Confession with Blue Horses

by Sophie Hardach

  I smiled. ‘We’re gentrifying.’

  He caught a passing branch from a tree, let go of it, caught another branch.

  ‘I think I need to at least give it a go,’ I said. ‘I’ll visit this archive, I’ll check what she saw, and I’ll come right back. And I’ll pay you back, of course, as soon as I can.’

  ‘I like how you elegantly slipped in the issue of funding there.’

  ‘It’s just the flight and a room somewhere.’

  ‘This isn’t about the money. I just think you’re in for more pain, and more disappointment, and more time wasted chasing someone we’ll never find.’

  ‘I have no choice, Tobi. I have no choice.’

  Often when I stood on the deck I had to fight the urge to jump into the water, not out of a death wish but because it would be so refreshing, so mentally cleansing. I would dive in and come out as new, with all the old Ella washed off.

  ‘I miss him,’ I said. ‘Don’t you?’

  A few moments passed, and then he said: ‘Can you show me that photograph again, the one with the horses?’ I gave it to him and he looked at it for some time. Eventually, he nodded. ‘There was a story you used to tell me…’

  I shook my head. ‘That was Mama. She told us a story about the three blue horses.’

  ‘No, it was you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Once upon a time, there were three children who lived in a bathtub. Then one day, the sorcerer came and…’ His voice was half drowned by the noise of the creek, but it did not matter, I knew the story so well.

  ‘… and took the children away,’ I continued. ‘And he carried them off to his castle, and there he turned them into three horses, into three blue horses.’

  ‘But their grandmother went after them. She killed the sorcerer, she lifted the spell, and she brought the children home.’

  ‘Except she didn’t bring all three of them home, did she?’ I reached down and dipped my hand into the water. ‘She only brought two.’

  5

  Berlin 1987: Spring

  ‘STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE,’ Sandy said and handed me the binoculars. ‘Go on.’

  ‘You first.’

  She stuck out her tongue. Sandy was not afraid of anything.

  ‘Now you.’

  I leaned out of the window as far as I could. There, just beyond the wall that closed off the end of Sandy’s street, was a viewing platform with tourists on it. Through the binoculars I could see them quite clearly. They huddled together to allow the rest of the group onto the platform. There was even a little queue on the steps.

  I looked at the street below, the shabby front doors with the flaking paint, the car parked on the corner, the guard by the wall, the women queuing outside the grocery.

  ‘Must be a slow day over there,’ I said, ‘if they’re queuing up to look at queues.’

  ‘Let’s make it more exciting then.’ Sandy waved her hands over her head. ‘Hello poo-poo-heads!’

  ‘Don’t!’ I jumped back, certain the guard must have heard her. But when I peeked, he was still in the same spot, staring into space.

  ‘You think they’ll come over here and complain?’

  She was right, of course, and this was quite a nice feeling: that the people over there couldn’t do anything to us, couldn’t reach us, couldn’t even complain to the guard, because he was our guard, not their guard.

  Sandy had only joined my class a few weeks before, but I already liked her more than anyone. Every day we played in the empty lots and abandoned basements of our neighbourhoods, slipped through rusted doors marked DANGER NO ENTRY and dug out old bullet casings and Red Army badges from underneath piles of rubble. Sandy was the one who told me that the holes in the wall of my building were bullet holes from the war. We fought endless street battles in which I often forgot that we were only playing, and would hide in the shadow of a building with my heart racing as her steps drew nearer. It was in one of the piles of rubble that we had found the heavy old pair of binoculars. The leather strap had snapped but once we’d wiped the lenses clean, the rest of it worked fine.

  ‘Go on,’ Sandy said. ‘Honestly, I do it all the time.’

  I popped my head through the window and stuck my tongue out.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Sandy grabbed me and pulled me to the floor. ‘Not like that!’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Didn’t you see? The guard looked up! Now we’re in big trouble.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Sandy was making strange grunting noises. I looked at her. She burst out laughing.

  ‘Haaa! Got you!’

