Confession with Blue Horses

by Sophie Hardach

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Look, I’m not going to lie, it’s all in the past anyway. Maybe I got a few perks for helping convince her to let your brother go. What’s wrong with that? It was all true; everything I said about growing up in care was true. Your brother should thank me. If it hadn’t been for me he’d have spent his entire childhood in hell.’

  ‘Or my mother could have got him out after she was bought free by the West.’ My voice cracked.

  ‘Have a schnapps,’ said Frau Benedikt, then called out to the waitress: ‘Two more, love.’

  I drank the schnapps, and wouldn’t have minded another.

  ‘Were you bought free as well?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She gazed at me with her watery, red-rimmed eyes, and then she laughed with boozy glee. ‘Wait, you thought I was a political, too? I wasn’t, darling. I wasn’t anything special, I was your ordinary, run-of-the-mill jailbird. No one turned over their precious West Mark for me. I was just a dumb bitch who got framed, all I did was – I didn’t even do anything, always picked the wrong men though, always the wrong men. What was I saying?’

  Up until then she had seemed sober, but now she was slurring her words.

  ‘The truth is, we despised people like your mother,’ she continued. ‘Intelligenz, they were called back then. Intelligenz! Too stupid to crawl through some barbed wire, too stupid to just stay fucking put, but still they thought they were better than us.’

  ‘I thought you were her friend.’

  ‘Her friend? Outside, someone like your mother would never even have looked at me. I said to her, I said, if I’d been in your shoes, I wouldn’t have risked it. Look at you, I said, you had everything – job, husband, kids, flat – and now look what you’ve got, which is nothing, and it’s your own bloody fault, that’s what I said. No one to blame but yourself.’

  ‘Shut up!’ I jumped to my feet. ‘Shut up! It wasn’t her fault! How dare you say it was?’

  Everyone else in the cafe had fallen silent and was staring at me. The waitress pursed her lips in disapproval. I sat back down.

  ‘No need to shout…’ Frau Benedikt’s voice petered out. She looked frightened and confused. She started again: ‘No need to shout. I was only…’ But again her mind deserted her. Eventually, she asked me for money to buy more cigarettes. I gave her a ten-euro note and watched her leave the cafe, plastic bag in hand. The shop was on the left. She turned right. I waited for twenty minutes, half an hour, but was not surprised when she did not return.

  29

  TOBI CALLED THAT EVENING, as usual. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘It’s not going anywhere. I’ve run out of people to meet.’ I stood up and walked to the window. On a rooftop across the courtyard, people were drinking beer and dancing. ‘You were right. Mama never left a trail for us to follow. She just bounced around Berlin in her usual erratic way.’

  ‘Don’t say that. You’ve done well.’

  ‘I so desperately want to find him, Heiko – sorry, Tobi. Tobi, I want to find him, I really do. But that’s not enough, is it? This whole trip has been a failure. I’ve been told that Mama had a terrible time in prison, that it totally broke her, that she felt guilty about everything. What’s new about that? We’ve known that since we were kids.’

  ‘You’ve found out loads of stuff we didn’t know – loads. And I was thinking, I could come to Berlin this weekend,’ Tobi said. ‘I’ve just finished a project, and I’m free until Tuesday. It’s not fair that you’re doing this all by yourself.’

  ‘It would be a wasted trip, I think.’

  ‘There must be someone else you could contact.’

  ‘Not really, no.’ I stopped myself. ‘Well. There is someone.’

  ‘I knew it!’ And he sounded so optimistic and trusting that I did not have the heart to tell him that this someone was our mother’s former interrogator, who lived in a pleasant home in a Berlin suburb, a home I had been looking at from many angles on various online maps and real-estate sites. He had a bird bath in his front garden and a cat-shaped mat outside his door. One of his windows was decorated with sticky foils that looked as if they had been painted by children; his grandchildren, perhaps.

