‘I don’t think it’s broken, I think you just stubbed it,’ Oma said. ‘A kind of shelter, five letters. Any ideas?’
‘Was anyone actually under the balcony?’ Tobi asked, intrigued. ‘Did you check?’
Oma tapped her pen on her crossword. ‘One, two, three, four, five. But I think the word should be Dach. That’s four.’ She crossed out the last box and wrote in the remaining ones: D-A-C-H.
‘From now on I’m always going to walk in the middle of the road,’ I said.
‘I’m going to walk even more in the middle of the road,’ Tobi said.
‘You can’t be more in the middle than the actual middle.’
‘Auto,’ Heiko said. I took a pen and a piece of paper and drew two circles. That was enough to get him excited: ‘Auto! Auto! Auto!’
I drew the rest of the car. No one else in the entire world appreciated my drawings as much as he did. No one. It was as if I could do magic, could conjure actual cars from nothing but ink and paper. He snatched the pen from me and ran it back and forth across the whole page, all over the car, until you could barely see it.
‘Heiko, don’t cross out Ella’s car!’ Mama said. ‘That’s not nice.’
‘He’s not crossing it out.’ I put myself between them. ‘He’s drawing.’
When we were alone, I often let Heiko draw on the walls under our beds, or behind the bench in the kitchen, or in the corner by the rubbish bins. What a stupid grown-up rule that was, not to let children draw on the walls of their own home.
‘Anyway, the balcony fell off, and I kicked it, and that’s how I broke, or stubbed, or anyway injured my toe. The End. It was right on Lychener Straße.’ My mother said this as if it was the most disappointing detail of them all, that even the houses on Lychener Straße could no longer be trusted. ‘The shopkeeper said there’s an official word for it now, Balkonsturz, that’s how common it is. It’s like a biblical curse. Frogs, hailstones and balconies.’
‘Done!’ Satisfied, Oma folded her crossword and stood up.
‘Mutti, did you hear what I just said?’
Oma sighed. ‘What do you want me to say? You think I made the balcony fall off? You think Marx made it fall off?’
‘It’s a scandal that they’re letting us live like this.’
‘You think Lenin made the balcony fall off?’
‘I said, it’s a scandal.’ My mother took a deep breath. ‘That they’re letting us live.’ Another deep breath. ‘Like.’ She thumped the table. ‘This.’
‘Mama loud,’ Heiko said and started to cry. Oma picked him up. He wiped his nose on her housecoat. Mama, too, started to sniffle. Heiko quietly whispered ‘Auto,’ his comfort word, which he liked to mutter to himself in times of distress.
‘Ach, Reginchen,’ Oma said in a surprisingly gentle voice. ‘It’s just a balcony. Come on, we’re tougher than that. Imagine if it had been the whole house! Then you’d have something to complain about.’
‘Or if it had been the whole street,’ I said.
‘Or the whole universe!’ – Tobi, now, with his mouth full of bread again.
Mama laughed, despite herself. ‘I’m not like you, Mutti, I’m not tough at all. Look at what they gave me at the shop. That’s probably not even a chicken.’
‘Of course it’s a chicken! It’s just right for soup, it’s perfect, it’s exactly what I had in mind.’
I loved my grandmother very much just then, the way she made everything a little better, the way she saved the ruined afternoon by pointing out what was good about it: we had brought her a chicken, a chicken that was exactly what she had had in mind.
*
Oma was looking after us that evening; my father was at one of his university meetings, which usually ended in a Kneipe, and Mama had some mysterious opening party to go to. Oma tried and tried to find out what it was, but all Mama would say was that it was a little exhibition in someone’s attic, just a small display of some paintings organised by a friend.
While my mother was getting ready for her party, I helped Oma change Heiko’s nappy. The bathroom in our flat was tiny, just a loo and sink behind a door in the corner of the kitchen. If you wanted to have a bath or shower, you had to pull out an enormous orange drawer with the tub inside it from underneath the kitchen counter. It was all very clever, and it never quite worked.
