A Conversation Over Breakfast

Words by Emma Venables

Art by Sandra Eckert

You ask for a divorce as if you were asking me to pass you the salt. I reply: no, thank you. You laugh in the manner of someone irritated by my response. I wonder where this lack of tolerance came from, whether it was there all along and I’ve chosen to lean into it, embrace it. One can’t see the forest when they’re in amongst the trees: one of those phrases passed down over decades from some English relative, distant and long dead. 

“It’s your Uncle Hans,” you say. Ah, a relative. Not so distant but definitely dead.

“Is he here?” I ask, turning to look out of the window despite the fact our apartment is on the third floor and Uncle Hans wasn’t known for his ability to levitate and certainly couldn’t find his way, press his nose to my kitchen windowpane, from the grave, could he?

You shake your head. I bite my toast. The crunch sends your shoulders a fraction closer to your ears. I take another bite. Sometimes I think of biting your face, ears, throat. I’ve done it before, in long-lost moments of passion, of I-can’t-let-go, but now I just want to do it to see your blood splattered across the tabletop, smeared to something resembling icing or the dregs of tomato juice. Nothing a damp cloth can’t erase. 

“Your uncle Hans,” you say. 

This conversation started and finished once last night. You brought it up over dinner and I slammed dishes, broke a vase—a wedding gift, of all things to break—and threw tulips into the bin. A waste, you said. I could have decanted them into a jar, a glass, anything but the trash. I had laughed then; a sound that got higher and higher in pitch until I’m sure I heard the lightbulb protest. You had stepped back then, hands up in defeat or fear or both. I had felt lioness-like, puffed chest, and straight spine. I’d sent a man of the Party to bed, to covers thrown over ears to block out the rage: the banging of saucepans and crockery as they’re thrown back into their hiding places; the sloshing of water as hands are ploughed into and out of it with too much force. Ah, the wrath of a woman who’d divorce you any day of the week. But not today. Not tomorrow. Definitely not this weekend. Perhaps not any day of next week or next month either. 

“Tell me about my uncle Hans,” I say. I know all about my uncle Hans, of course, but I want to see sweat decorate your upper lip and watch your cheeks reveal their discomfort. Come on. Tell me. 

I lean back in my chair, cross my legs in the so-called unladylike fashion that you always shake your head at: right ankle resting on left thigh. I flick a crumb off my trouser leg. 

You clear your throat. “Your uncle Hans, the National Socialist.”

“Uncle Hans was a Nazi?” I ask, placing my hand to my chest in the manner of someone who has just taken delivery of a shock. 

A huff of air. The rolling of eyes. Come on, Tobias, you can do better than this. But, then again, you are a Party man. Undercover is your way. I bet your heart storms. I bet your blood performs its adrenaline rhythm in your ears. I bet you’re clenching your fists beneath the table. I almost want to bend over and check. I’d take a bump on the head just to see some hint of your frustration, but, equally, you’re not worth the effort, the flash of pain. You stir sugar into your coffee. I watch for the quiver, listen for the chime of spoon against rim. Steady hand. 

“You knew Uncle Hans was a Nazi when I married you,” I say.

“Things have changed.”

“Weren’t your relatives Nazis too?” I remember a night, in the early days of us, when we shared our views in whispers lest your mother should hear you’d sneaked a woman into her apartment, into your bedroom; when we shared stories of family members we’d never met but knew were the bad ones, the maggots in the apple. I’d seen a photograph of uncle Hans when I was a child—a photograph my grandmother refused to throw away—and told you how normal he seemed. No uniform. No traces of evil hidden in his posture, the crease in his forehead, the curl of his lips. It had been my job to dispose of the photograph when my grandmother died. No one, not even my mother, now creeping into old age herself, had wanted a reminder of uncle Hans. I see him swinging at the gallows and that’s the only image of him I need, my mother had said, blanket across her lap and cancer in her bones. I burnt the photograph. You were there. We watched him curl in on himself. You had no problem with this crooked branch of my family tree then, did you? 

You lean back in your own chair. We look like a museum display. Mirror images. Husband and wife sat either side of the breakfast table with cups resting on knees. The curator would obviously fix my posture, make me appear more pliant. Tuck me in, put my cup on the table, put my fingers to my cheek in a thoughtful, can-I-get-you-anything-else-way. The DDR woman, empowered at work but not at home. 

You tap a rhythm on your cup. I want to tell you to stop but I don’t want you to know that I’m irritated, that all my innards are either clenching or working as if they’re on the run. 

“Let’s just get divorced, please,” you say, stopping your musical efforts. 

“Is there another woman?” I ask. “Does she not like uncle Hans? Is she old enough to be your mother? Did they have a dalliance and he never returned her letters?” I ask these questions with my hands pressed to my heart once more. 

