Shuttlecock
By Camara S. Garrett
Listen to Camara reading his piece:
“Remind me later to tell you something,” Steffi said.
I hadn’t realized that she was awake. She blinked her eyes open cautiously, like a child adjusting to the morning light, and stared at the tiny room’s gray ceiling. Steffi’s younger brother, Hans, had generously lent us his studio apartment in Nuremberg for the duration of my three-week visit to Germany. The room was modern utilitarian to the extreme – austere, stainless steel, shades of gray – but better than paying for a hotel room that I couldn’t afford.
During the few months that we’d been together, Steffi hadn’t once deviated from her sleep-wake ritual. She slept naked and, like an embalmed Egyptian, always on her back with her hands clasped over her stomach. The duvet, which she carefully tucked beneath her armpits before she fell asleep, would by morning have slipped below her breasts. No matter how late we stayed up, Steffi always woke up the instant the glow of first light reached her face. The days I woke up before her, just before dawn, were the only times that she was perfectly still and peaceful. I resisted every urge to trace the curves of her silhouette with my fingertips, if only to avoid disturbing the calm before the inevitable storm.
“Tell me what?” I asked.
“I said I will tell you later.”
“Please tell me now, Stephanie.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d asked for a reminder to tell me something later, and the ‘somethings’ tended toward the unpleasant. Remind me later to tell you that I was married before and that I’ll be busy all afternoon meeting my ex-husband for coffee. Remind me later to tell you about my before-and-after photo book of Nuremberg's destruction by Allied bombers during World War II, so when you laugh uncomfortably at my teary defense of wartime Germany, I can accuse you of anti-German bias. I thought it best to address this day’s forewarned test of my relationship mettle immediately.
“No. Not now, later,” she said, her voice rising. “It’s nothing.”
“If it’s nothing, and you know what you want to say, then just tell me now.”
Steffi sighed heavily. “Please, mein Schatz,” she said. This was a warning: Steffi only called me 'darling’ in German when she was extremely randy or extremely angry.
She took her bedside bottle from the nightstand and began the final step of the ritual – the daily morning chug of water. The discussion, at least from her perspective, was over. Neither caffeinated nor awake enough for a real argument, I gave up. Not that I’d ever been much of a match for her when we argued, a mismatch that felt starker now that our battles were taking place on her home turf instead of back home in D.C. My sharpest ripostes – keeping my passport handy and my suitcase packed; secretly checking the prices of early return flights – amounted to an unspoken, empty threat.
She returned her bottle to the nightstand. “I will tell you later,” she said. “Just don’t forget.” The burden to remind Steffi to tell me – whatever it was – was now mine. By the time we pulled on to the Autobahn two hours later, I’d forgotten.
Steffi set the scene for her maternal grandparent’s yearly family cookout during the hour-long drive south into the heartland of Deutschland. Her grandparents hosted the cookout at the country home they’d built 50 years prior on the outskirts of Weissenburg, a picturesque town in central Bavaria. I pictured two dozen relatives chatting, laughing, singing, and dancing to folk music, while barefoot, blond-haired kids, wearing all-white picnic outfits, whizzed a shuttlecock back and forth over a badminton net, doing how they do on The Sound of Music.
We took the exit for Weissenburg and passed through the town’s central drag of cobblestone streets, gingerbread houses, and wooden balconies lined with red geraniums. I glanced at Steffi in the passenger seat. For the occasion she’d donned what she referred to as her ‘battle armor’ – her favorite dress, which was black with red flowers and fell just above her knees; black, open-toed shoes with thick high heels; and a generous application of mascara. The night before she’d also re-dyed her layered, shoulder-length bob a color she called “raven,” which looked suspiciously similar to a color I called “black.” I wondered why she’d wear battle armor to a cookout.
“Turn left at the next corner,” she said. I pulled into the driveway and parked. Steffi unclasped her seatbelt, inhaled audibly, sat upright, pressed her hands down into the seat, and arched her back as if overwhelmed with a sudden, uncontrollable urge to practice yoga. I watched her, knowing from experience that watching her was what she expected me to do in such circumstances.
Whether by design or malfunction, the uppermost button on her dress landed just below the center of her chest. She typically held it all together with a single, gold-colored safety pin, placed an inch or so above the button, which did little to limit exposure but prevented any unintended spillage. Now, as she squeezed her shoulder blades together, the dam threatened to burst. This was all very familiar, Steffi powering up before taking the stage, drawing energy from the attention of others. The honor of being her main power source filled me with equal parts of pride and resentment.
We exited the car and I followed her along a curving path through a grove of evergreens. The sounds of young children’s laughter and animated voices speaking in German, harsh and aggressive even when joyful, grew louder.
Steffi stopped in her tracks. “Scheiße,” she said. Shit.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. I’m nervous.”
“I’m the one who should be nervous, wandering around Bumblefuck, Germany like I’ve got no sense.” Then I remembered. “Wait. The thing you mentioned this morning, to remind you about. That’s what’s making you nervous. Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Steffi said. She paused for a moment, then added, “You forgot to remind me.”
