Confession with Blue Horses

by Sophie Hardach

  ‘It’s not really a prison, at least not compared to the prisons in my day,’ she said. ‘If anyone asks, tell them your parents are away for work.’

  Another time she said: ‘Not another word about this. You’re putting us all in danger. Is that what you want?’

  It took me a week to write the letter, and when I gave it to Oma she put her arms around me and kissed my hair.

  ‘We can’t post all that, my darling.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That’s not a letter, that’s a book.’

  ‘Please, please send it to Mama.’

  I had drawn everything for her – our street, our building, our flat. I had tried so hard to get every detail right – the chicken in the oven, Heiko in his cot, his socks on the radiator, the picture of the blue horses on the wall. My father standing in the kitchen with the wooden spoon in his hand.

  Mama would stick it on the walls of her cell, and it would be as if she was here with us.

  ‘Ellachen, you have to be very brave now.’ Oma squeezed me tight. ‘Papa isn’t in hospital.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s dead, child.’

  ‘But where is he?’

  ‘He’s in a cemetery.’

  ‘But where is he?’

  That was all I could think about for a long, long time. Where was my father? If he wasn’t here, and he wasn’t in hospital, then where was he?

  Oma took me to a cemetery and showed me a stone with my father’s name on it, but even then I didn’t believe her.

  Papa has slipped through the barbed wire, I thought; he’s over on the other side, and soon he’ll write to us and ask us to join him.

  *

  ‘Oma, can we go and visit Mama?’

  ‘We can’t, my love, but she’ll be back very soon.’

  ‘How soon is very soon?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is it next month?’

  Next month seemed unbearably far. I had only said it as a provocation, to make her say: Of course not as late as that!

  But she looked at me sadly and shook her head and said no, certainly not next month.

  *

  There is one memory that stands out from that time. We were reading a story at school, a modern retelling of the tale of the fisherman who catches a fish that begs him to save its life. In return, the fisherman is granted a wish. The fisherman’s wife forces him to go back to the fish with more and more wishes, for a bigger house, nice clothes, and so on, until the fish in a burst of anger at their greed takes it all away, and they’re as poor as before. I remember getting more and more heated as we discussed the story. The teacher encouraged us to take sides with the generous fish and blame the materialistic, unreasonable wife for not understanding when enough was enough.

  Right there, I had a strong feeling that I had nothing to lose. I said the fisherman was not to blame, the wife was not to blame. No, the fish was to blame for taking it all away. The wife had only done what anyone would do: reach up, want more, ask for more. How nasty to argue that this woman had asked for too much, that she had brought her misfortune on herself.

  The room was silent after I finished. You could hear the mucous breathing of the boy in the very last row, who always had a cold.

  ‘That’s a curious interpretation,’ our teacher said finally, ‘because if you think about it, in real life, asking for too much does get you into trouble. Whereas the happiest people are the ones who are grateful for what they have.’

  On my way out, a boy sidled up to me and said: ‘You know what they’re saying about you behind your back?’

  ‘No,’ I snapped, feeling clever. ‘I can’t know if it’s behind my back, can I?’

  ‘They’re saying that if your grandmother hadn’t struck a deal high up, you’d all be in a children’s home now, all of you, not just your brother.’

  I slapped him hard on the cheek. He looked at me with stunned surprise. His hand flitted to the reddening skin. Then he turned on his heel and ran away.

  Walking home, I tried not to feel too bothered by it. Who was this boy anyway? His family came from the middle of nowhere, some godforsaken place near the Polish border. We called that part of the country the Valley of the Clueless, because they couldn’t get West German TV there, not even with an antenna the size of a tree.