  ‘You gave me a heart attack.’

  ‘It was fun though, wasn’t it?’ She peeked out, and added almost casually, as if in an aside: ‘My mum’s over there.’

  ‘In West Berlin?’

  ‘In Hamburg. She’s going to send for me really soon, though.’ She drew back and closed the window.

  This was one of Sandy’s more obvious lies. If her mother were really in the West, Sandy would never be allowed to live so close to the wall. Not that her lies bothered me. I lied quite a lot myself, mostly to make things seem more interesting than they were. Ultimately, it didn’t matter where exactly Sandy’s mother was. Sandy seemed to mostly raise herself. Her dad always put an apple next to her placemat before he went to work in the morning, and then Sandy did all the shopping, all the cooking, and no cleaning at all, which was why their place looked terrible.

  She was putting on her shoes now, restless as usual, always on to the next thing: ‘Come, I’ll show you something else.’

  We left the flat and walked a few blocks to the Bösebrücke. The bridge was closed off by a border post, with allotments to the right and flats to the left. Sandy’s father grew vegetables on one of the allotments. We squatted under some redcurrant bushes there, and she told me her latest secret in hurried, conspiratorial whispers:

  A few weeks ago she had looked out of her window and noticed that the viewing platform was closed, and the street filled with police. She’d gone to the allotment to ask her father about it, but the allotments had been cordoned off too, with more guards and policemen patrolling the bridge. She’d managed to slip into the allotments through the back, and had hid under the bushes, right here, and been quiet as a mouse, with her ears wide open, and she’d heard everything. A man had been shot on the bridge.

  ‘He nicked a ladder from one of the sheds over there,’ she whispered dramatically. ‘And then he used that to try and climb into the border post, and then he was shot.’ She pointed through the twigs. ‘Right over there.’

  ‘Did you see the body?’ I whispered back. She shook her head. I was in awe of her courage. Then it occurred to me that this might be another lie. I would ask Oma Trude about it later, because she usually knew what went on in the neighbourhood. And Oma was not like other grown-ups; she never said that she was busy or that my questions were giving her a headache or that I should go and ask someone else.

  ‘I’ll show you where he tried to climb over,’ Sandy said, and pulled at my sleeve. ‘There might still be footprints.’

  But I’d had enough. Already I was regretting our stupid game with the people on the platform. And it was almost dinnertime.

  Sandy walked with me to my corner, rather quiet now. That morning our art teacher, Frau Obst, had asked us to close our eyes and draw the shape of happiness, and Sandy had just sat there with her crayon in her lap, and then Frau Obst had asked if she wasn’t going to draw anything, and Sandy had said that this was the shape of happiness: nothing. Frau Obst had said that Sandy had done something very profound and lovely, because happiness was invisible, wasn’t it? But I knew she hadn’t meant it like that.

  To cheer her up, I told her about the yellow parcel we had received the other day, with chocolate and a doll from my dad’s cousin in West Germany. I would bring the doll to school and we could play with her, I said; then I remembered Sandy’s mother was supposedly in the West, and wished I hadn’t
said anything.

  She looked a little sad when we said goodbye at the corner. Her dad was on a late shift again. It was only when I walked through the front door of our building, which was much nicer than hers and always smelled a little of floor polish and cake, that I realised I should have asked her if she wanted to have dinner at my house, with all of us.

  *

  Like most buildings in Berlin, ours was divided into a front-facing Vorderhaus and a shabbier, darker, back-facing Hinterhaus, with a gloomy courtyard between them. The Hinterhaus was mainly occupied by students, and this was my one trump card against Sandy’s endless supply of drama and adventure, because there were no students at all in Sandy’s street. She shared my fascination with them and noticed things I never had, like how one of them, whom we came to call sock man, always dried his socks on the window sill. Sock man and his friends slept all day and sat on the roof drinking beer at night. They fought and kissed and walked around their flats naked. Once, one of the girls threw her lover’s clothes out of the window, and he had to rush around the courtyard with a towel around his waist and pick them out of the flower beds. Sandy and I re-enacted this scene endlessly, one of us standing on the bed and flinging things across the room, the other running around to collect them:

  ‘Forgive me, Beate!’

