‘I lied.’
‘You lied to your own daughter?’ I couldn’t believe it.
‘Well, you would have stopped me otherwise.’
‘Yes! At gunpoint.’
Dad sighed. ‘Svetlana really is a delightful creature.’
‘I’m sure she is. ‘
‘But…’
‘No buts! You’re mad to get involved with a woman like that!’
Dad answered sounding sad yet defiant: ‘You just can’t be happy for me.’
That hit me. Of course I wanted him to be happy. Since I was twelve, since the day that Mum had left him, I had wanted to see my Dad happy again.
When he stood in front of me back then, white as a sheet, and explained that Mum had moved out, I couldn’t believe it. I asked him whether there was any chance at all of her coming back.
For a long time he didn’t say anything. In the end, he just shook his head silently. Then he started to cry. It took me a while to realise that my Dad was actually crying. But when he seemed unable to stop, I hugged him. And he cried on my shoulder.
No twelve-year-old should see her father cry like that.
My only thought was: ‘Please God, please make everything be all right and make Mum come back to him.’ But my prayer was not answered. Perhaps God was busy saving some Bangladeshis from a terrible flood.
Now Dad was finally happy again, after all those years. But instead of being happy for him, all I could feel was fear. A fear of seeing him cry again. This Svetlana would surely break his heart.
‘And just so you know, I’m bringing Svetlana to the wedding,’ he said emphatically.
Then he left, slamming the door shut behind him, a little bit too theatrically in my opinion. I stared at the door for a while, until I caught sight of the seating plan again. And then my migraine kicked in.
Chapter Four
Despite what the Reverend Gabriel thought of me, I often prayed to God. And although I did not entirely believe in an Almighty Lord in heaven, I really did hope that he existed. So I prayed during take-offs and landings whenever I was flying with a budget airline. Or just before the lottery numbers were drawn. Or when I wanted the excessively noisy opera tenor in the apartment below us to lose his voice.
Yet most of all I prayed that this Svetlana would not break my father’s heart.
My older sister Kata, who looked rather like an unkempt version of Meg Ryan with her wild blonde hair, thought that my prayers were silly. And she told me so. She had arrived in Malente a week before the wedding, and we were on a run around the lake when she said:
‘Marie. If there is a God, then please explain the existence of Nazis, wars and Bros?’
‘Because he gave people a free will,’ I answered, quoting Gabriel.
‘And why does he give people a free will if they are going to torture each other with it?’
I pondered for a while. Then I admitted defeat. ‘Touché.’
Kata had always been the more clued up one of us. At seventeen, she left school, went to Berlin, came out as a lesbian and started a career as a cartoonist of a daily comic strip in a national newspaper. It was called ‘Sisters’. It was about two sisters. It was about us.
Kata was also much fitter than me. She didn’t get out of breath at all, whereas I on the other hand, had stopped thinking that the lake was beautiful after only eight hundred metres.
‘Shall we stop running?’ she suggested.
‘I still… need to lose… half a stone before the wedding,’ I gasped.
‘You’ll still weigh 11 stone,’ she grinned.
‘No one likes skinny smartarses,’ I panted.
‘Well, I think it’s nice for Dad to have sex after twenty years of celibacy.’ Kata brought the conversation back to www.amore-easterneurope.com.
Dad had sex?
This was a thought that I would rather have been spared, but much to my horror I now had a very vivid image in my mind.
‘I’m sure it makes him happy and…’
Kata didn’t get any further. I covered my ears with my hands and began to sing. ‘La la la, I don’t want to hear that. La la la, I really don’t care.’
Kata stopped talking. I uncovered my ears.
‘Although men like Dad,’ Kata cheerily started telling me, ‘who haven’t been in a relationship for a long time, probably do visit prostitutes once in a while…’
I covered my ears again and sang as loudly as I could. ‘La la la, if you carry on talking, I’ll hit you…’
Kata smiled. ‘I’m always amazed at how mature you are.’
