Black Forest Excerpt
Frankfurt am Main, May, 1970
Brenda went to Frankfurt on her last journey of preparation, taking a room near the Hauptbahnhof in a seedy pension run by a fat woman with red hair. The fat woman drank wine and counted money, believing that Brenda was in town to service the GIs staggering down the Kaiserstrasse. She understood that business and offered advice enunciated in lazy Hessian slang, so that Gueten Morgen came out sounding like Juta Morja. She greeted Brenda every morning before serving two eggs in a glass. Juta Morja. By the third day, Brenda had invented a biography for a girl called Juta Morja, a girl seeking revenge, or at least the courage to want it.
Brenda made notes as she traveled the city, riding the Strassenbahn to Am Zoo and Palmengarten, strolling past the Goethe Institute, eating in the cafeterias off the Hauptwache. Frankfurt, in its cold, precise way brought her peace of mind; Brenda considered the possibility of staying, taking a job, and becoming a guest worker of the Federal Republic. Brenda slept with a man from Belgrade, her first lover in many months. He was earnest and polite and, when he was finished and dressed, he placed a one hundred D-mark bill on the night table. Brenda lay on her bed and stared at the bank note until the whorls of color began to bleed together. She waited for a reaction, from her mind or her body, waited for sex to revisit her fear, waited for the money to pull her down into despair and self-loathing.
Instead she slept. When she awoke, Brenda put the money in her jeans. She crossed the Main on the Eisener Steg, a pedestrian in a sea of cars. Near the Ueber Main Kai she flagged a taxi. The driver was a Greek with sad eyes and curly hair. She was not afraid of him.
“Flughaven,” she said.
“Airport, lady?”
They battled through German as a third language, his version, her version. She introduced herself as Juta Morja, a refugee from a faraway land. He spoke of juntas and colonels and reprisal killings; someday he’d go home and kill his tormentors.
Near Darmstadt her story poured out, the story of Brenda Antonucci, a girl from Long Island in a Hell’s Kitchen bar. She told him about he night she had been raped, that her father had done nothing to avenge her, because he feared the men who’d violated her. Demetrius, the driver, pulled into a parking lot to listen, his face wet with tears, hands gripping the wheel. Brenda understood that he was hearing his own story, experiencing the ultimate pain of exile, the cowardice of distance, of life without a present tense. At Rhein-Main she gave him the one hundred-mark note, even though it was far too much, he folded the money and put it in the pocket of his jeans.
Juta Morja headed home.
Now in the traffic and blare and white neon of the city Brenda was frightened again. Her hotel, the St. Lucie, was far worse than the pension in Frankfurt, populated by hookers, pimps, jailbirds, drunks, and hustlers with love beads and bell-bottoms. Brenda waited in the lobby for the man Uncle Massimo had vouched for, the man he called Mr. Pins. Massimo had described the man as important , not short or tall, slim or fat, but important as though that characteristic alone would enable her to single him out. The lobby was busy, it was always busy, with girls flouncing in and others strutting out through revolving doors so filthy the sidewalk was invisible from inside. The windows facing the street were curtained and barred; a sign read ‘aviso’ and continued in Spanish to instruct guests what to do in the event of fire. Brenda read the notice, deciding that the first thing a guest should do in the event of fire was locate someone fluent in Spanish.