  30

  Berlin 1989: Winter

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER we received our mother’s yellow parcel from West Berlin, our quiet street filled up with protesters. It was November, cold and dark. We were sitting in the living room of Oma Trude’s ground-floor flat. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people streamed past the window. My grandparents seemed to have forgotten about bedtime; it was almost midnight. A man peered into our room, banged on the window and shouted: ‘Come out! The wall’s gone! The wall’s gone!’

  The crowd picked up speed, people tossed aside their banners and sprinted down the road.

  ‘How can it be gone?’ I asked Oma.

  ‘Of course it’s not gone,’ said Opa Horst, slowly and pedantically. ‘He just means that they’ve opened the crossing.’

  Opa was a quiet man and usually let Oma do the talking. But Oma was unable to reply. She let herself fall on the sofa. The one-woman antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the Anti-Fascist Rampart that was Oma Trude, finally gave way. It was over. She put her head into her hands and cried.

  Opa Horst sat down next to her, this stoical man who drank buttermilk mixed with chopped onion and linseed oil every evening and said it would help him live to a hundred. He said: ‘Yes, well. So.’ And then he too hung his head.

  If the wall was gone – or going – that meant we would see my mother. We might even see her the very next day. If the wall was gone, we might all live together again, and Heiko would come back to us. No, we would never live together again. My father was not coming back, not ever, not even if a hundred walls were torn down.

  There was anger, too. All my parents had to do was wait a little! What had they always told us? Not now, wait a little, don’t rush, have a little patience. No, you can’t have your pudding now, you can have it after dinner. No, you can’t open your present now, you can open it later when the others are here. But they, they had been unable to wait – they had rushed straight into that barbed wire, straight into that border guard.

  *

  My grandmother could not stop crying. She gathered us in her arms, as if wanting to comfort us. She held back the tears for a few breaths, then she burst into violent sobs again. ‘It wasn’t all bad,’ she said. ‘You know that, don’t you, Ella? You’re old enough. You know it wasn’t all bad.’

  ‘There, there.’ Opa rubbed her back. ‘We don’t even know what will happen. Let them all go to West Berlin and take a look around. They’ll see it’s not all chocolates and roses over there, and they’ll come back soon enough. There’ll be a few reforms, that’s not a bad thing, is it, Trude? You’ve said so yourself.’

  ‘A few reforms!’ She blew her nose. ‘Don’t you understand? This is it. There’s no stopping now. This country’s gone, it’s over; they’re going to swallow us up in one big gulp.’

  ‘Ach, Trudi,’ Opa smiled. ‘I can’t see that happening. There are enough people who love our country and who want to hang on to it. We’ll be seeing some changes, but that’s fine, we’ve pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps before.’

  Oma shook her head. ‘It’s over, Horst. All those years of fighting, it’s all been for nothing; and I shouldn’t even be surprised. Think I don’t know what people said behind my back? Didn’t I see them gloating after what happened to Jochen and Regine? That it was my daughter who tried to do a runner, that it was my son-in-law who attacked a border guard – that red old Trude lost her grandson – oh, I could almost see them rubbing their hands with glee.’

  ‘I’m sorry you’re sad, Oma,’ I said. Tobi teared up, but I think he did not really know why, and was only crying for Oma.

  ‘I’m not really sad, Ellachen,’ she said, drying her eyes. ‘To have been here from the start, to have built a Socialist country out of the rubble – no, I’m not sad about that. That was
a wonderful thing.’

  ‘Then again, some things weren’t wonderful at all,’ my grandfather said quietly. ‘Good riddance to that part of our lives, no? Good riddance to the bad parts.’

  Oma stared at him.

  ‘Horst, the party makes mistakes, the party corrects itself. You know that. The Soviets don’t send half of Moscow to the Gulag any more, do they? The party learns, that’s what dialectics is all about. You have to have some faith.’

  And then my grandmother began to sing, first quietly, then more loudly:

  She never abandoned us,

  When the world froze to death, we were warm.

  We were led by the mother of the masses,

  Carried by her powerful arm…

  ‘Will we see Mama soon?’ I asked. ‘Now that everything’s going to be different, is she going to come back to us?’