  *

  I was very lonely during that time. My friends at school avoided me. The worst was Sandy, my best friend. From her I had expected unquestioning solidarity. She never cared what others thought, after all. But Sandy did not want me any more when I came back from Hungary. She had moved to sit with another girl, and the chair next to mine stayed empty. In the breaks I could not find her. After school I watched her disappear down the street in a gaggle of girls. Pigtails, braids, bowl cuts, bobs. Heads tucked close together, whispered secrets passed from ear to ear. They played hopscotch in the breaks, and that jumping game with a giant rubber band. Their hands tied together in cat’s cradles, their ankles joined in three-legged races. I sat alone on a concrete bench by the rubbish bins and ate my sandwich. The janitor walked past and picked up discarded salami slices and chocolate wrappers with long metal tongs. I watched small birds dive in and out of the bins. I tried to look immersed in their fluttering business. I had better things to do than to play hopscotch.

  Even Frau Obst, my beloved art teacher, sided with the rest. She had always praised my talent, and given me little extra tasks, which was usually frowned upon at school, because we were all equal. Now she avoided talking to me, and when I asked her one day if I could borrow some watercolours to paint on my own after school, she simply did not reply. It was as if I did not exist.

  The neighbours in the Vorderhaus avoided us, too. Whenever I spotted die Minsky in her open doorway, leaning on her mop and yawning with boredom, she stepped back and closed the door. Frau Pietsch still occasionally gave us chalky slabs of Süßtafel chocolate but she no longer asked Oma to come along to party meetings. Our only true friend in the building was old Frau Rachmann. Sometimes we went to see her in her musty flat where a nurse or helper fed her cold cabbage soup because she could not be trusted to say when it was too hot. When we passed her in the hallway she smiled and stretched out her thin hand. The skin was loose and dry. She stretched out her hand whenever someone passed – it was no sign of special affection, but I was still glad that she did not turn her back on us.

  Oma moved up to the fifth floor so that we would not have to give up the flat. Opa Horst stayed behind on the ground floor. Oma slept in my parents’ bed, and I could see it made her uncomfortable, but there was no other way. One day I came home from school to see that she had sorted my parents’ clothes into big boxes. Some of my mother’s dresses were still on the hangers. Oma was sitting on the bed, clutching my mother’s black party dress, the one she had worn to the exhibition where she had met the painter. It was the first time I saw my grandmother cry.

  22

  IN THE WORLD OUTSIDE, two years passed. In our flat, time took on a different shape. Sometimes it seemed to move backwards. I would wake up in the morning feeling happy, convinced that Papa and Mama were sitting in the kitchen and drinking coffee.

  At other times, I could almost see them from the corner of my eye. When I was pouring a glass of water from the kitchen tap, I could feel Papa behind me, sitting at the table with an open book in front of him. He was propping up his forehead with his forefinger and thumb. With a pencil he made light, quick marks in his notebook, with such a gentle touch, as if he was afraid of hurting the page. Sometimes he let out a funny little hiccupping sound, a little half-laugh, out of amusement or surprise. That was how he was sitting behind me, exactly like that, but when I turned around, there was no one. It was as if he had only just vanished, had only just stood up and left.

  Next to his books and manuscripts, my father kept a collection of miniature old farming tools mounted on a board: a tiny plough, a hoe, a sieve to separate the chaff. Reminders of the rural origins
of some of his ancestors, Pomeranian and Silesian farmers with hands like pitchforks. My grandmother had mothballed my parents’ clothes, but she had not yet touched the books and trinkets. The miniature farming tools were still there, my parents’ wedding photo, my mother’s marked-up manuscript, even a stack of old messages that had once been pinned to our door, with shopping lists that rhymed.

  I looked after these things with the greatest care. Everything had to be in place for when my parents came back, so that they would know we had been thinking about them, and had made sure they would feel comfortable when they returned. It did not matter how many times I was told that Papa was not going to come home. I still kept his notes in order, and his books lined up just as he had left them.

  Once a week I dusted the plough, the hoe, the sieve, the scythe with its delicate metal blade. When Oma remarked that we might pack up some of the books, I protested. My father had been working on a book about the Bauhaus: an entire shelf was lined up with books for that project, weighty hardcovers with pencilled notes in them, comments, cross-references, question marks. If he came back, he would need those books. And not only that: he would feel deeply hurt if he saw that we had chucked them out as if they no longer mattered.

