Shorter Days Read online

  The revolving door turns, ferrying a constant stream of new people from the darkness into the lobby, like a tireless glass paddle-wheel. Fathers with pizza boxes. Mothers speaking loudly into phones clamped to their ears, lowering their voices once they get inside, then putting away their devices and falling silent. A plump old woman carrying a brown faux-leather suitcase in one hand and a huge stuffed animal in the other. She walks purposefully towards Judith. The toy, a fat snake with huge plastic eyes, sticks out a long pink tongue, fleecy and accurately forked.

  The woman’s face is red and moist. Tears run down continuously under the dirty lenses of her glasses, rolling over her fat cheeks and soaking into a scratchy-looking scarf. “Ya know me—I’m Mattis’s grandma. Ya drove him and Hanna here, right?” She takes a tissue from her jacket and blows her nose hard. She’d come to visit her grandson, the poor fellow. Station 12, as usual. The hospital had called and told her that Hanna was to blame for Mattis’s sickness. She’d been feeding him stuff this whole time: poison, laxatives, emetics. They’d tested his blood last time, and now there was no doubt. Hanna had always been a sly one. She couldn’t even stand to look at her daughter any more. They’d taken her away to another clinic. What had she done to deserve all this?

  Judith is glad that Mattis’s grandmother doesn’t wait for an answer. She takes her snake and stands in front of the elevator, which Judith has been keeping in view the whole time anyway. She gets in and disappears. Judith shrugs. She feels both pity and horror, like when she sees news of a catastrophe on television. And just as she fades the news with the touch of a button, she closes her eyes to conjure up a different image in her mind.

  The cold outside does her good. She leaves her jacket unbuttoned and takes out the Rothändles. She shoots out the smoke with a deep sigh, causing the smoker next to her to surreptitiously turn her head away. A slip of pink paper covered with stamps peeks from the pocket of her jogging pants, which is already bulging with the cigarettes and lighter. “The pink meal voucher and slippers—that’s how you can tell who really belongs here,” Hanna had said with a touch of pride, as if discussing membership in an exclusive club. The other woman stubs out her cigarette in a sand-filled concrete receptacle. She nods at Judith and shuffles her wide behind inside. I didn’t let myself go like that: same clothing size, even after two kids. He’ll be able to see that, even under this scarecrow get-up.

  At the same time, she wonders how he’ll react to her body, with the silvery stretch marks under her belly button, the sagging breasts, the delicate violet network of spider veins on her thighs and around her ankles. She looks at her reflection in the window. Her face isn’t bad, particularly the eyes. They’ve lost the dazed, sheep-like look of the mother, the Klaus-wife, the housewife, they’re alert and excited. She finds floral wire in the pocket of this damn jacket, a tin with herbal lozenges, but no lipstick, not even chapstick. She bites her lips to make them look redder and reaches for hairpins, only to draw her hand back, empty.

  The gardening clothes feel like a Mardi Gras costume. A cocoon, that would be another word for it. A cocoon is what peels away to reveal a butterfly. Will she do that today, peel away the earth-colored rags the way the insect sloughs off the chitinous brown shell to become something beautiful, something better? A glimmering silvery creature that spreads its wings and rises upward. Into the beguiling light of a scorching flame? Into a fiend’s crushing fist? What do I want to be? Scarecrow, housewife, Klauswife, Mama, porridge-cook, bottom-wiper, floor-scrubber? Or shall I instead step back out of the warm stink, back out to the shining, snow-capped, neon-white peak of the Hackstraße landscape, where the streams of vodka and tequila flow clear, where the night is always artificially illuminated and the day is slept away in a twilight of drawn blinds? Where the story always resolves in the long-awaited embrace, suffocation by Sören’s tongue, burial under his flesh, the flesh which he never allowed her to truly join?

  Why is she even thinking of that? She’ll never undress for him again. Why doesn’t she just go home? She could take Hanna’s Renault, if it hasn’t already been towed. Or she’ll take the streetcar from Schloßstraße. Subway to Österreichische Platz. Ten minutes and she’ll be back where she belongs.

