‘Kitsch,’ I could hear Papa say, ‘kitsch and silliness, a poor man’s Franz Marc, and those plasticky blues, aua, they hurt my eye!’ And this made me very happy, to hear him so hilariously cross, so animated. ‘But Papa!’ I argued back, ‘they’re just paintings!’ Which annoyed him even more, until he saw that I was laughing, that I was only saying this to rile him, to wind him up – I looked up, a reader at one of the desks was staring at me. I’d been laughing out loud.
I closed the encyclopedia, put it back on the shelf, quickly stroked the spine. Bit by bit, it was all coming together, and though I could not see yet how this piece fitted with the others, I would store it in my mind until its time came.
My chat with Aaron had not gone that badly, really. He’d seemed friendly; surely he would help. And I had a new ally in Katia, who’d offered to keep her eyes and ears open for me. I left the research centre feeling rather hopeful.
Outside the sky had cleared. Katia was leading a group of tourists into the main building. We waved at each other. There was an open garage in the far corner that I had failed to notice before, or maybe they had only opened it once the rain had stopped. A van was parked inside. I walked closer. The sides were covered with pictures of baked goods, crusty rolls, brown loaves, braided dough rising in the oven, that kind of thing. There was a jaunty slogan, too: ‘Always Fresh, Always Good’, or something like that; Immer Frisch; Immer Lecker, something along those lines. I didn’t really look at the loaves and the slogan because my eyes were drawn to the doors at the back of the van, which were open. With a heavy feeling in my stomach I walked around the side of the van and looked into the back, through the open doors, and there, just as I’d expected, were not crates of crusty rolls or boxes of iced buns, but two rows of metal cages.
13
Berlin 1987: Summer
OMA TRUDE AND MY father disliked each other, and for a long time I thought it was because of history.
I have an old photo album that my parents made when they got married. On one side is my father’s family, beginning with portraits of grim ancestors in corsets and high collars. When you flip the album and start on the other side, you see my mother’s family history, all two pages of it.
On my father’s side are formal black-and-white photographs of women with wide-brimmed hats and parasols, men in military uniforms, children in sailor suits. His family lived in the town of Stolpmünde by the Baltic sea, in a remote eastern region that was then known as Hinterpommern, or Beyond-Pomerania. As progress reaches Hinterpommern, the stiff studio photos give way to snapshots from the promenade: the women hold on to their hats, the children’s hair is ruffled by the wind. There is my great-grandfather, who was a Royal Dune Master in charge of the dunes between Stolpmünde and the city of Danzig. As a child I thought this meant he counted all the dunes along that stretch and made sure none was missing; and as strange as it sounds, that really was more or less what he did, because dunes, when not properly anchored by grass and shrubs, are mobile and can suddenly blow into a front garden or market square, covering everything in sand and leaving the townspeople rubbing their sore, red, sand-blinded eyes.
‘Stolpmünde – das Paris Hinterpommerns!’ someone has written across a snapshot of a lady with a particularly daring hat. ‘Stolpmünde – the Paris of Beyond-Pomerania!’
In the next photo is my paternal grandfather, a shop owner, strolling through Berlin during the 1936 Olympics, past a row of swastika flags. There is another photograph of that grandfather in his Wehrmacht uniform; his wife will look after the shop while he is away. Then a photo of a chubby baby in a white lace gown – my father! My paternal grandmother, Oma Henriette, wrote across the bottom in old Sütterlin handwriting: ‘Dem Führer wurde ein Sohn geboren’, ‘A son has been born to the Führer’.
There is Oma Henriette again, posing with a spade. She and other women are digging a trench, the ‘Pommernwall’, to stop the Russians. A rumour goes around saying the digging work is toxic to their lower bodies and will leave them infertile. This frightens Henriette, who slashes her own leg with her spade, leaving a gash deep enough to be acquitted of any further digging duties. (Look, Ella dear, that’s me. The Russians saw our trench, laughed, put some planks over it and drove their tanks across.)
