‘It wasn’t you, either.’
‘Of course it was. You don’t know what I was like. I was such a pest. Look at what the letter says: the child Ella Valentin, star informant on her own parents.’ The couple at the next table stopped talking and glanced our way, and I lowered my voice: ‘What I’m saying is, I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway.’
‘You brought a doll to school. If someone turns that into a crime, it’s their fault, not yours.’
‘But everyone told me to keep all my West German things at home – everyone. My parents, my grandparents. We weren’t stupid, Aaron. We were pretty clued up, we knew what was going on, even the children.’
‘You were, what, eight? No one would blame you for this, certainly not your parents.’
‘No, they wouldn’t, because they would have blamed themselves instead.’
‘Exactly, so don’t go and blame yourself, too. Look, it says right here, they were already suspicious of the whole art thing. They would have spied on your parents sooner or later anyway; you couldn’t have stopped it.’
‘It’s not guilt, not really. It’s more like… there’s something foul and rotten in those files, and now that foulness is part of me. Maybe it always was.’
‘I shouldn’t have shown this to you.’
‘I’m glad you did. I’d rather it was me than Oma.’
Aaron shook his head. ‘The important thing is that you’re going to see Heiko. That’s much more important than some file from a thousand years ago.’
‘I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to see him.’ I put the letter back into the envelope and slipped it into my pocket. We paid, left the cafe, crossed the canal. I needed to walk, to feel a physical sensation of distance and tired legs and getting away from it all.
‘I’m sorry I dragged you into all this,’ I said. ‘It just gets worse and worse, doesn’t it?’
‘No.’ Aaron put his hand on my arm. We stopped. ‘This is all there is, Ella. There’s no more, do you understand? The worst thing, that thing you were always afraid of, that’s out in the open now.’
‘Why would Heiko even want to know someone like me?’
‘Because you’re the only sister he’s got.’
‘I was hoping you’d say, because you’re amazing.’ I picked up a twig and snapped it. ‘It’s just, I wouldn’t exactly bring a bagful of fun to his life.’
‘You’ve brought a bagful of fun to mine.’ He coughed. ‘Well, OK, fun might be the wrong word, but…’
‘No, I liked fun. Can we keep fun?’
‘It’s better to have a sister than not to have a sister, that’s what I’m saying.’
‘It’s better to have a sister than not to have a sister,’ I repeated. It sounded reassuring, solid. Heiko had a mother, an adoptive mother, a mother he loved. But he didn’t have an adoptive sister. I wasn’t taking anyone’s place, I wasn’t challenging anyone’s position. I was just his sister.
‘Anyway, if I do meet him, and if it’s a total disaster…’
‘… which it won’t be…’
‘… if it’s a disaster, I might just board the next flight out.’
We sat down on a bench.
‘And if it goes well with Heiko,’ Aaron asked cautiously, ‘you’ll stay?’
‘At least for a while, I think. They’ve offered me a job at the artists’ residence where I’m staying, nothing special, but it would pay the bills, and I like it there. It’s been ages since I last saw a slug, and I have to say, I don’t miss them.’ I hesitated. ‘And I’m working on something.’
‘But that’s fantastic!’ He beamed with delight, and I was moved by his enthusiasm.
‘You haven’t seen it yet.’
‘Doesn’t matter, it’s just great that you’re making something.’
‘I’ll show it to you when it’s finished. That is, if you’re interested.’ I suddenly felt rather awkward. ‘It would be nice to stay in touch, right?’
‘Of course – if you need any help at all with the files…’
‘No, not because of the files.’ Neither of us said anything for a while, and then I took his hand, because we were both quite shy people, and one of us had to make a start.
38
I CALLED TOBI, AND he said I should meet Heiko first. It was touching. My little brother, sending me ahead to scout out the terrain. Hiding behind his big sister.
Even with Tobi’s backing, it took me a few days to work up the courage. Several times I picked up the phone, my thumb hovering above the screen, only to put it down again. And when I finally made the call, it was strangely dreamlike. Later, I could not recall the exact sequence. Who said what, and how. Only fragments remained:
‘Ella?’ said in a sampling, questioning, curious way, as if he was trying out the sound of it, as if it stirred some faint memory. Eyya! Eyya!
He spoke in a broad, earthy Berliner dialect. So rooted here.
He said: ‘Yes, that’s where I live now. It’s a long story.’
