No matter what you do

My alarm clock goes off — gentle, celestial, deceitful sounds, which I swipe away. To the left, so they’ll try again in five minutes.

Lynn, though, has been waiting for my alarm to go off and now yanks the door open to ask if she can have a hot chocolate. No, she can’t. She tries bravely every morning, and I bravely refuse. Stagger to the loo, bury my head in my hands.

I can’t do this yet. I don’t want to. I don’t know how I’m supposed to wake up.

Not hot chocolate; herbal tea instead.

Herbal tea with brown bread, like in a youth hostel. I take up my position and hold my ground as the youth hostel mother, being hard on myself and all the more so on the others. For their own good, of course. Yes, that’s how it is.

And then: snack boxes and PE kits.

I can’t do this yet; I don’t want to. It’s not even properly light outside. When do the clocks go back? Sunday.

From Sunday on, the afternoons will become the problem instead of the mornings. Then it’s just gaming and the sofa, because it gets dark right after school and childcare end. What did we use to do as children on autumn afternoons? Made animal figures out of conkers, would you believe.

Kieran wants to put on shorts. Outside it’s about eight degrees; on the other hand, boys a hundred years ago used to run around all day in shorts. So, it’s just a throwback to his ancestors’ values. I tell him he can.

‘Teeth!’

I’m hoarse and tired of saying it. What would happen if I never said it again?

Nothing would happen, but nothing happens when I do — nothing, in any case, that amounts to brushing teeth. Toothbrushes hang out of the corners of mouths while hands — ‘Just for a second!’ — check game scores. Eight clan members were back online at half past midnight; ‘Addicts,’ criticises Jack. ‘And what are you?’ says Bea in my tone of voice. Jack farts in reply; Kieran laughs.

‘PE kits!’

Jack and Kieran charge out of the door. I hear them in the stairwell jumping down the last steps on each floor. Bea follows them and pulls the door shut.

Now it’s just Lynn, sitting in her highchair in pyjamas.

Her legs have outgrown the highchair and her Hello Kitty onesie. Nobody is a baby here anymore—

Suddenly my yearning for them to be old enough to get ready on their own in the mornings flips over into wanting them to stay small forever.

What am I going to do when there’s no one to wake up, wash, tell off, and send out of the door?

Sven comes out of the shower.

‘Hurry up,’ he says to Lynn; but Lynn is incapable of hurrying. She can already do many things that her brothers and sister could only manage when they were at least two years older than she is, but always at her own pace, never on command, and definitely not according to her dad’s timetable, which is that he needs to leave now.

She goes into her room and gets dressed.

At least, I hope she does.

Sven eats the boys’ half-finished toast and drinks up their tea.

Lynn returns to the kitchen, indeed fully dressed, with her hairbrush in her hand and her hair falling in her face.

‘Why do only men go bald?’ she asks Sven, who ties her hair into a ponytail, puts on her hat, and holds out her jacket for her to put on while giving a quick summary of sex hormones and their effects.

‘So why aren’t you?’ Lynn asks, and Sven says ‘Ciao’ to me and ‘It has to do with genes too,’ to Lynn, and this will probably keep them going until they get to childcare, and I sit here all alone, awake at last but with a lump in my throat; I want to cry for them, put my arms around them all and hug them tightly to my chest, talk to them. Now that they are finally out of the door, I want them close to me and to never let them go, I want to save them—

Woe betide anybody who tries to hurt them out there in the big wide world, doubts their perfection for a second, tries to rival, criticise, or quarrel with them — all the things I do as soon as I’m with them.

Woe betide them!

It’s quiet in the kitchen: I turn on some music.

Paul Simon is singing that he has to leave. Creep down the alleyway, fly down the highway, before they come to catch him.

Bob Dylan sings that Miss Carefree doesn’t know how it feels to live on the edge and out on the street.

Jim Croce sings that he’s a fool, but that’s exactly why he won’t give up his dream; he is and always will be moving down the highway, and his dream will carry him.

The Boss sings that everybody’s got a hungry heart.

Mine’s thudding and trying to leap out of my chest, but more than that, it doesn’t want to be alone. It wants company on a tour bus.

‘This is where we part ways.’

When I told Sven, he shrugged.

‘They’ve “made it”. Isn’t that how they talk? This isn’t just where we part ways, it’s also the end of theirs.’

‘And my hungry heart? What’s it going to do without a highway?’

‘Sit with a drink in the service area?’

