Confession with Blue Horses

by Sophie Hardach

  Popping balloons

  Loud voices

  Cushion covers embroidered with little flowers

  When I was a child, my mother sometimes broke into a sweat for no apparent reason. We were at a birthday party, and suddenly, we had to leave. Or we were on the tube, and Mama’s hand gripped mine; she rushed me out and back up to the street. There we waited for the bus in the rain, my hand crushed by her fingers, until we got on, found a seat and she collapsed into it, damp with fear. They were so vivid, those moments, as if every single one of my fingers had stored the memory of her hands.

  Gunshots (also, slamming doors; the bang! of an exhaust pipe)

  I looked at the trolley again. The little fish were gone. There was one thing I had not told Tobi, and perhaps I should have: when my mother was already very ill, she made me promise I would not go looking for my brother Heiko. We had been looking for him for years, it was our only real activity together, and I had expected her last request to be the exact opposite: that I would spend the rest of my days searching for him.

  I asked her what she meant, but she refused to explain, and as so often, we left it at that. By then she was in constant pain. Sometimes it was even harder than usual to tell when she was lucid, and when she was off into one of her fantasies. She said, for example, that it no longer mattered who betrayed us, that she had wasted so much energy on trying to find out who it was, and now realised it was of no importance, and had never been of any importance.

  ‘What do you mean, betrayed us?’ I asked, and held her hand. She was in bed, her bony head propped up on the white pillow.

  ‘Someone told them about us.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  She shook her head. ‘I looked into things. I shouldn’t have. Let’s talk about something else, Ellachen, let’s talk about your paintings. Are you still working on those mushroom paintings?’ She opened her eyes and smiled. ‘I wish I could go and see them. What are they like?’

  I described them to her: the large canvases inoculated with a special fungus that changed colour as it aged, from brown to deep greens and even blues, creating a cycle of growing, living paintings, unpredictable and rather beautiful. It was only partly a lie. I really had experimented with canvases and colour-changing fungi, but the result had looked like a collection of damp rags. I was no longer making anything, really, but I did not want to tell her that. It was easier to invent imaginary paintings that were exactly as I wanted them to be. She listened with great interest, and said they sounded wonderful.

  That was the sort of thing we talked about in those final months: paintings, sculptures, artists we both admired, exhibitions I had seen. She only mentioned the past one more time.

  ‘Remember when we saw that balcony fall off?’ She laughed quietly to herself. ‘We were lucky it didn’t hit us.’

  ‘I didn’t see it fall off, you were on your own that day.’

  ‘No, no, I can see it right before my eyes, it whooshed right past us, it missed us by this much.’ She showed me with her index finger and thumb, marvelling at our narrow escape. ‘This much. And you held on to my hand for dear life.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I pressed an ice cube from its tray. My mother liked sucking on them. A falling balcony, a flat with a magical bathtub, two little girls sticking out their tongues at a concrete wall. Some of the stories from my childhood sounded like fairy tales, but they were no less true than this ice cube I was holding right now, this cool soaked flannel, this thin hand poking out from a pyjama sleeve.

  ‘Mama, do you remember my friend Sandy?’ I asked. But she had already fallen asleep.

  4

  I MADE BOILED EGGS in mustard sauce for Tobi, a recipe from Oma. We sat down on two wooden crates, but Tobi’s was too low for his long legs. He stretched them out and pulled them back towards him, all the while trying to balance the plate on his knees. He leaned against the damp wall, winced, discreetly sat up again. Maybe he’d hit a slug trail.

  ‘Is it OK?’ I gestured at the eggs.

  ‘Delicious.’ I’d never heard my brother describe a meal as anything but delicious, or a person’s house as anything but lovely.

  ‘Do you ever wonder what he’s like?’ I asked.

  Tobi had picked up our mother’s journal, about to open it, but now he paused.

  ‘Is that why you asked me over?’

  ‘I’m just thinking, I hope he’s charming. It’s such an asset in life. I hope he knows how to make people like him.’

  ‘It’s hard work, is what it is.’ Tobi massaged his legs. ‘I thought this was about Mama.’

  ‘You used to be so close, you two. Don’t you remember? You’d stand there, hugging each other, and all the grown-ups would be like, aww, and then one of you’d scream – He bit me! He bit me!’

  ‘I’m not a biter.’

  ‘Maybe it was him then.’ I could see them very clearly, squeezing each other so tightly.

  ‘The things you remember.’ Tobi shook his head. ‘I don’t remember anything. I suppose I’m lucky that way.’

  ‘You must wonder, though? Is he happy, is he safe? Even the small things: does he like dogs, what’s his favourite food, has he got a girlfriend…’

  ‘Or a boyfriend.’

  ‘Or a boyfriend.’ And I tried not to smile because I thought, of course Tobi thinks about him, of course he tries to imagine what he’s like, and he probably pictures him as a charming garden designer with a nice boyfriend, just like I picture him as a somewhat lost artist obsessed with the past. Where else could we start but with ourselves?

  ‘He might even be really sporty,’ I said, and Tobi said: ‘Highly unlikely’, and we laughed, having finally hit that point of connection. Team sports: never a Valentin strength.

