Chapter Text
The first time she stays at her brother’s apartment, Franziska is thirteen. They are visiting for the week so her father may speak at a convention and so her brother may watch. She bought herself a journal for her birthday that year, bound carefully in leather, and she drafts speeches for some fantasy crowd the whole flight, all twelve hours. She wakes up from blank snatches of sleep to find her hand has kept going, letters shaky and spiralled. She is too careless in her haste to cover them and leaves a blot on the page, a haphazard line blowing out of the pooled ink. Her father is sitting in the row in front of her; they could not find seats together. They get to the airport and she feels terrifically silly, expecting it to be the dead of night: it is just reaching the evening. In the taxi she notices the sun and moon are sharing the sky.
He ushers them in with appropriate deference and the dance begins. Her brother maintains one guest bedroom with one requisite queen bed. There is a sofa in the living room and it feels fantastically quaint, quintessential, when Franziska processes the pieces on the board. She fights a double-pronged battle of guest etiquette and filial piety and she executes each stroke like a general: she grovels, she simpers, she acts impervious and malleable. She rolls the word filial around silently in her head and across her tongue; it trips like filly, and she thinks about riding and about her father’s colleagues. Franziska sits in the center of the living room and of the apartment and thinks of spurs and of flying.
Her brother’s apartment has a skylight. She learns that this city is grey all the time and opaque too, regardless of the night encroaching. She realizes the stars would be in different places if she could see them. She tries to diagram their shapes: Orion and Sirius, Cassiopeia and Cepheus, Ariadne’s Crown, Perseus. Franziska realizes fast that she remembers the stories, but the patterns in the stars have slipped through: she could never fully map the bodies onto the points. She draws a map of words in her mind and projects it upwards instead.
Looking upwards, Franziska feels as if her body has never known sleep, as if her being has been divorced from the watch on her wrist which still shows numbers of home. She feels fantastically old, as if her brain has been pinned up with the stars like a spurned Greek girl. The edges of her mind begin to cut sharp. She feels that there is something she wants and has wanted more than anything, something she would sob at upon sight, but in her stupor she cannot make her thoughts converge around its form, cannot tell which of her languages it might be spoken in. She is all of a sudden very aware that this is a strange house in a strange land with strange light, artificial, streaming down on top of her, and Franziska feels awfully like the sofa is a stage. She hears her bones inside her body as she pads to the kitchen; she listens to the hiss of water and gas as she sets her brother’s kettle on the stove.
She watches the painted metal and pretends she can see it grow hot, imagines the water inside fizzing then bubbling than rolling. Franziska can so very rarely see things and is so adept at acting as though she can, interpreting metal echoes as stages of heat. She is waltzing with the water while trying to stop its downbeat foot, afraid of letting it scream in this house that is not hers. Its whisper starts accelerating and she lunges for the gas and while her body angles turning the knob she sees her brother in his doorway, clad in flannel, bleary, and her first thought is He looks so weak and she is very frightened. She is pouncing on the gas like a lion pacing his kill.
His voice cuts through the kitchen, quiet, and Franziska is confused and then horrified to realize he is speaking in the wrong language; he has abandoned the language of their shared childhood and of her father for that of this place. It washes over her coldly and too late that these are the words of home for him, that they have been separate in thought the entire time, that Franziska does not belong to the patterns in his head the way he fits in hers. Franziska is good with words and can recover from this moment of floundering as she parses through his whisper’s swishing timbre, but even as she switches tongues in her head she is hearing how deep his voice has become over years. The language of their youth is lost forever in octaves.
He says to her, you should be asleep, it is full morning now in Stuttgart, and she says to him, How astute. She does not say, I am so afraid I have lost where the stars are and she does not say, I do not know the map of this kitchen and I think if I do not learn it I may scream at my hot water and ruin the making of it. He considers her, the plane of his shoulders sinking slightly, and wordlessly reaches above her head to a high cabinet, drawing out two mugs.
He looks at a spot just above her head and asks, lightly, as if they are friends in middle age enquiring after people years in the past, Peppermint or pekoe, Franziska?
There are twin pangs in her chest: the blow of his memory and the affront of his needing to ask. She says to him, peppermint, it has always been peppermint, and he nods and withdraws two bags, and she sees his smiling eyes and says, you have not been gone so long, it is a foolish question. He only says, still no sugar, then. She feels the insult of her age in his pouring of the water for her, in his pattern of drawing cold water from the tap to combat the kettle’s heat. She feels it in his offer of caffeine and in her familiar weaknesses.
He says, shall we sit? and she nods and tries to look taller doing it. They sit on the sofa meant to serve as her bed and she tries, again, to find the stars above them, to wipe away the clouds from the skylight and understand their position in relative terms. There are no stars, no moon, and no relative terms. She says to him, weakly, stupidly, you seem taller in this place with all its newness. She says to him, I mean it is not like home. No rafters.
He holds his cup in both hands and it is like they are in his bedroom again, in Stuttgart, where she knows all of the constellations outside of his window, where she showed him starting with Ursas major and minor. He says, looking up, not like home, yes, I wanted it to feel open, like I could see anywhere. She says, following his gaze, I cannot see through that light at all, I keep trying, and he looks back to her and says, ut’s different here. Light pollution. He squints at the glass on the ceiling again and then says, quietly, It was cloudy tonight, but look, over there, you get a little sky.
Franziska follows her brother’s pointing finger and finally sees real darkness, chroma against the grey of the clouds. In it she sees the inkblots of the airplane, the darkness of her father’s guest room door, and the blankness of the kettle. She does not turn her head away and, slowly, she notices the light reflected there, a bird’s-eye-view of her and her brother, made worms by perspective, height forgotten. She begins the silent work of reorienting her diagram of the stars.
She mutters, How did you find that? and he says, I am always looking for it, I think. Franziska sips her tea.
Suddenly his eyes are on her and he says, Franziska, I am used to being awake and looking for it, are you? and he is her little brother all over again, pages open. She says to him, it is open in this house, I am unused to a great many things. She looks at the sky again and says, you found me, searching, did you not?
His hand tenses like he is preparing for a motion he has not yet defined. He says, I do not want this house to be hostile. It is a bizarre sentiment, both hostlike and nonsequitur, but Franziska feels that she can traverse the map the words are making. She says, there are but two beds and I am at least a good daughter.
He stands up and holds out his hand, and as she stares at him she feels that the expression on her face is wrong but she cannot place its motions. She does not take it but instead follows him through the kitchen and to his door. At the threshold she feels there is something she is supposed to do with herself, some dance step or proper word, but instead she lets her joints halt and her eyes gaze as he walks to the closet and pulls something from it. In his arms she understands its form: a blanket. She is at once furious at her previous lack, quieted by the way in which she did not notice what was missing, and baffled at the absurd hotel mannerisms of her brother. He comes to the doorway and she reaches out, unsure of language, afraid of scowling. He says, Franziska, please, you do not need to be afraid of being comfortable.
She says to him, I will not sleep on your floor like a dog, though in her head she feels that she could follow her brother to the end of the earth for his mercy, and he says, I know, Franziska. He deposits the blanket in her arms and it is cruelly soft, feels terribly gentle. She lays in her brother’s blanket in her brother’s house and looks at the broken corner of sky he showed her until she feels convinced of Polaris existing beyond it.