I was far too out of breath to be able to respond, and collapsed onto a nearby bench under a chestnut tree.
‘And I’m always amazed at how fit you are,’ Kata added.
I threw a conker at her head.
Kata just grinned. Her pain threshold was far superior to mine. While I moan when I tear a toenail, she didn’t even complain when she found out she had a brain tumour about five years ago. Or, as she put it, when she was given the opportunity to find out who her real friends were.
When she was ill, I jumped on a plane to Berlin every weekend to go and visit her in hospital. It was hard to watch my sister suffer like that; she couldn’t even sleep properly because of the pain. The tablets did little to ease her suffering. Neither did the infusions. And the chemotherapy turned my strong sister into a skinny, bald creature, who covered her head with a tongue-in-cheek skull-print scarf. It made her look as though she belonged aboard the Black Pearl with Jack Sparrow. After six weeks I started wondering why her girlfriend Lisa no longer came to visit.
Kata just said, ‘We broke up.’
I was shocked. ‘Why?’
‘We had different interests,’ Kata replied.
‘What?’ I asked, sounding confused.
A wry smile crossed her face. ‘She enjoys nightlife. I am busy puking because of chemo.’
My sister was determined to beat the tumour. When I asked her where she got her tremendous strength from, she answered: ‘I don’t have a choice. You know I don’t believe in life after death.’
But I prayed for Kata – without telling her, of course. That would just have annoyed her.
Now she’d almost done it. If she didn’t have any relapses in the next few months, she would still have a long life ahead of her. And I would finally know whether God had answered my prayers. Because that had to be within his remit. A tumour surely had little to do with human free will.
‘What are you thinking about so seriously?’ Kata asked. I was not in the mood to start talking about the tumour. Kata – understandably – couldn’t stand the fact that her illness always made me sadder than it made her. I got up from the bench and started to make my way back home.
‘Aren’t we going to run any further?’ Kata asked.
‘I’d rather go on a diet.’
‘Why do you want to lose weight at all?’ she asked. ‘You’ve always told me that Sven loves you just the way you are.’
‘Sven does. I don’t,’ I answered.
‘And are you planning to have children soon?’ Kata asked casually.
‘There’s still plenty of time for that,’ I replied.
Kata looked at me like she always did when she was trying to make a point.
‘Look! There’s a black swan over there,’ I tried, not particularly well, to change the subject.
‘When you were together with Marc you always wanted to have children,’ Kata pointed out, who incidentally never let me change the subject when I wanted to.
‘Sven is not like Marc.’
‘That’s why I’m asking,’ Kata said earnestly. ‘You loved Marc so much that you announced the names of your two future children after just two weeks! Mareike and…’
‘…Maja,’ I added quietly. I’d always wanted to have two daughters, who would have a great relationship just like Kata and me.
‘So what about Mareike and Maja now?’ Kata asked.
‘I want to enjoy our time as a
couple,’ I said. ‘Those little ankle-biters will have to wait before they can start annoying me.’
‘Does it have anything to do with Sven?’ Kata was not letting it go.
‘No!’
‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ Kata grinned, but then stopped quizzing me any further. I wondered whether I had in fact been protesting a bit too much. Maybe I didn’t want to have children.
Chapter Five
Meanwhile…
As Marie and Kata were distancing themselves from the lake, the black swan swam to the shore. From there he waddled over the pebbles to the path, shook his damp feathers and… turned into George Clooney.
Clooney ran his hands through his shiny hair, straightened his elegant designer suit and sat down on the shaded bench, on which the two sisters had recently been taking a breather. He sat there for a while, waiting for something. Or someone. As he sat there, he threw conkers at some of the ducks in the lake. They were knocked out and drowned. But even this little bit of fun did not bring the man any pleasure. He was tired. Very tired. He was suffering from burnout. This damn century!