  Tobi opened the journal. His lips moved as he tried to read Mama’s handwriting.

  ‘Privileg? What’s Privileg?’

  I leaned over the page with him. We were both left-handed, which was not something I thought about except when we sat close together, and didn’t have to worry about things like clashing elbows. ‘It’s a kind of aftershave. Really, you don’t even remember that? Papa used to wear it.’

  ‘Privileg.’ He shook his head, pointed at the next line. ‘No, nothing. And this? Cushion covers embroidered with little flowers. Not as bad as the rest; slightly unpleasant.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe they put a cushion over her head?’

  ‘Ella! Please.’ He closed the notebook.

  ‘What do you expect? It’s a trigger diary,’ I said.

  ‘What’s a trigger diary?’

  ‘A diary of things that frightened her. Come on Tobi, you know what a trigger diary is.’

  ‘You say that as if it’s common knowledge.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘In your world, maybe.’

  ‘What do you mean, in my world?’

  He ignored me and picked up the photograph of the blue horses.

  ‘Tobi, what do you mean?’ I repeated.

  ‘I mean that you’ve always been obsessed with that sort of thing, lists and codes and stuff.’

  ‘That’s so not true.’

  ‘I don’t blame you, it’s not like Mama ever gave you a choice.’

  ‘I’m not obsessed. I just notice things.’ I could hear the frustration in my voice, the impatience. ‘This painting, don’t you remember this painting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I do.’ I snatched the photo away from him.

  ‘What is this, an interrogation?’

  ‘I wasn’t an only child, Tobi, that’s all I’m saying. You were there, too.’

  ‘And Heiko.’

  ‘And Heiko.’

  ‘I’m not saying I wasn’t there, I’m just saying – I can’t really see why you’re bringing him into this, or why we’re sitting here talking about Papa’s aftershave, or why it matters how Mama felt about embroidered cushions.’

  The visit wasn’t going at all as I had
hoped. It shouldn’t have surprised me. We’d had this conversation before, and he’d blocked and derailed it before. I’d just thought that having something tangible to show him would make it different.

  ‘Look at this letter.’ I unfolded the typed letter I had found among her books. ‘It’s from an archive.’

  He frowned. ‘It’s a bit dense.’

  ‘You’re a bit dense.’ Line by line I translated the letter for Tobi, which I had to admit was rather satisfying. He was better at life, but I was better at German.

  OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL COMMISSIONER FOR THE RECORDS OF THE STATE SECURITY SERVICE OF THE FORMER GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

  SUBJECT: Request to view personal file

  Dear Frau Dr Valentin,

  Further to your application to view your personal State Security file, we can confirm that such a file exists here at the Office of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service. Unfortunately, much of the file appears to be missing. Even the pages we have succeeded in recovering are mostly incomplete.

  I would of course be more than happy to show them to you, should you be interested in viewing them anyway.

  I am sorry, Frau Valentin, that there is so little we can do to assist your search.

  Yours faithfully,

  Dr Reinhardt Licht

  Archivist

  My mother had regularly travelled back to Berlin, each trip one of her many futile efforts to reunite our scattered family. I tried to recall if she had ever mentioned an archive, but all I could remember from her last trip was some sort of school reunion. I hadn’t asked her about it; it hadn’t seemed important at the time. But I hadn’t asked her about plenty of really important things, either, and now desperately wished I had. Talking is a habit like any other, it needs to be sustained through practice. If you never talk about the small things, it feels weird to suddenly launch into a heart-to-heart. ‘Of course I never asked him about that,’ my father once said about his own father, who had been a member of the Nazi party. ‘We didn’t even talk about the weather. How could I suddenly ask him why he’d joined the Nazi party?’

  We had often trawled websites together, my mother and I; had posted search ads and dates of birth in the usual desperate threads and depressing forums; had fielded dubious replies from strangers who were quick to mention finder’s fees. I am looking for my son, Heiko, who was taken from us, she had typed again and again.

  We had put in official requests to various German ministries, only to be told that in cases like ours, there was nothing to be done. The separation had been legal under the old law, the GDR’s law. The details of the case fell under the Data Protection Act, including Heiko’s new address, if he had one, and his new name, if he had one, or even the basic question of whether he was still alive. It turned out that the question of whether my brother was alive was a very private matter, one that could not be shared with his family; because legally speaking, we were of course no longer his family.

  ‘You mean our politicians were able to hammer out a deal about nuclear bombs, and borders, and the privatisation of an entire economy, but not about what should happen to little boys who were stolen from their families,’ my mother said to a senior official during one of those visits back to Berlin. ‘You mean they were able to agree on how quickly Moscow would pull out its troops, and which weapons our country should be allowed to have, and how to value a collective pig farm – but not whether mothers like me would ever see our children again, no, that didn’t enter their heads, did it? To figure out how I might one day see my son again.’

  Upon which the official patiently explained again that while he understood our frustration…

  ‘I know,’ my mother said. ‘I know, I know. I know.’

  And yet she’d never mentioned this archive.

  ‘I’ve looked it up,’ I said to Tobi. ‘Check this out.’