Heiko was gripping the toilet lid. He lifted one foot, then the other as Oma put his trousers back on. I dropped his cloth nappy in a bucket to soak. Tobi sat perched on the kitchen bench, watching and commenting.
‘I was potty-trained at one,’ I said proudly.
‘I was potty-trained forever,’ Tobi said and pulled a face at me.
‘Everyone has different talents,’ Oma said, patted Heiko’s bottom and stood up.
‘Don’t they make him use the potty at nursery?’ I asked.
‘He’s refusing.’ Oma carefully washed her hands, then lifted Heiko to wash his.
‘He can’t just refuse!’
‘Nass,’ Heiko said and splashed with the water.
‘Oma nass.’ Oma gently pulled him away from the tap. My mother came in, dressed in a black skirt and a glittery jumper.
‘Has anyone seen my black handbag?’
Oma handed her the bag. ‘Are you sure you want to go?’
‘Thank you for helping out, Mutti.’
‘I’m just thinking, who would throw a party in an attic?’ Oma frowned. ‘All that dust…’
‘Perfume, Ellachen?’ My mother sprayed scent on my wrists. She opened her little compact blush, sucked in her cheeks and brushed pink powder on her cheekbones. I was glad I did not have to go with her. I liked drawing and painting, but I found exhibitions painfully boring, the pictures all above my head height, the adults standing around and talking.
‘Who’ll be there?’ my grandmother asked suspiciously.
‘Just the usual bores.’ My mother inspected herself in the mirror. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t be late.’
I sniffed my wrists. A heavy, flowery scent. The perfume had arrived in the yellow parcel from the West, along with the chocolate, coffee, plastic nappies for Heiko, a toy car for Tobi and the doll for me. Mama and Papa had been very happy. The whole flat smelled of coffee. The doll was called Sabrina. She closed her eyes when I put her to bed, and opened them when I stood her up on her little feet in their white cotton shoes. Best of all, Heiko slept through the night in his new nappies, and we were all in the generous mood of the well rested.
‘Oma, smell.’ I held out my wrist.
‘Yes, it’s nice, it’s nice.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not against these things.’
Because Oma and Opa were pensioners, they could travel to West Germany, drink hectolitres of coffee, try out every single perfume in the universe. Yet they never did. Oma didn’t see the point of visiting the West to stare at other people’s houses, when she could go to her lovely allotment on the outskirts of Berlin instead and relax in her Hollywoodschaukel. The Datsche, a little shed that had grown into a Russian-style summer house, was where she and Opa spent all their free time, harvesting gooseberries, making jam and sitting in the shade of their big cherry tree.
Oma brushed a bit of fluff off my mother’s shoulder. ‘Maybe you misheard, and they meant a gallery called “Attic”? That would make more sense, wouldn’t it? “The Attic”. That would be a good name for a gallery.’
‘Goodbye, Mutti.’ Mama kissed her. ‘Thank you.’
She hurried off before Oma could ask her any more questions. Heiko cried a little when she left. He hated it when people came back and then went out again; it confused him.
*
Oma took some eggs from the fridge and showed us how to crack them. She had two particular talents that fascinated me: she could peel a potato using only one hand, and she could crack and separate an egg, also using only one hand. She had learned this when she was a young servant girl on Gut Czarnikau, a big estate in East Prussia. She liked to say, with a small, hard laugh, that all the
girls there learned to cook with one hand because they needed the other to fight off the master.
The estate featured in many of Oma’s stories, sometimes as a place of terrible hardship and at other times of simple joys, of celebrating the harvest, and picking berries and mushrooms in the forest. Oma had started out working in the fields, like her siblings, but when she was fourteen she was taken into the house, and that, she said, changed everything. The gnädige Frau, who was sehr sozial, as Oma said, very socially conscious, taught her to read. A stablehand, who was even more sozial, taught her about Communism. As soon as she could, Oma hitched a ride to Berlin, stayed with one comrade and then another, and never curtseyed again.
I was great at cracking eggs; my brothers were rubbish. I was great at so many things they were rubbish at, but no one ever seemed to notice.
Oma let us have a go at separating the eggs.
‘Why is Mama’s friend having a party in an attic?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t there cobwebs?’
