“So your dear niece is coming!” Elena said.
“Yes, but we don’t know when. But yes. You like her too, no? I remember you two hanging out at pubs together, talking about art.”
“Yeah, that was fun. But now I gather she is a serious political scientist, whatever that means.”
“She’s just a young girl, fresh out of university.”
“Yes, but you know how I hate politics. And I think she wants to stay here. And this time, she doesn’t know for how long.”
“Let her stay for a while. She’ll find her own place quickly enough. She’s not a freeloader. She’s very resourceful. You could use the money, too, if you wanted to ask her to pay some of the rent. And give her some time. She’ll grow to hate politics too, like any sane person.”
They both laughed at this, again, a thing they had in common. The general distrust of politics. Not that they didn’t have ideas.
“Well, what if she’s not sane?” asked Elena.
Eva thought about that for a minute. She could very well not be sane. She wouldn’t be alone in the family. Eva often thought that Elena could be a depressive. Like her Hugo. Like her father, maybe. “Well, we can’t do anything about that, now can we?”
“Ah, Mutti, always with the practical response. What can we ever do? Nothing! Nothing about anything!” Elena downed her beer and belched loudly. “Listen to this next one, Mutti. You’ll love it. Then I’ll take you out to a café for lunch.” She loped over to the record player and put on another record. The recording was older, sounding distant and even more painful. Elena brought Eva the album cover. On it was a photo of a Black man named Lead Belly. He sang with all the hope and crushing fear of the whole world in his voice.
“My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me, tell me where did you sleep last night?”
“Hier, Mutti, für dich,” Elena said, and brought over the Nina Simone record.
“Danke, danke, Liebchen, wie lieb von dir,” Eva said and held her daughter’s cheeks in her trembling hands and kissed her again. She wasn’t so bad, this one. “Oh, ich freue mich. Wirklich.”
Elena took Eva out to a café around the corner from her apartment, a new place that Eva thought lovely. Eva kept the Nina Simone album on her lap the whole time, putting her napkin over it, while she carefully ate a delicious piece of chicken, with sides of rice and buttered green beans. She could tell that Elena was proud to be able to take her mother out to such a nice meal. She was so grateful, but underneath the gratitude was a resentment she tried to ignore. And she needed to ask Elena for money. Her face got hot at the thought and then, as if her daughter could read her mind, she asked, “Mutti, brauchst du Geld?”
They looked at each other then. It was not an easy look. It was not the first time by any means. Eva detected something ugly in her daughter’s eyes. Power? Pleasure? It was not a gentle look.
“Liebe Elena,” she said, “I could always use some money. You know, since I stopped working . . .”
“Kein Problem, Mutti,” Elena said, her look softer now. “I make good tips, good money at the bar, and my rent is nothing. Here,” she said, and passed her a small pile of bills. A hundred marks, Eva saw, and put them in her wallet.
“Danke, Liebchen,” she said, trying to smile, trying to hide her resentment.
By the time Eva emerged from the U-Bahn on her way back to her apartment, the sun had long ago stopped trying to assert itself. She didn’t like walking in her neighborhood at night. The walk from the U-bahn to her building was a long one, and some of the blocks were wholly desolate, free of buildings or people but full of cement and rubble and garbage bags and syringes, with the occasional mangy, feral dog, sometimes foaming at the mouth, undoubtedly diseased and dangerous. She hurried, the record Elena gave her tight under her arm, her head ducked into her coat. She got to the block before hers, full of older three-story houses in various stages of decline. Her enormous white building loomed high above her. The same three skinheads came out of the empty hole where there once was a doorway.
“Fräulein, stehenbleiben,” one said to her. The other two began to laugh.
Eva started to walk faster.
“Fräulein, Mädchen, stehenbleiben! Haben Sie mich nicht gehört? I sagte halt!”
Eva continued to walk very quickly; then she decided to run. They were well behind her now and weren’t following her, but she kept running. Then she tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and fell forward and put her arms out to catch herself. She heard the record crack. She was mad at herself now. She stood up with some effort and brushed off her coat. Her hands were shaking. She pulled the record out of the sleeve, and indeed it was badly cracked. She put it back anyway, carefully, as if she could somehow salvage it, and with her chin up, walked home.
Chapter 4
She had come home and taken four of her sleeping pills right away. Her hands were red and scratched from her fall but not bleeding. She poured a large wine. Her legs were throbbing. She had walked up the ten flights of stairs very quickly. She could feel them pulsing under her hands as she took her hose off, noticing a red bruise on one of her knees from her fall. But her legs didn’t hurt, just throbbed. No, nothing hurt right now but her heart. She placed the Nina Simone album in the stack. Well, she’d just put on an old record, one she’d heard a million times. They still were beautiful. She put