Idea for song lyrics: My hungry heart hitchhikes / my ass is on Sitzstreik / my feet train the moonwalk / my mouth bubbles small talk / my brain is still asleep / my guitar gently weeps.

I don’t even have a driver’s licence. Have never owned a car, have always been a passenger. Highway songs aren’t for me. If anybody, I’m the tramp, jumping on the freight train.

Making music would be so much better. Writing is too close to speaking, and its art gets lost in literacy.

Without music, the lyrics about having a hungry heart seem so trite that I can’t sing them out loud.

The last time my father came to visit, Bea, you said: ‘I feel so sorry for Grandpa Raimund.’ I played it down. ‘Why’s that? Grandpa’s doing just fine,’ instead of telling the truth: ‘Yes, you’re right, Grandpa Raimund’s got a hungry heart.’

Everybody does. And the closer you are to somebody, the more their heart touches yours, and then your heart longs to still the hunger of their heart, and because that’s not possible, your heart hurts, and you need something to numb the pain.

When you were two, Bea, and Jack was a day old, Sven picked you up from the nursery, and you went to the chemist to get lavender blossom for my sitz bath. Don’t worry, dear child, no more torn-perineum stories. At the chemist, you got a packet of gelatine-free gummy bears. Which was an exception, because it was usually a waste of time to make a fuss at the checkout, especially with Sven. But that day, it worked — and why? You remembered when you came home and saw me lying in bed with your baby brother Jack.

You stood there in your much-too-warm quilted jacket and your tiny winter boots and didn’t look at us — not at me, not at Jack, just at the gummy bears in your hand. You looked at them, and I looked at you, and saw you were connecting the dots between that packet and how our family had changed. I saw you weighing up the sweets against your bitterness, trying to hold the gummy bears and be pleased. You didn’t look up when I said: ‘Hi Bea, nice to see you!’ but carried on looking at the gummy bears. ‘Did you get a packet of gummy bears?’ — What a stupid question. You turned on your heel and marched off.

Off down the highway.

Oh, how my heart trembled when I saw your hungry one setting off.

And you feel sorry for Grandpa Raimund, Bea; you see him sitting at our kitchen table drinking coffee and eating cake, and you realise that cake isn’t enough to satisfy his hungry heart.

But you’re also realistic enough to know that you can’t buy happiness, but you can buy cake; that day it was the cheesecake you had made especially for Grandpa. And for a while, it calmed your heart to mix the flour and butter and sugar, stir in the quark, put the cake in the oven and watch it rise. And didn’t it turn out well? Grandpa Raimund sliced it up and put a forkful in his mouth. Mmm, how delicious! And it would be some time before his hungry heart needed stilling again, and until then, the cake would gently melt on his tongue.

But unfortunately, the sight of somebody trying to numb their hunger, either with cheesecake or gummy bears, hurts more than anything else, right?

The Boss sings for me. I listen to his comforting diagnosis.

‘Hungry heart’ sounds better than ‘borderline’, which is Ingmar’s diagnosis for me.

I heard it from Ulf, my conscientious go-between: ‘Ingmar said that you probably don’t know where you stop and others start.’

‘Really?’ I said and waited for Ulf to burst out laughing, but he didn’t burst: he looked sad and pensive.

‘It’s not like nobody’s trying to understand you.’

Ulf is trying to act as a go-between. He’s an architect for building groups: that requires mediation skills. You don’t have to deal with just one homeowner, but five, ten, or twenty. And each one has a hungry heart.

Ingmar could have numbed his six years ago with an act of charity. That didn’t work out, so his heart is still pounding and looking for explanations and diagnoses. Diagnoses are so much better than a vague feeling that something’s not right!

I understand Ingmar for wanting to tidy up the world for himself and his children according to the DSM.

I understand Ulf for thinking that if we all try to understand each other, then surely we’ll be able to see eye to eye, to forgive and forget.

I understand Frank for not wanting to forgive and forget, for wanting to make an utterly unforgiving gesture for once in his life — ‘Get out, all of you! I don’t give a shit what happens!’ — after years of his nerves and boundaries being trampled on by his wife and annoying sons, and his wife’s friends and their annoying kids, and God knows who and what else — ‘That’s enough!’ I understand all that.

I am the Queen of Understanding.

Understanding is a highly effective means of numbing hungry, painful hearts; it’s much better than anger, because, at some point, anger needs to erupt so that you don’t choke on it or burst. And who knows, it might strike the wrong person or be over-the-top in the first place — unjustified even. In any case, it’s risky because it’s loud and very visible. An angry person is already a victim; an understanding person is in control.

