Shorter Days by Anna Katharina Hahn Page B

up at her from the moist grass, reminding her of her mother’s “bullseyes”: when Judith was a child, she would fry eggs for lunch, and Judith was supposed to stab them with her fork. They made her nauseous.
    When she looked into the Posselts’ living room, she understood that she was cleaning up not as a favor to the old neighbors, but to restore a disrupted order. She saw rubber plants and philodendron pressing against the windowpanes next to a tarnished brass watering can; farther back she saw the darkness of the embossed wallpaper, the brown velveteen armchairs, and intricately patterned oriental rugs. Schlamper lay sleeping in his basket, his snout propped on crossed forelegs. The animal’s long back rose and fell regularly. It was just before twelve. Doubtless the Posselts were eating in the dining room, which looked out on Olgastraße. Today was Wednesday, so they’d be having poppy seed sweet buns. Like Herr Posselt, the recipe came from the Sudetenland. Judith was very familiar with the long and tortuous history of Wenzel Posselt’s odyssey from Bohemia to Stuttgart. As well as the hostility his wife had faced when she had exchanged her old Swabian surname, Läpple, for the name of a refugee. “He was just the most charmin’, no Swabian could deny that.” Judith knew of Frau Posselt’s struggles with the finer points of Bohemian cuisine. “I’d never made that kinda stuff, nobody could shew me how, no mother-in-law, no nothin’. Wenzel, he tried. Agin and agin he tried ta shew me. Shook his head and laughed, he did. And now we take it in turns, one day Swabian, the next Bohemian: Mondee stewed beef’n horseradish sauce, Tuesdee lentils’n spätzle, Wednesdee buns, Thursdee Gaisburger stew . . .” Judith doesn’t know why she burdens her mind with such trivia. And yet this information nestles in her mind, displacing other things. Remembering Frau Posselt’s menu and paddling endlessly about in an ocean of murky chatter is still more pleasant than thinking about her own past. Angrily, Judith tears paper towels off a roll and scrubs away the contaminants. It was her garden that had been invaded, her children’s space that some depraved, television-addled monsters had defiled.
    â€œMama, can we have sweets now please?” Kilian asks, cocking his head. His right foot scuffs at the ground. Uli stands a few feet behind him, grinning. Judith knows he put his younger brother up to it. She marvels at the two of them—how quickly they fix on something else and forget the bottle of poison. She hopes that her own genes have mostly been eradicated from the chiseled, finely turned strands of their DNA, which she imagines as glowing purple and black rods, like the lighting in a club. “You can have them when Mattis comes, as I told you. Look and make sure that there’s nothing missing in the playhouse! Is there a cup and saucer for everyone?” The brothers run to the hut to check the table settings, since Mattis and his mother Hanna are supposed to arrive in a quarter of an hour.
    They live next door, in a four-story, smooth-plastered, utilitarian building from the fifties with small windows—the kind of building that was so often constructed to fill bombed-out spaces. It fits the rest of the street like a rotten tooth in a healthy mouth. Judith has known Hanna and her lively son for a while now. They often run into each other on the street, where Judith hears all the latest horror stories about Mattis’s hospital visits and treatments. Mattis goes to the Catholic kindergarten on Sonnenbergstraße, but he is nonetheless a regular guest in the little garden; he’s even allowed to wreak havoc on the Ostheimer toy farm in the playroom, to the surprise and delight of Judith’s sons: “Come on, we’ll shoot the oxen, that one’s dead. Now a bomb falls through the roof and explodes on the pigs,