  ‘Never! Here are your stinky trousers, take them and go!’

  *

  I let myself into the clean, bright, well-mannered Vorderhaus where we lived, and knocked on Oma Trude’s door on the ground floor. No response. Oma was the only one in the building who had a telephone, which was impressive but a bit useless as a telephone only really makes sense when other people have one too, and can call you. Instead we left messages on her ‘door telephone’ – a notepad made of scrap paper that was taped to her door, with a pen dangling beside it – and she left messages on ours.

  Liebe Oma! I scribbled on her notepad, high up on my tiptoes to reach the paper, I will see you upstairs! Love, Ella.

  I had a rule for walking up the stairs to our flat on the fifth floor: one flight backwards, one flight forwards, one flight backwards, and so on. This was satisfying because it meant I always faced in the same direction. My ambition was to spend an entire day without turning my head, walking backwards, sideways and so on, but that would have to wait until the holidays since there was no way I would get away with it at school.

  *

  I walked backwards past the door of Frau Rachmann, who was about the same age as Oma but very forgetful. Sometimes we had to go out and look for her, and she would be wandering the streets in her rose-patterned nightie. Oma revered Frau Rachmann, who in her time had taught literature classes in Moscow and translated the greatest Russian poets. She was, Oma said, ‘a true woman of culture’, someone who had devoted her brilliance to the good of the country, not like today’s intellectuals who were only thinking about how to become head of department and move to a big house in the suburbs with more room for their books. (‘Just use the library,’ Oma muttered whenever my father paced the flat with a stack of books in his arms, looking for somewhere to store them. ‘Frau Rachmann used libraries, Gogol used libraries, Pushkin used libraries all his life.’ To which my father would tetchily reply that Pushkin had certainly not used libraries, Pushkin had had his own private library with gilded bookcases; and then he would wedge the new books into the last remaining little space between the old books and the ceiling, just to make a point.)

  I stepped sideways on the landing and continued up the stairs, facing forwards, passing Frau Pietsch, who was on her knees, washing the stairs in her green housecoat. I stopped to greet her and play with her little dog, Schnauzi, whose paw prints were all over the wet stairs. Frau Pietsch often accompanied Oma to party meetings and marches. From Oma I knew that she had married a man who was nice enough but hadn’t wanted children, and when Frau Pietsch was too old to have children he left her for a younger woman and started a family. This, Oma said, happened quite often, and I should keep it in mind when I got older so it would not happen to me. The other thing to keep in mind was not to become like Frau Minsky on the third floor, whom Oma called ‘die Minsky’ or simply ‘Minsky’.

  Die Minsky was a round and rosy woman who had stolen old Herr Minsky from his previous wife. Not long after their wedding Herr Minsky suffered a stroke and now Minsky was his carer. Walking backwards again, I passed her open doorway. She was leaning on her mop and looking bored, a cigarette in her mouth, her pert bottom sticking out.

  ‘Watch where you’re going,’ she said crossly, which was silly because the whole point of walking backwards was that you could not see where you were going. Still, I quite liked Frau Minsky, even though Oma did not. Die Minsky was the kind of person, Oma said, who broke the only hacksaw in the factory and then blamed the brigade. Frau Pietsch, on the other hand, was the kind of person who would stay behind after everyone else in the brigade had gone home, just to fix the hacksaw. Frau Rachmann had never touched a hacksaw in her life, but that could not be held against her as she was a great woman of culture. (Oma had worked in a fridge factory for many years, and that had shaped her view of things.)

  All the women in our buildings had stories like that, and Oma knew them in detail: who had trouble in her brigade, who had lost three little babies before they were born, who had been a big Nazi and now thought no one knew, who was making eyes at both Dr Kaminsky, who lived on the fourth floor, and the postman. The men in our building didn’t have any stories. Or if they did, they did not tell them to Oma. Herr Minsky had almost lost a leg in the war, that was all. And Opa Horst had been at Stalingrad but that was not talked about.

