees.

Beate wanted nothing more than to run outside and rub against something as a cat might.

But it was important, her father went on. To see him.

Beate moved her hands to the back of her knees, but Mutti stilled her. Her fingers were so close. Her mother’s cruelty felt exceptional. She tried to grab on to anything outside of her body—the stink from nearby traffic, the soldier’s blackened thumbnail—unsure if she wanted to go West at all. The officer closed their passports, which perhaps meant they’d been caught or were cleared to go. Beate placed one foot on top of the other, slid it back and forth and back again. She needed to get out of this room, which was warm and smelled of old sandwiches.

I was happy, Beate blurted. To meet my cousin. Though he was dying, I was happy to know him.

The soldier wrote down: She was happy. Beate thought to say more, but the room’s size, the plague of itching, turned thinking into a steep mountain. A soldier’s foot shifted, touching hers. Perhaps he’d mistaken it for a table leg; perhaps he and the other soldier communicated in a language of taps and pressures. Beate pressed back and watched the soldier write something down and couldn’t remember if she’d brushed her teeth that morning. When he told them they could go, Beate felt as she imagined her friend Astrid Münster did when she’d come to sudden, happy conclusions about Jesus.

Beate and her parents stood in a hallway in Lübeck’s train station, its walls lined with ads for items she’d never seen. People parted and came together around them, as if they were a rock in a river.

Do we really live on that street? Beate asked.

That was just for getting out, her father said. You are Beate now. Again.

We’re not going back, she said.

Her parents smiled, as if minutes before their true, useless selves hadn’t shone through, her father gripping fake papers, Mutti saying nothing at all. Beate scratched her neck and collarbone. Don’t, her mother hissed. Beate wished she’d stayed quiet as they’d been questioned, that she hadn’t announced a happiness she hadn’t felt for a person that hadn’t existed. She scratched the back of one leg with a foot, trying to imagine that buildings and the smells of winter would be different in the West, better.

The apartment they were staying in, in Cologne, was tiny. It belonged to the mother of one of Vati’s many faceless friends, an old woman who’d recently, suddenly died. This should’ve frightened Beate, but the place was too small for ghosts.

Vati got the twin bed in its bedroom, Mutti a row of cushions on its floor. Beate was given the living room couch, its pillows patterned in buttons.

How long is this ours? Beate asked.

She’d only slept in houses before, with bedrooms on a different floor, and long, large rooms. Here was a room that wasn’t a bedroom. Traffic rumbled down the street outside.

Vati is teaching at the university this semester. Then we’ll make other arrangements.

So this apartment isn’t ours?

We’re making arrangements, Mutti repeated.

Vati was asleep already. Mutti soon followed suit. Beate stared out the window, which showed little apart from the narrow street, windows warm behind curtains. People passed. A man in a green hat talked to his dog. The highlight came when a car tried to wedge into a tiny spot. You’ll never fit, Beate whispered, though it did, and in this little living room—closet of a kitchen on one side, the bed and bathroom on the other—she admired the driver’s skill. The driver turned out to be a woman in a loose sweater. There was something beautiful in the way she lifted one foot off the ground as she double-checked the locks, the swish as her purse rocked against her hip. Beate wanted to go with her to her apartment, to be in a place where someone actually lived. To ask this woman about Cologne and her car and the comedy programs on television.

The next morning, Mutti out for groceries, her father at a meeting, Beate explored the apartment. A box full of jewelry sat on the dead woman’s dresser. Beate clipped earrings on. She opened drawers in hopes to find a picture of this woman, Frau Eggers, though the only ones she discovered showed dour children on bicycles and in a pool. It felt strange to look through this woman’s clothes, to smell her coats and use her dishes while not knowing if she’d been a toothless old person or a regal one, whether her hair had been white or dyed, short or long.

The knock startled Beate; she opened the door without thinking. The man outside it wore matching shirt and pants. Pencils rested behind each of his ears.

I’m here for the furniture, he said.

You’re taking the furniture? Beate asked.

Measuring. Herr Flegmann was meant to call. The pencils bobbed as he spoke.

I’m here by myself, she answered.

It’ll only take a minute, he said.

Letting the man in felt right, also not, Beate unsure if the fearful reluctance she’d learned in Kritzhagen was universal or specific, or if trust was an easy thing to wear in Cologne, some cotton sweater.

My boss told me there were people staying here, that your last name is Haas. It’ll only take a minute. Though I’ve said that already.

Beate let this man in. His measuring tape clanked open.

We defected, you know, she said. Yesterday, I lived in Kritzhagen.

The man wrote down the size of the dresser and bed, the end tables.

We had fake passports, Beate went on. I had some other name.

He measured the sofa that was Beate’s bed. The tip of his pencil broke and he pulled out the other. The dead woman’s earrings ached against Beate’s lobes.

Why are you measuring all of this?

We’ll buy it. Then sell it.

Did you know Frau Eggers?

This is just my job, he answered.

