Higher Ground, Anke Stelling [historical books to read .TXT] 📗

advice. Sometimes it helps to cut notches into hard-coated seeds to help them germinate. Yes, I know, it’s an effort, and the knife might slip, but waiting and hoping is not enough. You’ve been here longer than I have, and you know your way around. Where did you leave the instructions? It’s unfair to hand something down but leave out the most crucial part. What are these figures for? What do these squares mean?’

Sven wakes up.

‘Resi?’

I’ve been tossing and turning. I can’t sleep.

Sven stretches out a hand and puts it on my neck. Pulls me towards him.

In three or four moves, Sven can take away my feeling of being a victim. I’m not alone and abandoned — quite the opposite. With Sven’s help, I have sired a whole gang who will open the door to the bailiffs in slippers, snot hanging from their nostrils, and say: ‘Hello? Who have you come to see?’

With the last remnants of my working-class instincts, I did what our sort does best: I bred like a rabbit.

Sex is a form of defiance, I read somewhere, because we do it to defy. Not only because a new person who will preserve the species might be born as a result, but because the act itself is defiant.

Death stands next to us and thinks, ‘Damn, they’re getting on just fine. I’d better go. Love, desire, and fun? Not my thing. I’m out of here.’

And so death takes off, along with fear, worries about coping, and anger at the injustice of the world: everything disappears, and I end up somewhere entirely different, and I become somebody entirely different, all heartbeat and skin and life.

Okay, for about fifteen minutes. But it amazes me that it still works, even though it’s so simple and we’ve already done it a thousand times.

I know you don’t want to hear all this, Bea. No one likes imagining their parents having sex.

My mother was very considerate about that.

She managed to tell the story of her lover, who didn’t want to marry her, without mentioning sex once.

Werner had a car, as far as I knew. And I also knew that people could have sex in cars, because Raimund liked to recite limericks: ‘There once was a couple from Waiblingen / Who used their VW for loving in / It made them quite glad / To be scantily clad / But after the sunroof was jammed right in.’

Resorting to a car because people didn’t have their own rooms, or only ones with landladies who didn’t let girls come up, or parents who judged the girl as inferior — I didn’t know anything about all this. Perhaps my mother mentioned the car because that’s where she could have sex with Werner — but for me to understand that, she’d have had to be much more direct.

I knew Marianne loved cars; and that later, when she had one herself, she was reluctant to let anybody else take the wheel.

She didn’t have one when she was young. Werner did though, and they went out in it for drives in the country. All the way down to the South of France — where Werner dumped Marianne.

How exactly? What words did he use? And why there?

‘His father never liked me. I was a nobody. His parents would have even had to pay for the wedding to do it the way they wanted.’

And then came the part of the story that had nothing to do with Werner, about the wonderful turn of events that occurred because Marianne was dumped by Werner: her wedding to Raimund, which took place in a pizzeria with only the witnesses. It must have cost a hundred marks at most, but money doesn’t mean a thing when you really love each other.

But you do have to love each other. And how does love show itself? In sacrifices.

Werner shouldn’t have listened to his father. Should’ve spurned his inheritance, and got married in a pizzeria — no, in a brasserie in the south of France. That would have been cool! But he failed. For that reason alone, I lost interest in Werner: he was a coward, a loser, a walking disaster. A caricature who didn’t feature in my life. I didn’t know anybody like Werner. I was with Ulf, who back then was never going to accept a pfennig of his grandparents’ tainted inheritance—

‘A marriage is so much better when you’ve blown ten thousand euros beforehand.’

Ulf and Caro aren’t married.

I don’t know where the money for K23 came from. Who paid for Ulf’s studies or the Mies van der Rohe cantilever chair in his office. It’s indiscreet to ask and unnecessary to think about.

It’s spiteful.

Idea for a Christmas series: the architect Ulf is in a tight squeeze. At the age of twenty, in a grand gesture, he spurned his inheritance (black-and-white flashback: forced labourers at the conveyor belt of a German factory, bombs falling on London, Ulf’s grandmother steps out of the factory-owner’s villa wearing a fur), but now construction has come to a halt on his current building site. The client, a committed NGO manager who builds flats for Syrian war refugees and hires them as workers, has lost his state subsidy. Architect Ulf runs around like a madman to drum up private investment in his project — but in vain. Only his sister Elfie, who accepted her inheritance and is in the process of organising a commemorative exhibition called ‘The Dark Years’ in the factory owner’s modernised villa, offers Ulf help. Researcher Resi, an unsuccessful scriptwriter, who is trying to draw attention to her blog with left-wing radical revelations, posts an article about the involvement of Elfie’s firm in arms exports to Syria just when, over champagne, Ulf is pocketing a cheque from his sister at her exhibition opening—

‘Resi?’ Sven has stopped. He’s noticed my mind is elsewhere.

I would like to tell him what I’m thinking. Let myself go and confide in him completely, but how?

Sven barely talks about himself, let alone his past.

A man without a past, an