When she’d first set foot in this country, she had known nothing about the life she was thrust into. The vast plains of the ice-clad Midwest, the chubby-legged children, the cars with their extraordinary fins, so sharp and fluted they reminded her of the Baltic sturgeon. But that day, taking the picture of that little girl, she had warmed to the idea that it might be possible to find some sort of happiness here, so far from the people she loved and pined for, the people who suffered, even now.
Bettina meandered around the gallery, champagne flute in hand. She wore new heels that pinched and a black silk shirt she’d bought that morning at Wieboldt’s on Grand and Ashland. Her slacks were undistinguished except that George’s wife had once complimented her on them. Bettina didn’t have much of an eye for fashion. She was thirty-nine years old, and her long hair, the color of wet earth, hung loosely around her face. The champagne tickled pleasantly at her throat. George caught her eye from across the room and raised his graying eyebrows, checking to see if she was all right. He knew that all this attention was hard for her. Bettina should have told her sister, Clara, about the event, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to her that it would be such a big celebration. She’d expected a handful of colleagues, a few amateur photographers perhaps.
One after another the visitors touched her arm with soft fingers and leaned in to say how they admired her work, how much it moved them. Someone finally dimmed the overheads, and after she downed a few glasses of bubbly in quick succession, it seemed as though the faces tilted in her direction were emanating a kind of warmth, and it drew her out of herself. Bettina began to smile in a more natural way. There was music playing in the background, something modern with sitars. Everywhere now there were bright shots of color, not only in people’s clothing but in their skin tones: faces all shades of white and brown and everything in between. Hair that curled and kinked and flowed in disheveled waves (on men, too—this was acceptable now). There was a woman with long white hair, her body draped in a caftan. Some of the men wore suits with pencil-thin pant legs, and a sprinkling of women were in jewel-toned cocktail dresses, cinched tight at the waist as had been the style just a few years earlier, though this already seemed outdated.
All these people, young and old, had come here to celebrate her! Bettina allowed herself the faintest prickle of pride.
“Ms. Heilstrom,” said one of the men. Dark hair sprang from his jawline. “I’m from National Geographic. I wonder, will you be focusing exclusively on this country? Do you plan to travel and document change in other places too?”
“I don’t have any plans yet,” Bettina said. She didn’t mention that George was putting ideas in her head, insisting that her work could make a real difference. That she had a voice now, and she had a responsibility to use it. He was pushing her to think about taking a position at Time magazine, but she was not accustomed to being hopeful—it made her vulnerable to disappointment. And there was a nugget of coal inside her, something toxic and vile that reminded her she did not deserve happiness or success.
“I like to take it one day at a time,” she added, and this was true.
A young woman with orange feathers hanging from her earlobes asked about one of the larger prints: an old photograph from Rügen that was, actually, the invisible backbone of the exhibition. Without it, none of the other pictures would exist—and yet she had almost not taken that roll of film with her when she left, and the composition had almost been relegated to nothing more than an idea. Black and white, a cluster of people at the base of a stark chalk cliff face; a distorted perspective that presented the cliff as a thing of terrible beauty and the people as helpless as insects. But it was too hard to explain her work. This one—it was a picture she both treasured and despised, yet she recognized it as connected to everything she was doing now. She shrugged and clinked her glass with the girl’s. “For me, it’s about the shapes, I suppose. For the viewer, it may have several meanings.”
If she didn’t eat something soon, she would keel over. On her way to the buffet table, she recognized a number of her colleagues from the paper: Demetrius and Sarah, standing with John, the photo editor who’d allowed her to use the Tribune’s darkroom during the graveyard shift many years ago. There was a man in an ill-fitting olive suit behind a cluster of people at the bar area who caught her eye, but she didn’t think much of it until he began moving toward her, and she realized that he was missing his right arm.
Her glass slipped from her fingers and fell to the ground, but it didn’t break. There was some commotion as people fetched napkins and one overeager woman mopped at Bettina’s trousers with the hem of her skirt. Bettina did not take her eyes off the man as he made his way through the crowd toward her. The sleeve of his suit was folded in half, and the excess material was neatly tucked under his armpit and pinned into place. In this country you rarely saw people with missing limbs. In her country you saw this all the time.
She stared at the missing arm and then shifted her eyes back to the man’s face. It couldn’t be, but it was. Herbert Lange.
“Bettina, mein Gott . . . I had to see if it was really you,” he said to her in German. Though he did not smile, his eyes were friendly, small and surrounded by feathered creases. His mouth, slightly downturned, gave him the look of a man about to tell a bad joke. “I don’t know how many Bettina Heilstroms there could possibly be, and yet, incredible . . .”
Her breath was caught in her chest; she was unable to utter a word.
“You look well. Very well. I see you’ve built yourself a new life,” Herbert said. “This makes me extremely happy. You deserve it.”
“You’re in touch with Clara?” Bettina managed to ask. “She knows about tonight?”
He shook his head. Over the years her brother-in-law had aged considerably. His flaxen hair was thin on top, but he retained that mischievous air he’d had when he was younger. Her hand flew to her face, and she wondered how changed she appeared in his eyes. Herbert and her sister had fled Germany for Chicago just one year before Bettina arrived; for the first awkward months she’d been here, she’d lived with them in their one-bedroom apartment. She hated thinking back to that time: Her fragility and neediness, the absolute shock and desperation of it. The guilt as bitter as thistle.
Her sister’s marriage to Herbert had already been disintegrating back then, though Bettina hadn’t known it. Until tonight, she hadn’t seen him since he’d moved away with Clara over a decade ago, this time to Milwaukee, in a last-ditch effort to reignite something that had already been thoroughly doused. Soon after that, they’d divorced.
“We’re not—we don’t stay in touch. I didn’t want it to fall apart, the marriage,” he said. “It was never my intention to divorce, but you know your sister. She had other ideas.”
Clara was now remarried to a man named Borvin Kuznetsov, who ran a catering business. The irony of this never ceased to amaze Bettina: Clara had left East Germany to escape the Russians, and then she’d married one.
“I’m sorry, Herbert. I’m so surprised—I don’t even know where to start,” Bettina said.
John, the photo editor, materialized at her side. His wavy hair hung to his shoulders, and an odor, something smoky, came from him. “Congratulations!” he said, clutching her hand. “You don’t have a drink. Can I get you one? Having a good time, are you?”