My mother never risked getting angry either.

‘I could slit somebody’s throat,’ she would sometimes say. She would play down the brutal image with a mocking tone, a friendly, calm expression, and restrained posture, all of which erased any suspicion that she would ever slit anybody’s throat.

We talked for hours; Renate’s right about that.

We discussed hundreds of questions and situations, but the lesson she taught me was to be understanding — as a weapon of defence and evasion, the opposite of justified anger and incisive insight.

Do you think, Bea, that I had the slightest clue what made my mother so angry that she felt like slitting somebody’s throat?

She used to tell three stories about her younger days: first, the one about the girls in fourth grade, who gave her the cold shoulder because of a fashion show. Second, about her first boyfriend, who was happy to date but not marry her. And last, about her father, who once beat her with a clothes hanger because he thought it was her fault that her little sister was almost run over by a car.

Stories full of unatoned injustice that were told not to make me take my mother’s side and feel angry towards the girls, her boyfriend, or her father, but to make it clear that she too had once been a girl and could empathise with me. Bad things had happened to her, but she’d survived. And she’d done it by figuring everything out and understanding the other side: the girls were probably just jealous, the boyfriend had been too much under his father’s thumb, and her father had suffered a nasty shock.

September 1957; Southern Germany.

One day, when Marianne was in the fourth grade of Gomadingen primary school, her mother told her that Neumaier, the children’s outfitter, had asked whether her two daughters would like to take part in an event he was planning that coming Saturday. There was a fair in town, and his shop was going to take part by presenting its new winter collection.

Marianne didn’t understand straight away. What was she being asked to do? Who had asked? What was a ‘winter correction’?

‘A fashion show,’ her mother said. ‘You’ll have to walk down the catwalk and show people what they can buy this winter. And Brigitte too, for the smaller children.’

Marianne thought about it. A fashion show, wow. But unfortunately, only at Neumaier’s, not in Paris. It wasn’t the same as being booked as a model for a photo shoot, but almost. You had to be pretty to be asked. Did that mean she was pretty? Gerda was the prettiest of all the girls in her class, and Evi, of course. And Ingrid had the best clothes, not from Neumaier, but from Königstraße in Stuttgart. Everybody envied her. But they’d all envy Marianne too, when they heard that she’d been asked to take part in a fashion show. Why didn’t Neumaier ask his own children or Gerda or Evi? It’s obvious why he didn’t ask Ingrid: her mother didn’t buy clothes from him.

That evening, Marianne’s mother told her father about Neumaier’s proposal. And that seemed to put an end to any doubt: Brigitte was excited, her mother chuffed to bits, and her father already planning Saturday: a trip to the beer tent was on the cards, and he hadn’t thought about dropping in at Neumaier’s, but now that his own daughters would be doing a show, of course he would. There’d be no riches, but fame and glory. His daughters were nothing to be ashamed of, pretty girls, both of them.

Only Marianne wasn’t sure. Did she dare walk down the catwalk? Who would be watching? Would she have to put on things she didn’t like? Wasn’t the whole thing just really embarrassing?

It was the 1950s: Marianne might have thought many things, but she couldn’t argue with her parents. Marianne might have felt ambivalent about the proposal, felt that fame was questionable and the whole event suspicious, but she didn’t have any framework for what she felt, and even if she had done — there was no way round it. Mum was excited, Dad was excited, Brigitte was excited, and only Marianne had a sense of foreboding that she couldn’t pinpoint, and even if she could, she would not have been able to argue. Marianne did what she was told. Full stop.

On Saturday from four o’clock in the afternoon, she modelled winter coats, tweed skirts, and capes on the podium from the shop window in Neumaier’s that had been turned into a catwalk. The showroom dummies had to stand in the corner for an hour. On that day there were real girls and music and free nibbles, and it wasn’t anything like in Paris, or perhaps it was, because it was all about walking with confidence. Brigitte did it better, that was obvious to Marianne; Brigitte smiled at the crowd, pushed her hands into the pockets of her winter coat and did a twirl. Marianne was glad when the whole thing was over, and she could go home.

Except that it wasn’t over.

Disaster struck on Monday morning when Marianne walked into the classroom. None of the girls would talk to her. Why? Ingrid delivered the explanation: ‘Because you’re vain and think you’re better than everybody else.’ Marianne looked at Sylvia, her very best friend. She knew she wasn’t vain: she’d seen how difficult it was for Marianne to model the clothes, because she’d been standing right next to her and had suffered with her. But Sylvia turned away. ‘I’m not taking sides. I don’t want to get involved.’