  Sören walks through the revolving door. He still wears the bomber jacket, black jeans, biker boots. Some people call me the space cowboy, some call me the gangster of love. His gym bag hangs from his left shoulder. He tosses it under the bench. “You really waited?” His eyes look tired behind the glasses, which are flecked with tiny drops. Judith nods. “It’s finally Friday, and you’re really still here. I heard from Jasper that you got married—some bullshit engineer.” Judith sees Jasper’s fox-like Young Union face in her mind, the fencing scar marring its milk-fed look, and has to push the image from her mind before she can answer: “Klaus is a professor at the University of Stuttgart.” Sören grins, his tired expression vanishing. He takes the coffee from her hand and sips it. “Ugh, it’s barely lukewarm. Twenty-hour shift—bullshit from start to finish. That last one was the icing on the cake.” He crumples the empty cup in his fist and furrows his brow. Judith looks at his mouth. She wants to stretch out her hand and trace the sharp outline of his lips with her finger. “Klaus—he was that tool who lived under you. Blond guy. Must be a drag, or you wouldn’t be standing around here in the cold with dishwater coffee.” Sören touches her arm. Judith closes her eyes—she wants to hurl herself into the abyss of his touch. Now it’s happening, and I’m letting it happen, I’m letting the cocoon fall away. “Sören, please don’t.” She whispers the old, nearly-forgotten phrase, the preface to their every encounter. He begins. He throws down her things. He’s the one that calls the shots. He reaches for her arm, but instead of Judith’s desired flesh he touches the rough fabric of her jacket. “Can you imagine if someone had told you six years ago you’d be out in public like this? You look like an eco-freak! But Klaus probably likes that.” She wants to answer, wants to say something cynical and poisonous, but the words won’t come—she can only stand there and wait until the dissonant overture ends and the feature presentation begins. She’s surprised by her hunger, her naked desire for his touch; she stares at his hands with their trimmed nails, his skin taut from washing and disinfectant. All she wants is for him to overpower her in the darkness of her Hackstraße room; she can hear the squeaking of the pull-out couch and smell Sören’s sweat. How many times did it happen—a hundred times, a thousand, just one more time. Sören has long since dropped his hand from her sleeve. He picks up his bag and shakes his head.

  “Typical Judith. Standing and waiting, just like old times. I can’t handle the way you look at me. This wasn’t a good idea. Go home to your little Klausie. I’m getting out of here. I’m tired, and I’ve had enough bullshit for one day.”

  It would be cheap to run after him, of course, to grab his leather jacket and not let go. Ridiculous to scream, “You asshole! You’ve always been an asshole!” It’s degrading how he took her hand and then let it go: both careful and determined, like the way she unclasps Killian’s fingers from her clothing one by one when he throws a tantrum. It’s utterly final, the way he walks out the gate, disappearing into the darkness with his swift steps, shaking his head all the while.

  Judith walks slowly through the Österreichischer Platz underpass, its walls covered with colorful metal plates. She pauses briefly by one of the orange ticket machines and leans her tear-stained face against the wall. She hears Sören’s voice in her ears, unrelentingly repeating the same insults, both old and very fresh. She has no reply, and she presses her fists against her eyelids, feels her pulse racing behind them. She wants to go home, to the medicine cabinet, to her Tavor. How much will she need to make it silent, to smother the piercing whispers in her head?

  She goes out the Christophstraße exit. Wheezing her way up the hill, she passes the community center, with announcements posted in its windows: gymnastics classes for kids, healing by therapeutic touch. She stops again at Mozart P
latz to catch her breath. The restaurant on the corner is full. Judith doesn’t see individual faces, only the contentment of those inside: undisturbed, free of anxiety.

