The Night Singers (10 page)

Willi was orphaned as Brandon had been. Certainly he had a mother—an uneducated woman with few financial prospects. This was the point of the law suit. The survival of these people. And justice. Actions had consequences. And there was something constructive about the truth. Brandon was an upright man, but perhaps not unflawed.

After, several days, she found the café. Frau Muller pretended she didn't know exactly where it was. She knew she'd have no luck with Sergeant Mackie. The American attorney refused to speak to her, saying it wasn't ethical. But after an hour's entreaty, the lawyer told Jennifer where Elsbeth worked.

She chose three o'clock, a quiet time of day, and negotiated her way with a map to a working-class quarter of town. Outside the modest restaurant, she watched a middle-aged woman helping her mother to a chair. Elsbeth handed them menus. She looked even younger in her blue and white uniform. Several other people entered. A married couple. A single man in his sixties.

What did she want from this encounter? What had Elsbeth wanted from her visit to Frau Muller's? She was connected to this woman, somehow, some way. She felt she might learn a bit of truth. Jennifer could go home now and commemorate the story about Brandon, the modest, inadvertent hero. But what she had loved about Brandon the most was not his ideals or his looks or his prospects, but the solid person he really was. She'd always had trouble imagining him as an inadvertent hero. She knew there was another chapter to the story.

Still, she couldn't bring herself to enter the restaurant; it was too much of an intrusion. At one point she thought Elsbeth noticed her at the window, but she gave no indication. Maybe Jennifer would return the next day. She hoped Elsbeth worked on Tuesdays.

At five o'clock, she strolled to the bus stop. As she waited in the busy evening among horns and construction drills and farewell conversations in this profoundly foreign language, she noticed someone pulling on her sleeve. She looked down to see Willi, whose other hand was held tightly by his mother.

They went to a
rathskeller
and found a corner table. Elsbeth knew the owner, who had a child slightly older than Willi and the two kids ran off to play behind the bar.

This wouldn't have been Jennifer's choice of venue because so many other people were talking loudly and merrily over large steins of beer. Even the decorations seemed loud—red and blue and yellow flowers dancing on green stalks.

Suddenly, Jennifer was being served
bratwurst, kraut
, black bread and beer. She never ate such heavy foods at home and wondered how Elsbeth could stay so slim.

The younger woman nodded to her. “Please join me for a little supper.” Simple words. She could handle simple words.

Before Jennifer could respond, Elsbeth was spreading mustard on the sausage and chewing enthusiastically.

They ate in silence—with the exception of several long sighs of satisfaction from the exhausted, hungry Elsbeth—for about five minutes.

Finally, Jennifer summoned the courage to say, “I have come to find the truth.”

Elsbeth laughed lightly, thinking about her father's attachment to the Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.”

“The truth is not such an easy thing—the finding it, or the telling it.” She hoped she was making sense in her elementary English.

Jennifer spread her small, competent hands on the table. “I'd like to know, if you don't mind, what happened that terrible night. And what you remember about Brandon.”

Elsbeth finished her sausage and drank her beer slowly. She was tempted to order another drink, but never in her life had she drunk more than one and she didn't think this was the time to start. “My English is not so good.”

“Your English is fine,” Jennifer insisted.

Elsbeth tried to convey to this woman who was strange, but also not strange, what had happened that night. Jennifer looked relieved to hear about the vial poured into Brandon's drink. Elsbeth considered withholding that, but she thought she owed the woman this much. She recalled the stages of shock and shame and public humiliation she and Kathe and Clara and Renate had experienced. Clara had a broken collarbone. Renate lost several front teeth. She and Kathe became pregnant. All of them continued to have nightmares. Both she and Kath had been ostracised by their families.

“And the soldiers? I mean the ones aside from Brandon, weren't they called to account for their actions?” She could hear Sergeant Mackie saying
alleged
actions.

“I would not know what investigation the Army held. We did learn, when we finally found an American lawyer, that the other three men have transferred out of the country.”

“How is your case proceeding? Do you have a court date?”

“They say we need the DNA. The Army says it can't get genetic evidence without the soldiers' permission.”

