Higher Ground by Anke Stelling (ap literature book list .txt) 📕

you want to have a family, you’ll have to get into practice.’

‘Do we want a family?’

‘You’ve come off the Pill.’

From under the PVC, floorboards started to show with centimetre-wide gaps in between. Frank started to tear his hair out.

‘The floor can breathe through the gaps!’ Vera said. She went to kiss Frank, but he pushed her away.

‘Huh?’ she said. ‘Seriously?’

Frank went back to his office; we went to the DIY store and bought oxblood-coloured paint.

Where the old kitchen stove used to be, the floorboards were missing; it was filled with a slapdash layer of cement. The paintbrush bristled as we painted over it.

‘It won’t be the last compromise Frank has to make,’ said Vera, slightly less buoyant than the morning before.

‘He likes his place to be tidy,’ I said.

‘He’s OCD,’ said Vera. ‘Seriously.’

We carried on painting in silence. I thought it looked okay in the end.

Frank nodded when he dropped in to take another look. ‘I thought it would look worse.’

‘If you really can’t stand it,’ I said, ‘you can always paint over it in a different colour.’

Frank knows that I remember all of this.

All the stories about this old flat — the transformations of the kitchen floor — and Vera’s doubts about their relationship and bringing children into this world.

‘What am I supposed to hand down to them? Let alone being an example! Me? Oh please! What a joke!’

And I visited her here after she’d given birth to Willi, and later Leon.

‘Look at them! What am I am supposed to do?’

Leon had just been born, and Willi was standing there with a reproachful look: the same look that you’d had too, Bea, the brave, introverted look of the first-born.

‘You have to take hold of the reins,’ I said to Vera because that was the exact same advice she’d given me when you were three and Jack was one.

November 2006; in our old kitchen in Winsstraße.

Vera was visiting us, but we couldn’t have a conversation. Instead, she observed how it was to have children and not manage in the least.

You wouldn’t let me feed Jack, and Jack was bawling, but I didn’t have the guts to chase you out of the kitchen, or lock you in your room, or assert my authority in any way. It was pathetic, especially as it was clear that you were just testing how far you could go. Did you really have the power to make me starve Jack? You were trying to test my limits, and were suffering most from having me in the palm of your hand. But I still couldn’t assert myself — you were stronger than me.

That was when Vera said: ‘You can’t let this happen, Resi; you have to change something.’

She wasn’t able to tell me what or how, of course, but she took a look at the situation, which was complete madness, and repeated several times: ‘You have to take hold of the reins, you hear?’

What a strange expression — what reins? But that’s why it’s so apt and memorable.

I had no idea what reins to take hold of, let alone how, but I knew I had to. I kept that fixed in my mind. Along with Vera’s voice, which sounded pretty level-headed in that chaos of churning emotions and soft-boiled carrots. ‘You not only have to, but you’ll be brilliant at it too,’ is what I heard, because if I’d been a lost cause, she wouldn’t have said anything.

And I tried to stand by her in exactly the same way in an impossible situation — right here, in this flat — when it was her turn to face the not-coping-and-having-to-anyway part of being a mother.

There was no time for the lengthy talks, plans, and solutions that were part of our past lives, but we had a few short, pithy phrases and sisterly solidarity to fall back on. We were each other’s witnesses.

At least, I thought we were.

But, like any criticism, we have witnessed so much that it has become a threat; what used to be a bond is now dynamite. Who knows what else I can remember and, above all, whom I might I tell?

I shut my laptop and go into the kitchen.

For lunch, I usually make myself an instant meal or a packet soup, some kind of unhealthy junk. I bury the packets at the bottom of the bin so that no one finds them, especially Bea on her nightly prowls through the flat when she tries to catch me out. About the fact that I preach water and drink wine — no: preach vitamins and stuff myself with E numbers.

I’m one of those people who likes to hide their hypocrisy.

Frank is worried that the floor might whisper something into my ear. About the day the East German PVC was forced to give way or about the doubts Vera had. About the daily loads of laundry because Willi peed his pants for ages, and about the steps they took to prevent it. How these steps were retracted and reversed, and remedies of a different kind were found. About the day the colour scheme for the new flat’s kitchen was chosen. Vera wanted white and Frank green. And who won? It all turned out well in the end, true. I was a witness.

And about a house which, once finished, started to fall apart again: how could the removal men have been so careless?

There were already scratches in the parquet floor and marks on the cupboard doors, and Willi and Leon definitely clashed with the surfaces and the tender-leafed plants in the garden.

But hey, they would just be swapped for new ones at some point. From the reserve funds for refurbishment.

We drank to the kitchen island, the ‘couchscape’, and the adventure bed. And to Frank, who was still playing with the boys, and still took them swimming every weekend — wow, such stamina, incredible — and to Vera, who looked so tired but managed not to throw anybody out, cry, or let anybody fall asleep alone.

It was enough. It