My egg yolk slipped through my fingers, and as if she had seen this coming, Oma caught it with a bowl. Then she separated six eggs with lightning speed using only one hand. Tobi insisted on separating an egg just to let the yolk slip through his fingers and watch Oma catch it with the bowl.
I beat the yolks with sugar, flour and milk, while Oma whipped the whites. Then Oma showed me how to fold my mixture into the whites. She was the only person I knew who made pancakes like that, foaming East Prussian pancakes that puffed up in the hot pan.
She talked about the estate again, which she had been doing more and more lately. She talked about the big forests and frozen lakes, and watching her father and the other men chip off big blocks of ice from the lake for the cellar. She talked about the cook, Big Hanne, who could make foaming pancakes for twenty, thirty people. In the winter, guests from other estates arrived at Czarnikau in horse-drawn sledges, and the servants gathered the fur blankets from the seats, brushed off the snow and laid them out in a warm room behind the kitchen until the evening was over, and the guests ready to leave.
Even my brothers went quiet when Oma talked about her childhood. The white and grey horses snorting in the cold, the silver cutlery and white china plates on the table, the day some of the silver went missing and a spirit medium was called in.
‘She was called Frau Günther Gefferts,’ my grandmother said. ‘We had to lay her place with a china plate and a special set of wooden cutlery, because whenever she touched metal, her hands went like this.’ She clenched her hands. ‘They were magnetic, you see.’
I clenched my hands. How wonderful it would be to be a spirit medium, and have magnetic hands.
‘And just as Frau Günther Gefferts was sitting there and eating her pancake,’ my grandmother said and slid the first pancake onto a plate, ‘she stopped and rolled her eyes, and we thought she was having a fit. But no, it was a vision. She said, “The next person to come through the door is the thief.” And the door opened, and it was the estate manager, and when he was confronted with the facts, he burst into tears and confessed everything.’
When he was confronted with the facts was a phrase Oma used every time she told us this story. I liked it almost as much as the bit about the wooden cutlery.
‘It was all superstition, of course,’ she said, and took the chicken out of its bag. ‘Silly, silly superstition. People were very ignorant back then.’
She put on the chicken soup for the next day, and we sat down to eat pancakes. I wanted to ask her about the man at the Bösebrücke, but it would have to wait until my brothers were in bed.
After dinner, we moved the chairs out of the kitchen and into the corridor. It was bathtime. Oma and I gripped the heavy orange drawer under the counter. I pulled, and my grandmother pulled. Nothing happened. My shoulders hurt.
‘I wish we had a proper bathtub,’ I said. ‘I saw one in Sandy’s flat. It has feet.’
‘A proper bathtub?’ My grandmother wiped her forehead. ‘When I was a child, we didn’t even have running water. You have your own bathtub, you have your own bed, you have your own towel with your own name on it, and still you complain!’
Even though I knew it would be better to be quiet now, I could not help blurting out: ‘But it’s stuck!’
‘It’s not stuck!’ my grandmother shouted. ‘IT’S – NOT – STUCK!’
And with that last ‘stuck’, she put one foot against the side of the counter and yanked the reluctant drawer out of its hiding place. Then she fished the hose from the cavity behind the tub and prepared a bath for us while I helped Tobi and Heiko out of their clothes.
‘What a nice hot soup of Valentins,’ she said when we were all inside.
Tobi splashed around with his hands: ‘Stir us! Go on, stir us!’
Oma took a big wooden spoon from the counter and stirred us. There was water all over the floor, but that kind of thing never seemed to bother her. When we were done, I pressed a button and a hidden pump sucked the water out of the tub.
It was when my brothers were finally in bed, and I had Oma all to myself, that I decided to ask her. We were brushing our teeth over the kitchen sink.
‘Oma?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is it true that someone was shot at the Bösebrücke?’
She stopped brushing her teeth and stood there, her lips flecked with foam. Then she continued brushing, but more slowly than before.
‘Who told you that?’ she mumbled through the foam.
‘People at school,’ I said cautiously.
‘Ah.’ She spat out white blobs of toothpaste. ‘People at school!’
