Confession with Blue Horses

by Sophie Hardach

  ‘It sounds a bit too good to be true, that’s all I’m saying,’ he continued. ‘If it’s really that easy, why hasn’t everyone done it?’

  ‘Because no one else knows about this particular spot.’

  ‘Still. It’s very nice of Sven, a little too nice if you ask me. He must still be in a transit camp, right? And yet all he’s thinking about is how to get you over there…’

  ‘How to get us over there.’ My mother turned towards my father and ran her fingers through his hair. ‘It’s going to be OK, darling. I know you’re scared, and I’m scared, too. But it’s going to be OK.’

  ‘Can you do that again?’ he asked, still looking at the road. But there was a smile in his voice. She ran her fingers through his hair, and then she rubbed his neck.

  ‘The trick is not to think about this next bit,’ she said. ‘It’s like when you’re in an obstacle race, you have to think about the stretch after the obstacle.’

  ‘As if you’d ever run an obstacle race.’

  ‘I have, at school! And anyway, it was only a metaphor. What I mean is – where shall we go first? Quick. The first country you want to visit.’

  ‘Right now? Austria.’

  ‘Come on, humour me. Once we’ve settled in, once everything’s normal, what’s the first country you want us to visit as a family? Imagine, Jochen! Not as part of a boring delegation, not in the shadow of five colleagues who’re there to report on you, but just as a normal man on holiday with his family.’

  My mother’s voice was heavy with Fernweh, the aching desire to be far away, the opposite of Heimweh, homesickness. So strong was the longing in her voice that I expected her to open the window and rise out of her seat, to follow her yearning, to rise and rise until she was nothing but a dot in the sky, travelling with the wind.

  ‘When I was a little girl,’ she said in that yearning voice, ‘… when I was a girl, I wanted to be an explorer. Have I ever told you that, Jochen? I packed my bag and walked down the street, and I said to myself, I’m going to keep walking until I find a jungle with monkeys.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I made it as far as the park. No jungle, no monkeys. Anyway, our first country. Quick.’

  ‘Italy. The Sistine Chapel, and all the rest of it. Come on, that’s not even a question.’

  My mother laughed. ‘An art historian through and through. You could have just said you wanted to go to a Spanish beach, you know, I wouldn’t have held it against you.’

  ‘Well, Spain’s on the list, too. The Prado, Goya, Velázquez.’ He tapped the steering wheel once for every name. The Dog – now there’s a beautiful painting. I wouldn’t mind seeing that.’

  ‘I want to go to London,’ my mother said.

  ‘London? What, because of Turner?’

  My mother laughed again. ‘To be honest, it’s nothing to do with art. I just like their culture, they’re so peculiar and eccentric.’

  ‘Yes, I can see why you’d like that.’ He focused on the road for a while, and then he said: ‘Still, your mother…’

  ‘My mother is secretly glad that I’m doing this. No – more than that – she’s proud of me for doing this.’

  ‘I must have missed a nuance there…’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘So when she begged us not to leave…’

  ‘You’ll never understand it, it’s just one of those things – one of those things you’ll never understand. She’s not blind, Jochen, she can see what’s going on, she can see this isn’t what she fought for.’

  ‘I think you’re giving her far too much credit there.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s hope you’re right.’

  She leaned over and kissed him.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For letting me persuade you.’

  My father glanced up into the rear-view mirror. His eyes met mine. ‘Hey mouse, did you wake up just now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Almost there,’ my father said, and put on a brave smile.

  *

  We stopped by the road to have lunch from our jars, cold stew and cold rice. My brothers woke up, and my mother gave them some tea from a thermos flask.

  I wanted tea, too, but she said it wasn’t for me. Later she took me aside and said that the tea was meant to calm down the boys and keep them quiet. She had to tell me something important, she said – I was a big girl now and could be told important things. We were not going to drive around Hungary; we were not going to Lake Balaton. We were going to abandon the car near a field and walk through a forest where there was an unprotected stretch of border, Hungary’s border with Austria. Once we arrived in Austria, we would contact my father’s cousin, the one who had sent me that blonde doll, and he would help us reach West Germany.

