Джоан Силбер - Improvement

The bargaining went back and forth. Bruno’s eyes were excited, and he kept touching Steffi’s arm. How much money did they have left? Probably not enough. At one point Steffi stood up—she was leaving, no deal. She was urged back, given more tea. In the end she offered an amount too close to all they had with them (seven hundred fifty deutschmarks) and when the man continued to scowl, she unhooked the gold locket from her neck and set it down before him. A stunning move, and it must’ve proven they really had no more cash, because the man gazed at all of them in turn and then said, “Okay, I see, yes.”

All the way back through the rest of Turkey, across dicey, barely paved highways through the mountains and endless sandy roads along plains in the middle of nowhere, they were in danger of running out of money to buy gas and they ate only the cheapest kinds of food. They slept in the van, hidden behind trees; Bruno and Dieter took turns staying awake to keep guard. On one night, Steffi had to slip out of the van to pee, and she knocked over one of the amphorae, which had not been wrapped well enough and broke in several pieces.

Bruno called Steffi an ugly cunt too stupid to walk straight, after the amphora shattered. The fighting among them was worst in bare landscapes where there wasn’t another living soul around to hear them. Steffi said Bruno was a sexual joke so in love with himself he didn’t know the world was laughing at him. Dieter called them, more than once, the couple from hell. Bruno said Dieter was fooling no one with his high-minded smugness the whole time he was dying to stuff his pockets.

At Ipsala, the border crossing from Turkey into Greece, cars and trucks and buses were backed up for miles. Dieter had to keep turning the engine off so it didn’t overheat. “I bet it’s taking so long,” Steffi said, “because they search so thoroughly.”

“Please shut up,” Bruno said.

“I can’t stand this,” Steffi said.

“Well, stand it,” Dieter said. “You have to be cool when the guard is around. You have to.”

“Steffi can do that,” Bruno said. “She’s used to being fake.”

The guard they finally got was a stern-faced kid with a mustache who beckoned them out of the van. They had to show him the registration for the VW and all their passports, and then he poked his head inside the van and decided to make them unroll a carpet Steffi had bought. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Steffi said. The guard pointed to a suitcase and said something. He said it again, loudly—was he saying “Open,” was it English?—and Dieter stepped forward to unzip the thing. I shouldn’t be here , he was thinking. I’m in a fucked-up situation I shouldn’t be in, I’m ruining my life for the wrong thing . How would Steffi ever manage in a Turkish jail? Bruno would get through it. Dieter didn’t know about himself. The guard was saying something to them very sharply. What was it? Steffi’s eyes were very still and scared; Bruno wasn’t moving. Now the guard was waving his arm as if he were directing them back into their van. He said, “ Mach schnell ,” the one phrase in German people knew from movies. He wanted them to hurry, he wanted them out of the way. “Good-bye,” he said. “ Auf wiedersehen .” Was it over? It was over. The engine coughed before it started up again. They rode like phantoms; none of them spoke.

Once they were on the Greek side, they were hooting and sighing and making jokes, happy culprits together. And in the first town in Greece, Steffi stole them a bottle of retsina to celebrate. They’d gone into a market to buy a loaf of bread and Steffi turned up back at the car, laughing as she pulled the wine bottle out from under her jacket. Bruno was furious—did she think they could take stupid chances? they couldn’t take stupid chances!—but Dieter admired her nerve.

And Yugoslavia, which went on for a long time—it had Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia—was full of things to unnerve you, road signs depicting rockslides, rumors of thieves, police, wolves. They cheered when they crossed into Austria, and from there Bruno could send to Germany for more cash while they waited in a border town. The waiting took longer than it should have, and when Steffi wondered why, Bruno said he was sick of her opinions and he was never going into business with a woman again.

Steffi handled the insults with brisk counterattack—she said, “Oh, fuck you,” or “Don’t be a prick every minute.” But Dieter felt sorry for her. Bruno was harsher all the time, and the time wasn’t up yet.

The van wasn’t in great shape either, so when Bruno’s cash finally arrived, they had to have work done on its poor engine before they drove the last stretch. At least they could move into a cheap hotel for the night, take real showers, eat a meal.

The joy of glasses of beer made them all act like the best of friends at dinner. They toasted, they reminisced—remember the old lady giving us soup in the farmhouse? Remember when the border guy scared the shit out of all of us? Steffi and Bruno finished each other’s sentences. “A trip we won’t forget in a hurry,” Bruno said.

In the middle of the night Dieter woke to a faint knocking at his door. Even half-asleep he knew it must be Steffi. She stood in the hallway in her red kimono—on her face was a crooked smile of assured naughtiness tinged with a little panic. Dieter, who’d answered the door in his underwear, beckoned her in. Quiet, quiet, they had to be quiet, Bruno was across the hall.

But it was sexy, all that stealth. Dieter felt at first that he was being kind to Steffi, he could be a lot kinder to her than Bruno, couldn’t he, but he was excited as well. Under the robe she wore nothing, and the frankness of this seemed clever and wonderful. She had a lusher body than you would think in her clothes. Dieter hadn’t been with a woman since leaving Berlin, and he hadn’t entirely known how hungry he was.

They were trying to be soundless on the bed, and Steffi got the giggles and put her hand over her mouth, which made her laugh more. Dieter was past silliness by that time, too intent to be playful, and for a while they were on separate streams, friendly but estranged. He was thinking this really would have gone much better with Kiki; all his lusts in the past week had been for Kiki. He remembered the last night at the hotel in Ankara, lying in that bed and thinking of her, more than thinking. But now Steffi had come to him as a gift, and he remembered to have the sense to take it.

Of course, Bruno knew. How could he not know? When Dieter went down to breakfast the next day, Steffi was absent, and Bruno, looking up from his coffee, said, “It was her idea, wasn’t it?”

Dieter shrugged. “I didn’t stop her.”

“I’m not asking what you didn’t do,” Bruno said. “It’s time to leave her here. She can hitch home, she’s so good at fending for herself.”

Was this Bruno? He could be caustic in his hearty way but he’d never been cruel, in Dieter’s long experience.

“You know she’s been useful on this trip,” Dieter said. “Her bargaining.”

“We would’ve done fine without her. And now we will.”

Leave Steffi behind, with no money at all, to get into strange cars across Austria and East Germany? Much about Steffi was annoying—her snap opinions, her talking too much, her faith in her own adorableness—but throwing her into danger was a whole other story. If they heard later that she’d met with real harm—raped, run over, taken up by Soviet pimps—how would either of them live with that forever? Bruno was never one to look ahead.

“Tell me you don’t mean it,” Dieter said.

Bruno gave him a very annoyed stare. “But I do.”