Distant Signs E-Book

Anne Richter

• Herausgeber: Neem Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 343

Beschreibung

Rooted in the author's firsthand experience as an East German who bore witness to the fall of the Berlin Wall at the age of sixteen, Distant Signs explores the complexity of familial bonds, love, and life behind and beyond the iron curtain. Against the backdrop of seismic political upheaval in 1960s East Germany Margret, a professor's daughter hailing from the city, and Hans, a man rooted in a tranquil Thuringian forest village are embroiled in a family saga. Their love story is colored by the clash of their disparate origins and the lingering emotional wounds inflicted by a war-torn childhood. As historical events play out, the secrets of two families are revealed. Anne Richter's exquisite prose translated from German by Douglas Irving, paints a vivid portrait of a society marked by change while paying homage to the quiet strength that exists within the most trying of times.

Leseprobe

Anne Richter

Distant Signs

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Neem Tree Press Limited, 1st Floor,

2 Woodberry Grove, London, N12 0DR, UK

Published by Neem Tree Press Limited 2019

[email protected]

Originally published in German as Fremde Zeichen

Copyright © Osburg Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 2013

Translation © Douglas Irving 2019

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-911107-08-8 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-911107-16-3 (e-book)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address above.

For Judith

Opening Note

Anne Richter’s novel offers a portrait of life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as experienced by three generations of two families, including several flashbacks to events before and during the Second World War.

Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party, achieved absolute power in Germany in 1933. Under Nazi fascist rule, all opposition elements, including left-wing resistors and communists, were forcibly removed to concentration camps. Later these same camps would become the focus of the systematic persecution of Jewish people under the Nazis’ “Final Solution” programme during the Second World War.

In 1945, the victorious allies of the United Kingdom, the United States of America, France and the Soviet Union settled upon a divided governance of post-war Germany. The GDR comprised what had been known since the end of the Second World War as the Soviet Occupation Zone (the “East Zone” referred to early in the novel), and was officially founded as a new state on 7th October 1949. It was one of the Eastern Bloc countries, with close economic, political and ideological ties to the Soviet Union.

During the 1950s, GDR industry was centralised and agriculture collectivised through state-controlled land co-operatives. The emphasis was on labour productivity, and a considerable percentage of the workforce was female. Workers’ housing was heavily subsidised and state care provision was high, with freely available childcare.

Pressured by increased production level targets, many GDR citizens chose to emigrate to the West. Between 1949 and 1961 some 2.7 million citizens defected. The Berlin Wall, built in 1961 by the GDR government, was officially an antifascist barrier against the West. In reality, it was a physical barrier to mass defection of GDR citizens, who were closely monitored, both formally and informally, by the state’s security police, the infamous Stasi.

By 1965, when Distant Signs begins, the GDR continued to emphasise its socialist identity as separate from its capitalist western counterpart, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG: the “West” referred to by several of the novel’s protagonists). In 1971 the GDR declared itself an ideologically distinct socialist state. The ratification of the Basic Treaty between the GDR and the FRG in 1973 led to the two German states recognising each other’s sovereignty, and the GDR receiving the international recognition it had sought.

The GDR remained in existence for four decades, until shortly after its fortieth anniversary on 7th October 1989. Soon after, on 9th November, came the fall of the Berlin Wall, possibly the most iconic symbol of the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. Just under a year later, on 3rd October 1990, the two separate East and West German states were officially reunified. These two closely related historical events are the “momentous changes” mentioned near the end of the novel.

Translator’s Note

Words italicised in the original German text have been retained and are generally significant German words, phrases or literary references. In this English-language translation further East German cultural or historical terms, as well as general German historical references, are italicised, or else translated into an English equivalent where this exists. These are all marked with the symbol † in the text, and a brief explanation of the term can be found in alphabetical order in an end glossary, for interested readers. Literary references, marked *, appear after the glossary in alphabetical order.

Contents

Communist Cow

Cat Dreams

Armoured Protection

Waiting for Friedrich

Singing Soldiers

Silent Christmas

The Greatest of Joys

It’s not about Fun

Sleeping in the Snow

Fragile Specimens

End of Waiting

Dancing Daughter

Farewell

On the Horizon

Protagonists

Margret

Hans

Sonja, Hans and Margret’s daughter

Johanna, Margret’s mother

Friedrich, Margret’s father

Lene, Hans’s mother

Erwin, Hans’s father

Communist Cow

Margret • 1965

I ran into my father in the university quadrangle this morning. Our footsteps echoed off the centuries-old walls. He avoided my gaze until we were standing face to face and had looked each other over in embarrassment; finally, he enquired how my exams were going and what plans I had for the semester break. I told him I was planning a short trip with Hans.