The huff of air. The eye roll. Come on, Tobias. I know why, of course. You want to go up a staircase, stay on the elevator a little longer. You’ve earnt your stripes, your pats on the back, your heavier briefcase, but I’m standing in your way. I’m petite and you can easily lift me, but my family history is heavy and hard. Hard for us all, Tobias. When the Russians knocked at my grandmother’s door she fainted. SS. SS. SS. My mother said she repeated the abbreviation as if she’d never heard it before. She had, of course, but never from uncle Hans’s lips. He rarely came home, sent letters from occupied Europe, his news heavily censored.

You stand up, shoes squeaking on the linoleum. The orange curtains framing the window waft in your breeze. I’ve always hated this flash of color you insisted upon hanging. Tacky, I told you. You said your mother had made them for us. Don’t be ungrateful. You begin to fill up the sink as if you might actually wash the dishes. I wonder what I’ll do if you do. Perhaps I’ll use it as an example: a reason why I can’t possibly agree to a divorce. But you’re becoming the perfect husband, I’ll say. Oh, the fury you’ll feel. Will you follow in my petulant footsteps and break something, tear down your mother’s curtains? I’ll use that as another reason. Finally, the hideous curtains are gone. We’re on the same page. 

The tap clinks as you turn it off. I’ve been on at the Hausmeister about that. He always says tomorrow. He’d definitely listen to you if you got your promotion, wouldn’t he? A man from the higher echelons can’t have an indignant tap. He’ll be here with his rag and his wrench today, not tomorrow. I watch you dry your hands on a cloth, stare at the tiles in the manner of a man seeking an answer to a complex quandary. Your posture irks me, have I ever told you that? It seems fake, like your spine desperately wants to curve but you stick to the mantra of mind over matter. 

“Let’s just get divorced,” you say. 

The dropping of your chin to your chest, the press of your cervical vertebrae against your skin. A more realistic posture for a man not allowed the thing he wants the most. Oh, how it would snap back, threaten to crack itself, if I just mouthed the word: yes. I consider saying it, just for my own amusement. Yes—then waiting a moment, leaning forwards, picking up my coffee cup and inspecting the dregs. Oh, the weight of hope floating in the atmosphere—but, then again, no. 

You turn back to me, begin collecting plates from the table. What does it feel like, lifting a finger for the first time? I almost point out the apron, an anniversary gift you gave me a few years ago, hanging on the back of the kitchen door. I tore open the brown wrapping paper and we both laughed. How often do I have to wear it? I asked. You gesticulated, hands encompassing all the time. I’ve only worn it once or twice but it’s begun to fade from disuse, or sunlight, or fatigue. If aprons had ears. This one might. Do you spy on me too? I stand up, fingers itching with the need to find a bug, a wire, to confront you with something tangible. I go to the hook, shake the material, squeeze it tight in my fist. 

“What’re you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Something.”

“Make a note of it if you’re that bothered.”

You put the plates down. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I yank the apron from its resting place, expecting the resistance of a wire, the revelation of a hole in the wall. Nothing. I scrunch up the material and throw it in the bin. Go on. Ask me for a divorce again. Go on. But you don’t. You continue to stand with your fingertips on the table, dirty plates resting where you rested your elbows not thirty minutes ago. I could lift the bin, throw the entire thing at you. Watch the apron, cracked eggshells, paper packaging, veer through the air, watch you watching a so-called crazed woman, a usurper, a challenge to crease-free edges. 

You run a hand through your hair; I want to tear mine out. I never used to despise you this much, not until you donned a suit, acquired a briefcase, a way of looking at me and our friends as if there might be meaning between the lines of dialogue we exchanged, slotted into the silences that fell over dinners and drinks. And then Harald was gathered up on Marienburger Strasse and spent several nights alone except for four walls and a bright light in Hohenschönhausen and Petra felt she was being followed, began waving at a man who appeared during her morning commute, sat on a bench under a tree as she smoked on her lunchbreak, leant against the streetlight across the road as she closed the curtains at night. The link? You, Tobias. You. You’d heard them make a joke at the expense of the Party, heard Petra say she wouldn’t mind life in the West. Comments shared between friends over two bottles of wine which you poured. Nothing for you, Tobias? Oh, no. Work, you said. Were you still on the clock, mein Liebling? Of course. Those hands tick to your time. And you carried all the information you learnt to your colleagues, threw my friends under the bus for a bit more respect and a bigger paycheck, and now you want to do the same to me? 

We stand. Bin. Table. Chairs. Dirty dishes. The paraphernalia of married life between us. 

“No divorce. It’s not good timing for me,” I say. “I’m going for a walk. You can follow me if you like.”

As I leave the apartment, I hear crockery shatter, the thwack of a towel meeting the countertop. 

About the author

Emma Venables's short and flash fiction has been widely published in magazines and journals. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London and Liverpool Hope University. Her first novel, Fragments of a Woman, was published by Aderyn Press in 2023. She can be found on Instagram, BlueSky, and Threads: @EmmaMVenables.

About the artist

Sandra Eckert is a retired art teacher. She has a deep love for nature and living things. She lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania with her husband, Peter, and her rescue dogs, Jack and Teddy.