not asking me, really, she’s asking Asperger. A friendly old woman, she looks at me with curiosity, apologizes repeatedly. Asperger used her telephone a few times. I notice that this neighborly familiarity makes me happy, even if it’s not aimed at me. He talks to her about the water getting turned off again, about when the outage is planned. And that not long ago the electricity was out too. That’s when I was still sleeping. I miss every chance of belonging, every bit of fellowship.
Her cat slips in behind her, it’s the red one. It rubs itself against their legs, sniffs at the stove, the legs of the chairs, inspects the kitchen, tail lifted. I stoop down to pet it but it dodges, goes to Asperger.
“Salo, come here!”
“What’s the cat’s name?” I ask, incredulous.
“Salo, from Salome, but she only reacts to the first two syllables; if you say the whole name she tunes it out.”
“So she’s not called Salome?”
The cat leaves the apartment, goes down the stairs. “I have to go too,” says the woman. “I have two fruit loaves in the oven. The children are coming over the holidays. I still have to bake cookies. I’ll bring some up!” she calls from the hallway.
“We won’t be here,” I say, but Asperger has already closed the door. “Why do you have to spoil her pleasure? And where do you want to go, anyway?”
“I have to get back.”
“To where?”
“I’m meeting the others in Metz.”
“What are you doing there?”
“They’re already rehearsing, I’ve told you.”
“They can do that without you.”
We’re back in the continuous loop we’ve been in for days; he stubbornly repeats the same sentences, I stubbornly give the same answers.
“And you, don’t you have anything to do?” I ask.
“Unlike you, I went to the doctor,” he says. “And he gave me a note. I’m unfit to work for at least another week!”
I look at him.
“I don’t know anything about you, really, except that you’ve taken care of chickens and are from Germany.”
“That’s not entirely true,” he says. “Part of my family comes from Iglau.”
“What?”
“You’d probably say Jihlava.”
“Indeed I would!”
“I don’t like the word ‘Sudete,’ or ‘displaced person,’ for that matter.”
“How very nice of you!”
He’s chopping vegetables and refuses to be distracted. I watch him. “And how do you feel about the Pentecost meetings?” I ask crossly.
He laughs. “I was born in the American zone, if that’s what you mean. Specifically, in Frankfurt—Free City, not to be conflated with Hessen; as a Praguer you must understand that. But I don’t want to bore you with our internal affairs. I count Huguenots, Netherlanders, Czechs, and Germans among my ancestors. In the whole family—and my father had nine siblings—there was only one uncle who once went to a Pentecost meeting of the Czech associations; they showed images from the ‘homeland.’ He’d gotten a head wound clearing away war rubble, when they were demolishing a wall he came down with it. And it was too dumb even for him.”
“Too bad, the ‘homeland,’ is nice,” I say. “So, just saints and head cases in your family. No one knew a thing.”
“On the contrary, my grandmother was a staunch National Socialist Women’s Leaguer, and proud of it. She’d made it from housemaid to housemisstress, the neighbors finally greeted her. And my mother too only managed to say the
word ‘Jew’ in a whisper for years after the war, as if it were forbidden. At the same time there were Jews from Amsterdam in our clan, just third degree, of course. What do you want to hear about my family, actually?”
“Nothing, actually.”
“We had some of everything—there were enough siblings. One was even a Communist, he was drafted into the police after the war.”
“In the GDR?”
“No, in the West of course. In the ‘Zone,’ as we called it, he would have landed in jail; revisionists got special treatment. My father was first locked up by the Nazis for being a Social Democrat, then—pardon me—by the Czechs for being a German, and after deportation by the Americans for being a suspected Nazi, but only briefly. Then he translated for them. It was the expulsion by the Czechs that hurt him the most. He didn’t cope well in Germany, it wasn’t his landscape. Even though the Allies had decided on the expulsion together, in some places it looked more like revenge, the Czechs were zealous. Not everywhere, but in the border territories there were riots that had nothing to do with any kind of ‘democratic tradition.’”
“My compatriots. Who love to play the victim!” I stare out the window; half a frozen deer is being unloaded from the roof of a car.
“What can I say?” He shrugs.
“I’m going into town tomorrow, to meet people, talk to someone.”
“I’ll come.”
“No, I don’t want you to.”
“Why, because I’m German?”
“You needn’t be so conceited about your Germanness, being Czech is no more pleasant, no simpler or more flattering.”