Home Leave: A Novel (5 page)

Liebe Liesel,
it begins. And then German sentences that she cannot make out, aside from easy words like “we” and “you” and “weather.” There has obviously been a huge mistake; the boy must be reunited with whomever left him here as soon as possible. She glances down at him. His eyes are shut with the concentration of fake sleep. He is waiting, she sees, for her reaction.

“I’m not Liesel Kriegstein,” she says to him. He does not look up. “I’m Elise Kriegstein. There’s been a mistake.” What is the word for that? “
Fehler.
” Usually she is proud to reveal her German last name, acquired from Chris’s ancestors, gratified by the nod of approval from the gynecologist’s receptionist. But now the farce has been revealed; Elise is not German, not Liesel, and she cannot help this boy.

He won’t budge. Carefully, she shakes him and gently urges him into a seated position. He opens his eyes. They are the bright blue of the cold February sky outside. He turns away from her with tear-streaked cheeks, digging moodily in his pockets for something: a white handkerchief. Somehow this strikes Elise as laughable; it is something an old man would carry. He blows his nose, and this makes her giggle out loud.

Then he says, still looking away, in a crystal voice, “
Ich liebe dich.
”

Why would he say that? It is the most intimate thing she has ever been told in German; somehow it strikes her as one of the most stirring things she has ever heard, even words from Chris before sleep do not plummet down her well like the words of this little boy. She feels suddenly afraid and looks down at him severely, as though he were much older. “
Nein,
” she says. “I’m not Liesel. We need to get you home.”

Home. The boy leads the way. They leave Elise’s apartment, stopping at the bakery, at the boy’s tugging insistence, to get a few cookies. He orders and she pays. The baker, whom Elise sees every few days, gives her a quizzical look but does not inquire what she is doing with this boy. Thank goodness for German reserve. In Vidalia she would have been given the third degree, and she isn’t even sure how she could have answered the question in English.

As they exit the shop, Elise is suddenly lighthearted, as though she were playing an enormous prank on Hamburg and her life in Germany. She will miss German class but she doesn’t care; on the contrary, she feels eminently relieved. The day has taken on a snow-day feel, like the one or two times flakes would fall in Vidalia each year, and Ada would make the children hot chocolate with whipped cream and cinnamon on top.

With the boy marching ahead, Elise no longer feels like a foreigner. She sees the street before her in a new light, as Liesel might see it. Who is this Liesel? The boy’s estranged mother? An aunt? Should I be going to the police? Elise wonders. But what would I say when I got there? Would they speak English? Elise’s initial imaginings of Germany had also excluded the fact that everyone would be speaking German.

Rationally, of course, she had known this would be the case. Months before the move, she had listened to language tapes on her drive to the school in London where she taught third grade. But the emotional reality of living in another language didn’t sink in until they arrived at the airport and the words buzzed all around her, like summers in Vidalia when the cicadas came.

Chris speaks some German from his days as an exchange student in Stuttgart. He also comes from a farming town in northeast Indiana, where each of his ancestors can be traced back to farms around Hanover. Chris and Elise took a train to Hanover in the early fall, the trees as yellow as dandelions, their first excursion from Hamburg. Elise had found it depressing that the Hanover farmland looked so similar to Indiana, that Chris’s great-great-greats had traveled so far from home to face the same landscape. What kind of escape was that? Then again, the same regrets and insecurities haunt Elise now as those that haunted her in Vidalia, Atlanta, and London. Her moves have never resulted in the new personality she always hoped would come as a reward for the upheaval.

Elise doesn’t notice when the boy turns a corner, until he shouts, “Liesel!” and waves furiously. She breaks out into a cautious run, holding her belly. She could begin the
I’m not Liesel
line of argument again, but she doesn’t want him to have a breakdown here and draw attention. So she follows his surprisingly quick gait for another fifteen minutes through small streets filled with bright balconies and large trees stretching their naked limbs to the sun.