The circumspect, impervious nod my father gave no longer provoked my anger; I took it for granted that he neither showed surprise nor asked where we intended to go.

On his forehead, the two familiar lines drew down to his eyes, lending him an air of perpetual contemplation – as a student across from me had once said. My father’s meticulous dress reminded me of Marie, the household help who ironed his shirts and ties and straightened his bow ties – of her confidently striding through our house, her gentle groans as she cleaned the bath, and the smell of cleaning products. My father, on the other hand, smelled of sweet tobacco. I shut my eyes and swayed momentarily from the fatigue of nightlong study and because pictures were flooding my memory.

To break the silence, I asked how my mother was. He replied that she was fine. When he cast a furtive glance at his watch, I turned and glanced up at the big university clock tower. My father appeared not to notice. When we said goodbye he offered me his hand, which hung in the air, strangely awkward and limp. His hand was warm, and I could feel the calluses on his fingertips.

Alone again in the courtyard, I scoured the windows for any witnesses to our encounter. Relieved to see none, my gaze drifted farther up to the high midday sky, where a swift circled. I felt dizzy again, so I lowered my eyes to the cobblestones and took a few steps over to the wall. I was accompanied by the fleeting scent of pipe tobacco.

Leaning against the wall I asked myself: what kind of person is he? Last autumn, I had given up hope that my father would acknowledge me as his child, even just pay me any regard, let alone feel anything for me. On my last attempt to entice him from his lair he had leaped out, but only to snarl warily at me, the intruder, chase me off then retreat into his den.

The encounter had begun at one of his cross-faculty lectures, which I attended from time to time. Usually I sat in one of the back rows, but on that day I could only find a seat in the middle of the lecture theatre. My father spoke about the younger generation’s duties, here and in West Germany; about books that could help them to fulfil these duties. He said that young people, particularly in the West, had to learn to rebel against their parents’ generation and question the fascist past. Most students leaned over their notebooks or stared intently at him. Although I think I know my father’s political views well, indeed mostly share them, at that moment I felt the urge to disagree with him.

I assumed my father hadn’t yet noticed me, and this seemed to be confirmed when I raised my arm and slowly stood. I was pleased that my presence unsettled him: his smooth, pale facial skin, always clean-shaven, reddened. He turned from the lectern and made for the rear exit, as though he would flee the hall. Just before reaching the door, unexpectedly he turned around, raised his head and, with an imperceptible wave of the hand, invited me to speak. Taken aback, I too turned red and, keeping my eyes trained on the rear exit said that, no matter the circumstances, I was unsure if I would be able to sever all ties with my father. As I hurriedly took my seat again, I sensed the students’ stares; then someone clapped, others began to whisper. One student stood up and spoke heatedly about the gas chambers, the concentration camps, the piles of bodies, the silence of the masses. A moment later I felt ashamed of my declaration.

Once the student had finished, my father walked back to the lectern and said in a firm voice, looking directly at one face after another, “In our times, private matters must come second to societal.”

A low murmur went through the room; impossible to identify the culprits. It was of no consolation to finally know for certain that my father hadn’t simply forgotten me and my sisters, but that his lack of attention corresponded to his Weltanschauung. So, without getting up again, I shouted that he had been braver once, in the past, but soon I faltered because I realised I knew hardly anything about it; there had been a party process, the exact circumstances of which I was unfamiliar with.

My father didn’t rise to the bait and resumed his lecture. But because his speech now lacked its usual vigour, the hope grew in me that I had touched a raw nerve; and on my way home this hope remained stronger than every other feeling. Yet the more I thought about it, the more inappropriate my behaviour during the lecture now seemed.

One evening several days later, there were two rings at my door. Over recent days I had hoped with every ring that there would be a second, because two rings was our family signal: when I forgot my key as a schoolgirl, or when on occasion I visited my parents in my first years at university, they knew by the two rings that there was no need to get changed or clear the dirty coffee cups from the table or quickly open the window to get rid of the smell of food.

