JOY CASTRO

No More Beautiful Day

“In the mountains, there you feel free,” my mother would say at the breakfast table, apropos of nothing. She would glare at my father with defiance, absorption, watching him raptly, as if he were a moving picture that had hypnotized her with a plot she could not fathom.

My father would glance up from his newspaper.

“Oh, good morning,” she would say as if surprised. She’d turn to me. “Look, Ingrid.” I hated this: how she roped me into being her witness, her collaborator. “Your father has decided to join us for a moment this morning after all.”

His blue-gray eyes would narrow; he would grunt and turn back to the headlines. We chewed to the rhythm of his newsprint’s rustle.

“I read most of the night, and go south for the winter,” she would say, but his face would fail to rise. Back then, I did not know she was quoting anything.

They spoke in code, in patterned silences. It was strange, like a play. Like the cinema. I was the audience, dwarfed by darkness.

This idea of cinema gripped me. Marlene Dietrich. Babelsberg. If our lives were a film, my mother would star. The audience, like I did, would adore her beyond measure: the baker’s dreamy only daughter, her books, her wistfulness, the careful way she tucked her golden hair behind her ears. Wronged and pretty, she delivered her lines with simple conviction, as if the director had taken her aside and explained, quite clearly, each emotion she must convey: sadness, hope, a wounded anger at her husband’s latest crass betrayal. She would wear a blue dress with white frills at the wrists and bosom, her hands crossed at her breast, her eyes turned toward heaven.

My father, too, seemed sure of his part, but I could not decipher it. I would stare at his neat gold mustache, trimmed and soft on his lip like a nailbrush, trying to imagine it grown thick and black with drooping wings, his eyes shrunk dark and beady.

It did not quite fit: my father did not have the mad fire proper to villainy and melodrama. With his strong jaw and tailored coats, he had the handsome surface of a hero and a hero’s gallant manners. But there was room for only applause in his world, not sacrifice. He spent a lot of time in front of mirrors. When I learned in school the Greek myth of Narcissus, the concept seemed to suit.

My father was finally drafted by the navy in 1939 (to his great surprise—though he put on a marvelous show of patriotism for our neighbors, he had privately asserted to my mother and me that he was too old, that it would never come to this). He was still, in my view, the banal Narcissus I had dubbed him, with all the surety that came of being eleven years old and observant. He still snapped on his fedora with a little flourish; women still gave him the quick, flirtatious glances I had always seen when he took me out alone for ice cream or when we walked down the broad avenue lined with linden trees, my gloved hand in his, the pale yellow blossoms dripping their fragrance down onto the promenade.

*

My father’s farewells to us on the stone steps of our apartment building were brisk, and my response was equally so. A quick embrace, no bodies pressing—a polite vague little smile. I had my limits; I knew whose side I was on. I pulled at my mother’s arm, whispering, “Stop. Please stop,” but she kept weeping, kept clinging to him, following him onto the sidewalk, even as his hands kept peeling off her grasp. Neighbors were idling at their tasks, pretending not to watch us.

How could she? Everyone knew about his women by then. I knew, too, from the countless cold exchanges behind the closed doors of our apartment, from the way my mother’s sobbing sifted through the walls on the nights he wasn’t there. How could she now weep publicly over him? I would never—I swore to myself, there on the steps while my mother made her scene—I would never become an imbecile over a man.

My father left us then, his hands neatly manicured, and I wondered if any other soldiers packed stoppered flasks of cologne mixed especially for them to smell of the woods where they hunted boar. I imagined my father inquiring of the rough men at some outpost where one might find a good cognac, and I thought of what they might say or even do to him, and secretly I was glad.

*

Six horrifying years passed. Our beautiful city was destroyed. We learned in fits and scraps that we had been the villains all along.

*

One late September afternoon in 1945—after my time at the work camp at Yarochin, where I’d been sent for my safety, and after the barracks in Luchau—when I had finally come back to Berlin and was living again with my mother, she sent me up to hang laundry in one of the shattered rooms on the top floor of my grandfather’s apartment building, where we had moved. Our own building was gone, bombed into rubble and bricks. For months, we had lived with my grandparents in the dark cellar with five other families. When the Russians came through with their sweat and torches, looking for pretty girls to rape, my mother and grandmother lay on top of the mattress, which lay on top of me. I’d thought I would never breathe again. But I was not raped. My grandmother died and we buried her.