I held back the things I wanted to ask. You moved back? So you do remember us? What do you remember? The smell of burnt pancakes? The West German nappies? Mama shouting at Oma? Your bee toy? The forest in Hungary?
Have you missed us?
That was another thing I did not ask.
At one point the line crackled and I was terrified I would lose him.
Towards the end he said cautiously: ‘It would be nice to meet you.’
But we have already met, I wanted to say but did not. I am your sister. We are not strangers. We are kin.
Afterwards, I resisted the urge to call him back. I wanted to hear more of that voice, to fill myself up with it, to let it become familiar until it was my brother’s voice again. Not a stranger’s voice, but one that belonged to Mama, Papa, Tobi and myself. Perhaps Heiko was doing something similar, staring at his phone and trying to picture a body that would fit that unfamiliar Anglo-German voice, trying to find a connection.
It would be nice to meet you.
*
I was early. I went round the block once, twice, three times, then found myself walking into a second-hand bookshop. I had avoided this particular kind of bookshop since arriving in Berlin – small, cosy, with an ironic print of Lenin on the wall, and a well-stocked section on art history. I scanned the shelves for non-fiction, for history, for art history, for V, for Valentin.
There she was. Expressionism and Class Struggle, by Regine Valentin. Her regime-friendly book from the seventies, in which she argued that the Expressionists were decadent layabouts who were ultimately overtaken by true revolutionary artists with a Greater Purpose.
It was a handsome book, a light orange paperback with the title and my mother’s name in black. The font was the GDR version of Garamond, produced by the collective enterprise VEB Typoart. It is still the most beautiful Garamond around; yes, we did manage to make some things that lasted. I leafed through the book. In the footnotes, I found a reference to my father, a little spousal wink from one art historian to another:
1) See also: Valentin, Jochen. Die Avant-garde im Spiegel der Zeiten. Aufbau Verlag, 1975.
Regine and Jochen Valentin. Two people from very different families who merged their life stories and left behind three footnotes: the Ella footnote, the Tobi footnote and the Heiko footnote.
2) See also: Valentin, Ella. It Took Me a Long Time to Come Back, Mama, But Look, I Am Here Now. Berlin, 2010.
I ran my finger along the spines of the books. Startled, I spotted another book by my mother. It was slightly mis-shelved, wedged between Volcker and Voss. I had not even known about this one; I had never heard or seen the title:
Not Nearly Close Enough: The Avant-garde’s Legacy in the Divided Germany. By Regine Valentin.
I pulled it out and opened the cover, checked the edition and publication date. It had come out in 1994! We were already in London then. I would have been fifteen. I had no idea she had been working on a book at the time; I had no idea she was in contact with e
ditors in Berlin. Why had she never mentioned it? Had she thought we would hold it against her, that we would accuse her of forgetting about Heiko, of pressing on with her career?
I closed my eyes and remembered a scent. It was the scent of a rainy English summer – of plum cake, ink and grass – and all of us sitting on a blanket on the wet grass and eating cake while my mother marked up her pages. Maybe she had mentioned a book. Maybe I had simply not been interested. Maybe I had cared more about what we were having for dinner that night, and whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher. I turned around and there she was, tilting her head to read the titles on the spines, with that pinched, concentrated look on her face. Then she was gone. I leaned against the wall of the bookshop, knocked a few books off a shelf, had to crouch to pick them up. The woman behind the counter rushed over to help me.
‘You’re lucky, that one gets snapped up quite quickly,’ she said and pointed to Not Nearly Close Enough.
‘Does it?’
‘It’s a wonderful book, and I think people take to her personal story. She was in prison, you know. She composed the whole thing in her head, and when she came out, she wrote it down.’
‘I knew she was in prison,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t know about the book.’
I bought Not Nearly Close Enough, and then I turned back to the other, earlier book, Expressionism and Class Struggle. I read the introduction. The final paragraph said:
In the 1950s, some of these East German artists left for West Germany, lured by the promise of wealth and comfort. The majority, however, stayed and threw themselves into the construction of a new country. They streamed into the collective farms and factories, willing to forgo an easy life for the deep certainty that all their sacrifices would be worth it in the end.
‘I’ll buy this one, too.’
All their sacrifices would be worth it in the end. Were they, Mama? Was it all worth it in the end?