  15

  AS WITH ANY STREAM of refugees, single young men made up a big part of the East German outflow. But entire families left, too, and it was often the families that made the most spectacular breaks. There was the family of four that paddled to the West in a rubber boat, circumventing the East German navy patrols. Nine hours into the voyage they lost a paddle, and had no choice but to dock at the next island, not knowing if they were in the East or the West until they saw a row of big, shiny Mercedes.

  There were the two families, four adults and four children, who escaped in a homemade hot-air balloon, constructed with the aid of a physics textbook and an American magazine for balloonists. To test for the most airtight fabric, one of the fathers developed a device made from a hoover and a glass tube filled with water, whose level rose higher the more airtight the fabric was. Umbrella silk tested well, so did tent nylon, but in the end the families went for taffeta because that was available in the shops.

  Then there was the dad who dived into a canal and sawed through four underwater iron grilles to free the way for his wife, daughter and father to swim through.

  The unifying characteristic of these families was a certain amount of technical know-how. It took a rare combination of engineering and dissimulation skills to secretly build a hot-air balloon in the GDR, where even paragliding was banned in case someone figured out how to paraglide to freedom. The families that did these things, I always thought, were the kind of families who also knew how to build a bookshelf, or change the plug on a hairdryer.

  Our family, on the other hand, was hopelessly impractical. Two art historians. Between the two, who was more likely to be the grille-sawing, balloon-building mastermind? My mother? Let’s just say, if you could unblock a drain by talking about Expressionism, my mother would have been a star plumber. My father? My father could authenticate Baroque furniture from a mile away, but our kitchen table still wobbled.

  When the heating failed or a fuse blew out, they would tell me to go and knock on the door of a neighbour, or fetch Oma Trude.

  And yet it was their very position as absent-minded, star-gazing members of the Intelligenz that could have made escaping easy. My mother had been on departmental group trips to Munich and to Paris. My father had visited Stockholm and even New York. No need for my parents to do pull-ups on the kitchen door until their biceps were ready for extensive paddling. No need to dig a hole into the floor of Oma Trude’s living room and keep on digging until they emerged into a kitchen with an electric bread-knife, a fruit bowl full of bananas and a copy of Der Spiegel on the counter. No need for any of that: with my parents’ jobs, escape could have required only the ability to sneak away from the official delegation, put one foot in front of the other and avoid the wrong embassy.

  It could have been easy for them – as easy as a Sunday stroll. Leave the Met, leave the lecture theatre at the Sorbonne, and keep walking until you see a building with the West German flag high up on a pole.

  But there was Tobi, and there was Heiko and there was me. The ball, the chain and the manacle. The pier, the anchor and the mooring line. No matter how far Mama and Papa went, the three of us always stayed put.

/>   Maybe they did consider just doing a runner. Maybe my mother did once look at the Eiffel Tower and think, to hell with them, I’ve only got one life and I’m not going back there. Just like Sandy’s mother apparently did. Maybe my father did sit in his hotel room on the Upper West Side and think, that’s it, they’ll forgive me, I wouldn’t be the first man in history to dump his loved ones.

  They could also have applied for all of us to leave East Germany. Some people did that. But after years of waiting, the application was often rejected, and in the meantime, the whole family was punished, sacked from jobs, barred from studying.

  As a family, our most realistic hope was the utterly unrealistic. Our most realistic hope was the fantastical, the outrageous, the never-in-my-dreams. The equivalent of a submarine built from sardine tins, a catapult that would launch us over the wall, a Valentin family space shuttle that soared out into the universe and came back down on the Western side. The world’s most powerful trampoline, a people-carrying hydraulic drill, a giant trained mole. Or, failing these options, a holiday in Hungary that ended in a hiking trip to Austria.

