That time he dragged her home, and when they were up in their room he hit her. Lukas was in bed next door and heard everything.
This scene has left me feeling miserable. I wish I were with Henner. I wish I were free. I’d live with him for as long as it worked. And when it stopped working I’d stay anyway.
12
The following morning Siegfried is in the animal sheds by five o’clock as usual. His determination, his strength, his sense of duty—these are the reasons Marianne has always admired him, and why she loves him still. Yesterday evening’s outburst was an aberration in almost twenty years of marriage; by and large they have been good years. By midday the dark clouds have already blown over, only to gather again when Henner appears in the shop.
He buys meat, salami, potatoes, leeks, tomatoes, and a basket of raspberries. He’s not here because of me, but he looks pleased when I come to serve him instead of Marianne. She hardly dares glance at him, even though he cannot know about last night’s argument. She’s relieved when Siegfried calls for her help in one of the meadows. Maybe he just wanted to get her away. I’ve come to realize that in matters of the heart, older folk are just as foolish as younger ones. I’m left on my own with Henner. Johannes and Lukas have gone to town to get something for their father. There’s only Alfred, and he’s easy to forget, given the way he sneaks around the place so inconspicuously.
I pack his shopping into a paper bag and put it on the counter. “Come here, Maria,” he says. “I want to feel you.” He gives the door a kick and it swings closed, but doesn’t shut completely. All of a sudden I am struck by an urge to sink to the ground at his feet. Where this comes from I have no idea. But he pushes aside his shopping and hoists me up onto the counter. His hands roam at will and I say, “Are you insane? What if Marianne comes in?”
This does not seem to bother him, and he asks, “When are you coming over again?” Then he pauses and whispers, “I’ve gotten used to having you there.” His smile is genuine, and it pains me. He strokes my hair, arms, neck, lips; he’s soft, and a little sad as well. My surrender during those feverish nights was like a promise, and now he’s coming and demanding it be fulfilled.
There is a movement at the door. It might have been the cat, or some other creature slinking about.
Henner rolls up my dress. “I hurt you,” he says without looking me in the eye. “But I’m not sorry for it.” His hands are resting on my legs. “Say something, Maria, say something!” But I don’t know what to say. My hesitation is not for the reason he thinks. I can’t find the right words; all I feel is a vague fear that rears up from some dark corner and vanishes again in a flash. Not for me, no. For him. That’s all I know.
It’s Alfred at the door, I’m sure of it. I think he’s known for ages. He has eyes in the back of his head, because no one takes him seriously. It makes him almost invisible.
“I don’t know when I can come. Here they’re beginning to wonder why I keep on going home to my mother. And what happens if they bump into Mom in town and ask about me? What then?”
“I don’t know, Maria,” he says with a shrug, and I’m so disappointed by his answer that I push his hands away and swing over to the other side of the counter. He must have seen his failure in my eyes, because he comes around, grabs me by the wrists, and says with the certainty I had wanted to hear, “You’re coming anyway!”
Then we hear the car out in the yard. “Hi, Henner,” Johannes says as he enters. He comes behind the counter and gives me a kiss, but Henner has already gone. It’s all so sordid and yet I’m still going along with it.
Johannes asks when lunch will be ready, but there’s nothing happening in the kitchen. We all realize how much we’re missing Frieda. I start preparing lunch; I’ve learned a lot over the past few weeks. Later, Siegfried praises my cooking—he said he was amazed by how good it was. Strange that I’m trying to distance myself from the family just as my place within it is becoming more secure. No one here has any sense of the finer things in life. “Maria,” Siegfried says, “who would have thought?”
I owe my name to my mother’s nostalgia. As the daughter of a communist she rarely went to church, but once she saw a nativity play and the girl playing Mary made such an impression on her that she used to wish she were called Maria too. She’s a northerner, my mother; she never felt at home here in Thuringia. She loathes the rolling landscape that I love so much. When she was pregnant with me, my father packed her things and simply took her with him. She cried the whole way, not stopping until they reached the village where I was born. When she went into labor she really ought to have gone to the hospital, but because my father and grandparents were not there, and she couldn’t make it to the nearest telephone in the co-op, I entered this world on my grandparents’ kitchen floor. Looking back, my mother wasn’t at all unhappy about this. Other women had told her that in hospital they took the babies away at birth, and they only saw them every four hours for feeding. But she was able to keep me. She didn’t put me down for days, apart from the odd spell in my crib, and then only so that she could sit beside me and stare. At least this is what my grandmother told me; she wouldn’t stop moaning about it at the time, but now she no longer mentions it.