By the time he had climbed the stairs my father had cast off his stiffness and his thoughtful expression. I smiled and invited him in, nervous but pleased he had found the way to my flat. Without looking round, he went through the hall into my tiny kitchen and sat on the stool I pushed over to him, the only padded one I had. I offered him bread, and wine or lemonade, but he said he wished to make it brief: he asked that I not interfere in his professional affairs; if I were interested in philosophy, then he was glad, but it had hardly been about philosophy, rather, about me affronting him in front of the others; why, that was unclear to him – had it to do with my mother? Did I blame him for her illness?

I fluctuated between dismay and a remaining glimmer of hope that dwindled by the second as our silence filled the room and I considered what he had just said. Talking, I thought despairingly, would no longer help us.

When I was little I had two mothers: my biological one and my big sister, Rosa, who comforted me when my mother couldn’t stand my screaming, gave me food from her plate after my mother had shared it all out, and carried me to the air-raid shelter while my mother took our sister Tanya by piggyback.

Rosa was thin and reached almost to my mother’s shoulders. She never cried; she didn’t laugh or shout. After the war, once my father was living with us again (and Rosa had reached my mother’s chin), sometimes she ran over to him and buried her face in his grey woollen jacket. Briefly he stroked her dark hair and gently pushed her away.

My father wore the jacket summer and winter. When he laid it over the back of the rough living-room armchair or left it in the bathroom, I too sometimes sniffed at the itchy wool, redolent of pipe tobacco.

When we moved into a detached house a few years later, my father placed the armchair in his new study. If he got too warm during a meal he would stand up, cross over to his study and return without his jacket. Only once did I discover it on the hook on the back door that led into our garden. My father took his strolls there. That March day it was warmer out than in. As I walked past I discreetly fingered the wool.

My mother found the house far too large. My father needed a room for his library; he had taken up a professorship at the university and earned well. So my mother insisted upon engaging a gardener and a household help. During the day my mother mostly lay on the sofa and would only get up to give the housekeeper money for the shopping, or to remind Tanya and me of our homework.

We avoided confrontation with our mother because we feared her raised voice. On one of his visits, the family doctor admonished us, “Your mother has to look after herself; she has a weak heart.”

Tanya and I nodded shamefacedly. A few days later, Tanya pressed her hand up to my left, still-flat breast, and I pressed my hand to one side of the slight bump she had in the same place.

“My heart’s stronger than yours – can you hear?” I giggled.

“You have to put your hand right on top,” Tanya replied, but I didn’t dare. We were crouched behind a hazelnut bush at the bottom of the garden, where we often played in the hope that no one would hear us.

Sometimes, while Tanya and I chased squirrels or played catch, Rosa would lean against the house wall and gaze in the direction of some far-off tree she scarcely seemed to see. Only when my father opened his office window half a metre away and called for quiet, or when my mother came to the door and shouted, “Is Marie to do all the work herself?” or, “How does the upstairs bathroom look?” or, “Come and sweep the stairs!” did Rosa give a start and totter into the house on her spindly legs. Tanya and I hid behind the hazelnut bush and from there watched what went on behind the windows.

From one day to the next, Rosa left us. She ran off after a haggard military doctor, whose erratic behaviour Tanya and I had often laughed about. Although I had rarely played with Rosa, I missed her greatly. Even though latterly she had glided shadow-like through the house, suddenly I felt as though the absence of that shadow had robbed me of a safeguard without which I felt anxious and insecure; I could always go to Rosa when someone from school taunted me, or if I felt sad for no apparent reason.

After Rosa moved out, I went along with my parents’ suggestion that I attend boarding school from ninth grade. My decision was made easier by the knowledge that Tanya would be there as of autumn, and I, following on two years later, would be sure to have her near when I started; besides, Free School Community† sounded like a place where no one complained about noisy games or laughter.

Tanya and I no longer played catch. She brought home friends with whom she whispered behind her hand, and I joined in their roaring laughter without knowing the reason for it. Our sudden outbursts, lasting minutes at a time, disturbed my father at his work and unnerved my mother, with the result that Tanya’s friends gradually stayed away and eventually Tanya longed to move out.

To reach my boarding school, first you go by train over the flat then by bus up to villages scattered amongst extensive forest; from the bus stop at the forest edge you walk along the village street then turn right into the school grounds. Every September, villagers crane their necks to see the new pupils, but they also slip them food (sausage and honey), the boys schnapps and cigarettes. Tanya had a boyfriend in the Young Patriot house who used to meet up secretly with other boys to play cards; she told me how she would often see them furtively sucking peppermints the next morning and turning their heads aside when talking with the teachers or senior house boys.