Back in Stolpmünde, Oma Henriette spends the last days before the Russians’ arrival cycling up and down the dunes with her bandaged leg and crying: ‘No surrender! No surrender!’ When the booms and bangs of the Russian artillery can be heard, she throws her bike into the dunes, grabs my father and boards the first refugee ship westwards. Her sister misses the ships and has to walk to safety across frozen lakes and rivers, holding her baby daughter to her chest.
It was my mother who told me the story of that walk, not my father, which is odd given that it was not her family. But my father was not that interested in ‘family stuff’, as he called it – Familienkram. So it was my mother who told me about Oma Henriette’s sister, who walked across a frozen lake with her baby daughter pressed to her chest under her coat. She made it to the other side and continued along a road, and as she walked on she noticed all the things that people had discarded as they fled – suitcases, clothes, a hatbox, and she thought, but why are there so many dolls? Why are there so many dolls by the roadside? And when she looked at one, she saw that it was a baby, a human baby that had died of the cold and been left by the road.
‘But her own baby?’ I always asked when she told me the story of the walk, even though I knew the ending. ‘What happened to her own baby?’
‘Her own baby lived, my darling,’ my mother said and stroked my hair. ‘Her own baby lived.’
Because my mother’s side was so much poorer, there are far fewer photographs in her part of the book. A photo of Opa Horst’s parents with a pram, then a photo of Opa Horst at some Communist function in the 1950s. Oma Trude’s page is even more sparse. I once asked Oma Trude why there were no photos of her family.
‘We were poor, child, we were very poor, all the servants at Czarnikau were poor, all servants everywhere are poor.’ She stroked my hair. ‘We didn’t have the money to go to a studio and have our picture taken. The first time someone took a photo of me was when they liberated Buchenwald. There were photographers who came in after the soldiers – photo-reporters, I suppose they were called – and that’s the first time someone took a picture of me. But who’d want to keep such a picture?’
The first photo of her in the album is her wedding picture with Opa Horst. He looks a little cold still from his time in the snow at Stalingrad. There is also one of her wearing her green gaberdine coat. She is standing in an allotment, holding a baby in her arms, my mother. Her peace coat and her peace baby.
In the years after the war, Oma Trude was so poor that she sent my mother out to the railway tracks with an empty tin to gather coal splinters that had fallen off the passing freight trains. My mother knelt in the gravel with dozens of other Berliner children, all of them picking black crumbs from the dirt, until her tin was full and she ran home and gave it to Oma, who fed the coal to the always-hungry stove. Once when she was by the railway tracks my mother looked up and a train passed, not a freight train but a train full of American soldiers; they threw oranges to the children and slices of white bread. Where had it come from? Why were there American soldiers in this Soviet-occupied part of Berlin? Had my mother strayed into the American sector? She never found out. She caught an orange and a slice of white bread, which was new to her; she had only ever known grey, brown and black bread. The orange was sour. The bread was a little bland, but sweeter and softer than dark bread. She took two small bites and gave the rest to her parents. All my mother’s childhood stories were like that: suffering was being cold and hungry, happiness was being warm and full. And I always wondered when that feeling changed; when exactly she decided that there had to be more to life than bread and coal.
The two sides of my family could not stand each other. Once, when we were sitting on a bus, my father’s moth
er, Oma Henriette, boasted about my father’s latest book: ‘He has that from me, I’ve always loved the arts!’
At which point Oma Trude said loud enough for the whole bus to hear: ‘Is that why you voted for a failed painter?’
Which everyone later agreed had been in very poor taste.
So this was one of the reasons why Oma and my father did not get along: despite her measly two pages in the photo album, despite her family’s poverty, despite her start in life as a servant, despite her history as a former convict, Oma made no secret of the fact that she thought my mother was too good for my father; that my mother deserved someone with a better lineage; that my mother, in short, had married down.
‘I’m not going to say a word against them, Ellachen, because they are your family too,’ she sometimes muttered when she brushed my hair. ‘But it’s hard to forget that they’re a bunch of old Nazis.’