‘Is it true though?’ I asked.
We rinsed our mouths. My grandmother sat down, her hands in her lap. She looked at me for a long time before she answered:
‘I don’t know. But it’s true that sometimes people do try and cross, and then the guards have to shoot.’
I sat down, too, with my hands in my lap.
‘Why?’
‘It’s their order. They have to protect our border.’
‘But he wasn’t coming over from the West. He was running away.’
I dangled my legs back and forth.
‘Well, imagine if everyone ran away.’ Oma put her arm around me. ‘Then the country would be empty. That’s how it used to be, you know, you couldn’t move for traffickers and smugglers and gangsters talking people into leaving. Every day someone else went over, they just downed their tools and to hell with solidarity. I showed up at work one morning and the whole factory floor was empty, the entire brigade had left. The entire brigade!’ She shook her head. ‘We didn’t make any fridges that day.’
I pushed my tongue against a loose tooth. It had been bothering me for days. Tomorrow I would tie a string around it, tie the other end to the door handle and ask Sandy to open the door. I could already taste a bit of blood. I did not want our country to be empty. Why hadn’t the man just stayed here?
Oma stroked my hair.
‘If only someone had told his parents. They could have talked him out of it,’ she said quietly. ‘He’d still be alive, that boy.’
‘So he was shot?’
‘Ach, Ellachen.’ Oma closed her eyes.
*
When I finally crept under my duvet, I could not sleep. Something dark and frightening was lurking under my bed. I counted the stones on the amber necklace under my pillow. All three of us had worn these necklaces as babies; they were meant to soothe teething pains and ward off evil. I counted three or four rounds, then I lay there and listened to the familiar sounds. Tobi tossed and turned in his sleep. Heiko snuffled and snored. Occasionally he stirred and said in his high, clear voice: ‘Auto’, or ‘Bus’, and then went back to snoring.
I could not stop thinking about the man at the Bösebrücke.
I had taken Sabrina to bed, my new doll from the West, but she was too hard and plasticky to cuddle. I reached for Nuckabutz instead, my floppy old bear.
A key turned in the lock. I heard my father�
��s heavy footsteps. He exchanged a few whispered words with Oma, then they grew louder.
‘She’s not back yet?’ He sounded worried. ‘I’ll go and look for her.’
‘I told her, Jochen! I told her it was a daft idea, but she just laughed, she laughed and said…’
The front door opened again. A low crashing sound came from the corridor, then a curse and the rattle of dropped keys.
‘Regine!’ My father sounded both angry and relieved.
‘I’m sorry! Oops!’ She giggled. ‘I’m so, so sorry – I completely lost track of the time! It was such a great exhibition, Jochen, you should have seen the paintings – and the whole atmosphere, everything just felt so…’
Oma interjected: ‘We were sick with worry.’
‘… so alive. So alive.’ There was a silence. ‘And now I’m back. Sorry.’
‘Well, I’m glad you had a nice time,’ Oma said sourly.
Mama opened the door to our bedroom. She looked lovely in the sliver of light, her face flushed and happy, her eyes shining. She was even carrying herself differently, more upright, with her head high and shoulders back. She tiptoed over to me.
‘You’re awake, how come you’re still awake?’ She stroked my hair. Her breath smelled of wine.
‘I can’t sleep.’ I took her hand. ‘I was scared.’
‘Why were you scared, my darling?’
‘Because you were gone.’
‘But I was only looking at some paintings, Ellachen! I was only looking at some lovely, lovely paintings.’
‘Someone shot a man at the bridge,’ I mumbled sleepily, but it did not feel that frightening any more, because Mama was back now. I held her hand and fell asleep.
6
IN THE DAYS AND weeks that followed, Mama often talked about the exhibition in the attic. She thought the paintings were good enough to be shown in a proper gallery. Perhaps she could introduce the painter to some of her friends at the artists’ association. Maybe my father could help?
‘I’d love to,’ Papa said when she brought it up over dinner one night. ‘I can think of nothing more thrilling. It’s just that I’m really busy marking papers right now.’
Confession with Blue Horses Page 4