We would go up north whenever we could, and there were always tears when we said our good-byes. It was on one of those holidays to visit my mother’s parents that I saw the West for the first time. We took a trip to the small town of D. The border strip, with its tall, barbed wire fence, ran alongside one of the streets. One of my mother’s relatives lived on the third floor of an apartment block in that street. You could see the West from her windows. Beyond the River Elbe and across the meadows stood a solitary house, which I’d never be able to visit. I can quite clearly remember what I thought and felt that day. I must have been around seven, and I couldn’t take my eyes off this house. How on earth could people live only a few hundred meters away, and yet we’d never get to meet them? I mean, we could almost see them! And they us. We could have waved to each other, or signaled with lights, like I used to back home with our neighbor’s son. I got stomach cramps and didn’t want to eat any of the cake, even though it had strawberries on top.
When we left my uncle’s apartment and came out onto the street, I ran over to the fence and stuck my nose through the wire. My mother called me back—in the end she had to drag me away—the dogs behind the fence were yelping, and a soldier raised his rifle and screamed, “Get away from the fence!”
You never forget something like that.
It’s been almost a year since we were first allowed across the border, but we’ve only been to the West twice.
Siegfried wants to go to Bavaria on Sunday, the day after tomorrow. They’ve planned that when Frieda comes home, he’ll go back with Hartmut for a week and visit a Demeter farm. He’s completely obsessed by the idea. Johannes will have to cover for his father, and there’s also Alfred. It will make him feel important for a change.
My work begins on Monday, too. The landlord will show me the ropes and then I’ll start properly on Tuesday. I’m glad to be doing this; it’ll take my mind off things and I’ll be earning my own money.
Marianne helps me wash up. Today she smells just like Gisela; she must have asked what the name of that perfume was. When we’ve finished she strokes my hair and says, “You’ve become a real help, Maria,” and that makes me feel dreadful all over again.
13
August is my favorite month. The heat is still there, but it’s not oppressive like July. I become faintly wistful when summer veers toward autumn and my birthday is around the corner. I’m going to be seventeen, and with each passing year I have a greater sense of my significance in the world. But now that our world has become so much larger, this feeling of importance is once again on the wane. On the farm I know I’m needed at least, although they’d get by fine without me.
I’ve hatched a clever plan: I’m going to spend my birthday with Henner. The timing works rather well. I’ll have breakfas
t with the Brendels, and then Johannes will have to work all day because Siegfried will be away. After that I’ll go and see my mother for an hour or two. I’ll tell her that if I don’t get back to the farm, Johannes will be sad. She’ll understand. Then I’ll make my way across the fields, through the corn, which is now at waist height, and down the valley to Henner’s farm.
Frieda arrives home today. We’re all dying to hear what she has to say. But when she finally gets here she looks quite unwell and goes to lie down in her room. Hartmut says she’s been tetchy for a few days, she hasn’t even wanted to eat properly. I imagine a trip to Bavaria must be pretty major for someone like Frieda, who has spent her whole life on the farm, never going farther than the county town apart from one trip to the Baltic. And it turns out I’m right. Later she tells us how uncomfortable she felt so far from home, in Hartmut’s guest room among all that modern furniture. She was anxious, and she missed Alfred. Alfred, of all people! She’s overjoyed to be home, and by the evening she’s back to her old self. “Did you do all the cooking, Maria?” she asks. This is the first time she hasn’t addressed me in the third person.
It’s Monday. Siegfried has gone and I’m on my way to the tavern, which is not open today except to the regulars. My first customers are the village drunks, and I’m delighted to see that Henner is not among them.
There’s very little to do, just the same round over and over again: a schnapps, a beer, and the occasional plate of raw minced beef with egg and onions.
After two hours the landlord reckons I’ve mastered the basics, so he sends me home. The day is still young; Johannes is grafting in the animal sheds, and I read the story of the Karamazov brothers almost to the end.
Now I understand why Henner was pleased when I said I preferred Grushenka to Katarina Ivanov, despite the fact that she can be quite wicked. Dmitry is sentenced to twenty years in a Siberian camp and Katarina visits him, even though she testified against him in court. All of a sudden Grushenka appears, and Katarina begs her forgiveness. Grushenka replies, “We’re wicked, my dear girl, you and I! We’re both wicked! How then are we to forgive one another—you me and I you? Just save him and I’ll worship you all my life.” So she intends only to thank Katarina, not forgive her. Dmitry is plunged into despair, but Grushenka says, “It’s her proud lips that spoke and not her heart . . . If she saves you, I’ll forgive her everything.”
That’s what Henner wants. The heart, not the pride.
But I save the final chapter, the funeral of Little Ilyusha, for later.
In the evening Johannes is so exhausted that he can barely stand. Hard labor on the farm is not his thing. I think Siegfried knows this, which is why he’s letting him go. He’s a reasonable man. Even Johannes’s hands are different from his father’s. Narrow, pale, and soft. Unlike Siegfried, when Johannes wields the pitchfork it doesn’t look natural. You could say we have no word in the matter; our bodies are predetermined from the outset. Johannes’s hands, Siegfried’s paws, my own body, which just now seems to have been made for Henner alone.