Before things had been all right. But since, no matter how hard he tried, people were simply much, much better at creating their own hell on earth – and he was Satan!
He had of course come up with quite a few good ideas about how to torture people: neoliberalism, reality TV, Bros (he was particularly proud of the song When Will I Be Famous?). But in general, he was no match for human beings. They were far too creative with their stupid free will.
‘Long time no see,’ he suddenly heard a voice behind him.
Satan turned around and saw the Reverend Gabriel.
‘It’s been almost exactly six thousand years,’ Satan replied. ‘Since the Man upstairs threw me out of heaven. Or rather, down from heaven.’
Gabriel nodded. ‘Those were the days.’
‘Yes, they were,’ Satan nodded.
They smiled at each other like two men who used to be friends, and who deeply regretted that they now weren’t.
‘You look tired,’ Satan said to Gabriel.
‘Thanks. Ditto,’ Gabriel replied.
Then they smiled at each other even more.
‘So, what’s this meeting all about?’ Satan wanted to know.
‘God wants me to tell you something,’ Gabriel replied.
‘And what’s that?’
‘The Day of Judgement is upon us.’
Satan thought for a while, and then breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Well, it was about time.’
Chapter Six
Our wedding began as most weddings do – with the bride having a minor nervous breakdown. I stood outside the church door. The guests were waiting for my performance. Everything was actually almost as perfect as I had always hoped it would be. The pews were filled. Soon everyone would be admiring my wonderful white dress that I knew fitted me like a glove, as I had indeed managed to starve off half a stone. I would be giving my vows in this romantic ecclesiastical setting. Everything was indeed almost perfect. There was only one problem: my Dad no longer wanted to walk me down the aisle.
‘You really shouldn’t have shouted at Svetlana like that,’ Kata said.
‘I didn’t shout at her,’ I replied with tears in my eyes.
‘You called her a “vodka-whore”.’
‘OK, maybe I was a bit harsh,’ I admitted.
Before I got into the carriage to go to the church, I had been determined to act completely cool during my first meeting with Svetlana. But when I actually met this heavily made-up yet pretty, petite woman, it was clear to me that she would break my Dad’s heart. A young thing like that couldn’t possibly have fallen in love with him! In my mind’s eye I saw my Dad crying in my arms again. And as I couldn’t stand the thought of this, I asked Svetlana to bugger off back to Belarus, or just to keep going all the way to Siberia. That made Dad angry. He shouted at me. I tried to explain to him that he was just being used. He shouted at me even more. Then I lost it. When I lost it, he lost it too. And that’s when phrases like ‘vodka-whore’, ‘ungrateful daughter’ and ‘Viagra-Dad’ were thrown into the ring.
Why do you always hurt the people you are trying to protect from themselves?
‘Come on,’ Kata said, drying my tears and grabbing my hand. ‘I’ll walk you in.’
She opened the door for me. The organ started to play. Holding on to my beloved sister, I stepped into the church with as much dignity as I could muster and made my way towards the altar. Most of the people there had been invited by Sven. Many of them were related to him and the others were friends from the football club, his colleagues from the hospital, people from the neighbourhood… Well, half of Malente was either related to or friends with Sven. I didn’t have nearly as many friends. Actually, I only had one real friend, and he was sitting in row number five. Michi was a skinny, scrawny fellow, with dishevelled hair, and he was wearing a T-shirt that said, ‘Beauty is totally overrated’.
We’d known each other since school. At that time he was part of a truly freaky minority – he was a Catholic altar boy.
Even today, Michi was the only really religious person I knew. He read the Bible every day. He’d once said: ‘Marie. What’s written in the Bible must be true. Those stories are far too crazy for anyone to have made them up.’
Michi nodded at me encouragingly and I was able to smile again. In row three I spotted my father, and immediately stopped smiling. He was still angry with me, while Svetlana was nervously staring at the floor, probably wondering how we Germans defined hospitality. And kinship.