I lived in Red Flag, a small house with a bell tower. Today I would perhaps find the bell’s dull ring pleasant, but each school morning it wrenched me awake with a start. Before we assembled in the school yard for morning roll call, we had ten minutes to brush our teeth, wash and dress, and fifteen for breakfast.

I didn’t mind the confines of the six-bed dormitory. We chatted and played music together, made fun of each other’s idiosyncrasies without hurting each other (no one here called me a “communist cow”, like they had at my old school). We worked in the fields and the henhouse, in summer bathed in the chilly pond close by, gathered mushrooms in the shaded woods or on winter evenings appeared in the dining hall where our teachers, sitting in our midst, spoke softer than in class. The fire in the middle of the hall spread a cosy warmth to the farthest row of seats. On other evenings, when I sought peace and wished to be alone, I withdrew to the boarding-school library. As soon as I opened a book and became immersed in the narrative, I experienced a strange captivating thrill; I lost myself in the story and only became aware of my surroundings again when the librarian came to check the aisles and told the last remaining readers to leave.

I had little to do with Tanya. Sometimes we met in the playground or the hall and briefly messed around before going back to our own friends.

At first I made regular visits home. No sooner would I arrive than my mother would reproach me for my dirty clothes and the additional work I caused her, but at the same time for my sporadic visits. She complained about her tiredness, her head and joint pain, and that she was limited in many ways. My father I only got to see at mealtimes, and when I arrived and left.

Together with Marie I washed my own and my parents’ clothes; I cajoled my mother to take walks, rubbed ointment into her joints and back, and brushed aside the disconcerting sensation triggered by the sight and touch of her soft swollen body.

Back at boarding school I always reproached myself for not devoting more time to my mother. Once, I spoke about this to Tanya, who nonchalantly replied that it was not our problem. I did not like her saying that, and, although I felt reluctant to go home more often than necessary, still I went time and again.

One day – it was in my final year – I received a letter from my father, the first in the four years I had been at boarding school. At the time I didn’t yet know what I was going to study; I was interested in plants and liked to look up their names, their significance and uses, but I also liked being with people and was intrigued by the influence our teacher exerted over me. It struck me as very fulfilling to educate children or young people who would work alongside each other in harmony and exist in a happy community like ours.

My father wrote that he and my mother wished me to complete a period of practical work before beginning my studies, because contact with workers or farmers in our state was an important experience, one they had unfortunately not been able to impart to me; in addition, I would make a personal contribution to the country’s economic development.

I pictured my father’s slender hands, which he had once run over the bark of a tree, or the time he had clumsily cut a flower from the garden with secateurs to put in a tumbler on his writing desk; I saw his fingers deftly tapping at his typewriter, his eyes inflamed from reading, the lines on his forehead. That aside, I found his sudden interest in my development strange; however, it was probably only about me insofar as I, a part of the community, had a duty to fulfil, the sense of which was clear to me.

To mark our school-leaving I went with some of the girls to the coast for two weeks. On our return, we gave each other long hugs at the train station before going our separate ways. I took the tram and got out not far from our house. The closer I drew to my parents’ house, the clearer I heard my mother’s voice. I opened the garden gate and walked up to the kitchen window in the hope that someone might notice me. My mother was standing not a metre from my father, shouting in his face; suddenly, she stroked his cheeks and his hair, before breaking into sobs and sinking into a chair; my father spoke softly to her, without touching her. I would gladly have turned and fled the scene. Even though I had known these scenarios from childhood, the sight of my parents pained me unexpectedly; at the same time, I wanted to understand what was going on between them.

But my parents barely spoke with me during the following weeks. My father had found me a placement on a farm, as I had requested. The training farm belonged to the university and comprised countless fields and meadows. I knew the village directly bordering the city from walks and had observed how the corn glinted in the sun one last time before harvest, how the cows peacefully grazed and the horses pulled trailers of harvested crops along the village street towards the farmyard. The farmers either nodded affably to us walkers or ignored us.

In early August the late summer air lay hot and oppressive; the village street was lined with horse droppings. At the farm gate I encountered a girl leading a horse under the archway through a sawdust-filled trough. There was a strong smell of disinfectant. The girl briefly studied my clothes and told me I had to thoroughly clean my shoes – that there was foot-and-mouth.