Then he stops at a small gate and they enter a series of private gardens, where city dwellers own small plots of land. She has noticed these
Gartenkolonien
scattered in pockets throughout the city, with their carefully tended rows and doll-like sheds, but she has never been inside. Now, in winter, the plots are all dead, the gates locked, apples rotting in brown grass. For the first time since leaving her apartment she feels uneasy and wonders if the boy has led her astray, or is simply lost himself. “Excuse me,” she calls out to him, coming to a stop. “
Entschuldigung?
” but he keeps going. As she catches up to him she can hear he is absorbed in humming a childish tune, the sort of thing you sing in grade-school choir. She can almost recognize it. He slips a hand confidingly in hers, and she falls silent.

Then they hear voices. The boy quickens his step and grips her hand tighter. At the end of the path, on their right, is an open gate. Inside the garden, on a picnic table, are an enormous cake and a steaming thermos. Four people, so bundled as to make their age and sex anyone’s guess, huddle around the table, picking haphazardly with mismatched forks at the cake and passing around the thermos. No one has their own silverware or plate or cup. The air of disorder is decidedly un-German, Elise thinks, and for a second she feels a strong sense of camaraderie with the wayward winter picnickers.

“Oma,” the boy calls out, and one of the bundles turns around and opens her arms. The boy lets go of Elise’s hand, and she watches with anguish as he falls into the old woman’s embrace. “Come back,” she wants to call, knowing she has no right to him. As soon as he leaves her side, the familiar lonely ache begins again, and Elise thinks of her bathtub and tries to picture the walk back home, how to get back in the hot scented water as soon as possible. The group regards her with silent curiosity, and the boy points to her and announces, simply, “Liesel.”

“
Auf
Liesel!
” one of the men shouts, lifting the thermos to her, and they all drink from the thermos, crying “
Auf Liesel!
” before they drink.

“
Nein,
” Elise protests. “
Elise.
Ich bin
Elise.
” And then “
Tut mir leid,
” at the man’s look of offense and the boy’s scowl.

“
Natürlich bist du nicht Liesel,
” says another man at the picnic table, offhandedly, picking at the cake. “
Liesel ist tot.
”

Elise understands what the man is saying, even as the words fill her with an undefined dread. Liesel is dead. Elise feels nauseous and dizzy. She needs to sit but there is no place at the table for her.

“
Komm,
” the boy’s grandmother says, and gestures for Elise to sit beside her. Elise freezes, recognizing the voice. It is the woman who spoke into the intercom, back at Elise’s apartment. The woman gestures again, patting the seat beside her. Weary of trying to make sense of it all—Germany, German, the old woman’s voice—Elise acquiesces, childlike, and finds herself sitting on the rough wooden bench between the boy and his grandmother, leaning her head on the old woman’s shoulder. The grandmother offers Elise the thermos. Elise realizes she is shivering, despite her heavy jacket and boots. Elise accepts the thermos, then discovers from its ripe, rich perfume that it is mulled wine, the smell of the Christmas markets that popped up all over Hamburg in mid-November. She gives the thermos back to the grandmother, pointing at her stomach by way of explanation.

“
Kein Problem,
” the grandmother insists. “
Gut für das Kind.
”

Inscrutably, Elise obeys her, for a small sip, and a rich, sour, cinnamony taste flies down her throat, hot and safe, like the Russian tea, made of Tang, cloves, cinnamon, and sugar, that she’d drunk at Christmas back home. Shyly, Elise takes a closer look at the other women around her. They remind her of a ruddier version of the women her mother plays bridge with. Last week, her father told her over the phone that, despite Elise’s request in a recent letter, he and Ada wouldn’t be coming to Germany for the baby’s birth; it would be a waste of money. Chris had fumed at the news when Elise told him; it hadn’t occurred to Elise to argue with her father, just as she’d stayed tongue-tied when he’d told her she had to stay in Mississippi for college. She wishes she hadn’t asked, hadn’t scrawled the letter in a moment of weakness when Chris was on a business trip, hadn’t given her father the power to say no. It is her punishment, she knows, for the five years that she stayed away from Vidalia, for living abroad now. Elise closes her eyes.

