“It was for Holger.”
“For Holger.” Mathis immediately knew what she meant. Holger Meins had died last year in jail after waging a hunger strike against prison conditions. He and Helga had been at his funeral and had vowed revenge. But not like this!
“What are you doing, Helga? How can more violence help anything? This isn’t about our fight anymore. Where will this ever fucking end?”
Helga got up from her chair and screamed at him. “You’re a miserable coward, Mathis Hagena, and a traitor! Sitting around doing nothing all day, while others put their lives on the line for our cause. ‘Our fight’! Please. You stopped fighting a long time ago. What would you rather do, have a nice chat? Who are you going to chat with, Mathis? You know that’s pointless. The only way to get these people’s attention is to blow them up. I’m doing this for you, Mathis, and for our child. And what are you doing? Hiding like a coward.”
“You know why I’m keeping out of all this, Helga. My God, you kill people and then you’re surprised nobody wants to listen to you anymore. You’re going about this the wrong way—why can’t you people get that through your brainwashed heads?” But Mathis knew that shouting wouldn’t do any good. It wasn’t the first time they’d had this fight. He’d tried to explain—he still believed in the cause, just not in the means they were using to fight for it. They’d laughed and told him to stop shitting in his pants over it. But the problem wasn’t that Mathis was afraid, it was that he had doubts. They didn’t understand. Neither did Helga.
“Shut the fuck up, Mathis. So a couple of assholes who deserved to die get killed, and my husband of all people feels guilty about it?” Helga turned to the door. “I’m going to the meeting. I don’t suppose you’re coming? At least I can get some inspiration there.” The front door slammed behind her.
Mathis had attended plenty of these meetings, known officially as “political training.” He viewed them as indoctrination and considered what took place there the worst kind of brainwashing. Someone had even been ordered to give up horseback riding, which was considered a sport for the entitled. Not just horseback riding, but all hobbies were frowned upon. People were expected to devote all their time to “The Cause.” Those with hobbies were viewed as conformists and thus members of the establishment. The Communist Manifesto was not just read in these meetings but studied. Mathis had once believed in communist ideology, and he still found the idea that all people should have the same opportunities appealing. But this idea had become twisted during their supposedly world-changing meetings, where questioning the group’s rules was forbidden. After one incident in particular, Mathis thought that he might not make it out alive, they’d come after him so fiercely.
Sighing, he went into the bedroom. All the organization’s pseudointellectual chatter was useless. Regular people didn’t understand a word of it.
Lars lay peacefully asleep on his pillow, his body stretched across the width of the bed. Mathis pushed him gently to one side and lay down next to him. “Something’s got to change, little guy.” Mathis gently brushed a blond curl off Lars’s warm, sleepy face. “But one thing’s for sure. I’ll never give you up. No way. I’ll fight for you, little one.”
It was another incident—an hours-long police interrogation—that pushed Mathis into making his decision.
“I want a separation, Helga,” he told her.
“Well, you can’t have it.” Helga stared at him, stunned. The cigarette in her hand fell to the table and left a burn mark. Mathis pushed past her. They’d just finished their evening meal, and Lars was already in his crib.
“Oh, yes, I can. And I’m taking Lars with me.”
“No, you’re not!” Helga shouted. “I will never let you take my child from me!”
“You can’t keep filling his head with this garbage. Do you even realize what you’re doing to him? He’s a little kid. He should be playing outside in a sandbox and romping over meadows and fields. You’ve got him in a little gray Maoist coat, reciting The Communist Manifesto. This is bullshit! No, Helga, I’ve let this go on far too long.”
“You’re really serious.”
“Yes.”
“Is it because of what happened with the boat? But there were no complications. They have no proof of our involvement.”
“No proof of our involvement? Helga, I had absolutely nothing to do with this thing, and you know it. You gave that maniac the key to my boat. That could have gotten me in deep shit and you didn’t care at all.”
“But nobody knew that—”
“Helga, please. Two men in a car have been watching our house around the clock for months. They follow us as soon as we leave. You think they don’t know that was my boat in Hamburg? You’re delusional.”
“But—”
“No buts.” Seething with rage, Mathis pounded his fist on the table. Helga winced. He’d never acted like this toward her before. “They dumped an arsenal on my boat—a weapons depot, Helga! I’m lucky the police stopped at interrogating me. They’ve arrested people for far less. This is the end—of everything. Now pack your things and go!”
The front door slammed. The story of Mathis and Helga was over.
Boy, that was intense. So much for the romantic seventies.” While Mathis spoke, I’d been snuggled in his arms. By the time he was finished with his story, my whole body was shaking and my beer had gone stale as I’d forgotten to drink it.
“That was only a part of what happened. I’ll tell you the long version another time, if you want.”
“Sure.” I stared into my beer and reflected. I felt a little strange. I’d been only a child during the seventies, but I had always felt connected to the era. Now here I was, in the arms of a genuine child of those days, one who’d actually experienced all the things that fascinated me about that time. He had been in the middle of it all, and I had fallen in love with him. It’s funny the way things happen sometimes.