Her friends froze her out for a whole fortnight. Marianne kept wondering whether she might have deserved it after all. Arrogance and vanity were deadly sins! Hadn’t she been happy for a moment to think she was pretty? Hadn’t she basked in the warmth of the attention for a moment? Not in the shop, but at home, and the fact that even Dad had come to watch.

Marianne found proof of her guilt. And that, said Ingrid, was precisely the point of the exercise: they had wanted Marianne to take a look at herself. With these words, Ingrid declared an end to Marianne’s two-week banishment, and life at school carried on as usual.

I can’t begin to explain how angry this story makes me. It doesn’t just make me feel like slitting somebody’s throat; I feel like blowing up an entire crowd with rocket-propelled grenades. I want to find out where Ingrid and Sylvia live and confront those bitches. But here comes Freud again, telling me that this is mere projection, because it’s not about Marianne's pain, it’s about mine. And he’s right, of course.

Renate and Sigmund are clever and clued-up. I’d like to be too, but I’m not, and if anybody thinks I’m going to calm down, they’ve got another think coming because that would mean that you, Bea, won’t find out what makes your mother so angry.

I’m not going to find excuses for stupid old Sylvia, who really seemed to believe that not saying anything wasn’t taking sides.

Not a shred of understanding for poor, rich Ingrid, who was probably just frightened of being victimised herself for wearing fancy, overpriced clothes from Königstraße.

Everybody has a reason; nobody has what they really want.

If my mother had managed to stick up for herself, instead of numbing her pain with excuses and understanding for the others, then as a child I might have understood her.

But she wasn’t a victim, God no, she didn’t need to stick up for herself: she could keep her emotions out of her stories and take care of other people’s needs.

That’s wrong, Bea.

Please remind me of that, just like the stewardess reminds her passengers before take-off: in the case of a loss of cabin pressure, please place your own mask over your face first.

September 2013; Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin.

I received a commission. The editor of a magazine who asked me ten years ago to write about the baby boom in our hipster Berlin district remembered me, and asked if I could write about the boom in building groups.

‘You weren’t going to write for newspapers anymore,’ Sven says.

‘And our children want to spend the summer holidays by the sea,’ I reply.

And it wasn’t such a bad commission.

I could turn it into a personal story, the editor said, because that had worked so well with the story I’d written about being a mother ten years ago.

So I wrote two pages about how it felt to be the third from last person in my district not to be in a building group; about how it felt to live in a building without a name, how I still sat around on playgrounds instead of in communal gardens, and was envious of lifts, people who got to choose their own tiles, and being able to project onto a project.

On Friday, the article was published in the supplement of a national newspaper.

On Saturday, Carolina hosted a party for her fortieth, and at first, I thought, okay, she’s the hostess and has to set priorities, and she can count on my understanding as her friend, that she has more distant relatives to talk to before she can say hello and thank me for my present. However, after four hours had passed, and Vera and Friederike had also ignored me except for a brief hello, but had made a big show of greeting Caro’s younger sister and done their best to persuade her to dance with them for the birthday choreography, I knew they were angry with me.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked Ulf, and he said: ‘You could have been a part of it. It’s embarrassing how you make yourself out to be the victim.’

That was how it started, Bea, I should have known. First saying nothing and then opening your mouth doesn’t work: it has to be either or, you or me, commission or no commission — it shouldn’t be about me when it’s about them. Getting to grips with your own feelings is a risky business.

September 2013; Carolina’s fortieth birthday.

‘What have I done?’

Ulf opened another bottle of champagne. I offered up my glass, trying to get him to give me a refill, come what may, wanting the others to see that at least Ulf was still talking to me, wasn’t giving me the cold shoulder or going to throw me out. The wall of silence from the women might have just been a catfight, a game among fourth-grade girls; they were probably annoyed that my photo had appeared in a magazine and not theirs—

‘Is it about the article?’

Ulf said nothing.

‘It was a commission!’

Ulf narrowed his eyes at me.

‘I was writing about myself!’

‘And about us.’

This us was a we that didn’t include me.

Ulf turned away and refilled other people’s glasses. Had neither the time nor the inclination to argue with me. It was Carolina’s fortieth, and he was not going to let anybody spoil her party, any more than his house, his project, his private or his professional decisions.

The only person who spoke to me at the party was Ulf’s father.

‘I thought it was funny,’ he says.

‘Oh, really?’

I was already on my way out, and he was already drunk.