  ‘Of course, my darling,’ Oma said. She ruffled my hair and pulled me close. ‘You must be bored of my songs, but what can I say, it’s been a long life.’

  *

  Oma and Opa did not want to join the crowds who were rushing to the wall. They made beds for Tobi and me on their sofas, then went to sleep in their own bedroom. My grandparents seemed very dignified to me in their stubbornness, more dignified than the chanting and crying masses outside. It would have been disappointing to see them suddenly run over to West Berlin after years of hearing them preach that we had everything we needed here. But as I lay on the sofa and listened to my snoring brother and the voices outside, I began to feel very restless.

  My mother must be just on the other side of the Bösebrücke. She lived in Wedding – she had written in her letter – right across the tracks from Prenzlauer Berg. I pictured her leaning out of her window as she did every evening, flashing her torch three times, and suddenly hearing the noise of thousands of people from the direction of the border post. Surely she would drop everything and run down into the street, towards the bridge, and then she would see that the bridge was open and that East Germans were rushing across. And then? Well, she would not be able to cross over to our side. The rush of people towards her would be too strong. She would be frightened of the guards. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that my mother was standing there right now, staring at the celebrating crowds. It could be no other way. She would not be sound asleep in her bed, expecting the crossing to stay open a few more days, or even forever. No, she was not one to sleep through an opportunity. She was there in the dark, stretching her neck to see better, calling our names. Hoping perhaps that Oma or Opa would take us across to see her that very night.

  I did not believe the border would stay open. If this stream of people continued for days or even weeks, our country would be empty. There would be no one to drive the buses, no one to sweep the streets, no one to teach us in school, no one to sell us green oranges and scrawny chickens. I tried to picture our neighbourhood without any people in it, wholly deserted, the coal buckets left carelessly in the gutter, the milk curdling in the shops, the parcels undelivered, the buildings cold and silent. It was impossible. Much more likely was that they would let this first rush of people through, then they would shut the border again and have a sensible discussion with the rest.

  In school we had listened to a speech by Walter Ulbricht, who was head of state when the wall was built. That was exactly what he had said back then. He had thanked the workers who built the wall, and then he had predicted that after some grumbling and moaning in the West, things would return to normal: ‘Das Leben geht seinen ruhigen Gang.’ Life goes on in its tranquil way.

  Yes, after this strange and noisy night, life would revert to its usual, calmer pace. It could not be any other way. But before that happened, before they closed the border again, I had to see my mother.

  I slid off the sofa as quietly as I could, pulled a jumper over my pyjamas, put on socks and shoes and a thick coat and hat for good measure, picked up a bunch of keys and slipped out of the door, pulling it softly into the lock.

  31

  ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE SOMEONE brought their kid,’ said a man with long hair and a moustache, who was swinging a fringed woollen bag with a deer on it. He stared at me. ‘Aren’t you a bit young for the revolution?’

  ‘Pssst.’ His friend looked over his shoulder. ‘You never know who’s listening.’

  ‘What? Don’t you get it? The wall’s down! We can say whatever we want!’ The long-haired man ran ahead, and his worried friend had trouble keeping up. They looked vaguely familiar to me, perhaps because many of the students in Prenzlauer Berg had long hair and walked around with those fringed deer bags. I followed them.

  It was frightening, being stuck among so many adults. Everyone around me was singing and shouting and whooping. People stepped on my feet, hit me in the face with their handbags, pushed me aside without even noticing. I fought my way through the crowd until I saw the two students again. We were on Bornholmer Straße, where the tram usually swerved to avoid the bridge. Ahead of us were the border post and the watch tower. The more cautious of the two men stood still and stared at the border post, at the people pushing through. A Trabi honked and honked. People waved flags and banners. The lights from the border post brushed over my face and blinded me, and for a moment I was far away in a meadow in Hungary. I reached out, grabbed the handle of the deer bag and clung to it.

  ‘Hey!’ The long-haired man, bolder than his friend, had been moving confidently towards the open crossing. He tugged at his bag. ‘It’s you again! Where’s your Mami?’