*
I was still half an hour early, but I could not wait any longer. I stuffed my mother’s books into the pockets of my gaberdine coat and walked towards our street. The neighbourhood was mine again, the old map in my mind overlaid with a new one. The children in their yellow helmets, the restaurants with the mezze platters, even the British and Australian waiters had come to feel almost as familiar as the old people and landmarks. A neighbourhood became part of you quickly, if you let it.
There it was, our old front door. But it was not an old front door: it was new, painted cadmium yellow. Our entire building had grown younger. The stonework had been restored, the windows replaced. The bullet holes from 1945 had been filled in and painted over.
It had been quite a shock to hear Heiko give me his address. He was now living in the building where we had grown up; not the same flat, not even the same wing, but still, the same building. What I had really wanted to ask was: Did you move back so we could find you? But I had not dared to, on the phone. I had been afraid of saying the wrong thing, of scaring him off.
Heiko’s name was the first on the brass plate by the doorbell. The brass plate was new, the intercom was new. The door was new, the paint was new. The people were new, their habits were new. No one in this building bathed children in a kitchen drawer any more. No one hung up furry Russian hats and gaberdine coats on hooks by the door. No one peeled potatoes with one hand. No one talked about winters in the camp. No one made foaming pancakes with cherries. No one defended falling balconies. No one traded sloe vodka for car parts. No one sighed and said building a country from scratch was hard, but look at what we had already achieved. No one was waiting for me behind one of those doors inside the building with her arms stretched out wide for a hug. No, that was wrong. Someone was waiting for me inside that building, behind one of those doors, and maybe his arms were stretched out wide, and maybe they were not, but there he was, waiting for me.
*
I rang the doorbell. Behind one of the ground-floor windows the curtains moved, thin white gauze curtains. I caught a glimpse of a room with bookshelves and a painting on the wall, then the curtain fell back again. It could not possibly be the same painting – no, the painting in my mind was larger than the span of my arms, overpowering almost, three big horses massing against a storm, tucking their hind legs under and curving their necks, comforting and threatening at once; and the painting I had spotted on the wall of this ground-floor flat was hardly larger than a doormat; the horses in it looked quite gentle and there was no sign of a storm. I was about to ring the doorbell again when the buzzer went. I pushed open the door. How easy it was to push open a big door when you were a grown-up. I used to have to push this door with my shoulder. This door that was not this door. The hallway smelled of soap and cabbage. In a minute Frau Rachmann would shuffle towards me and touch me with her papery hand, and from upstairs I would hear my mother call out and ask if I could bring up a bucket of coal.
‘Come in,’ a voice said. ‘I’m right here.’
Author’s note
THE STASI ARCHIVE IN this novel was loosely inspired by the work of the Stasi records agency in Berlin, which has undertaken the enormous task of safeguarding and providing access to the records of the former East German secret service. However, the archive where Aaron and Ella meet is ultimately a work of fiction. None of the characters or events there are based on real life. The same goes for everything else in this novel, including places such as Hohenschönhausen prison that were also broadly inspired by historical sites, but then fictionalised to fit the story.
Acknowledgements
I WOULD LIKE TO thank my editors, Helen Francis and Neil Belton, and my agent, Mark “Stan” Stanton, for their sharp-eyed comments, brilliant edits and unwavering enthusiasm. I am also very grateful to Eleanor Rees for her excellent copy-editing. Goldsmiths College and the German Academic Exchange Service kindly funded research trips to Berlin for this novel. The Goldsmiths community, especially Naomi Wood, Adam Mars-Jones and Andreas Kramer, provided much-appreciated insight and advice, as did Benjamin Markovits and Jo Catling. The Baltzer family generously allowed me to use a beautiful illustration by Hans Baltzer, which helped a generation of schoolchildren learn to read.
Sophia Tobin, Ceri Radford, Türküler Isiksel and many other dear friends inspired and encouraged me from draft to draft. The Bensimon-Lerner family provided warmth, support and laughter, and my son, Aaron, brightened my days throughout the writing process. Iwona Wysocka looked after him while I was writing; working on this book would not have been possible without her. Finally, I would like to thank my beloved husband, Dan Lerner, for believing in this book and its author.
About the author
SOPHIE HARDACH is the author of two novels, The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages, and Of Love and Other Wars. Also a journalist, she writes about subjects from multilingualism to child development for a range of publications.
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