‘I liked the thing about the transparent walls that still serve to segregate people. Very well observed, Resi. Hats off.’

‘Ulf taught me that. How to reflect on architecture. How to see it as a metaphor as well as something concrete.’

‘Now he’s offended.’ Ulf’s father grinned.

I didn’t grin back, and he noticed. Looked at me pityingly and almost lovingly.

‘He’ll get over it,’ he said. ‘Just you wait.’

And I waited. Avoided the topic and pretended there was nothing wrong. Carried on meeting my friends for coffee — but preferably out in a café rather than in their spacious kitchen-cum-living-rooms, or on their balconies decked with plants, or in the communal garden. Lest we were reminded of that unpleasant subject.

But at the same time, I was always thinking about it. Why was it so terrible to write that the house had created a divide?

‘You wrote about yourself,’ said Sven.

‘Yes, of course! That was what I was asked to do!’

‘Perhaps. But you gave yourself that liberty. Why, actually?’

Sven understands more than I do, Bea, you should know that.

Sven realised long ago that this equality thing was a lie. Because as a kid, Sven had not only made it into a Gymnasium but even higher, studying the Classics at university, where the people he met had no intention of stooping to his level. They made sure instead that the guinea pig knew where it really belonged: in its pen.

As a kid, I had mixed with people who all agreed that pens, fences, and lines of any kind should be abolished and overcome in the name of freedom. Leftist people, idealists who, even if they were privileged, dreamed of a world that was more just, at least for us children. And that’s why they did everything in their power to make us forget the existence of privilege; or, at least, to see it as a nuisance, like an untidy garage with a broken automatic door.

In those circles, people said that money didn’t buy happiness, property was a burden, and the rich didn’t enter the kingdom of heaven, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Evil people like Scrooge were responsible for the misery in what was called the Third World back then. People like that even made pacts with Hitler during the Third Reich, just to keep their revolting privileges. But the rich people we knew were different and were just trying to stop suffering and inequality. And that’s why poor, innocent, non-homeowners like us — who were therefore morally superior — weren’t allowed to harp on about being poor, honest, and morally superior. No, everybody had to turn over a new leaf together. And because at that time, educational establishments had started offering everybody the same access and opportunities, and we had a level playing field — except that term wasn’t used at the time, and why should it have been, seeing as we all played fair — it was only natural that things would turn out better for everybody from then on.

It’s nice to move in these circles.

Until you realise that something’s not right.

That it’s necessary to share or even give up privileges instead of merely being ashamed of them or badmouthing them a bit.

That by the time these people become older and wiser than the rest, have children or just with the passing of time, they have become more interested in 'making it' than being able to face their old, idealistic selves in the mirror — the mirror they left behind in their old flat, because it didn’t suit the furnishings of their new flat, where even the mirrors are flawlessly fitted.

As it happens, the first thing that came to mind when I was writing my article was Ulf’s embarrassment when he tried to skip the walk-in wardrobe while showing me around his apartment.

‘But why?’ I said, opening the door myself. ‘These wardrobes are fantastic. I’d love one myself.’ Pointing out in my article that I was envious didn’t make up for mentioning the wardrobe, along with Ulf’s embarrassment.

It was treason. Suddenly everybody knew: Ulf and Carolina had one of those wardrobes, and others, like Sven and me, didn’t — and Bea, if you pointed out that everybody knew this beforehand, you’d be completely right. But knowing something and saying it out loud — or even writing about it and publishing it — are two different things.

As soon as the article was in print, it was out in the open: the elephant in the room, the thing you could deduce from the Bible quotations we had picked out for our confirmations.

Idea for a Bible quotation for a confirmation: making it to higher ground doesn't mean befriending the animals on the ark. It means having your own private cabin and a stake in the mountain.

It wasn’t until the article came out, and all the trouble started, that I realised my parents had, of course, wanted to move up in the world. Not necessarily so they could have a walk-in wardrobe, but so they could decide against it without being suspected of envy. And I realised that Ulf’s mother, for her part, longed to get rid of that silly wardrobe and all it stood for. Nobody wanted to feel ashamed of the unfair distribution of wealth anymore; but if it wasn’t redistributed or reallocated, the only escape was to focus on being the architect of your own happiness, personal failure, and foolish decisions. Which in my case meant: I could have been a part of it. Studied law. Married an heir. Accepted Ingmar’s money. Been proud and happy with little money, carried on doing my own home repairs, and suffered inequality in silence instead of attracting unnecessary attention.