  He had pinned index cards to the wall with quotes for his book. I unpinned one by Klee and put it up over my own bed.

  You can’t even catch me in this world. For I dwell just as much with the dead as with the unborn. A little closer to the heart of creation than is usual. And not nearly close enough.

  It sounded comforting, strong, larger than my daily worries: the concrete bench, the empty kitchen table, the times when I would sit on the edge of a playing field and wait for someone to pick me for their team. That was where I wanted to dwell, with the dead and with the unborn. Close to the heart of creation.

  I tried to read my father’s Bauhaus books, but they were too difficult. The only one that spoke to me was the story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who taught the basic course of the Bauhaus to children in Theresienstadt ghetto. The children drew pictures of their families and the pets they had left behind, they painted open landscapes and the cramped rooms of the ghetto. And it seemed to me that if art had helped these children, who had been caught in far crueller circumstances than myself, then it would also help me. After that, I began to draw pencil sketches and paint with watercolours every evening. I had an idea that painting had somehow saved Friedl and the children, that they had painted their way out of the ghetto and into gentle watercolour landscapes and brightly crayoned homes, although the truth was of course that all of them were later deported and murdered at Auschwitz, and art had not saved them at all.

  *

  One morning I was sitting in the kitchen eating rye bread and jam. Tobi was sitting next to me, his own slice of bread untouched. He was not eating well in those days. At night he cried under his duvet, thinking I could not hear him. He got into fights with the teachers at school. Both of us were behind in every class, but while my own bad performance did not bother me much, I was worried for Tobi. He had always been popular, bright and happy, with a large group of friends. Yet in those days he was as friendless and withdrawn as myself. He lost weight, and looked pale and bloodless.

  I pointed my piece of bread at the painting of the blue horses that now hung on the kitchen wall. ‘Mama told me a secret about that painting,’ I began. ‘She said I should tell you when you were old enough to understand.’

  He looked up, a rare flash of interest in his eyes.

  ‘Look,’ I continued. ‘The blue horses, that’s meant to be us, you, me and Heiko. It’s like a code.’

  And then I told him the story of the three children who lived in a flat with a bathtub, just like ours, until one day the evil sorcerer came and turned them into three blue horses. He kept them in a dungeon and fed them nothing but bread and water. All is lost, they thought, we will be here forever. But then! The clouds opened, a great thundering noise cracked the sky, and their grandmother swooped down from above like an eagle, her arms spread like wings. She fought the sorcerer and killed him; she waved her magic wand and turned the horses back into three children. And just like in the story, we would be freed, too. Oma would get Heiko back. All of us would be back together. It would be just like it was before, or at least almost like it was before.

  ‘But I asked Oma,’ Tobi said. ‘And she said she can’t bring Heiko back.’

  ‘Then I’ll bring him back.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise,’ I said.

  *

  I often looked at the painting, and each time I noticed something new. The blue horses were standing on a meadow dotted with wildflowers. To the right was a corn field, tall stalks swaying in the breeze. At the back, towards the horizon, loomed a dense forest.

  It was the meadow, and the forest. It was the place where we had tried to cross.

  Sven must have discovered the meadow during one of his painting trips to Hungary. A quiet area without a watch tower in sight, without a border guard. He had painted it, and months later he had gone back, crossed the meadow and climbed through the barbed wire.

  Sven crossed the border here, my mother had said to me. It’s all right, it’s safe.

  I wanted to tell someone about this painting, which surely showed that it had all been Sven’s idea. My parents were blameless; he must have talked them into it.

  ‘Oma,’ I said, ‘Oma, can’t you see? That’s the meadow, that’s the forest, that’s where the guard shot Papa.’

  ‘Ellachen, the things you come up with!’