Now we had moved back up to the first floor, above my grandfather’s bakery, which sat empty. We’d swept away the broken things and nailed blankets up over the window-holes.

Up on the top floor, hanging the clean laundry was pleasant—not because of the clothes themselves, which were drab and few: my mother had buried our silks and cashmeres and the good linen underthings along with the silver and her jewelry. She had wrapped everything in tissue and sealed the boxes tight, but when we dug them up (on a moonless night, with only the small stub of a candle so no one would come rob us with our hands still in the dirt), the fabric stank of damp rot. She threw it out. So even the hanging of laundry—that smallest of dutiful pleasures, one’s hands on soft cloth—the war had nearly ruined.

But the bombed-out rooms, after they’d been searched for unexploded shells, were interesting to explore. There was so much light and air. The roof and some walls were open to the sky. One could stare out over the city, and people could see inside. There were blackened rugs still on the floor, and broken figurines. Leaving the damp clothes, I tried to fit one little statue together, a pale blue china shepherdess. She was like a puzzle. Just one small shard was missing, yet I couldn’t make her stand up. My hands grappled with the bits.

Suddenly, the eerie feeling—the new sense I had acquired since the beginning of the occupation: the certainty that someone was watching me—swept in a wave over my neck and scalp, like a swarm of cold ants.

My hand closed on the pieces of sharp porcelain, and I scanned the open room, a swift sudden terror of Russians jellying my legs. (I was the only girl from my class who had not yet been raped. Some were dead. Susanne, a sweet, plain girl and the best in math, was raped by four soldiers and shot in the street while her father pleaded. Then they shot him, too.) But there was no one in the room, in the stairwell. No one on the landing. I moved, trembling, to the torn wall, and looked down.

In the street stood a thin, shabby stranger, staring up at the building in a trance. He wore civilian clothes. It was not at me he had been looking—he couldn’t have seen me from where he stood—but at the apartment house itself. How odd, I thought, that my eerie feeling should stretch to cover whole buildings now. I shook my head to clear it.

My movement caught his eye, and his terrible pale gaze shifted onto me. He was hollow, a shell-man. Darkness haloed his whole body, seeping under the bones of his face, pooling under his eyes and cheekbones. He stared.

“Hallo,” I shouted, uneasy, and waved a hand, but less as a greeting than to wave him on his way. His arms lifted up toward me, his fingers outspread like a derelict’s, and he began to speak. From my height his weak voice sounded like a whisper. Only the hiss and thud of his consonants came through.

I backed away from the shorn bricks, opening my hand above a singed Victrola cabinet and dropping the shepherdess in a pile. His whispery voice kept on and on. I could not bear it. Terror gripped me. Abandoning the damp clothes in their basket, I rushed down the staircase, turning its squared corners at a run, racing down all four flights with a queer cold fear galloping up my spine. I burst into the apartment.

“Mother,” I cried. “There’s a lunatic in the street!”

My grandfather, half rising from his chair by the window, craned to see. “We are all lunatics now, my dear,” he said, shaking his head, sinking back.

“Mother!” I cried, frantic. She came from the kitchen, drying her hands on a cotton sack.

“I heard you,” she said, frowning as she passed me. “Maybe he’s hungry,” she said reprovingly. “Hunger makes men strange.”

I wasn’t to sum people up, she was always telling me. I should hear their stories first. Fine, I’d say aloud, looking down at my shoes, thinking, But maybe their story is your slit throat, your raped girlhood, your cousin killed in the street for a gold pocketwatch.

At the window, my mother sagged and staggered. She clutched the white casement, and the sack fell from her hand.

“Mother?” I asked, reaching for her.

“Oh, God,” she cried. “Oh, God,” and she was out the door and stumbling downstairs at a run. My grandfather shoved himself upright and we stood frozen together, staring, as she ran into the street and clutched the man’s collapsing frame against her. We watched from the window as they stood there clasped, my parents, both sets of shoulders shuddering as they pressed their faces close amid a million yards of rubble.