“What are you thinking about?” Mathis stroked my shoulder.
“Helga left Lars with you, without a fight?”
“No, of course not. Three weeks later, she and three of her comrades met me at the front door. I’d just picked Lars up from kindergarten and they tried to take him. They said he belonged to his mother and they had to teach him about ‘The Cause.’ They said I’d never see him again.”
“So what happened?”
“I was so filled with rage, I managed to beat up all three of them. They kept shouting out threats even as they ran off. Lars saw it all. It took a long time to calm him down again. The divorce lawyers took it from there. We shared custody. If I’d brought up Helga’s extreme left-wing politics in court, she’d never have seen Lars again. But that’s not the way I wanted to do things. In the end, Lars turned out fine.”
“Did Helga continue to be so radical?”
“Yes, but a ban on the employment of politically radical teachers and other civil servants was implemented. Helga was suspended from her teaching job, though she was able to work as a teacher again later.”
All the way back to the boat, I reflected on Mathis’s past. Maybe it was better that I hadn’t experienced the seventies. Who knew what kind of shit I would’ve landed in!
“Please don’t ever do that to me again, Nele. It would break my heart.”
I turned to Mathis in irritation. A few minutes before, we’d made love passionately in our bunk. What was he talking about?
“Never do what again?”
“The party. On Ines’s birthday.”
“What happened at Ines’s party?” I was completely clueless. Suddenly it dawned on me—he meant Steffen! And I’d been convinced that he never found out about that.
“It was nothing.”
“It didn’t look like nothing.”
“It was just sex.”
“You slept with him.”
“Well you didn’t want me.”
“Still, you can’t ever do something like—”
“No, of course not. From now on, it’s either Mathis or celibacy. Don’t you think that’s asking a lot?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I see. So what did you mean then?”
“He was very handsome.”
“Yes.”
“And young.”
“Correct.”
“And available.”
“Now that you point all that out, I see I should’ve stayed with him. Handsome, young, and available. How stupid of me not to notice those things. Maybe this one-of-a-kind Superman would be willing to take me back and try again. Would that make you happy?”
“Back?” Mathis looked confused. “What do you mean, take you back? Were you and Steffen—?”
Why didn’t I ever think before I spoke?
“I did have a relationship with Steffen, a long time ago,” I admitted. “After I separated from Paula’s father.”
Mathis was silent for a while as he digested this confession. “So why aren’t you with him now?” he asked in a soft voice.
“It wasn’t working. He wanted to make me into this little housewife—a doctor’s wife. That wasn’t me, so I left.”
“But . . . you still loved him. You didn’t leave because you didn’t love him anymore.”
My silence lasted a little too long, and I realized that Mathis’s body had grown tense.
“It’s over, Mathis. It’s been over for a long time.”
“But you still left with him that night.”
“I already told you, it was just sex.”
“Huh.” Mathis seemed unconvinced.
“Please, just forget it!”
Mathis thought about it for a while, then made a decision.
“If you say so, we’ll forget it.” He gave me a quick kiss, then sighed. “Oh, Nele, it just hurt so much. Just seeing you that night had already upset me, even though I’d prepared myself for the fact that you’d be there. It took me a long time to decide whether or not to go. But I had no choice: I wanted to see you, maybe even to talk to you. But you were so dismissive—”
“I was just trying to survive.”
“And then I saw you on the dance floor, looking so beautiful in your blue dress—so sexy and seductive. I lost my self-control. I wanted to go to you, to take you in my arms and ask you never to leave me again. And then . . . this man showed up. I wanted to pull you from his arms and smash his face in. But then—”
“Then you hooked up with the blond and took off.”
I’d never intended to bring this up to Mathis. As far as I was concerned, I’d left the matter back on the Rügen beach. But now . . . He really believed I didn’t know anything at all about her? He wanted me to obey some kind of moral code that didn’t apply to him?
Mathis looked like he had no idea what I was talking about.
“What blond?”
“Don’t be so hypocritical—blaming me for turning to someone else and then pretending you didn’t do the same thing. You know exactly what I’m talking about. And don’t try to deny it because Sandra saw you both.”
“Saw who?” Mathis looked genuinely innocent. For a moment, I was unsure. Had Sandra exaggerated things a bit? No, that wasn’t likely. I’d seen Mathis and the blond whispering in each other’s ears a number of times myself.
“Mathis! You and your blond! Sandra said you two left the party with your arms around each other, and I’ve seen you with her, too. She’s been picking you up and dropping you off for work a lot lately. And don’t tell me that’s your wife. Or have you two kissed and made up recently?”
I felt like crying.
“Aha!” Something occurred to Mathis, and he began to laugh like he might never stop. Oh my God, I thought, he’s hysterical. I didn’t see anything to laugh about.
“I’m glad you find this so amusing, but I really don’t see how—”
“Nele, sweetheart . . . I’m sorry, but I have to laugh. You’re right, if you don’t know us both and don’t know . . . it would be easy to think that—”
“Mathis!”
“Helga.”