  ‘But Oma, Sven must have sent Mama a map, or maybe he just sent her a secret letter and said, go to that village in Hungary, look for the meadow, it’s just like in the painting…’

  ‘No more, Ella! No more!’ She put her hands over her ears.

  The next day the painting was gone. In its place hung a painting of a dozen red-cheeked boys and girls harvesting golden wheat. And when I asked Oma where the painting of the blue horses was, she said she had no idea what I was talking about, there had never been such a painting.

  23

  STRANGE THINGS HAPPENED DURING that year.

  There was the winter of the pets. On a few weekends in January, our doorbell rang until the neighbours complained. Outside were clusters of men and women holding baskets full of kittens, dogs on leashes, cardboard boxes rumbling with guinea pigs and rabbits. They all told us we had answered their ads, placed shortly after Christmas to get rid of unwanted gift pets. Oma stood her ground: she had not answered any ads, nor had her husband. There must be a misunderstanding. Some of the people grew angry: they had come from afar; they demanded we at least pay for their fuel. Opa Horst turned tetchy and short-tempered. One day he shouted at the whole crowd to get lost, for goodness’ sake, this was worse than Stalingrad. My solid, un-shakeable grandmother developed a slight tremor in her hands.

  The pet visits stopped. Other curious events followed, sudden spells and jinxes. One day all our yellow towels were gone. A week later, they were back. The same thing happened with our duvet covers. The striped ones remained in place. The flower-patterned ones vanished, and returned a while later.

  I overheard Oma and Opa talking about the strange things late at night, when they were sitting in the kitchen and thought I was asleep.

  ‘What do you expect?’ my grandfather said. ‘It’s one way to make sure we don’t make a fuss about what happened to Jochen. They show us they can walk in and out of our lives as they please, and on top of it, it makes everyone else think we’re crazy. Two birds with one stone.’

  Oma sounded weak and brittle, not like herself at all: ‘But why would they do something like that? I’ve never made a fuss, I’ve never wavered. I’ve given them my entire life. Horst, I went to Buchenwald for them. Why would they harass me like this?’

  ‘To make sure.’ His voice was infinitely gentle and sad. ‘Just to make sure.’

  I slipped out of my bed and spied on them through a crack i
n the door. Oma was pouring herself a schnapps.

  ‘I’m not going to let them intimidate me.’ She downed the drink, and her voice strengthened a little. ‘Let me tell you, my friends in the party would be furious if they knew about this. It’s just some grubby low-lifes stepping over the line. I’m going to make a complaint, Horst, I’m not going to put up with this, I’m going to have them called to order.’

  ‘You think the party doesn’t know? This is the party, Trude.’

  ‘It can’t be! You’ll see, you’ll see how they’ll take my side.’

  ‘They’ll take away the other two, that’s what they’ll do. One complaint, one wrong word, one question about Regine and Jochen, and they’ll take the others, you know they will.’

  ‘They wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Oh, but they would. They’ve taken one already, haven’t they? And we don’t even know where he is.’

  And with that, my stoical grandfather turned to the window and hid his face, and now it was my grandmother who tried to console him, with low, deep murmurs and a helpless hand on his back.

  24

  AFTER A YEAR I received my first letter from Mama. She was very well, she said. She missed us and hoped we were well, too. My mother, who for years had filled hundreds of pages with beautiful words and sentences, seemed to have run out of things to say. Her letters arrived irregularly; we would not hear from her for weeks, and then two came at once. She encouraged us to be good and work hard on our homework, to do what Oma told us, to make sure we ate well and kept ourselves healthy. She mentioned neither Heiko nor my father, but on one of the letters she drew a picture of three little blue horses.

  I wrote back to her, and drew a little picture of three blue horses on my letter, too, but I was never sure if it reached her.

  In summer 1989, two years after our holiday in Hungary, we received a yellow parcel. I could not imagine who it was from. Our friends in West Germany had long stopped sending presents, possibly to avoid creating even more problems for us.