*

My father, who had contracted tuberculosis in the Russian camps, who had been beaten by the guards and tortured for information he did not know, died in bed seven months later.

Those months were quiet and busy. People worked to rebuild, to find one another if they could. We learned from the newspapers and the outside world the specific truth of what we had done.

My mother and I took turns nursing my father. My grandfather, who had never liked him, grumbled. He had—he reminded us often—warned my mother against him from the beginning. But he was polite when my father came in to sit at the table or play cards in the evenings, propped on the sofa—held upright, it seemed, more by the quilts wrapped tightly around him than by the loose strings of his muscles. Dark moons hung under his eyes. Sometimes his arm would fall in a slow arc to his lap, and his cards would lie there, open for us all to see.

My mother would nudge me, and I’d glance away from what he held. We’d go on without him, quietly conversing as before. He would just stare, his mouth slightly ajar. When his arm slowly rose again, we’d pause—whoever’s turn it was—and let him in.

*

One dusk when my father could no longer get up, I carried hot onion broth into his room.

He reached out and clutched my wrist—I almost spilled the soup.

“Papa,” I chided. “Gently.” With my other hand I eased the bowl onto the nightstand and turned on the little lamp.

The long slack flesh of his cheeks was wet. I had never seen that before.

“You must not tell your children—” he said, and then he just looked at me, waiting for words.

“I’m never having children,” I said. I stopped short. It was not a decision I’d consciously made.

He shook his head as if brushing my words away.

“You’ll have children,” he said, his grip tightening. “You’re a good girl. You’ll have children. But don’t tell them—don’t ever tell them,” he continued, “what their grandfather was.” He wouldn’t say the word. “Don’t tell them what we did.”

I sat down on the edge of my parents’ bed, my wrist still in his grasp.

“Tell them I loved a good cigar,” he said. “A fire after dinner. Automobiles.” He sighed with pleasure. The left side of his mouth wrenched itself into the old half-grin for a moment, then fell back. “Tell them I loved to dance, Ingrid,” he said. “That I hunted boar with my brothers every autumn—” His voice broke.

“You’ll do those things again,” I said dully, as if on cue.

“Tell them I loved Germany,” he said thickly. He shook his head. “No. Berlin. I loved Berlin.” A fit of coughing shook him. I held the handkerchief against his mouth, and he spat. I felt the damp warmth hit the cloth. He cleared his throat.

“Tell them I was a fool about everything I loved. Everything. Your mother,” he said.

My mouth flew open. A little sound came out, and heat flashed to my cheeks and forehead.

His grip loosened and he smiled, meeting my eyes for the first time. He tapped the back of my hand with a single finger.

“Always, your mother,” he said.

I closed my mouth and looked away.

“Love is not simple,” he said, “like in fairy tales for girls.”

He was quiet for a long while then, and his breathing slowed, but when I turned back to him at last, he was still awake. His gray-blue eyes were shining.

“Tell your children,” he said, and his breath came hard, “that on Saturday mornings I took my little Ingrid to Tiergarten. That we fed the ducks with bakery bread. You tell them,” he said, his voice rising, “that my little girl, running up and down the bank, throwing her fists of bread on the water, shouting, ‘Papa, Papa, see!’—” He was trembling, and his hands shook. “The most beautiful thing God ever gave me in this life, you were. There was no more beautiful day on this earth. Nothing more pure.” His smile lifted all the thin muscles of his face, and his eyes were pools of light.

Heat swirled in my forehead. My stomach felt like I would cry. He squeezed my hand. We sat there. It got darker and darker, until the room was black and cold except for the small cloud of gold around the lamp.

“My soup?” he said finally.

And I fed him.

Joy Castro is the author of four novels, a short fiction collection, a volume of essays, and a memoir. Her books have received an International Latino Book Award and starred reviews from ‘Publishers Weekly’ and ‘Kirkus Reviews’ and been published in Germany by DTV and in France by Gallimard’s historic Série Noire. Her fiction has appeared in venues including ‘Ploughshares,’ ‘The Brooklyn Rail,’ and ‘Michigan Quarterly Review.’ The founding editor of Machete, a series in literary nonfiction at The Ohio State University Press, she is the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.