Higher Ground Anke Stelling (great novels of all time .TXT) 📖

how powerless and power-drunk becoming a mother can make you. What if I hadn’t been healthy?

I asked Raimund, my father. He looked at me as if I was setting a trap for him before he said: ‘Well, we’d have done everything in our power for you.’

‘What was in your power?’

‘I don’t know. Thankfully we didn’t have to find out.’

‘Did Marianne have nightmares before I was born? That she might give birth to a monster? Or a headless child?’

‘No idea. And even if she did, what do you think that would have meant?’

‘I just want to know what you felt!’

‘We looked forward to having you.’

My parents didn’t have much money. She was a bookseller, he a draughtsman: both worthy jobs with low salaries. But highly regarded jobs, associated with intellect and creativity rather than sales and services. Marianne might have owned the bookshop she worked in or have studied German philology, and Raimund might have descended from a long line of architects but just have been the more practical type.

My brother, sister, and I were all healthy. None of us needed special aids, prosthetic limbs, or anything else that would have been expensive. The desire to move up in the world was enough, a good disguise; we definitely weren’t poor. The poor were people who had never heard of Le Corbusier, the people for whom he built his brutalist buildings.

We lived in Stuttgart in a 1960s house that had been converted into flats. Above us was an old couple, below us a teacher who lived on her own, an orthopaedic surgery, and an accountant’s office. I would have liked there to have been more children in our building; I didn’t know why there weren’t, and it never occurred to me to ask.

In the kitchen, there was the aforesaid, preordained West German PVC floor, and wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere else. My parents eventually removed it in their room because it had been laid over a herringbone parquet floor. The wood was loose in places, and the adhesive strips that had kept the carpet in place at the edges couldn’t be removed without using solvent, which would have corroded the varnish, so they left them there, collecting fuzz.

No one wanted to bother the landlord.

There was woodchip wallpaper on the walls, which was repainted every couple of years by my parents. Marianne liked renovating. Raimund didn’t, but he acquiesced.

And I learned all the necessary skills: how to use masking tape, stir and apply paint, wash out the brushes. Window frames, paint, hand-me-down clothes — there was always enough to go around somehow.

DIY is seriously back in fashion. But not for me, Bea, d’you hear? For me, it’s part of the cover-up. Perhaps you can do it all yourself, but there are differences as to why you do it: out of snobbery or to save money, to relieve boredom or because your bank account is empty.

Making babies is part of the same thing. And having them. And breastfeeding.

You can buy human organs on the darknet and breast milk on the internet, and there’s a service for peeling asparagus at the local supermarket, and there’s Friederike asking me whether I could cut Silas’s and Sophie’s hair too, because it’s really great that I know how to do everything myself.

For a long time, I was proud of this. I looked down on people who didn’t know how to decorate a room, cook, or repair the toilet; people who always asked their parents for money, who even had them buy their prams, despite eBay. Yes, the second-hand ones have ugly patterns, obviously, but then, add a new cover and you have a one-off! So much cooler than an 800-euro model! Dishing out 800 euros for something like that, how pathetic. Needing parents even though you are one yourself.

I was so practised in DIY to compensate for my non-existent budget that I not only ignored the reasons and limits of these home renovations, but also forgot to ask who stood to gain from them. And now it’s up to me to cobble together a new flat, perhaps out of egg cartons and pipe cleaners. I’m left thinking how much further I might have gone. Perhaps I’d have breastfed Silas and Sophie if Friederike had asked me? Been a surrogate mother?

‘Everybody knows that,’ Friederike said when we were sitting outside the café in the sun.

It was autumn three years ago, when things had already become quite tricky between us, but we still met regularly. No longer at their house, though; preferably outside, in public. We sat there and chatted, and I complained that I had to pay for two childcare and two school excursions in one month, and Friederike replied, ‘Everybody knows that. You have to think about whether you can afford children in the first place.’

I stared at her. She didn’t return my look but gazed instead at the people walking through our neighbourhood, past the boutiques that stocked designer clothes. It was impossible to tell who could afford them and who couldn’t, who did DIY or paid for the services of others. Friederike and I probably looked the same too, except, at that moment, I might have looked aghast; incapable of responding, in any case. Was that the beginning of the end of my friendship with Friederike or the beginning of my switch to reality? Because she was right, of course. Children cost money, and you shouldn’t buy what you can’t afford.

Vera was also sitting at the table and stared at her plate, dabbed up her cake crumbs, and said nothing, which was okay because she might not have heard. Since Leon’s birth, Vera had mostly been caught up with herself, on the verge of collapse and constantly mulling over all the wrong decisions she’d made, so perhaps Friederike’s statement wasn’t directed at me but at Vera and all the other mothers who always complained and moaned and looked for sympathy. Everybody had too little money, too little sex, blocked drains, and slipped discs. They all should have known!