  *

  I stopped at our own front door and read a message my father must have scribbled on his way out:

  We don’t have eggs, we don’t have cheese,

  Can somebody go shopping, please?

  Underneath, my mother had added in her own small, sharp handwriting:

  How about YOU go shopping, for a change?

  Which broke the rules: when somebody left a message in rhyme, your reply was supposed to rhyme, too. I tore off the message because I hated it when my parents argued on the notepad, in front of all the neighbours, or at least in front of anyone who made it all the way to the top floor. The door swung open. Heiko ran into my arms: ‘Eyya! Eyya!’ He slapped my face, which he always did when he was too full of love.

  ‘El-la! Say El-la!’

  ‘Eyya!’ Heiko poked me in the eye with his fat finger. ‘Auge.’

  ‘Aua!’

  ‘Aua! Auge putt.’ He poked my eye again.

  ‘That’s right, now my eye is broken. I’ll have to go to the shop and buy a new one.’

  He slapped my face again and laughed. Tobi came out into the corridor, chewing on a piece of bread, and told me that Heiko had tried to flush his glasses down the toilet. Heiko grabbed the bread and drove it along the wall, making engine noises. Then he ran back into the kitchen.

  Mama was sitting at the kitchen table, her foot in a bucket of ice. She was still in her work clothes, a brown skirt and a beige jumper with the sleeves pushed up, her dark hair gathered up into a bun. Oma sat next to her, dressed in a purple housecoat with small orange snails on it, brooding over a crossword. I went up to Mama and gave her a hug. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing, Ellachen,’ Oma said. ‘Your mother stubbed her toe.’

  Mama sighed. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘A type of shelter, five letters. Any ideas?’ Oma squinted at her crossword.

  ‘How did you stub your toe?’

  ‘I went to buy you some trousers.’

  She stretched her arms, leaned back and began:

  One of Mama’s colleagues at the university had heard that a shop down the road had a new supply of children’s trousers, and they went out to buy some. Only the shop turned out to be not down the road at all but in an entirely different neighbourhood. They had to take the tram. Along the way they met another art historian, who
asked my mother how her chapter was coming along. Which was a mistake, of course; Mama did not like to be asked about her chapters.

  Eventually they found the shop, spent the afternoon queuing, reached the front of the line, and were told there were no more trousers left, or indeed any children’s clothes left. All that was left were some women’s blouses with a flower pattern and ruffles, which Mama said looked like baby clothes in adult sizes. She bought one anyway since she’d come all that way.

  ‘Well done,’ Oma said. ‘Leave it with me, I’ll swap it. There’s always someone who needs a blouse.’

  Oma was an alchemist: she could turn blouses into bottles of vodka, and bottles of vodka into tyres, and tyres into spare parts for the love seat on her allotment, her Hollywoodschaukel, where she liked to sit and read biographies of great women of culture.

  ‘Yes, that’s the moral of this story. There’s always someone who needs a blouse.’ Mama took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Her face looked naked and tired. ‘There were no men in that queue, you know. No men at all. I suppose they were busy building the Socialist dream.’

  ‘But how did you stub your toe?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah. Yes.’

  After the failed shopping trip Mama had taken the tram back to our neighbourhood, where she queued at one shop that was selling bruised apples and green oranges, and at another that was selling soft carrots and tins of solyanka. At a third shop she bought a chicken, and was about to pack it into her bag when she heard a loud crashing sound. Dust and debris flew into the shop. Everyone screamed. When the dust settled, they saw that a balcony, an entire stone balcony, had hit the pavement right in front of the shop. There were bits of stone everywhere, and broken flower pots, soil, dirt, a chair even. Everyone in the shop started laughing, and this infuriated my mother, because she could not see what was funny about a balcony breaking off the side of a house and almost killing her. So when she left the shop, she kicked a big chunk of carved stone.

  ‘And that’s how I broke my toe,’ she concluded.