  The traffic light across from the nursing home turns green. She hurries across the street and rushes past the wooden statue of St. Martin, who towers huge and jagged over the beggar who huddles beneath him, sheltered under the edges of his coat. “Where’s his sword, Mama? He doesn’t have a sword. If he doesn’t have a sword, why’s his coat sticking out like that?” Kilian and Uli always complain that the saint, who’s supposed to be a knight, carries no visible weapon. But now she’s not Mama, she’s a pill-addicted slut whose past could be material for a porno directed by Tarantino. The dainty, perfectly cleaned and appointed apartment that she now so longs for, the warm glow of the lamp over the dining room table, the flowers in the windows, the nature table with its felt dwarves, decorated for winter—all could dissolve at any moment into a panopticon of abomination. Suddenly, instead of oats and semolina, bluish-black fetuses float in the jars on the kitchen shelves. As a baby, all of Goethe’s limbs were bluish black, and behind the curtain in the bedroom lurks the hydrocephalous boy who’s to be raised by Steiner until the day he starts college. His grin is spiteful, his high forehead bulges like a roll soaked in milk. Judith runs up the steps at the top of Bopserstraße, sobbing. Something’s burning—a strong, scratchy smell makes her cough. She tries to force different images into her head as she runs.

  Uli and Kilian: the Hans-Thoma-children with apple-cheeks and blond curls, well-adjusted and healthy. They’re at the Posselts’, they’ll feel a little sick, but that’s not so bad. She can cure that. Klaus will come home, like he does every Thursday. A few stories from the university, a few light, dry kisses on the corner of her mouth, cheeks, forehead. They’ll talk about the children. Later, a glass of red wine on the sofa, his arm around her shoulders.

  She doesn’t want to ask questions. The bell that swings them all, that brings them safely and securely through the days, mustn’t be disturbed, mustn’t lose the full, dark tone that deafens them to the whisper of fear.

  Klaus loves the boys. He loves them so much that he’d like another one. A tiny new bundle wrapped in a yellow-brown wool blanket. A girl would be nice. She could call it Rike, like in Mörike: “Are you sleeping, Rike?” And Klaus can cut the umbilical cord again, laughing, his face covered in tears as the child emerges from her spread legs. The tiny child’s thin whine will carve up Klaus’s nights and weaken him, bowing his back and making his penis droop. She sees Rike’s fuzzy head in the crook of Klaus’s arm—a tiny lady Venus, demanding her huge Tannhäuser’s attention, until he finally falls asleep in a mountain of pillows and sheepskin, clouded in mists of milk and post-birth discharge, next to Judith’s ruby-red-suckled nipples. As with Kilian and Ulrich, he’ll be a devoted father, home every evening, even Thursdays.

  Once again, she tries to fix her mind on the place where these redemptive scenes will take place. Just a few minutes and she’ll be there, at home. At home: Judith murmurs it like a mantra as she wheezes up the steps, then passes the Baden-Württemburg Farmer’s Association building, from whose glass foyer a black-and-white-painted cow points its sharp horns in her direction. She can see the “snake path” winding up the hillside across the way. The lanterns sprout from the undergrowth like curious mushrooms and illuminate the cul-de-sac, which is unusually full of cars. Cars turn and back out, humming as they disappear up the hill in the opposite direction. On Constantinstraße, which Judith finally reaches, breathing hard, cars are bottlenecked in front of a row of red-and-white-striped traffic cones topped with flashing lights. A policeman waves. The flashing blue lights of emergency vehicles light up the area like a little fairground.

