From behind the inn’s gate, there was the dull thud of a beer stein knocking against another, a clatter and an outburst of scolding. Benita turned her feet toward the noise and discovered a meager Biergarten behind a stone wall, long roughly hewn tables arranged over gravel. It was nearly empty: a group of older men sat in the corner, another group stood at the bar. The heavy smell of stale cigarette smoke hung in the air. Benita sat at the end of an empty table and ordered a schnapps.
She thought of her mother, poor hardworking Ilse Gruber—how she had loved her glass of schnapps before bed. And now she was dead. Benita had never even said good-bye. To you, Mama! she thought as she swallowed the rough, tangy liquid, flinching at the burn. She felt a rush of sadness for her own loss, and for the decidedly unsparkling life of her mother, a woman who had existed entirely outside the reaches of love. And now she, Benita Gruber, would become just like her. She would return to Frühlinghausen in shame and be consumed by her own roots.
Benita finished her first schnapps and ordered another. The world grew less bleak. She caught the bartender eyeing her curiously: a middle-aged woman in a proper dress, drinking alone. Did he see some trace of the girl she had once been? The Benita who Connie had boasted could turn even a blind man’s head? A woman whose smile made Franz Muller blush? Her knees began to feel watery. And the harsh tragedy of the world was enveloped in a soft, forgiving haze. The beer garden was filling up. A small group of teenagers sat at the end of her table. They were boisterous girls and boys, poor kids, workers’ children, the girls in their new American-style full skirts, but their hair still worn in plain farm-girl cuts.
A man sat down beside Benita. He was young, a boy really, and handsome with a particular blooming sort of handsomeness that would not last, was even now beginning to thicken and dissolve. “Another schnapps for the lady,” he called, “and a beer for me.” He had the air of a posturing teenager. How amazing that such an impulse could still exist! That a young man could still care enough to pretend to be something he wasn’t. And the girls, too—she saw it suddenly, these young women, self-consciously sipping their beer-and-lemonades, affecting worldliness. It was at once horrible and marvelous. It made her feel a thousand years old.
“What is a beautiful woman like you doing drinking by herself?” the boy asked. His curls poked out from underneath his cap, small and sweaty and distinct. Under the table, Benita felt the warmth of his leg against hers.
“What is a young man like you doing with a beautiful woman drinking by herself?” she found herself asking, her old sharp-tongued self returning.
In a moment, two other boys joined them—straight from work at a building site, plaster dust on their jackets and under their fingernails. And all of a sudden it was a party! More schnapps and beer and wursts with curry ketchup and crusty Br?tchen. When was the last time food had tasted so good?
The night grew cool and when Benita shivered, the boy—the man, now that she was playing along—gave her his jacket. It was warm and smelled of paint and sawdust and, beneath this, of him. It had been so long since she had been drunk. Franz had never drunk more than one, maybe two beers, which was like a thimbleful of water for an ox, and it had never occurred to her to outdrink him. Before that, during the war, with the Russians and their stench of vodka, she had never wanted to touch the stuff. Now she was reminded of those early, heady days of her romance with Connie, when he had filled her with champagne and berries, Sekt and peach juice, and Brandy Alexanders, delicious, exotic drinks. She had the same lovely clumsy feeling, a sort of numbness in her face and jerkiness to her vision. Dear Connie. She felt a swell of warmth for him—he had shown her a good time in the beginning. Once, he had presented her with a fox stole that wrapped around her shoulders with a glimmering, silky softness that made her feel like a movie star. A woman everyone envied. And Connie, confident, sleepy eyed, with one arm draped around her, had enjoyed the attention as much as she did.
In the middle of this reverie, Marianne appeared.
She stood in the doorway of the grubby Biergarten, a homely shawl clutched around her shoulders, her eyes searching the crowd. For an instant, her eyes met Benita’s and a look of surprise, even shock, registered so transparently in them that Benita felt a corresponding jolt. There was no joining these two worlds—Marianne’s ordered existence on one side, and these boys, this place, this buoyant, drunken feeling of irresponsibility on the other. And so Benita looked away. It was not so much a decision as an instinct. She threw her head back and extended her neck in a way she knew was loose and inviting. She laughed an indiscreet laugh. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Marianne hesitate as if considering whether to barge in.
But she didn’t. And a moment later she was gone.
Benita was disappointed and relieved at once.
The boy placed his hand on her knee, rubbing the fabric of her dress against her thigh in a way that made her skin feel rough. What did it matter? Benita rested her head against his shoulder—she was the slut and idiot Marianne had always thought she was. She was nothing but a stupid girl. The empty doorway where Marianne, her friend, her roommate, her coparent, really, had stood, was like a black hole.
Upstairs, in her room under the eaves, what happened was quick and unclear. Benita floated through it as if from above: the sweaty hands on her breasts and the boy’s wurst breath, the hot, surprising baby smoothness of his belly, the hard strength of his thighs. He was no expert. And more surprising, he had a false leg below his right knee, a hard stalk of wood that pressed against her shin through the pants he kept up around his knees. Did she imagine it? She reached down, but he pushed away her hand. And so she let him finish without knowing for sure.
Only after he was asleep, with one arm thrown gratefully across her breasts, snoring slightly, did she verify. Gently pushing up the leg of his pants, she felt the smooth wooden shape of the false limb and ran her hand to the end where it attached to his leg with primitive leather straps. A delicate nub of scar tissue covered the bone, dimpled and uneven, yet still smooth—as delicate as the head of a penis. She winced and the boy stirred in his sleep. Benita sat beside him for a while, in the lamplight that shone through the window, beside his clumsy, damaged body. A war injury, probably, despite his youth. Maybe he had been one of those hapless boys ordered to the front when no one else was left, shot on the spot if they so much as looked the wrong way. Or maybe he had been a cruel child soldier and performed some God-awful task.
As quietly as she could, she gathered her things, the small bag she had packed, the shoes she had kicked off, the skirt she had dropped to the floor. Stepping carefully, she slipped into the hall and down the stairs, this time without question as to where she was going, and with the cold, relieving calm of purpose; and when she shut the door of the inn, there was a satisfying finality to the click, severing her ties to this strange in-between life.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Burg Lingenfels, October 1950