My shoes sank deep into the wet sawdust, which clung to the hem of my woollen skirt. In the yard I sat on a wooden bench under a small linden and picked off the sawdust. Several young people in wellington boots and dirty blue dungarees, probably trainees, walked past me and smirked. Only later did I work out that it was because I was the daughter of an academic.

There were some days when I almost gave up. I was used to the early rising, but I found the strenuous physical work hard; it hardly compared with our afternoon farming activities at school when we had dug potatoes or turnips, fed the hens and planted out flowerbeds.

But it felt good in the evenings as the pain subsided in my joints, and the strain eased from the dung cart against my stomach and the weight of the potato baskets on my forearms. I got used to seeing the ends of my fingernails brown – they looked eerie in the moonlight – but the work in the fields and the byre demanded the utmost of me; still, my strength seemed to suffice, until that day in mid-September.

I had been assigned to clear rogue shoots along with some of the farm girls, as well as the girls from my dorm who were studying agriculture. We were standing in the middle of a field in two long lines at the edges of a hand-scythed strip, each facing an uncut side of the field. I saw the golden-green flower stems before me and knew that they contained valuable seeds. After the tractor with its front mower had driven past, I cut off several stalks with my sickle and cast them behind me; quickly, I moved on a metre and cleared away the next ones. At the end of my fifteen-metre strip the blades of several stalks had entwined. As I tore at them with the sickle to separate them, on the right-hand edge of the field I saw the tractor advance anew. I lost focus, my strength left me and my arm went limp. While I gave it a quick shake, the tractor trundled past again.

During lunch, whispers drifted over from the farm labourers’ table. “The professor’s daughter may be bright up top, but her arms are pretty useless.”

Someone sniggered.

I turned red and lowered my head. When I left the dining hall I avoided everyone’s gaze.

That evening I took a walk between the fields. The earth stuck to my shoes in thick clods. I walked so long through the darkness that my eyes almost shut as I went. As soon as I was in bed surrounded by sleeping girls, thoughts of that afternoon spun round my head once more. I switched on the table light I shared with the next girl and swivelled it towards the wall. Then I began to write a letter to my parents. I said I was exhausted, that I did not really fit in here, but mentioned nothing specific; afterwards, I tore the letter up.

I knew it stood within my father’s power to protect me from other people’s cruel remarks. He could easily find out who had made fun of me and ask them in for a word. After that, fear of reprimand would keep my mockers quiet.

But I did not want to ask my father for help, either in this or any other matter; if I got along without him, my pride would remain intact and I would be spared the farm labourers’ resentment.

In winter the earth turned hard. At around three o’clock in the morning I would stumble numbly over to the byre, hit the sleeping cows on their rumps with a stick and call them by name. Their bulky bodies felt warm to the touch. Along with a farm girl and one trainee, I fed the beasts before we mucked out the byre, scattered fresh straw and drove the cows to the milking parlour in the yard. As I hand-milked some sensitive cows, I would think of the sweet calves in the opposite stall, their soft lowing and their thirst; perhaps I could have a look in their stall afterwards. I would wish for the sun to be up when I left them, and that it would be a bright day.

After work, I was now in the habit of taking an evening stroll through the surrounding area. My eyes quickly grew accustomed to the faint light, so that each time I recognised the contours of the land better, easily discerned the paths, trees, meadows and fences. Shrouded in my coat and woollen scarf I was at one with the winter air, the dormant plants, the sleeping animals, on some days with the snow, luminous against the dark.

One evening, at the edge of a meadow I spotted a man’s silhouette, static and slightly stooped, hands clasped behind his back. He turned to me as I approached.

“The evening air here,” he said by way of greeting, “reminds me of home.”

I recognised the young man’s face; he too worked on the farm.

“Where are you from?” I asked, and he named a village near my boarding school. I told him where I had gone to school and how fondly I remembered my time there. He mumbled in surprise that no one else here knew his village.

We were silent for a moment; then he said, “I learned some of the work when I was a child: harvesting crops and milking goats.”

I nodded, and was surprised to think that he had also noticed me on the farm.

“I’m here to deepen my knowledge before I start my studies,” he continued, and proceeded to tell me that while it was still light on his early autumn walks he had picked plants at the field perimeters and set up a herbarium. “I don’t mind the winter,” he said.

I rubbed my hands together, formed two small hollows and breathed into them. We were not far from the farmyard when he offered me his gloves. I hesitated. Then my hands slipped into the already warm wool.