I think of his hands, which are like Siegfried’s, but also quite different. They’re waiting to caress me.
Down below, Alfred is sitting idly on the bench. He seems happier, now that his Frieda is home. What binds them is their secret, a secret they will never disclose.
It’s peaceful on the farm tonight. There’s not a breath of wind in the leaves of the old chestnut tree. The cat is lying at Alfred’s feet. Johannes is asleep, Lukas went to bed ages ago, Frieda is recovering from her adventure, and at last Marianne has the chance to leaf through her magazines, which recently she’s been hiding from Siegfried. The chickens are still running around, even though it’s dark. I think about chasing them into the shed, but then assume Alfred is going to do it, so I get into bed beside Johannes.
When I wander out into the yard the next morning, Marianne is crying on the bench. Her elbows are propped on her legs and her face is buried in her hands. She’s sobbing so loudly that it’s not long before Alfred and Frieda appear at the windows. Then I see the catastrophe with my own eyes: a fox has been by and all the chickens are dead.
Worst of all is that it should happen now, while Siegfried is away and Marianne is in charge. He has his views on women, one of which is that you can’t trust them to do things by themselves, or everything goes belly-up. That’s unfair, but he won’t be argued with. We wonder what we should do, and Johannes suggests that we buy new chickens. But this sets off Marianne again, and she says, “He’d notice at once. Come on, he knows every animal here personally.” She really does say “personally,” and for some reason this makes me want to laugh, but I hold myself together as best I can.
Eventually I head over to the tavern to start my shift, and from there I call Hartmut. I can scarcely believe that we’ll soon have our own telephone line. It seems like the height of luxury, and I make a promise to myself never to forget this time, when it was different. Hartmut isn’t at home, but Siegfried comes to the phone and listens in silence as I tell him what happened. I didn’t think he would say much, and I was right. “You just can’t trust them to do things by themselves,” he says after a lengthy pause. Then he hangs up. The entire day is under a cloud.
When I get back to the farm that evening I see a car in the drive I don’t recognize. It’s my father; he’s sitting on the bench waiting for me.
I should say about my father that he isn’t really a father at all.
I remember very little. I was always told that Dad was away working, and when he came home on leave the arguments would start again almost immediately. Perhaps Mom started them too; at any rate there was a lot of shouting. What I most remember about him is that he was never there. He seldom lived with us even though they were married. First came the work trips, then the Russian gas pipeline. On leave he was permanently restless, pacing up and down, going for long walks in the woods. Even on the coldest winter days, he insisted the barbecue was lit in the garden. It was a habit he picked up in Russia, where they barbecued all the time. Vodka kept the men warm and the women wore thick fur coats. Oh yes, the women. When he was home on leave he’d often go into town to buy ladies’ underwear. They didn’t have enough of it in Russia, he said, and you could sell it easily there. I don’t believe he ever sold any.
He didn’t even know what year I was in at school, and once, when he made a very poor attempt to try and teach me something, I said, “I’m not listening to you,” and he replied, “You’re as stupid as your mother.” I can still hear those words today; they’ve left a painful echo in my mind. Mom kept finding photographs and letters in his pockets. As the pipeline progressed, so the women changed.
I hated him for a long time. His beard, his expression, his small, restless eyes, his hurried way of walking and talking—I hated everything about him. I only ever saw my mother looking depressed. She went around in a haze of sadness, which then stole over me, too, and gnawed away at my soul with increasing ferocity. I knew I’d never be rid of it.
Then he built us the house—it was the only time he was with us for a good while—but in fact he didn’t build it for us as a family, only for my mother and me. It didn’t make me any happier, because we were alone in it. But when he left for good I felt better. My mother didn’t, and I’ve never understood that.
Later I realized what had driven him away each time: a longing to see the world and its far horizons. The GDR was far too small for that. This little country, surrounded by a wall, was like an animal in a cage. In Russia, by contrast, everything was expansive, on a vast scale and seemingly endless. There he could breathe more easily than in our village. And the women sweetened the loneliness he suffered, but which he sought time and again.
I forgave him long ago, even though he denied me something which no presents or excuses can make up for: my childhood—this slice of our lives that everyone says is pure bliss. I don’t know what such happiness feels like, but the longing for it has not gone away.
Grandma
Traudel has often told me that I’m like him; she said I’ve inherited his restlessness and obstinacy. And there he is, sitting on the bench: Ulrich, my father.
He smiles, jumps up, and gives me a hug. Then we go for a little walk.
“Why aren’t you living at home anymore?” he asks, and his eyes roam across the fields.
“Because I prefer it here,” I say bluntly, and that’s enough for him.
“What about you?” I ask. “I’ve heard you’re getting married again.”
“Yes,” he says, nodding contentedly. “I’m going to give it another go. She’s a fine girl, Nastja.”
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