  ‘On the other side.’ I started to cry. ‘She’s on the other side, she’s in West Berlin.’

  ‘Shit. Shouldn’t you be at home? Look, go home, and I’m sure someone will find her tomorrow.’

  ‘No! She’s there now. I want to see her now.’

  ‘Oh, man. Honestly, I can’t really…’ He looked around for his cautious friend. But the friend had disappeared. The people behind us were pushing against us and sweeping us up in the rush.

  ‘Fine then.’ He took my hand and pulled me with him, through the open border post, onto the bridge. Here was where they had shot that man who had escaped from the allotments. Here was where the guards used to stand with their guns. Where were they? All I could see was ordinary people – laughing, crying, hollering ordinary people. The bridge was wider than I thought, with people all around us – a wide river flowing west. I was no longer afraid. I held the hand of my reluctant friend. He was strong and tall, like my father. And then it seemed to me that it really was my father taking me across, that his kind warm hand was guiding me, that there was nothing to fear.

  When we reached the other side, the crowd grew denser. Some stopped to feel the ground beneath their feet, to take in the moment. A man accidentally elbowed me in the face, and I gasped for air, pressed and squashed by all those slow big bodies. I was pushed one way and my friend the other, and our hands came apart. A woman’s thick coat covered my face. I struggled to breathe, fought through the crowd, emerged in a pocket of air just by a lamp post. A window opened above me and I felt a pair of hands lift me up and prop me up on the window sill.

  ‘Watch out, girl! You almost got crushed in there!’ A woman of about Oma’s age was holding me in place on the window sill and smiling at me. A West Berliner. ‘Now, why don’t you sit here and wave so your family can see you?’

  ‘I need to find my mother,’ I said.

  ‘Can you see her? What does she look like?’ The West German Oma scanned the crowd.

  ‘She’s got long brown hair…’ I realised she might have cut her hair. She might even have bleached it. ‘And glasses.’

  ‘Right. Let’s look sharp. And wave, remember to wave.’

  I waved. In my confusion, I looked at the faces coming in from the bridge. Then I realised my mistake and turned the other way, westwards.

  ‘She won’t be coming from there, love,’ the woman said gently. She had curly grey hair and was wearing a nightgown.

  ‘No, that�
��s definitely where she’ll be coming from. She’s already in West Berlin,’ I said. And at that moment, I saw her. My mother was standing in a doorway on the other side of the road. She was not looking at the people walking past her. She was simply standing there, staring straight ahead, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

  ‘Mama!’ I screamed at the top of my voice. My mother flinched and looked around her, panicked and frightened, and then she saw me. She pushed her way across the street, right through the mass of people, was shoved back and forth, and when she reached my side, I jumped into her arms.

  *

  The nice Wessi-Oma let us sit in her living room. It did not seem all that different from our own living room. There was a big TV and an expensive-looking telephone, but apart from that, the furniture could have been my own Oma’s: broad sofas printed with roses, a rocking chair, a basket of wool and half-knitted socks.

  Mama held me on her lap, her arms around me. She kissed my face, ran her fingers through my hair, kissed my face again, and we both cried, and the Wessi-Oma cried as well. I curled up like a baby and Mama rocked me.

  ‘I’m sorry, doll,’ she said eventually, put me down and shook out her arms. ‘I’m so weak. Where’s Oma? And Tobi?’

  ‘At home.’ I told her what I had done, how I had snuck across the border, how I had followed the man with the deer bag. As I talked, Mama became very pale. She pulled me onto her lap again and I noticed how thin she was. Her face was gaunt, her hair streaked with grey. She had a nervous tic, a twitch of the chin. Her hands were rough and thick-skinned, with calluses on her fingers.

  ‘You came over by yourself?’ She shuddered.

  ‘The guards are gone.’

  ‘What if the Russians had sent in their tanks? You must never do that again, Ella, do you hear me? Never!’

  And then we looked at each other and laughed, because the idea that there would ever be another night like this was ridiculous.