In the meagre light of the murky farmyard lantern, I noticed he had a slight squint in his left eye and blushed under my gaze. Although he did not come across as very athletic and looked poorly suited to hard farm work, I felt at ease in his presence, precisely because there was nothing boisterous or uncouth about the way he talked and behaved. As we said goodnight he asked me my name.

“Margret,” I told him.

And he told me his – Hans – before adding, “The women in my village don’t have as nice-sounding names as yours.”

Several years have passed since that evening stroll. Hans helped me to get through the year on the farm without me becoming completely isolated from the others.

During my final weeks on placement I often thought back to my schooldays and felt a desperate desire to read, to at last re-immerse myself in books. I scoured the little library next to the dining hall for books that had nothing to do with farming, and, sitting on the wooden bench at the farm entrance, I read works by Seghers and Borchert, Marx, Lessing, Büchner and Schiller. When trainees or farm labourers walked past I tried to ignore their comments. At the end of my placement I decided I wanted to be a German teacher.

Thereafter, I saw Hans every now and then at university and we exchanged a few words, until, this year past – it was a crisp, spring-like day at the end of February – we met while walking through the botanical gardens. We strolled side by side, as before. Hans explained the names of the trees and flowers and, when we left the gardens, picked me some daisies with pretty little petals from the grass. I thanked him with a quick kiss on the cheek, the way Rosa often used to brush my cheek with her lips when she passed.

Later we talked about the poems we liked, about our studies, the reasons we had both joined the Party† early on. Hans said we had a special duty to fulfil in our country, and I nodded. He walked me to my apartment (I had moved in at the start of my studies), awkwardly removed his glasses and kissed me under the protective cover of evening darkness. Even now, when I hug or kiss him by day, he blushes; and, although I have suggested it various times, Hans has yet to stay the night.

In two years he will have finished his studies and then, or perhaps even sooner, we want to marry and look for an apartment together, which we will adorn with flowers fresh and dried.

One day, shortly before my father’s visit last year, I introduced Hans to my parents, but we stayed only an hour at most. At the time I still occasionally took the tram to my parents’ house, suffered my father’s silence and my mother’s nagging, and attended to her for a few hours like a good husband should have. Each time, I was glad in one way when I arrived and glad in another when I left.

I showed Hans the garden, and we kissed next to the house wall where Rosa had often stood. For the first time in ages I saw squirrels scurry up tree trunks again and jump from tree to tree. Before setting off, we gathered hazelnuts under the old bush, like children. Hans found a bluish-black bird feather which he admired, attributed to a jay then carefully tucked away in his jacket pocket. Back at my apartment he laid it on my desk next to my little glass vase, and later, when sunlight sometimes slanted through the vase, the feather seemed to shimmer. The hazelnuts I ground in my coffee grinder and mixed through the dough which I baked into a cake for us. As always, Hans left in the evening, and I busied myself with a book for advanced-level pupils.

I think the key thing today is to choose the right books for our pupils, books that spell out how they can shape our society. In those who rarely read we must also awaken an interest in the future our country aspires to as it distances itself from the past. Young people today still know poverty, but not war. Books have been written for them that speak of that, but also of the present and the future.

When I see pupils in front of me, some with bored faces, others from homes where the past is not spoken of, I worry about not reaching them with my message. What do I say to them when they enthuse about their relatives’ fashionable clothes, the music that teenagers listen to on the other side of the Wall†? That they will enjoy the same advantages a few years hence if they help? Wealth means little to me. And what if there are no questions? I do not want to shout at people like my mother, who was also a teacher before the war.

Cat Dreams

Hans • 1967

Hans’s mother called him at around ten in the evening: “The doctor said it’ll soon be over.” She sounded tired and deflated.

That night, Hans dreamed that his mother left his father sprawled on the floor with a head wound. In his dream, his father had watched television, as he did every evening, while his mother begrudgingly waited to carry him to bed. When his father clasped his arms around her neck so she could carry him on her back, she thought she would choke from his tight grip and vigorously shook her shoulders and head. Hans’s father fell to the floor and cracked his skull on the oven while his mother, gasping for breath, hurried into the bedroom and double-locked the door.

Hans awoke with a racing heart, wiped the perspiration from his upper body with his pyjama top and washed in the sink of the small guesthouse room. He would put in a request for a few days’ holiday; under the circumstances, the head of the herbarium would have to accept it.

