Free Shorter Days by Anna Katharina Hahn Page B

quite empty. Leonie drinks quickly and waits for the relaxing effect of the alcohol, which sets in quickly after the forced abstinence of pregnancy and the baby years. She walks to the window, buttered bread in hand. The orange glow of the streetlamps lights up the street. Wilheminian-era standstone buildings, which look like little knight’s castles with their turrets and opulent ornamentation, alternate with post-war concrete buildings, hastily constructed to fill in the holes that the bombs had left behind, which fortunately aren’t too numerous. Almost all the buildings have generous backyards—there are bushes and trees here, even in the middle of the city. On her new street, Leonie can see traces of the last World War only in the details: there are bullet holes in a few of the walls, the iron cellar doors are still marked AIR RAID SHELTER . The whole city is marked by the war and the hurried construction of the economic boom years. Leonie is unmoved by Stuttgart’s homeliness, and she hasn’t left the city for an extended period since her time in Montpellier. She has plenty of favorite places, including the Bopser woods, where she and Simon like to jog; Penguin Ice Cream on Eugenplatz; “Monte Scherbelino,” the hill that’s made of war rubble, where lizards are always scurrying around; and since August, Constantinstraße.
    At the same time, Leonie had been loathe to move out of the Heumaden row house: a thousand square feet split between two floors, the beige carpeting, all tossed away like the cardboard boxes she’d once set up for her dolls. She wanted neither to part with the handkerchief-sized garden, where she could hear the neighbors’ phone conversations through their open doors, nor to leave the new development, which had been quite stylish in the eighties, with façades painted olive and cream. It had been their first house together—the Ostendplatz co-op didn’t really count. But it was in Heumaden that Lisa and Felicia had taken their first steps; there had been barbecues with the neighbors and bike rides through nearby fields on the weekends. It had been a good house: friendly, practical, and unspectacular. No one gasped when they came in, the way practically every visitor to her new apartment does—including her parents, who had walked through the rooms wide-eyed and enthralled. Her father had clapped Simon on the shoulder and said, “It’s fantastic, son. We didn’t start out with this much. Do you remember our first apartment, Heidrun?” Leonie had tried to point out that it was their third apartment rather than their first, but to no avail.
    Simon is strategic. He wants to make the stages of his success visible on the map of the city. Little red flags identify each conquered territory: from Heslach to the hip student co-op in East Stuttgart, then the row house surrounded by greenery and finally, as the crowning achievement, the historic building in coveted Lehenviertel. Actors, singers, and dancers who work at the nearby opera house live here. It’s also teeming with architects that the architecture school spits out, rapid-fire—Leonie wonders how Lehenviertel can support so many. It’s a bourgeois neighborhood that does without front gardens or wreaths of dried flowers on the doors. The balconies are planted with climbing roses, lavender, and kitchen herbs, like mini-Provences. In other respects people project a studied casualness and proudly identify themselves with the stony neighborhood. Children play in the courtyards. The residents go to the Staatsgalerie, the library, and the black-and-white breakfast café on Hauptstätter Straße. Cravings for nature are satisfied at the Schloßgarten or in the nearby woods. The neighborhood’s inhabitants find themselves at the heart of a city which, despite its best efforts, will never be a metropolis, and which therefore exudes a certain contented peace. The