“So you're left in limbo.”

Pastor Schmitt didn't believe in limbo, but indeed his daughter found that to be her precise place of residence. She shrugged to Jennifer.

“And as for me, since Brandon has died, there is no DNA, only the truth as I know it.”

Jennifer thought of the embryos again. Four of them. Would they have to sacrifice one to identify DNA? Would she do such a thing?

Willi came screaming to his mother like a siren. Jennifer thought of the whining police cars in World War II films. She looked away. She didn't want to see the child's eyes, his jaw. She didn't want to see Brandon in this pub.

Willi was reading a picture book about dinosaurs. His aptitude for science pleased Jennifer. She wondered if the school would place him in her class in a few years?

“Another glass of juice?” she asked as she walked from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel.

“No thank you,” he smiled up at her from the dining room table.

“How about you?”

Elsbeth glanced from her book,
Of Mice and Men
, a novel she was studying in her English class at Arizona State University. “Oh, no thanks Jennifer. Now remember, you promised to let me cook the dinner tomorrow.”

“You have your studies.”

“You have your job. Besides, I wouldn't have my studies if it weren't for you.”

“Well, this isn't your Pacific dream. I always wonder if you're happy in the desert.”

“They say it rains all the time in Seattle. OK if you're a fish, but Willi would hate that. Besides, I'd have no friends there.”

Jennifer smiled and turned back to the stove, unconsciously running her hands over her belly.

“And to think,” Elsbeth said, “if we lived up there, how far Willi would be from his little sister Amelia.”

Jennifer stirred the pasta sauce. “Amelia,” she whispered,
talking through her love
.

The Palace of Physical Culture

I love to watch naked women. I would enjoy men, too, but they're not allowed into the ladies' locker-room. Watching is the best part of each day at the Y. Of course the glance must be discreet, you don't want people thinking you have designs on them or the handbags they leave behind when they shower. Actually, most women are curious: comparing, contrasting, worrying, admiring. In this reunion of exiles, long separated by civilised attire, I decide that naked assembly promotes democracy because, after all, most of us have the same basic equipment. We stare at ourselves, at what we might become, at what we once were: big bottoms, little bottoms, pregnant bellies, surgical scars, buff thighs, silvery stretch marks, shaved legs, hairy armpits, tattoos, bunions, pink nipples, red nipples, brown nipples, pierced nipples.

My dear brother gave me a summer pass to the Y this June when I turned forty. A complicated present. Yes, I'd been planning to exercise as soon as I found time. But, was he saying I looked fat? Did he notice the way my leg stiffened after sitting through a long movie? Was this a use-it-or-lose-it ultimatum? No, honestly, he insisted. He worked out himself and just thought I'd
enjoy
it. What a thoughtful gift. Maybe he wanted me to live longer.

By July, whenever I enter the locker-room, I anticipate the familiar, curiously welcoming potpourri of disinfectant, sweat, moisturiser, deodorant and talcum powder. Today I spot Mrs Hanson slowly rolling support nylons over the amazingly irregular shape of her left knee. I hold my greeting until she has pulled the pantihose to her waist.

“So, how's the new hip?” (A macabre question, I would have thought a month ago, but now it seems as natural as the frequently asked, “What's your pulse rate?”)

“Good, good,” the old woman nods with pleasure. “I got through all the kicking and treading.”

I savour the smell of Mrs Hanson's apple-mint soap.

“And the waterjacks. All of it,” she beams.

On first encounter, Mrs Hanson is an oddly diaphanous figure: wispy halo of curls atop white, bulky shoulders; thighs and hips so much loosely packed ricotta cheese; breasts sagging like the flesh of a plucked turkey. Who assigned me a locker across from this enormous old woman? She's hardly what I consider a fitness muse. For a while, I am annoyed by the whole Senior Aqua Class who usurp bench space, noise space, shower space in mid-day, when joggers and weightlifters need to slip in and out over tight lunch breaks. Can't the water birds reschedule for three in the afternoon? Or is that nap time, prime canasta hour, the perfect part of the day for a sloe gin fizz and a little virtual sex? In truth, I grow petulant.