In the hospital ward Hans pressed the warm, calloused hand of his father, who seemed unchanged.

“I’ll pop my clogs here, for sure,” Hans heard him say, and thought that he would talk in exactly the same way if a doctor or nurse were present.

On a chair slightly away from the bed sat Hans’s dozing mother, her head sunk on her bosom. The smells of disinfectant, coffee and floor polish failed to mask the smell of his mother’s and father’s sweat. Hans stood awkwardly by the bed because there was no second chair.

Suddenly a pained expression spread across his father’s face; he screwed up his eyes and pressed his lips together. Hans grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him on his side. His father gently groaned. Hans reached for the button beside the bed, but his father gestured dismissively. “Leave it, lad, I don’t need them. They’ll only meddle with me.”

After his mother had woken up, she and Hans took turns until evening so that one of them was always with his father to pass him a cup or help him eat, sit him up, lie him down again, exchange a few words from time to time, fetch him an extra blanket and remove it again if he became too warm.

As they left, Hans’s mother promised she would visit again the following day.

When Hans nodded in affirmation, his father said, “Just you help your mother.”

Hans and his mother did not talk on the bus home. Hans felt her warm, fleshy hips pressing against his own through the woollen fabric. His quickened breathing and the heat rising in his face bothered him, but the bus being full meant he could not edge away from her to stretch his leg or he would block the aisle.

At home his mother prepared a quick supper of goat’s cheese, liverwurst and bread from the Konsum†. Hans remembered an evening with Margret’s parents when he had been surprised to discover that there was such good food in the city, and Margret’s mother had told him, not without pride, about a shop that sold exclusively to university staff and their relatives. Usually Hans loved the taste of his mother’s food, but tonight he had as little appetite as she. The silence in the house spoke of his father.

After supper his mother offered to let him sleep beside her on his father’s mattress because the top floor was not heated. Hans knew how cold it could be up there in October. Around midnight he climbed the stairs, draped a blanket over the window, took a pair of his old pyjamas from the wardrobe and with a shiver buried himself under the clammy feather duvet.

After breakfast the next morning, his mother went to see his father. Hans accompanied her into the garden. The path from the shed to the front door was partly laid with stone slabs, which had not been the case on Hans’s last visit. Where the slabs ended, a shallow trench ran to the shed.

“Your father did it all,” his mother said. “Even cast the slabs. Lay and supported his whole body on his arms and slid forwards. Sometimes had sore knees afterwards but carried on next day. Feels nothing in his legs, anyway.” Hans was amazed how neatly the slabs fitted. He would struggle to work as meticulously.

In the shed he found a wheelbarrow and loaded it with slabs. As soon as he lifted the barrow off the ground the weight dragged on his arms and shoulders. On the farm placement they had had to hump baskets of potatoes over to a trailer. In the ensuing years Hans had not worked physically but instead taken part in field trips, written reports, created herbaria, made lecture notes. The barrow wobbled as he wheeled it over the doorsill of the small wooden hut, looking down while trying to keep the barrow steady. The mild pain above his shoulder blades would last no more than a minute.

Suddenly their cat leapt towards him. Hans had missed her the night before. She regularly roamed the village and hissed at people; only in Hans’s presence did she purr. Hans stopped in fright, making the barrow tip and several slabs slide out, one of which broke under the weight of the others.

“Cats bring bad luck,” his mother usually said. “Trample the flowerbeds, ruin the vegetables. Mostly it’s black ones.”

Perhaps she was right. For all that Hans had missed the cat the previous night, now he vehemently shook the leg she was rubbing against. He had never been entirely at ease with her, even though he enjoyed her affection. His father liked to annoy her by tugging her ears or tail, pretending to quietly bark or setting a dog on her.

For years as a child, night after night Hans had dreamed of jet-black, sparkly-eyed cats that suddenly morphed into black-haired witches. The witches uttered curses. If they appeared in the last six days of the old year or the first six days of the new, their curses would come true, his mother had said. Even though the curses had remained benign until now, one day they might not, and not only at the turn of the year. To this day, on those twelve winter nights Hans endeavoured to get by without sleep. Every year, after his first night awake, his eyes would begin to droop, and sleep would overcome him either on the sofa, during breakfast or lunch at his parents’ place (whom he visited over Christmas), or on a shop floor after he had lain down exhausted in a quiet corner. The dreams, though, did not disappear.