  16

  MY MOTHER EXPLAINED THEIR plan to me, and I was horrified. This was a holiday. Heiko and Tobi and I had been having such a nice time. Why did my parents have to spoil it?

  I tried to reason with them. I asked them to at least wait until after my Jugendweihe. One of my friends’ older sisters had just had hers. I could think of nothing else but the Jugendweihe, who I would invite, what presents I would get; it occupied my thoughts even though it was years away.

  ‘What about them?’ I whispered and pointed at my younger brothers, who had fallen asleep. Two Hänsels in a fairy tale.

  ‘I’m going to carry Heiko,’ my mother said. ‘And your father is going to carry Tobi.’

  ‘It’s never going to work.’

  ‘Ella, who taught you to talk to me that way?’

  ‘Please, Mama, let’s just have a nice holiday, please.’ I interlaced my fingers in a pathetic plea; I would have fallen to my knees if I thought it would help.

  ‘Ella! Of all days, this is not the one to throw a tantrum.’

  It was not as if I was unaware of the problems in our world. After all, I knew about Sven and his run-ins with the artists’ association. I knew about the man at the Bösebrücke. I knew that my friend Lisa’s older brother had got into trouble at school because he refused the Jugendweihe ceremony and announced right in the middle of class – to everyone’s surprise, especially his family’s – that he was a Christian.

  At the same time, I loved our flat, our street, Oma Trude, Opa Horst, my friends. I loved art lessons with Frau Obst, who always wore dangling plastic earrings in the shape of triangles or bolts of lightning, and who asked us to decorate the classroom with dried leaves, or imagine the shape of a sound. I loved running through abandoned basements with Sandy.

  Who would help us on the other side? Who would be our friend there? Who would tell my mother before she left the house that she still had a pen in her hair? Who would remind my father that it was time to leave for his lecture, when he was lost in a book?

  Whenever we ran out of salt or oil, which happened often, I only had to ask Frau Pietsch next door and she gave me a cup of whatever I needed, and always a piece of chocolate, too. Just the other day our building had won a Golden House Number for our exemplary collective cleaning effort. I had chipped in with Frau Minsky’s Subotnik and she had promised me a reward. Now I would never know what the reward was, let alone receive it!

  I absolutely did not see why I should be forced to run away from all these people. It seemed unfathomable to live without them. As for the fact that I could not visit Western Europe or the United States, might never see Spain, might never see Italy: well, my world was quite small anyway. The authority I most chafed against was that of my parents, not the state.

  ‘You know, it’s not true that everyone in the West is rich,’ I told my mother. ‘The children there go barefoot.’

  ‘That’s not why we’re leaving,’ she snapped. ‘It’s got nothing to do with rich and poor and barefoot. And anyway, what nonsense. Barefoot! The things they tell our children! I’m really disappointed, Ella. I thought you were a big girl.’

  ‘A lot of children in the West take drugs though, that’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘Listen, once we’re over there, you can ask as many questions as you like. But not now.’

  So much for freedom of speech. I was fairly certain that the reports of a drug epidemic in the West were true. Even the West Germans wrote about it. My friends’ older siblings were all reading Christiane F.’s memoir in school, with its stories of child prostitutes gathering at Bahnhof Zoo in West Berlin. Our teachers loved that book, they always said it was the imperialists documenting their own disaster. I did not want to live with the imperialists, in a country full of child addicts and American nuclear weapons.

  ‘What if we go home and try it next time instead?’ I suggested more carefully. ‘Then I can at least say goodbye to Oma and my friends.’

  ‘There might not be a next time. And what do you think will happen if you tell your friends, and they tell their parents, and the parents tell the police?’

  ‘They won’t,’ I said feebly.

  Mama crouched down and looked at me.

  ‘There’s no going back now,’ she said. ‘We’ve prepared everything. We’re ready.’

