The Recent East by Thomas Grattan

Author:Thomas Grattan [Grattan, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Sagas, Lgbt, Gay
ISBN: 9780374722234
Google: vcDiDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2021-03-09T08:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

12

1971

Beate’s father tried to look serious in photos, but in this one his mouth wasn’t quite closed. Strings of hair were pasted to his head; his tie a shade crooked. Even more it was his eyes. They weren’t looking at the camera, or at anything. Beate invented the article’s alternative title—“Man with Dementia Found Wandering in Winona”—cruelty and truth twinning, as they often did. Mutti bought a cheap frame and slid the article inside. They’d been living in Minnesota just over a year. In his first semester Vati had taught philosophy, though the friend of a friend who’d gotten him the job had either lied or not known about her father’s English, saying it was solid rather than rudimentary. His lectures were carefully written, though in translation Vati’s ideas wended into murky waters. Even when he made sense, his accent was thick. And he switched to German without realizing, one bold, annoyed student making it her job to say: “You’re doing it again. With the language.” For the rest of the semester a translator was hired and the class addressed their questions to him. Now Vati taught beginning German. He balked at his students’ incompetence, though he seemed resignedly pleased that they knew nothing while he knew everything.

A reporter from a Minneapolis paper heard of their defection and interviewed him just as the hysteria over communism was reignited by Vietnam. The article landed on the Sunday paper’s front page. Beate hated the title—“The Brave Professor”—but most of all, the photo. At dinner, Beate sat so she didn’t have to look at the copy hanging on the wall.

“What you said, about the soldiers who questioned us, how you felt for them though they were keeping us from what we wanted,” Mutti said. “That was quite moving.” Mutti had been with him during this interview, but spoke as if she’d just read it. They ate hard-boiled eggs for dinner. Someone walked back and forth in the apartment above them.

“They were frightening, I thought,” Beate said.

Her father cut into his egg. Its sulfur smell rose.

“They were children,” Mutti said.

“With guns,” Beate answered.

“Beate,” her father chided.

“What did I say?”

“It’s how you said it.”

“How I said it?”

“Are you repeating my words because you don’t understand them? Or are you angry?”

She felt many things, like the dread of her second year of American high school, though there was also a relief in the return of classes. Moving through halls at school where people shouted to one another trumped the boredom of summer, when she slept late and got up only to lie on her bedroom floor, each free day a rocket ship she couldn’t consider how to build.

“I think,” Beate said—she crumbled the last of her egg onto her bread—“that they were frightening. That we can call them children now. But at the time…”

Beate waited for her father to ask her to finish the sentence. Instead, he looked at a book that sat open on his lap. Mutti started to clean up though they were still eating.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.