Then I study the naked Mrs Hanson. Dignity is the only word for her movement in the nobly earned flesh of those pale arms and legs. Her walk is light and graceful, despite a limp, which I soon understand is from her second hip replacement. I've learned a lot about Mrs Hanson this month, about how she still goes ice fishing on Lake Minnetonka in February, about how she lives alone, but likes to visit the “elderly ladies” at a nearby retirement home, about how she plans to be walking perfectly by September, so she can visit her grandson in San Francisco for her eightieth birthday. Usually, we have a long chat, but right now Mrs Hanson is hurrying off to “take an old dear to the doctor.”

Today's class is “Stretch and Strengthen.” Surrounded by the studio mirrors—glass and human—I enjoy the initial deep breathing and arm raising, but soon feel like a cartoon of a decrepit ballerina. Forty years old, what am I doing here? As a child, I thought forty was ancient. I remember telling myself that there would be no point in visiting the library after forty, because I'd be almost dead, anyway. Now, I am head of a branch library and go to the gym every lunch hour.

At first this class looks easy—swinging pink baby weights back and forth, up and down. I sign up to swell my self-confidence and because I like the Salsa music.

Within two weeks, I am using the green, three pound weights. Once, on a double espresso day, the macha five pound ones.

A new instructor stares at me.

“The lady in the back row,” she calls, “don't
swing
your weights. Concentrate on lifting and lowering. To the beat.”

Today's music is speedy rap.

“That's it,” she says, “you can feel it now. Lift and lower. You've almost got it.”

Almost?

My arms are sore. Sweat pearls on my forehead. My
coif
is losing its
fure
. Smelly, wet hair drips around my headband in humiliating strings.

“Just eight more,” exhorts Brunhilda-the-Brawny.

Defiantly, I pause to sip water.

“Just seven more,” she cajoles in that cheerful-earful voice, effortlessly pumping her own ten pound weights. “Seven. That's it. Six. Come on, five …”

Whenever I skip a work-out, I feel that old childhood remorse about missing Sunday Mass. And when I keep my new exercise schedule, I imagine the Sacrament of Penance erasing sins of sloth and gluttony. Sick, I know this is sick, the transfer of Catholic schoolgirl guilt into menopausal health guilt. But first I'll deal with the body, then I'll tackle the bad attitude.

Marta, the Otter, and her mother Rosa are laughing in the locker-room when I return, exhausted from class. Luckily, it's never hard to hold up my end of the conversation with Marta, who eagerly keeps me apprised of her progress on the Otter Swim Team.

This nimble six year old has the taut, androgynous shape of an archer's bow and—while she casually surveys the older bodies as if she's shopping for a puberty outfit—Marta tells me that having mastered the crawl, she will learn to dive this week.

Quiet, self-contained Rosa is her daughter's mirror image. Lean and dark as Marta, but virtually silent each afternoon as she helps Marta into her striped yellow suit and purple cap. At the moment, Rosa has retreated to the corner studying a computer science text.

“Mama is going to be a business executive,” Marta tells me.

Rosa rolls her wise, twenty-five year old eyes. “Graduation. An office job maybe.”

Since June, I've discovered much about Marta and a little about her mother, such as although Rosa grew up in Cuba, she never learned to swim. Now, every day, she wilts in the chlorinated steam on the bleachers, peering as her daughter bobs in the big pool. I cannot imagine how, as a single mother, Rosa manages to work as a janitor, attend junior college and escort Marta to the gym, but I get the impression that Rosa and Marta believe swimming is as important as eating.

In early August, I begin a Circuit Class, which my brother warns, is only for serious exercisers. I understand why, within five minutes, when we commence a gruesome rota of one minute ordeals: push-ups, weighted butterfly lifts, star jumps, bicep curls, step straddles, tricep hinges. Our respite after seven of these in-place routines is to sprint back and forth across the gym five times. Then we continue the torture circuit on the other side of the room—squats, back curls, double crunches … The single pleasure here is the vibrant beat of reggae music.