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

We had fulfilled our dreams, built our façades, and had our kittens and kids. We were queens at deceptive appearances and conjuring up perfect family lives. We were trained and tutored by our mothers, who had turned us into their accomplices. And in the meantime, this role had become second nature, and we took it for granted. We really believed it was enough for us, or at least that we had chosen it ourselves. Which is why we weren’t allowed to remember or remind each other of who we used to be.

Autumn 1998.

Vera was listless and depressed, didn’t feel like doing anything, left everything lying around. Lay in bed while the biscuit packets and empty yoghurt containers piled up next to her; drank flat, lukewarm Fanta straight from the bottle.

And binge-watched films all day.

Meanwhile, her flat rotted away — in the truest sense of the word, as there was a hole in the kitchen floor. And who cared that the water leaking from the pipe of the washing machine ran all over the place, or that there were little black bugs in the kitchen? Why want anything when it was all shit anyway?

When it was dark, Vera would get out of bed and dress up. She already had cold sores back then, but she just painted over them in bright red lipstick.

Vera was so beautiful and deathly pallid. Oh, to be out on the town for a couple of hours with others who wanted the same vague thing — everything, that is! At least for one night, and forever! In those days she was aimless and inconsistent, far from being older and wiser than the rest.

How Vera swayed back and forth.

Yes, you can only get away with all that when you’re young. Because it’s disgusting, all that rash, reckless longing. It spills all over the place, and who’s going to clean it up? At least when you’re young, it doesn’t stink as much.

I know that Vera doesn’t want to be reminded of this. Not of how she was or what she wanted. These days she just wants everybody to be happy. And for things to be enough, just the way they are!

‘Piece of melon?’

Yikes, look at it dripping everywhere.

Vera waves it away with her hand; she’ll clean up later. Now it’s party time! Vera never lets it show that she’s thinking about cleaning up.

But I know.

Because I remember Vera as a child, and her mother thought that if she cleaned up after Vera, they would all live happily ever after. But it didn’t work even then. Cleaning up after somebody doesn’t make anybody happy. It’s tedious, dirty work.

Vera’s happiness wasn’t enough to leave some spare for her mother; her gratitude wasn’t enough to pay for her mother’s work. Vera left one day with a mountain of debt on her shoulders which she now has to pay off by cleaning up after Willi and Leon, so that they’re happy. Tell me it’s not true!

But it is. And it’s true of me and countless others, because that’s the idea someone planted in our brains: who was it, for Christ’s sake? Jane Austen? The German economy?

Message to Vera: sorry, sis, but I recognise you in Willi, the way he stands there in a rage, and you stand there, dishcloth in hand — even if you let it drip and congeal for the time being, and Willi is kept in check by Frank in his room. Willi is fighting you, just like you fought your mother: ‘She’ll never manage to clean all this up!’

I was there. I have been looking into your eyes for as long as I can remember, and you have Willi’s eyes. No, other way round — he has yours.

‘All I need now are two cats, and I’ll be perfectly happy,’ Vera said in the back garden on the day of the move, when the group had gathered round the fire pit to celebrate the grand completion of K23.

All the uncertainty and improvisation were over; there the group lived, and there they would stay. They had ‘made it’, and all I could do was go on about being locked away and empty promises of salvation.

‘Where will you get them from?’ I asked.

Vera didn’t understand.

‘The cats?’ I asked, and Vera said: ‘Why? Who cares?’

So I reminded her of Käthe, the poor cat from my childhood who led the rest of her wild life behind carefully closed windows.

‘Okay,’ said Vera, ‘I get it. I’ll go to the animal shelter. I’ll save them from an even more miserable life. Will that make it okay?’

And I nodded, and Ingmar added that the cats could use the back garden and it was their fault if they went out, and I said: O-U-T spells OUT, and everybody laughed.

It was a lovely day. I hadn’t written anything yet; not my article and certainly not my spiteful book. The sun wasn’t shining, but the fire was crackling merrily, and the cats hadn’t been rescued yet, so there was no danger of them getting run over. Nobody knew where Frank had got to, whether he was with the kids or had decided to drill in a few screws at the last minute so that everything was done.

Message to Bea: don’t wait for better times.

Said Wolf Biermann. No, he wrote those lyrics, and now they’ve become a cliché. But forty years ago, they were just words to a song he thought up, then played around with until he came up with a tune, which he later sang and recorded and went on tour with.

I think that’s good. And now I have some lyrics for you that express my horrible feeling of insecurity: Have we suffered enough yet? Do we have the right to complain yet?

Perhaps if it hadn’t been for the article.

Or the next commission from the TV producer who had an idea for a Friday evening show: ‘A mother who hides her poverty from her daughter.’

She called and asked me if I could imagine something along those lines, and