Suddenly, the table erupts in raucous laughter, except for the grandmother, who is shaking her head, looking mildly offended. One of the men is wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. Elise feels herself entering invisibility. Usually, it is an exclusion she deeply resents; if she were at a dinner party with Chris right now, she would be tugging on his sleeve, demanding a translation, faking laughter once he’d told the joke in English, but right now she feels her ignorance is a privilege, an excuse to opt out of the present company. The sip of mulled wine has warmed and calmed her, not unlike a bath. She eases herself off the bench. The grandmother gives her hand a squeeze; the boy gives her a questioning look but does not protest. The others take no notice as she wanders away from the picnic table, deeper into the garden.

Elise meanders along the tall hedge of evergreen that separates the garden from adjacent properties. At the far right corner is a small gap in the branches, a gate leading into the next garden. Elise tests the latch. Unlocked. She glances back at the table. The grandmother and the boy are playing a handclap game. The others, from their increasingly impassioned gesticulations, seem to have entered some kind of argument. No one is watching her. She pushes down the latch and walks boldly through, as though the property were her own.

On the other side of the gate, Elise encounters not another garden, but a large greenhouse. Emboldened by the afternoon’s growing shadows and their gift of anonymity, Elise heads towards the tall glass structure. She tries the door handle and finds it is also unlocked. After a moment’s hesitation, she enters.

Inside, it is spring. Colors crowd Elise’s winter-starved vision: lemon-hued forsythia, tulips the color of Dreamsicles. The air is humid; Elise can almost hear an exhaling. Or is it her own long sigh? She steps slowly down the aisles, bending her head over the blooms, pausing to fill her lungs with scent. At the end of the hall is another door that Elise continues through, this time without a second thought.

The next room is a good ten degrees warmer, and Elise shrugs off her coat, lays it on an empty plastic chair. The plants here, arranged on shelves in neat rows, are suited for warmer climes. She spots her father’s favorites: gardenia, jasmine, lilies. All the flowers he tends with such care, the one luxury he allows himself: rare bulbs, heirloom seeds ordered from distant states. Usually the thought would make Elise scowl, roll her eyes at the irony of it: a father better suited for plants than children. But right now, in this warm, perfumed air, she feels a swelling gratitude to him, for working so hard on beauty. His garden (for it was always referred to as his, never the family’s) often won first prize in the annual Tri-County Gardening Society contest. And he would bring cut flowers for Mama in the spring, Elise thinks, surprised by such an easy, happy memory of tulips on the kitchen table.

“
Ist da jemand?
”

Elise jumps at the voice, which comes from the other side of the room, behind a dark, waxy bush.

“
Hallo?
” Elise stammers back.

A woman, whom Elise guesses to be in her late forties, emerges from behind a row of shelves, her hands in gardening gloves, her face streaked with dirt, her graying hair tied back in an unkempt ponytail. She is sporting blue coveralls with innumerable pockets: the ubiquitous uniform of handymen and laborers throughout Germany. Elise has never seen such clothes on a woman before.

“
Was machen Sie hier?
” the woman demands.

Where to begin? Elise takes a deep breath. “
Ich bin—es war—
Liesel.”

“Liesel?” the woman says suspiciously. “Liesel Kriegstein?”

“Do you speak English?” Elise asks, giving up.

“Yes.” The woman’s tone is arrogant, testy. “What are you making here? This is not a public garden.”

Racking her brain for an answer, Elise realizes that language is not the issue. How can she begin to explain to the woman what remains a mystery to herself?

“I came from a party over there,” Elise says, pointing in the general direction of the first garden.

“Yes, for Frau Kriegstein, I know. They invited me also. I do not go. It is a strange habit,
nicht
? To have a birthday party for the dead. A tradition, where they come from, but for me, it is strange. I do not like it.”

Elise nods, trying to look sympathetic, cataloging the new information. “It is Liesel Kriegstein’s birthday?”

“
Was
her birthday. She died six months ago. But to continue to celebrate, after death, is not good.
Besonders
not good for her little boy. Time to move on,
nicht
? I am taking care of Frau Kriegstein’s flowers for many years. All of the gardeners from this
Kolonie
come here to my—how do you say—warmhouse, to give me their flowers for the winter. I keep them alive through the cold months, give them back in the spring. Every year, until now, Frau Kriegstein too. Now, her mother, the old woman, has the garden.”