  We got back into the car and drove on for a bit, then turned into a paved road that narrowed to a dirt track and ended by a corn field. My brothers stirred as my parents gently pulled them out of their seats. Outside, they nodded off again. Heiko, I remember, wore a red-and-black T-shirt.

  *

  We hid in the corn field until my parents decided it was the right time to attempt the crossing. The green stalks stood very tall and straight, full of sap, with long, slender, drooping leaves that brushed against my face. I was a city child, I had never seen a corn plant up close before. The cobs did not grow out of the top, as I had thought, but sat snugly against the stalks, swaddled tightly in their green leaves. It was strange, watching my parents crouch among the corn. They looked completely out of place. Every time they adjusted a leg or stretched an arm, they knocked against one of the plants. This would never work; we were too clumsy and there were too many of us, surely we were making the entire field ripple. It was no good at all.

  By the time we edged back to the dirt path, another thought had formed in my mind. If I tore away right now, I could disappear between the plants and make my way back to Berlin. I was small and quick, much quicker than them, it would be easy. And anyway, they wanted to leave, they would not come after me. Then I remembered the man who was shot at the Bösebrücke.

  ‘What if they start shooting at us?’ I whispered.

  ‘They don’t shoot at people here,’ my mother said. ‘Look, there isn’t even a watch tower, there isn’t even a wall.’

  Then she said Sven had told her about this crossing. He had sent them a map, hidden in a painting, through an art dealer they all knew. Everything had been carefully planned, everything had been talked about in detail, just not with me. And I realised then that I could not run back through the corn field. I could not change their minds, I could not make them turn around, I could not separate myself from them. I belonged to them, and I had to go with them. In some sense I was already crossing the meadow, I was already fighting my way through the forest and through the invisible wall.

  The future had always seemed limitless to me, an empty space to be filled by life. But it was not like that. It had already been filled in for me by others. Others had decided that I would cross this meadow, others had decided that I would walk through this forest, others had decided that I would live in West Germany. Their ideas were my reality. It was like everything else in my life – school, clubs, homework, chores, falling asleep at night, waking up in the morning. It was all arranged by others. I had no power at all – not over the present, not over the future
.

  The sky was darkening, and my parents said it was time to go. Dark enough to be hidden, but still light enough to see where we were going.

  ‘Come, Ella,’ my mother said.

  I took her hand and followed her into the meadow.

  *

  She was carrying Heiko, and my father was carrying Tobi. My parents’ legs buckled a little under the weight, it threw them off balance. They made slow progress. The meadow was uneven, treacherous. The vast silence of the countryside at night frightened me. It was as if someone had torn away a protective blanket and left me exposed and alone.

  Finally the black cluster ahead of us turned into trees, shrubs, undergrowth. We had reached the edge of the forest. It was dense and forbidding, lined by a barrier of thorny bushes. My parents paused and put down my brothers. My father went to look for a gap in the bushes large enough to slip through. He had taken only a few steps away from us when a beam of light shone on him.

  I froze, then ducked between two shrubs. Thorns scratched my face and arms. Cowering under some branches, I watched the light travel from my father to my mother and my brothers. I stayed just outside the bright circle, hidden in the dark. Somewhere in the distance, a man yelled something in a foreign language. I could not see him; it was too dark and he was too far away.

  ‘Take the boys!’ my father shouted and handed Tobi to my mother. ‘Run!’

  My mother grabbed Tobi with one arm and tried to pick up Heiko with the other. She half carried, half dragged my brothers into the forest, trampled on the thorny shrubs, pushed through the undergrowth. I stumbled after her, tripped on roots and fallen branches, stepped into puddles and holes in the ground. Where was my father? I heard him shout again, further away now: ‘Run! Don’t wait for me, run!’

  A shot rang out. My mother froze and turned around.

  ‘Jochen?’ she called out, but no one answered.