14
IN SUMMER 1987 we went on holiday to Hungary, one of our Socialist brother countries. This was a great treat: I’d never been to a foreign country before. Usually we went no further than Oma’s Datsche or one of the university’s holiday homes by the Baltic sea.
On the day we left, Oma Trude hid our suitcases. At first I did not know it was her. We got up even earlier than usual because it would be a long drive. I wish I had more memories of my father that morning, but all I remember is eating breakfast under the weak kitchen light, and my mother running back and forth saying she could swear she had put the two suitcases and the big bag in the kitchen, where else would they be? She wasn’t going mad, was she?
‘Is this a prank, Ella? Is this a joke? If so, it’s a really bad one. Where are the suitcases? Come on now!’
‘I swear it wasn’t me! I have no idea where they are, I swear!’ I looked under our beds just in case someone had put them there. Nothing. When I crawled back out, I had white dust sticking to my hands, flakes of paint and plaster. I called out: ‘Heiko!’ and he came running. He’d been doing this for some time, running everywhere instead of walking.
‘Heiko, what’s that under my bed?’
He lay down on his belly with his knees tucked under and his bottom up in the air and peered into the hollow. Heiko had a way of looking with his entire body, every muscle straining to discover what was there. He did this when he looked into bins and buckets too – put his entire head inside, bent so far that he almost fell in. Now he stretched his neck for a better view and gripped the carpet with his little hands:
‘Bider.’
‘That’s not a spider, you silly bean, that’s dirt. How on earth did you do that? Were you drawing again?’
‘Bider.’
‘Look, I don’t mind if you draw on the walls.’ I lowered my voice so our parents couldn’t here. ‘I don’t mind, OK? You can draw, but don’t start scraping the paint off like that, yeah? Malen, Heiko. Nur malen, nicht kaputtmachen.’
‘Puttmachen.’
‘Nicht puttmachen.’
‘Dirty.’ He reached out, picked up some paint flakes with his fingers and inspected them. ‘Dirty, dirty, dirty,’ he repeated crossly and tried to shake off the paint. I wiped it off with my sleeve.
‘Ella!’ My mother came in, carrying a suitcase. ‘Where’s your jacket? Where’s Tobi? Come on now, time to go.’
‘Where did you find the suitcase?’
‘Oma hid them.’
‘Oma!’
‘I know, it was silly of her, wasn’t it? Come on now.’
‘Was it a prank?’ I picked up my doll and my bear.
‘You can’t take Sabrina,’ my mother said quickly. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but she’ll have to stay at home.’
My parents were always very strict about the doll, and I knew it was because she was West German. I wasn’t even allowed to take her to school, though I often did anyway.
‘That’s fine, I’ll just take Nuckabutz, then.’
‘No, no, you can’t take either of them.’ My mother nervously turned towards Papa, who’d just walked in. ‘Or what do you think? I hadn’t thought about their toys.’
‘It’ll look weirder if they leave them behind.’
‘The doll or the bear, then?’
My father’s eyes went from Sabrina to Nuckabutz and back. ‘The bear.’
‘But then they’ll find the doll here…’
‘Let’s not overthink this. We’re just packing for a holiday.’ He smiled and clapped his hands. ‘Right, all bears on board, all children on board, this train is ready to depart.’
‘Choo-choo!’ said Heiko and ran out into the corridor. I sat Sabrina up on my pillow, her blue eyes wide open, and apologised for leaving her behind.
‘Next time, it’ll be your turn,’ I said, which was a lie, because I would never travel without Nuckabutz.
*
We left much later than planned. When we said goodbye to my grandparents in the downstairs hallway, Oma began to cry.
‘Mutti, don’t.’ My mother looked around in case anyone could see us. ‘I wish I hadn’t told you.’
‘Leave the children with me,’ Oma said and pulled me towards her. ‘Please.’
What an odd thing to say! It put my mother even more on edge. She pushed us all into Oma’s flat and shut the door behind her.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ she hissed at my grandmother. ‘What if someone heard that?’