Yes I’d forgotten, but she hadn’t, and both of us knew it. Her five-word accusation served as a self-pardon and also implicated me in whatever crime she was about to confess. A confession she’d postponed until it was too late for me to refuse to come.
I’d spent sleepless hours contemplating what compelled Steffi to play these games with me, to send me on such wild swings of emotion, often on a whim but always with intent. I had a couple of working theories: that she was mimicking destructive behavior she’d witnessed at home during her childhood, prior to her parents’ divorce; or that my being from a different culture and ethnicity than any of her previous lovers made me an intolerable mystery, a conundrum that she needed to break down to its constituent elements to truly understand and love.
Or, perhaps, I was overthinking it all and the explanation was straightforward: Steffi simply enjoyed toying with lovers’ emotions. Some predators, after all, enjoy playing with their food before they eat it.
“Okay. We’re here now. So what’s the big mystery?” She shook her head. “Come on, Stephanie,” I said, raising my voice. “Tell me now or I’m getting in the car and driving back to fucking Nuremberg.”
“Okay. Fine,” she said. Steffi approached me, not stopping until she was only inches away, which instantly defused my anger, a tactic she’d employed before. No longer blinded by my rage, I saw her again. I noticed her mascara. At a distance it accentuated her comic book heroine’s eyes, bright blue with flecks of hazel and dark limbal rings. This close I could see that her mascara had gathered on the tips of her lashes like tiny clumps of fudge. Her hair framed her face, with its high cheekbones, softly squared jawline, and crossbow-shaped lips. She squeezed my hands and moved even closer, pressed her breasts against my chest, so close I thought she was going to kiss me. My lips parted. When she spoke I could feel her breath on my mouth.
“The dark family secret, well I don’t know how much of a secret it is, really, but…” She giggled uncomfortably. “We think that my grandfather was probably a Nazi during the war.”
I felt the knot of rage in the center of my chest, a permanent fixture since my arrival in Germany, tighten. I shook my head. She looked at me impassively, as if waiting for a response. I pulled my hands from Steffi’s and backed away from her. An insect buzzing around my face made me aware that my mouth was open so I shut it, clenching my jaw so tightly I thought my teeth would crack.
“It’s a joke, right? Tell me this is a joke.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not a joke.”
“Oh. So just a lovely afternoon with the Nazi relatives?”
“Only my grandfather. It’s not even a 100% sure thing. We just think so.”
“If his own family believes he was a Nazi then it's a 100% sure thing that he was a Nazi.”
“Come on. You’re making too big of a deal about this. It was 60 years ago.”
“What? Who cares how long… I’m the one making a big deal?” I balled my hands into fists and pressed them into my temples. “You were looking forward to this, weren’t you? Parading your boy toy in front of the SS. I’m guessing you also failed to mention to the Führer that I’m Black.”
“Actually I did tell him.”
I studied her face, unsure whether or not she was telling the truth. “And?”
Steffi shrugged her shoulders. “He asked me if you were an African,” she said, pursing her lips as if trying to stifle a chuckle.
I spun on my heels and marched back up the path toward the car, before stopping and turning around again. I closed my eyes and took several slow, deep breaths. Until that moment I hadn’t noticed the scent of summer flowers, lavender or perhaps jasmine, beneath the rich smell of the pines that surrounded us. The hum of voices beyond the trees spiked with laughter before settling again.
I opened my eyes. Steffi, framed by the trees, with the path winding away behind her, stood motionless as if posing for a portrait. As we stared silently at one another, the warm, redolent zephyr relieved me of my rage.
“Well, your grandfather will be very disappointed when he finds out he’s meeting an American instead of a real, live African for the first time,” I said.
“Steffi!”
The voice came from behind her. A young girl ran up and jumped into Steffi’s arms. They spoke excitedly in German. The girl looked at me open-mouthed and wild-eyed, as if she’d just found her parents' secret stash of unwrapped Christmas presents.
“This is my cousin, Clara,” Steffi said.
I forced a smile, offered a quick wave, and approached them. I shot Steffi the iciest stare I could muster and leaned toward her until my mouth was next to her ear. “Remind me later to tell you something,” I whispered.
I turned to Clara - she’d seen the expression on my face. Her smile dissolved and she cocked her head at me. I noticed something dangling at her side: a shuttlecock, its skirt pinched between her fingers. She held it up, said something to me in German and reached for my hand.
“Komm und spiel,” she said. Come and play.
Camara S. Garrett spent 16 years responding to political and humanitarian crises in war-torn countries, including Ukraine, Libya, Myanmar, Iraq, and Bosnia while working for USAID, an incredible community of hard-working public servants that was recently “fed into a wood-chipper” by renowned apartheid baby, Elon Musk. Camara left the U.S. Government during the first Trump administration and moved to Costa Rica, where he spent his time building a forever home in the cloud forest, co-raising two wacky, beautiful children and, occasionally, scrawling opinions about geopolitics and reflections about past lives into Google Docs. His essay “Uncaptioned” will be published in the summer 2025 issue of The Threepenny Review.