While he measured the icebox, she went into the bedroom. Her parents’ suitcase was formidably neat. If the passports were there, she couldn’t imagine the unearthing it would take to find them. Her parents had no patience for Beate looking through their things. In their house, when they’d caught her hiding in their closet, they removed her by the elbow and wouldn’t talk to her for a day, apart from declarations about what was hers, theirs. Thinking of that closet, with its shoes in rows, its air cool even on Kritzhagen’s hot days, Beate realized that, like someone living, then dead, that house had moved from place to memory.

Beate replaced the earrings with a different pair.

After a week at school in Cologne, which was both easy and hard, where girls reminded her of dogs from a book she’d had with pages of collies and shepherds alertly fluffy, Beate came home to the relief of an empty apartment. She wore a cheap skirt and blouse. Frau Eggers had a closet of gray and brown dresses. Bolts of the same fabric sat behind them, next to a sewing machine. Beate took the fabric and machine from the closet.

Make my clothes with these, she said when Mutti returned, not with groceries, or anything at all.

I’ve taught you to sew, her mother answered, and took the opportunity of Vati’s absence to nap on the bed with her shoes on. After lying on the fabric to take crude measurements, Beate sewed herself a brown sack dress that smelled like Frau Eggers, whom Beate had started calling by her first name: Adela.

The next day, girls at school commented on it. Are you Russian? one asked. Another did a dance that had something to do with gypsies. They were in math. A girl with a pig nose leaned in to Beate and sniffed. Another asked if she’d ever met Brezhnev.

The little Soviet, classmates started to say.

Though Beate knew it was an insult, the truth of it felt good. After girls called her this name, Beate stared at them with the unblinking frown of the soldiers who’d questioned them until those girls blushed into their laps. When a boy from a neighboring school followed her home one afternoon and said, You like fucking, little Soviet, Beate stared the same way and answered, I’m taller than you. A swallow stuttered down his throat, and the unreal feeling of Cologne slipped away. The next day, the girl with the pig nose walked past and didn’t say anything. Beate stared. What? the girl asked. Adela Eggers, Beate answered. She walked into literature class and sat at an empty table. Students saw her there, then squeezed into tables that were already full.

She kept wearing the dress, blotting its stains each night and spraying its armpits with Frau Eggers’s lavender water. And after weeks of wearing it, as the credenza and television were taken to be sold, her father finally noticed. They sat at the kitchen table that would be gone in a week. A crooning from the apartment below may have been Elvis.

That dress, he said. You look like a Bolshevik.

It’s just a dress, Beate answered.

I think she made it, Mutti said.

For the rest of dinner Vati called her the girl, as if she were something that had come with the apartment and would also soon be sold.

The next morning, changing in the bathroom as was her custom, Beate put the dress on, took it off, and settled on a cheap blouse and skirt that Mutti had gotten her. At school she turned invisible again. She missed the confused fear of other girls when she stared or finished her math minutes before the rest of them and announced to the room: I learned this already.

She took the dress out each morning and tried it on, put on her Moscow face, worked on her Leningrad walk. After she hadn’t worn it outside of the bathroom for a week, her father spoke to her normally again. One night he asked: "Child. How is school?"

As she stared at her soft-boiled dinner, Beate realized that the perplexed looks from classmates mattered to her more than Vati’s talking or not talking to her. She wanted students to whisper, Soviet, then say, when she stared, It wasn’t me! As she told Vati about the algebra she was learning—not mentioning that she’d mastered it the year before—she decided to wear the dress again the next day.

When she snuck out of the apartment in the morning, she thought of girls in her class punished for wearing short skirts. Her sneaking a different subversion. Walking into school, she held down a smile at the looks that at any moment might come.

She walked up to the girl with the nostrils and said, Notice anything?

Alarmed, the girl answered, Are you making fun of me?

My dress! Beate answered.

The girl found a classroom and slid inside.

By week’s end, the Soviet comments petered out. When Beate stared at a girl one day, that girl handed her a pencil, then said, Pencil, slowly, and people smirked. When another student looked at Beate, then asked a friend, What’s wrong with her? the friend answered, That’s just what she does.

At home, Vati went on about his terrible students. Being in a free country, according to him, meant it was their right not to know things. She tugged at the dress as she sat down to dinner, a muddy soup with fists of floating potato. She tried to get each swallow down before its taste registered. Vati complained about a student who’d confused Plato with a self-help book. Beate closed her eyes so as not to look at what she was eating. It had a fetid, toilet quality, and she was sure it would reverse course and pummel her tongue and nose. Beate lifted her spoon. As it veered toward her chin, soup slipped onto her lap. And her parents laughed. Beate dreamed of soup spilling on them instead. Imagined the soldiers arresting them rather than letting them cross to Germany’s democratic side, her parents in jail, Beate living with her aunt and her cousin Liesl, who taunted Beate but also made her laugh, Liesl, who knew when she needed an extra blanket or to be told to stop talking. It’s nothing, Beate said, and her parents tried to hold in their laughter, which turned their faces grotesque. She could tell them she hated this place, but they’d answer with pity. Could throw her bowl against the wall, but that would turn her into a culprit. Also, the bowls were being sold. As Beate went to the bathroom to rinse the dress in the sink, she thought of the other dresses she’d make in the week and a half they had left in Adela Eggers’s apartment. Mutti had found them a new place to live. Beate would have her own room, though it would take her an hour to get to school. As she scrubbed, more dresses became her singular remedy. Brown and gray and sweetly scented in Adela Eggers’s perfume. Sacks so shapeless that her classmates would have to react to them.

