The new girlfriend had brought Irina flowers, a few straggly, pathetic chrysanthemums, but all the same she’d brought flowers. Irina thanked her nicely, and while the others were still in the hall quietly removed her lavish arrangement of asters from the dining table, and fetched another vase. As she came back into the living room with the chrysanthemums, Kurt was already holding forth on the subject of his Christmas tree. While he almost never talked about his work, he was in the habit of delivering an extensive, literally blow-by-blow account of every nail that he knocked into the wall.
Sasha thought the Christmas tree was “perfectly okay,” while the new girlfriend stared at the tree incredulously.
Kurt suggested a toast to the fact that they were all meeting at last, and asked the children what they would like to drink. The new girlfriend said she would like “just a glass of water.”
“You can’t drink a toast with water,” said Kurt.
The two young people glanced at one another before, almost in chorus, they decided on “A sip of red wine, please.”
“Here’s to Christmas,” said Kurt.
“Here’s to the Holy Ghost,” said Sasha.
“Thank you for your kind invitation, Frau Umnitzer,” said the new girlfriend.
And Irina said, “Cheers, I’m Irina, and in this house we use first names. ”
Irina always worked with the kitchen door open. If the fat wasn’t sizzling in the pan or a machine running, she could hear voices from the living room, mostly the voices of the men—two Umnitzers at the same time, it wasn’t so easy for anyone else to get a word in edgeways, they always started talking to each other right away in loud voices, they had important news to exchange, in this case, among other things, about Wolf Biermann’s concert in Cologne. Meanwhile Irina, who was getting sick and tired of all this fuss over Biermann, put the green cabbage through the meat grinder and thought about the new girlfriend’s clothes, her long, brown corduroy skirt, her brown woolen pantyhose—and what kind of top was that thing she was wearing? Something shapeless in a neutral color. And why on earth, if she had short legs to begin with, didn’t she at least wear heels? Did Sasha like her the way she was? Was that to the taste of the younger generation? Irina softened onions in butter, added the cabbage, filled the pan with water to blanch it, and turned her attention to the dumplings.
She had never yet, thought Irina as she began grating raw potatoes—for real Thuringian dumplings you needed both raw and boiled potato, half and half, or more precisely a little more raw potato than boiled—she had never yet known a man who fancied thick woolen pantyhose and earth colors. Men liked colors of a very different kind! Men liked intricate lacy underwear, not woolen pantyhose! Was Sasha any different? Different from Kurt? Even at the age of fifty-five Kurt was still the same, still eyeing up other women all the time…
She sipped her beer, but suddenly the beer tasted stale. Irina tipped the end of it down the sink, and fetched her glass of red wine from the living room. They were just talking about Christa Wolf, wonderful book, Irina put in, although she hadn’t finished reading it yet, but she had heard it discussed so much that she was beginning to forget how trying she had found the elaborate style. Why, Irina had asked herself as she read the book, why did the woman write like that? What was the matter with her, when she had everything, even a husband—so she’d heard it said—who did the housework for her?
“Wonderful book,” said Irina, taking two puffs of Sasha’s cigarette, and then she went back to the kitchen and set to work.
She squeezed the liquid out of the grated potato, put it in a bowl, and scalded it with hot milk. Then she cut a few thumb-sized cubes of white bread and fried them crisp. While they were frying she began to grate long shavings off the winter radish—her fingers were getting stiff with all this grating. But she had ruined her hands converting the house anyway, hauling stones about, unloading cement—you wouldn’t believe how much cement went into a house like this. She took a sip of red wine, shook her hands to loosen them up, and just as she picked up the grater again the new girlfriend appeared in the kitchen. Was there anything she could do to help?
However, Irina was almost through, there was just the boiled potato still to grate for the dumpling mixture —but that was easy, and anyway she had only one grater.
“Oh, dumplings!”
“Thuringian dumplings,” specified Irina.
“I just love dumplings,” said the new girlfriend, beaming at Irina.
Maybe she wasn’t as unattractive as all that. In fact her face was really pretty. And if you looked closely, you could even see something like a bosom under the neutral colors of her shapeless garments. Someone ought to have a word with her sometime; why go disfiguring herself like that?
Only when the new girlfriend had left the kitchen again did Irina add another dessertspoon of butter to both the red and the green cabbage—and in addition a spoonful of mustard to the green cabbage; that was the secret ingredient. You didn’t have to give all your secrets away.
The doorbell rang at two on the dot: Charlotte and Wilhelm were at the door—with their man-made fiber shopping bags. What would be in them this time? A wipe-clean tablecloth? Some kind of Cuban calendar?
Wilhelm came in, taciturn and stiff as ever; so did Charlotte, talkative and vivacious as ever, and full of praise for everything Irina did. It was really odd, the older she grew, the more she praised Irina, and in such a ridiculous, effusive way. Even as she came in she was gushing about the delicious smells coming from the kitchen, she swore, still with one arm in her raccoon coat as Kurt helped her out of it, that she hadn’t eaten a thing all day except an egg for breakfast (as if she were doing Irina a favor by going hungry), she asked (for the second or third time) whether the not entirely genuine art nouveau coat stand that Irina had painted white was new, marveled at this house, always so light even in midwinter, and finally lapsed into her recurrent complaints of the darkness in their own home—subtext, you two live in a palace, and I have to make do with a hole in the ground!
A dramatic change of tone as she greeted the new girlfriend. Theatrical, meaningful. “We’ve heard so much about you!”
“I haven’t,” said Wilhelm.
Charlotte laughed; she always laughed at Wilhelm’s jokes, or more precisely she laughed at his morose comments as if they were jokes. But Wilhelm was probably only telling the truth. What could Charlotte have heard about the new girlfriend already?
At this point Nadyeshda Ivanovna came out of her room to join them. Charlotte spread her arms wide: “Nadyeshda Ivanovna!” The two of them had met only once before in their lives, when Nadyeshda Ivanovna came here on a visit four years ago. All the same, Nadyeshda Ivanovna also spread her arms wide, grabbed Charlotte with her gnarled hands, which were strong from the sawmill and from harvesting potatoes, and planted kisses firmly on her cheeks, left, right, and then left again. A misunderstanding, of course. You could actually see Charlotte’s breath taken away by the smell of mothballs clinging to Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s clothes. She swiftly wriggled out of the other woman’s embrace, swallowed, pulled herself together, and brought out a few standard polite remarks in a Russian that was reasonably correct, if not entirely accent free—while Wilhelm made a decent stab at saying
“
Wilhelm replied,
Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s “Happy Christmas” was provocative insofar as Wilhelm utterly rejected Christmas in principle. Christmas, according to Wilhelm, was a religious festival; religion, being the work of the class enemy, served to befuddle the brains of the working classes; such nonsense, and Wilhelm was therefore unable to reconcile all this fuss and bother about Christmas with his conscience. As usual, he sat down with his back to the Christmas tree.
Charlotte, on the other hand, was