  I opened my laptop, but the connection had frozen.

  ‘We’ll try the roof,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t believe this.’ He groaned. ‘Every time, Ella, every time I come to visit you…’

  ‘… we have such a lovely time, right?’ I nudged him. ‘I know. It’s wonderful.’

  I climbed onto the roof of my cabin and opened my laptop. Tobi followed, making a great show of wiping down a corner before he sat down. Which was ridiculous: surely he worked in places much dirtier than my roof.

  ‘Should have brought my gloves and overalls,’ Tobi said, as if he’d read my mind.

  *

  The archive’s website had seemed a little overwhelming at first, filled with pictures of looted Stasi offices and archivists painstakingly reconstructing old files. But there was a friendly sidebar for people like me: Are you a victim, or the descendant of a victim, of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic? Here is how the archive can help.

  ‘That’s us!’ I swivelled the laptop so Tobi could see. ‘Victims and their descendants. That’s us, right there.’

  ‘You say that as if it’s something to be proud of.’

  ‘It’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of. We are victims.’

  ‘I’m not a victim, I’m a garden designer.’

  ‘They’re not mutually exclusive.’

  I clicked on the link in the sidebar. A new page opened up with a contact form.

  Please tick one of the following four options:

  I want to research…

  the activities of the State Security Service

  the rulership mechanisms of the GDR

  the rulership mechanisms of the Soviet-Occupied Zone

  the National Socialist past.

  ‘That’s so German,’ Tobi said. ‘Like a menu, or multiple choice. Which of our twentieth-century atrocities are you most interested in? For genocide, dial one…’ I noticed a link at the bottom of the page: Viewing files for near relatives of missing or deceased persons.

  This was very different from the dire online forums we had wasted so much time in. Much more legitimate, more official, more promising. If there was a surveillance file on my parents, then surely it would include details on our family, and our separation. And we had the right, it seemed, to view that file. Even if it was incomplete, it was at least something.

  Who knew what else my mother had discovered in Berlin? Were we not perhaps doing exactly what she had wanted us to do, walking in her tracks, following the little trail she had laid for us? If she had truly wanted me to stop looking for Heiko, she would have destroyed the letter from the archive. Instead, she had left it there for us to find.

  I took the laptop back from Tobi and started filling in the contact form. We could get a cheap flight, go for just a few days, visit the archive, see what we could find. Already I could picture us going through the records, noting down addresses and leads, finally getting somewhere.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Tobi craned his neck to see.

  ‘Could you take time off next week, do you think? A couple of days should be enough.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To meet this guy, this archivist who wrote to Mama. He sounds helpful.’

  ‘Ellz…’

  I sighed. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that this is just one of my crazy ideas, and you’ll have to bail me out in the end.’

  ‘Who says I’ll bail you out?’

  ‘She went to Berlin to visit that archive.’ I could hear myself getting louder. ‘She must have thought they could help her find Heiko.’

  ‘So what? She also thought the lady in the corner shop was spying on her.’

  ‘You can’t discount everything she did because of a few isolated incidents.’ For a moment I wasn’t sure if I was talking about our mother or myself. ‘Come on, give her some credit. She wasn’t stupid, she knew more about the world than you and I ever will. And you can say what you like, but that corner shop woman was a bit weird. Remember the time she asked Mama where we were from?’

  ‘That wasn’t weird,’ Tobi
said wearily. ‘What’s weird is that Mama replied, “From Canada.”’

  ‘It’s no one’s business where we’re from.’

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t you think it might be better to leave him in peace?’

  ‘You can’t mean that.’

  ‘All those years she spent looking for him, and not a single trace, not a single sign. If he wanted to be found, he’d have let us know.’

  ‘Why would he not want us to find him?’ I said, suddenly feeling a bit deflated.

  ‘Because he doesn’t even know we exist, maybe? Because he’s fine with the way things are?’

  ‘I have a friendly disposition and tolerate all known foods. My hearing is above average and I have a fine creative mind. Why would anyone not want me for a sister?’

  ‘Ach, Ella.’ He put his arm around me. ‘Don’t run off to Berlin. Stay here and…’

  ‘… get a proper job.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I’m the worst cleaner in London. My clients’ desks actually look dirtier after I’ve been there. I think I’m about to get fired.’

  ‘How about teaching art?’

  ‘I’m terrible with children.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘They make me sad. I look at them and I think, that’s how small he was.’

  ‘Take a year off and focus on your art then. You can stay with me. I loved your show, I thought it was brilliant.’

  ‘No one came to that show.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘OK, one person came to that show.’

  ‘You’ll have thousands of shows. Look at Picasso, it took him decades to make his mark.’

  ‘No it didn’t. Picasso was a child prodigy.’

  ‘You could pass for a child prodigy.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘With a bit of Botox.’

  ‘Oh Tobi.’ I laughed.

  ‘That’s better.’

  We went down onto the deck to watch the rain-swollen creek. The dark water rushed past carrying with it all sorts of urban swag. Broken barbecues, bicycle pumps, plastic bottles. Another shopping trolley.

  ‘Look.’ Tobi pointed at the trolley. ‘That one’s from Waitrose.’