  Sluggish clouds of smoke drift through the blue lights and rise into the reddish-brown evening sky. The fire truck stands at the edge of the street next to two ambulances; the sidewalk is blocked off. Judith sees firemen with yellow helmets, EMTs, and policemen. Nâzim’s big display window is shattered. The shards that still cling to the sides form a giant star filled with blackness and smoke. Judith stands and looks, a rubbernecker among the other gawkers, whose comments are loud and penetrating: “Arson, no question.” “Islamists!” “Don’t be ridiculous, it was the PKK!” “It’s a Turkish shop.” “Nâzim—they’re taking him away now.” She hears the distorted metallic directives through the emergency team’s walkie-talkies, and the policeman’s irritated voice: “Go home, folks, there’s nothin’ to see here!” Slammed car doors, and then the siren, piercingly loud. Judith presses her fists against her ears. Holding her head as if she’s worried it might be torn off, she stares at the second ambulance, which is still parked. Two people are sitting between the open back doors, garishly illuminated from inside. Leonie’s face is smudged with black and her red hair hangs in strings over her eyes, which look like holes in a piece of paper. A blanket covers her shoulders. An EMT passes her a paper cup. Her husband sits next to her, looking at the ground. Judith lowers her eyes to avoid meeting Leonie’s. Maybe she didn’t even notice. What she really wants is to bury her face in her hands like a child who thinks it can disappear by closing its eyes. Standing on Constantinstraße, she finds herself catapulted into the middle of the evening news, and she’s almost surprised not to see headlines running along the curb or the station logo lurking in the corner of her field of vision. This is what the images from Kabul, Kandahar, Baghdad would smell like if they had a smell. Now she has to look at Leonie and her husband, a big sporty guy who’s bent over, hands folded in his lap, and at the star in the window with burnt-out darkness behind. Just yesterday she’d stood here holding Kilian’s hand. None of this belongs here, yet somehow it found its way, between the baskets of apples and pots of basil, into her paradise.

  The EMT speaks to Leonie, and she turns her face from Judith. Judith pivots and walks away, bumping into a few passersby in her haste. She looks up. The buildings along her path look the same as ever, although many of the windows are open, with black heads in the illuminated frames. They hang out over the street, letting the smoke and cold into their warm rooms. Judith breaks from a trot into a run, abandoning all reserve and fleeing with quivering nostrils: a cowardly animal—a rabbit or something that can be cooked into a ragout. She sees her building, like a huge ship anchored in the darkness. The Hutzelmännle is there with his friendly grimace, hanging over the door as always. Melter-away of bad luck, comforter, protect me, let me come back in under your stony grimace, a child on each hand.

  Her gaze climbs up the floors: Lights on at the Posselts’, dark at the Rapps’: shiny black panes with nothing moving behind them. Even in the back rooms there’s no one to make tea or warm up the casserole that she’d set out on the counter before they went out to hang the lanterns. It’s seven-thirty, and Klaus isn’t home yet.

  Judith shifts from foot to foot outside the Posselts’ door. Her short, polite rings have turned into prolonged attacks in under a minute. Finally she just holds her finger down on the doorbell. The door remains closed. The light behind the fluted panes seems to mock her, and she can hear the dog’s yelps, which finally become a drawn-out howl.

  In the garden Judith finds four apple cores on the table; the crispbreads have disappeared too, a few crumbs cling to the remains of the fruit. Her basket sits in a corner next to the gardening tools. Just as she did hours ago, she stands at the open glass door of the old couple’s apartment, pushes aside the heavy velvet curtain, and enters. She walks through the room, illuminated only by the light from the hallway, her shoulders hunched and tense. The lace doilies on the furniture glow through the gloom. The doors of the sideboard are all wide open. Drawers are pulled out, tablecloths and napkins lie on the floor, candles and silverware lie in desolate piles. It smells strangely of alcohol. There’s an empty decanter on the coffee table. Did the old people get drunk? The kids, my God—and why is it so dark? Judith hurries down the hallway. The lamp on the hall table is on, lighting up
the old-fashioned telephone with its dark green velvet cover. Now she hears the dog, and children’s voices. It’s Uli, thank God, Uli and Kilian. Where are they? “Ulrich, Kilian!” she calls softly. “Frau Posselt, are you there?” She glances into the kitchen, where there are shards of porcelain on the floor and the closets are turned out as if there’s been a break-in. Her heart beats faster. She’s at the end of the hallway. She’s never been here before. Which room is this? Dürer’s rabbit and two mangy squirrels stare from the papered wall, next to an oil landscape: mountains and woods. The door is ajar and the children’s voices drift out; she opens the door.

  The boys stand at the foot of the wide double bed, next to two redheaded girls in pink jackets: Leonie’s kids. What are their names? Sweets are strewn on the white duvet: bonbons, sugar cubes, and round, chocolate-covered cookies. Kilian’s jaw moves, Uli crinkles tinfoil. The girls are chewing quietly too, their heads lowered.