People outside bellowed as they left a bar. Vati snored in the other room. Beate lay on the sofa and tried to remember her bedroom in Kritzhagen, alarmed as parts of it already started to fuzz over. She would forget this place, too. The dresses she made would stick with her longer than anything about Frau Eggers, whose picture Beate still hadn’t seen, whose furniture was being plucked from the apartment each day, like ripened vegetables. Beate tried to memorize the ceiling she stared at each night as sleep hovered but refused to land.

The bedroom door opened. Mutti tiptoed to the living room window. Her hair, usually up, tumbled past her shoulders in a way that felt girlish and strange. Streetlamps deepened her wrinkles.

Hi, Mutti, Beate said.

You’re awake, Mutti answered. Her shadow crowded the ceiling. Adela Eggers must have stared at this ceiling, too, must have fallen asleep on this sofa while reading or watching television. Maybe she’d died there.

My bed is not a real bed, Beate said.

I sleep on some cushions, Mutti answered. Perhaps she came out here most nights and stood next to Beate, moving hair from her sleeping daughter’s face. Or she stared out the window, trying to make sense of this city’s crowded streets and loud people.

I was here once years before, Mutti said.

This apartment? Beate asked.

Her mother’s consternation was, in its familiarity, relieving.

I was close to your age and we were in Cologne, though I don’t remember why. We spent some time near the river.

Did you like it? Beate asked. Mutti didn’t answer.

In those moments of near-sleep Beate sometimes imagined Adela Eggers walking into the room, seeing Beate there. Stop using my fabric, imaginary Adela would say. You’re dead, Beate would answer, waiting to see if the woman would turn angry or stare out the window as Mutti did, talking to Beate without looking at her.

Why did we leave Kritzhagen? Beate asked.

Outside, a car door closed. Beate hoped it was the woman she’d watched parking weeks before.

You know your father, Mutti said.

Vati made the decision? Beate asked.

Not only Vati.

Did he say? Why?

It was more than your father, she repeated, though perhaps he’d declared one day that it was time—declarations his favorite form of talking—Mutti too afraid to challenge him.

Sleep, child, her mother said.

I want to know, Beate answered.

Her mother’s shrug told her to sleep anyway.

That day, Mutti had worn the same brown dress she’d had on when they’d defected. So Eastern-looking Beate couldn’t imagine their luck in getting to the other side. Unless Mutti hadn’t wanted luck, her mother won over by stories of the West as a dangerous animal. Her annoyance at Beate in the train station not about the fake street her daughter forgot, but about decisions others made. Maybe Mutti had worn that dress in hopes of being found out. Perhaps she tried and failed to find a way to stay. Maybe Mutti had gone into Beate’s room the day before they’d left and packed useless things for her daughter, certain they’d never make it across the border.

2

1990

Michael and Adela got home to find their father gone. His books swept off shelves. Closet empty apart from a button-down and a pair of fancy shoes, remnants of the teaching job from which he’d been fired. Dust lined the closet floor.

"Ein Wunder," Michael said. A miracle. Because after years of Dad’s sulky pronouncements, after fights with their mother where he howled that he was leaving but never did, he finally took action. Michael grinned. He grabbed Dad’s shirt, pointed to the shoes with his chin. Adela picked them up and followed.

Where are we going? she asked, annoyed, as she usually had a say on their wheres and whys.

Can’t it be a surprise? Michael asked back.

They walked to the lot behind the Grand Union. The rumor for as long as they could remember was that it was going to be turned into a park. But no park appeared, only collages of bottle caps and cigarette butts, and a car left there so long squirrels now lived in its engine. Michael—thirteen, Adela underneath him by a year and change—moved past all this. Stopping at a patch of dirt, he tried to dig a hole.

Isn’t the ground a block of ice? Adela asked.

Don’t they bury dead people in winter, too? Michael answered.

A game of theirs was to speak only in questions. Their record was thirty-eight.

When hacking at the ground did nothing, Michael covered Dad’s shirt and shoes with swathes of leaves, reminding Adela of the story they’d been obsessed with a year before about a dental hygienist who’d left her office late one night and disappeared. It had become a staple on the evening news. Search parties scouring forests. A befuddled sheriff who leaned too close to any microphone he talked into. When the woman’s body was found, in a spot like the one they stood in now, she was covered in what Michael had called a bikini of leaves.

Janet DeMarco, he said, invoking her name. For a minute, Adela worried he could read her