Home Leave: A Novel by Brittani Sonnenberg Read Free Book Online Page B

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