Home Leave: A Novel by Brittani Sonnenberg

here and draw attention. So she follows his surprisingly quick gait for another fifteen minutes through small streets filled with bright balconies and large trees stretching their naked limbs to the sun.
    Then he stops at a small gate and they enter a series of private gardens, where city dwellers own small plots of land. She has noticed these Gartenkolonien scattered in pockets throughout the city, with their carefully tended rows and doll-like sheds, but she has never been inside. Now, in winter, the plots are all dead, the gates locked, apples rotting in brown grass. For the first time since leaving her apartment she feels uneasy and wonders if the boy has led her astray, or is simply lost himself. “Excuse me,” she calls out to him, coming to a stop. “ Entschuldigung? ” but he keeps going. As she catches up to him she can hear he is absorbed in humming a childish tune, the sort of thing you sing in grade-school choir. She can almost recognize it. He slips a hand confidingly in hers, and she falls silent.
    Then they hear voices. The boy quickens his step and grips her hand tighter. At the end of the path, on their right, is an open gate. Inside the garden, on a picnic table, are an enormous cake and a steaming thermos. Four people, so bundled as to make their age and sex anyone’s guess, huddle around the table, picking haphazardly with mismatched forks at the cake and passing around the thermos. No one has their own silverware or plate or cup. The air of disorder is decidedly un-German, Elise thinks, and for a second she feels a strong sense of camaraderie with the wayward winter picnickers.
    “Oma,” the boy calls out, and one of the bundles turns around and opens her arms. The boy lets go of Elise’s hand, and she watches with anguish as he falls into the old woman’s embrace. “Come back,” she wants to call, knowing she has no right to him. As soon as he leaves her side, the familiar lonely ache begins again, and Elise thinks of her bathtub and tries to picture the walk back home, how to get back in the hot scented water as soon as possible. The group regards her with silent curiosity, and the boy points to her and announces, simply, “Liesel.”
    “ Auf Liesel! ” one of the men shouts, lifting the thermos to her, and they all drink from the thermos, crying “ Auf Liesel! ” before they drink.
    “ Nein, ” Elise protests. “ Elise. Ich bin Elise. ” And then “ Tut mir leid, ” at the man’s look of offense and the boy’s scowl.
    “ Natürlich bist du nicht Liesel, ” says another man at the picnic table, offhandedly, picking at the cake. “ Liesel ist tot. ”
    Elise understands what the man is saying, even as the words fill her with an undefined dread. Liesel is dead. Elise feels nauseous and dizzy. She needs to sit but there is no place at the table for her.
    “ Komm, ” the boy’s grandmother says, and gestures for Elise to sit beside her. Elise freezes, recognizing the voice. It is the woman who spoke into the intercom, back at Elise’s apartment. The woman gestures again, patting the seat beside her. Weary of trying to make sense of it all—Germany, German, the old woman’s voice—Elise acquiesces, childlike, and finds herself sitting on the rough wooden bench between the boy and his grandmother, leaning her head on the old woman’s shoulder. The grandmother offers Elise the thermos. Elise realizes she is shivering, despite her heavy jacket and boots. Elise accepts the thermos, then discovers from its ripe, rich perfume that it is mulled wine, the smell of the Christmas markets that popped up all over Hamburg in mid-November. She gives the thermos back to the grandmother, pointing at her stomach by way of explanation.
    “ Kein Problem, ” the grandmother insists. “ Gut für das Kind. ”
    Inscrutably, Elise obeys her, for a small sip, and a rich, sour, cinnamony taste flies down her throat, hot and safe, like the Russian tea, made of Tang, cloves, cinnamon, and sugar,