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

‘What part do you sing?’ she asked me before she had even said hello.

I didn’t know how to answer. I had no idea what they were doing; it was alien to me, the way they were standing, with very upright postures, in a semi-circle around the grand piano. I offered my hand to Grandma as was expected.

‘Hello, I’m Resi.’

‘And what do you play?’

I instinctively knew that my two years of learning the recorder in primary school didn’t count in this context; that it would be seen as the equivalent of doing a cannonball in the pool.

‘Er, nothing,’ I said.

Ulf poured me some tea. But then had to rejoin the circle to sing the tenor.

There they stood and sang one carol after another, Grandma propped up with her cane, Daddy hitting an ironic bum note here and there, which earned him a dig in the ribs from his daughter. And I sat at the table, drinking tea and being the audience. I smiled, because at least I could show my teeth after the orthodontic treatment I had been given at the expense of the public health service, into which private patients like Ulf’s parents and his grandma had never paid a pfennig, but which nevertheless existed, preventing the insurmountable rift between us that a crooked or, God forbid, toothless smile would cause. It was still the 1980s.

So I smiled and made sure I didn’t join in the singing. I recognised the carols from the words and the soprano sung by Ulf and his mother, but I knew that I couldn’t for the life of me sing along. Couldn’t hit those high notes in a million years.

It’s fine. And it was all over a really long time ago.

And those thirty years ago, the concert was eventually over too, although the carols didn’t just have four parts but an incredible number of verses on those alien sheets of music.

I didn’t suffer that much. Others had it much worse: others weren’t let in in the first place or weren’t even considered human — speaking of which, Grandma was not only an arms manufacturer but had also grown up in the colonies, but perhaps I imagined that. Ulf wasn’t quite sure of the details.

In any case, because I couldn’t join in the singing, I bolstered my ego with other things — like the biscuits Ulf’s mother had tried to bake, for example. Dry and hard as rocks! I was a thousand times better at baking.

Or with Grandma’s age. There she stood, propped up on her stick, with a wrinkly neck and drooping earlobes — I’d outlive her by decades!

Had the earrings dragging down her earlobes been pawned, the money would have covered a hip replacement performed by a chief surgeon, followed by eight weeks of physio in a private hospital room. But I hadn’t grasped this yet, nor why Ulf’s mother lacked culinary skills: Grandma was the first in the family to have studied, and Ulf’s mother, the first not to have a hired kitchen help.

I didn’t talk to anybody about this. I can only tell you now, thirty years later, that I wish somebody had warned me.

My mother’s second story was about Werner, her first boyfriend, who wanted to sleep with her but not marry her. I always thought it was a strange story and wondered why she told it to me in the first place.

‘So what?’ I thought, and ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ and ‘Losers weepers.’

I wouldn’t for the life of me have realised that this was the story of Marianne’s missed opportunity to move up in the world.

The story was very short.

‘Werner, oh yes.’ Followed by a cheerless smile. ‘Dumping me didn’t help. He didn’t find happiness.’

Unlike Marianne, who married Raimund and had us.

She was happy. Because love is more important than financial security and social standing. Werner didn’t get that; he had to learn it through painful experience.

It’s not clear to me how my mother knew that Werner never found happiness. And yet this was the moral of the story as I saw it: Werner’s unhappiness was the result of kowtowing to social pressure; Marianne’s happiness was the transformation of the brief disgrace of being dumped by him.

Exactly how Werner had dumped Marianne and what led up to it, and that she’d lost her virginity to him, along with a few of her dreams that she managed to bury afterwards — not a word was breathed of this.

Perhaps the story was intended as a warning, but if so, its effect was lost on me. It was too short and too abstract, too directed towards the ending, where it became too concrete. I was the result of its fortunate twist: if Werner hadn’t dumped my mother, neither I nor my brother and sister would have been born. So I could not identify with my mother because I could only imagine the outcome of the story and not the Marianne of the beginning, who had naively blundered into the wrong social circles.

If she was trying to warn me, she should have told her story differently: ‘Okay, darling, go ahead and attend the family carol-singing, but beware. Ulf’s parents belong to a different social class than we do and yes, they have invited you, but you don’t know the rules and requirements. Do you remember Werner? He was a pastor’s son, and I was entirely out of place, no matter how much effort I put into behaving correctly, even though we too said grace before meals in our family. But in Werner’s family, there were napkins that you had to spread across your lap, and a serving girl. She always came from the right. How was I supposed to know that? I didn’t have a hope in hell, but perhaps the next generation does. Ulf’s father is now Werner, you could say, and maybe he had a girlfriend like me too once. Before he married Ulf’s mother. Isn’t he a lawyer and a member of the SPD? I’m sure he’s