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

Money doesn’t grow on trees, partners lose their appeal, and desk jobs ruin your back. Things you flush down the toilet don’t disappear forever just because you can’t see them anymore!

I should have known, and wondered why I didn’t, whereas Friederike obviously did. Was she more intelligent than me? Had she done the maths to check whether she could afford to procreate? Ingmar being a doctor was a coincidence, in my opinion: handy, without a doubt, but not part of her calculation.

It wasn’t until I’d thought about it for a long time — in the sanctity of my broom cupboard — that I realised Friederike had known since the age of fourteen what it meant to build a family: you had to pay attention to the foundations.

The Bible quotation she picked out for her confirmation was about the foolish man who builds his house on sand.

And mine? The one about beholding the birds who don’t sow or reap, but who God feeds anyway.

The house in which Friederike and Ingmar and all my old friends have lived for four years has a three-metre-thick concrete foundation and no cellar. It doesn’t need one, Ulf said, they could easily cut corners there. No one stores potatoes these days, and a cellar wouldn’t protect them in the next war; it would only flood after heavy rain.

The rooms have custom-fitted built-in cupboards so that you can store your stuff upstairs, and anyway, it’s outdated to own everything. The sharing economy is on the up. Friederike and Vera had a clear-out before they moved. If they need a drill, they borrow one, and children’s clothes that don’t fit anymore go straight to the Syrians.

I’d like to be like that.

I like minimalist rooms and clean surfaces, but Sven keeps all the boxes just in case something breaks, and we have to exchange it or make money on eBay. And I can’t complain. I save the zips from ripped trousers and buttons from torn shirts. Who knows, you might need them again, and you’d be glad to have them.

Our cellar is bursting at the seams with precautions against all kinds of eventualities.

Our cellar isn’t our cellar either — why can’t I get that into my head? DIY has its limits when it comes to building a house. As a writer, I should at least have married the heir to a fortune or a high earner: it’s an either/or situation, self-fulfilment or marrying for love. The two don’t go together, at least not in times of declining resources and rising sea and rent levels.

I’m a late starter, Bea. Honestly. I’ve fallen for romantic dreams and look where’s it’s got me: a low-wage job and four children, a rented flat that obviously doesn’t belong to me, an adorable but equally low-earning husband, and a flooded cellar full of soggy boxes and rusting zips.

‘You’re all doing fine,’ Renate said.

‘What do you mean by “all” and how do you define “fine”?’

‘My mother had eleven children. Nine made it into adulthood.’

She looked at me, now serious, her eyebrows no longer raised derisively. As if this statement was the answer to all my complaints, the final retort, the last word in wisdom.

Eleven children, two dead: that probably did say everything.

But then I thought of my four births and how I had enjoyed them. In any case, each delivery had been easier than the one before, and it was probably possible to extrapolate from this. The bigger problem to me seemed to be how to see each child as an individual later on, and how to have room for them all in your thoughts. On the other hand, perhaps this ambition ceased after the fifth child, and you went back to seeing and thinking about yourself.

‘What exactly are you trying to say?’ I asked Renate.

‘I’m certain I wouldn’t have wanted her kind of life. And I didn’t have it either.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘How do you know what kind of life she had? Did she tell you? Or is that obvious from the number of children she had?’

‘She worked all the hours that God sent. Had no quiet place of her own, no privacy. Never travelled, never met up with women friends, and didn’t have any male friends except for my father—’

‘You don’t know that. Perhaps she led a double life!’

Renate laughed. ‘When? Where?’

‘In her head. At night. In a secret diary, which she later burned.’

Renate shook her head.

My mother left a diary when she died. In it, there’s just one sentence:

‘Ate way too much again.’

It’s only natural to take this sentence at face value. Ever since I can remember, Marianne had been on a diet. But it could also be a code, heading, or place marker for something completely different.

Hunger has more than one meaning.

And a diary containing one sentence is no diary at all.

Here is an accusation aimed at my mother, Renate’s mother, Renate, and all the others who believed it was better to stay silent, put the needs of others first, and place their bets on their daughters’ futures: you were mistaken. By keeping quiet, sucking it up, and hiding things, you didn’t spare us. You just kept us in the dark. And what’s more, you made social inequality a private matter, because we saw you weren’t enjoying your lives, but we thought it was due to personal reasons. Like you couldn’t cope or weren’t strong, beautiful, clever, or assertive enough. Or, even worse, that you had us and were forced to sacrifice everything else.

We went out into the world assuming that, unlike you, we were completely free, equal, and architects of our own happiness. And unsuspectingly, naïvely and defencelessly, we walked into the same trap that you had walked into before us. Because you don’t really believe anything has changed, do you? Or is that what you want to believe?

I think so.

‘That’s enough!’ was one of your favourite phrases when we argued, as if it was within our power to stop things.

Please remind me, Bea, never to tell you: ‘That’s enough.’

‘I’ve had enough,’