“I’m Nele, not Helga!”
“It was Helga, my ex-wife, you saw me with—Lars’s mother. The one I just told you about!”
“Helga. The Helga?”
“That’s the one. We see each other quite often, sometimes with Lars. We’re good friends, but that’s it. Did you really think . . .”
I felt like an idiot. Helga, of course! That’s why her smile looked so familiar to me. It was the same smile as the one in Lars’s happy family photo. The blond was Helga, now thirty years older.
“I’m sorry, Mathis. I just—”
“No apologies necessary. You couldn’t have known that Helga and I are so close. Though we’re not nearly as close as you apparently thought we were!” Mathis pulled me closer. “You were jealous of my ex-wife the whole time.” He gently stroked my hair. “What a silly misunderstanding.”
“I guess we’re even now,” I said.
“No more jealousy.”
“Were you a little bit jealous of Steffen the whole time?”
“A little bit jealous? I was ready to explode for weeks. I didn’t know that it was for only one night. I thought you—”
“Because he’s so handsome, and young, and free.”
“Exactly.”
“You and I were both pretty stupid.”
“And now?”
“Now, we’re going to make everything right again.” I dropped back into the bunk, and soon we were gently rocking with the boat, forgetting everything around us.
I thought that everyday life would change now that Mathis and I were together, but I was wrong. Mathis was around more often. We often ate dinner together, sometimes going out, either alone or with Paula. He and I loved each other. But I realized very quickly what it really meant to be involved with a family man. It took a while to get used to. Even though he felt his marriage was over, Mathis still wanted his children to have a stable home life. For him, this meant going back to his house every night so he could prepare his sons’ school lunches and talk with them about their days. And I couldn’t count on the weekends, either, as he usually spent these doing chores around his house and yard or flying kites or sailing with his sons.
In short, my life went on pretty much the same as before, except that now a man sat with Paula and me at the table—and I felt no more heartache. But it wasn’t easy for Paula to share her mom with someone else. Although Paula had accepted the fact that I slept with Mathis in Rügen, it was much more difficult for her to accept him once we were home. At times, she was downright nasty to him. It was a good thing that he was such a patient man.
“Mathis, how old are you?” she asked one evening, just as we’d put a delicious cheese fondue behind us. It was pretty much the first complete sentence she’d spoken to him all night.
“I’m sixty,” Mathis said.
“That’s not so old,” said Paula. Relieved that she finally seemed ready to make nice, I gave Mathis a conspiratorial wink. “It’s too bad you’re not ninety, so you’d die pretty soon.”
Bam! Her words fell like a ton of bricks. I dropped my knife on my way to the dishwasher. Paula hadn’t really said that, had she? I looked from my daughter to Mathis. He looked stunned, and I couldn’t think what to say.
“You don’t think your mom and I should be together, right?” Mathis spoke in a peaceful tone, but I could tell her comment had hit him hard.
“What Paula does or does not want isn’t the point,” I interjected forcefully. “If you think you can act up simply because I love Mathis, Paula, you’re very much mistaken. Apologize to Mathis immediately and then go to bed.”
Paula stood up and headed straight for the bathroom.
&
nbsp; “I said you need to apologize to Mathis!” I yelled after her. She winced, turned and looked at Mathis through tear-filled eyes, and murmured, “Sorry.” Then she ran into the bathroom.
“Don’t you think that was a little harsh, Nele? Maybe you could have tried—”
“No, Mathis, I’m not going to try something else. Paula has clearly overstepped her bounds.”
“But first she needs to get used to all the changes. I could explain to her that I don’t want to take her momma away. Maybe she just needs to understand the situation better.”
“Mathis, I’ve already spent hours explaining the situation to Paula. Believe me, this isn’t an issue of her understanding things better. Paula is acting up, that’s all. But the world doesn’t revolve around her, and she isn’t the queen of this house. She needs to accept that I have my own life, and that I don’t need to get her permission for my choices. Besides, she’s had me to herself for years. Am I supposed to wait until she grows up and leaves before I can think about myself? There’s no way I’m going to do that.”
I heard Paula creeping from the bathroom to her bedroom.
“I’ll go tell her good night,” I said.
When I walked into her room Paula was already in bed, hugging Knut tightly, her face turned to the wall. Her little body jerked with each sob. The sight broke my heart, but I knew I had to be strong.
“Good night, Paula,” I said, tucking her in.
“Are you still mad, Momma?” she sobbed and I took her in my arms. “Yes, Paula, and I think you know you’ve gone way too far this time. If your behavior toward Mathis doesn’t change, you’ll see me angry a lot more often. There’s no reason for you to behave like this. Mathis has never been anything but kind. Has he ever acted badly toward you?”
Paula barely shook her head.
“So why in the world are you being so nasty to him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it. And now, get some sleep.” I kissed her cheek and turned on her CD of kids’ music to help her feel better.
“What would you think about the three of us going away for a little while? Paula should have a three-day weekend coming up at school. We could go to the sea and I could show her my boat, or maybe we could go to the lake . . .”
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