‘You’re the one who’s lost her mind. Both of you, you’re both out of your minds, you don’t know what you’re doing.’
‘We know, Mutti. We’ve thought this through.’
‘But you haven’t! It’s because of that stupid book, Regine, it’s because you’re upset, in a sulk, all over nothing. Hasn’t our government given you everything you could possibly want? A good education, a steady job, one where you can both sit in nice warm offices all day, looking at picture books…’
‘Art books,’ my father said through gritted teeth.
‘You’ve never known hunger, you’ve never known want. Don’t you realise how lucky you are?’
‘Trude, we’re late already,’ my father said, and picked up the suitcases.
‘Regine, think about the bigger picture. I was a servant and you’re a professor. In which other country would that even happen?’
‘Lecturer,’ my mother reminded her. ‘Not a professor, just a lecturer.’
‘Lecturer, professor, my point is that you’re not a field hand, you’re not a maid, and you’ve never had to wash your face with snow. The things I suffered in Buchenwald…’
‘Mutti…’
‘And when we were so poor, my darling, don’t you remember that? When you had to go and pick coal splinters from the tracks, don’t you remember that at all?’
‘I do remember.’ My mother put her arm around Oma’s shoulders. ‘Mutti, we’re not leaving you. You and Vati can travel, you can come over any time.’
‘Don’t run away, Reginchen. It was the comrades who helped us survive.’
My mother looked at my grandmother and said in a voice that was quiet but firm:
‘Survive? I don’t just want to survive, Mutti. I want to live.’
She embraced my grandmother. They stood there for a long time, leaning into each other. I thought of Tobi and Heiko when they hugged, those hugs that ended in a pinch or bite, because the emotions were too fierce, because love and fury were too close together, were perhaps the same. My mother whispered something into my grandmother’s ear, and after a while they separated and we left the flat. Outside, my father was already loading the suitcases into the boot.
*
It was our first family holiday outside of East Germany. The plan was to go camping and eat stews and boiled potatoes from jars we had sterilised, filled and sealed before the trip.
Several times we had to stop by the side of the road because I felt sick, or my brothers felt sick. We were not used to such long journeys in our Trabi. I pictured an aerial view of our trip, the route marked by little pools of vomit beside the road.<
br />
In Hungary we had dinner at an inn, a special holiday treat. We would open the jars the following day. I had my first and last Hungarian goulash, which they called pörkölt. It came with giant soft dumplings. My father cut the dumplings into small pieces for me. I was old enough to do that myself, but he reached over anyway and cut up the dumplings with his knife.
The campsite was in a forest. All night long little flies and midges bit my hands and face. Tobi woke up crying and said he wanted to go home and sleep in his bed. Heiko peed in the tent. In the morning, my father lit a small gas stove and made watery hot chocolate for everyone.
That is really all I remember of the holiday part of the holiday.
*
On the second day, my parents had an argument in the car. It was about Oma. I had fallen asleep, and when I woke up, I heard my father say:
‘You shouldn’t have told her, Regine. You know what she’s like. I’m surprised we haven’t been stopped yet.’
‘How can you say that? She’s my mother.’
‘I’m just saying.’ My father took a few more drags and threw the unfinished cigarette out of the window. They fell silent. My mother bit her nails. Click, click, click.
‘What about Sven?’ my father asked after a while.
‘What about him?’
Papa reached for the cigarettes, then changed his mind.
‘Sven.’ He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘With his purple tigers.’
‘Red.’
‘Red tigers.’
‘Jochen, we’ve been through this a thousand times. Why would Sven want to get us into trouble? He’s in the West now.’ She looked away. ‘Besides, he’s our friend.’
‘Your friend.’
‘He’s your friend, too. He likes you. Otherwise he’d never have helped us.’
‘I wonder.’ My father reached for the cigarettes again and shook out two, one for himself and one for my mother. She lit them both. We were deep in the countryside. There were no other cars on the road.
Confession with Blue Horses Page 11