My mother was sitting in row one, deliberately far from my father. With her short, dyed red hair she looked a bit like a trade union boss. She seemed much more lively than back then, when she’d sat at the breakfast table in her blue dressing gown with a tired expression and told me and Kata: ‘I’m leaving your father.’
Mum had tried to explain to us children as gently as possible that she hadn’t loved Dad for a long time, and that she’d only stayed with him because of us and that she simply couldn’t carry on living a lie.
Today I know that it was the right decision. She had been able to realise her dream of studying psychology, something that Dad had always opposed. She now lived in Hamburg and had her own practice specialising in relationship counselling (of all things), and she was much, much more confident than ever before. Nevertheless, a part of me still wished that Mum had carried on living that lie.
‘Marriage is difficult,’ the Reverend Gabriel declared during the sermon in a resounding tone. ‘But everything else is even more difficult.’
It was not exactly a ‘what-a-wonderful-day-let’s-rejoice’ kind of sermon. But I suppose that not much more was to be expected of him. I was of course relieved that he hadn’t spoken about ‘people who use my church to stage events’.
Sven stared at me throughout the sermon, completely overjoyed. So overjoyed that I couldn’t stand not being as overjoyed as he was, even though I really did want to be overjoyed. It was probably just because I was still so shaken after my argument with Dad.
I did my best to beam now as well. But the more I tried, the tenser I became. Racked with guilt, I couldn’t even look at Sven. I scanned the church and caught sight of a crucifix. At first, stupid sayings came to my head from our confirmation time. ‘Hey Jesus! What are you doing here?’ – ‘Oh, Paul. I’m just hanging around.’
But then I looked at the red marks on his hands, where the nails had been hammered through. I shuddered. Crucifixion. What kind of brutal thing was that? Who had even thought of doing it, something so incred-ibly horrific? Whoever it was must have had a really awful childhood.
And Jesus? Well, he knew what was coming to him. Why did he allow himself to be subjected to that? Of course, to absolve us of our sins. That was an impressive sacrifice for humanity. But did Jesus even have a choice? Was he able to choose whether or not to sacrifice himself? It was his destiny – right from the moment he was born,
wasn’t it? That’s what his father had sent him down to earth for. But what kind of a father demands that kind of a sacrifice from his son? And what would Super Nanny have said about that father? Most likely: ‘Go and sit on the naughty step.’
Suddenly I got scared. It was probably not a very good idea to criticise God in church. Especially not at your own wedding.
I’m sorry, God, I said in my head. It’s just that – did Jesus have to endure such a painful death? Was that really necessary? I mean, couldn’t he have died from something other than crucifixion? Something more humane? What about a sleeping potion?
But then, I started thinking to myself, there would have been drinking cups hanging about in churches instead of crucifixes…
‘Marie!’ the Reverend Gabriel said in a penetrating voice.
I jumped. ‘Yes! Here I am.’
‘I asked you a question,’ he said.
‘Yes, yes… I heard,’ I fibbed in a fluster.
‘And so maybe you would like to answer?’
‘Well, yes. Why not?’
I glanced over at a nervous-looking Sven. Then I looked into the nave and saw lots of confused eyes and wondered how I could get myself out of this situation. But I couldn’t think of anything.
‘Erm, what was the question again?’ I anxiously looked at Gabriel again.
‘If you want to marry Sven.’
I was having hot and cold flushes. It was one of those moments where you want to fall into a spontaneous coma.
Half of the church was laughing. The other half was appalled. And Sven’s nervous smile turned into a scowl.
‘Sorry. It was just a little joke,’ Gabriel explained.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
‘I just asked whether you were ready for your vows.’
‘I’m sorry. I was miles away,’ I said sheepishly.
‘And what were you thinking about?’
‘About Jesus,’ I answered honestly, keeping the details to myself.
Apocalypse Next Tuesday Page 2