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

Is that supposed to be a joke? I laugh. He gets up.

Sven will sort it out. I can let him take care of things and go to sleep.

When I fall asleep in the morning, I always have the same dreams. There’s a train on the platform, and the ticket machine won’t accept my money; or the connecting train is coming, but I don’t know where it’s arriving. I wander, lost and breathless, through the underpass and can’t decide what to wear, even though I’m in a hurry. I’m back in ninth grade, and there’s a geography test, and I haven’t studied. Can’t even remember the subjects we’re being tested on, so I’m definitely up shit creek. Oh, and speaking of shit, there are only dirty toilets in my dreams. I desperately try to hold it all in. Why can’t I relax? Why am I so afraid of things being dirty?

Bea gets all that from me.

Her fears of having greasy hair, a fat stomach, and unsuitable clothes. Her fear of smelling bad, taking up too much room, being thought of as slutty. I passed this all down to her through genes, example, or upbringing.

I have to work against all this: I should swear, stink, stuff myself with food, and fuck. I should talk much more often about sex organs because soon it’ll be too late. How opportune that we’ll soon be living under a bridge! Then she can see about her hair! Washing it in the canal water, rubbing it dry with newspaper—

When Bea was about ten, we saw a woman at Friedrichstraße underground station, squatting next to the lift with her trousers down. You could see everything — her arsehole, vulva, the lot. People walked past her, or stood right next to her, waiting for the lift, or came up from the lower floor and saw her when they got out. The way she squatted there. Peeing. She seemed alert, not drunk at all, just very dirty and fat, with several plastic bags filled to bursting next to her. She just let it all out, peed right in the middle of the underground station as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

‘Uh-oh, look at that,’ Bea said.

‘Uh-oh’ was the phrase that kindergarten teachers used to express displeasure. ‘Uh-oh’ was not used to mean ‘Oops, how clumsy!’ but: ‘You know very well you can’t do that.’

That day in the underground station, Bea reclaimed the phrase ‘Uh-oh.’ Hers was a combination of uneasiness, indignation, and sympathy. Instead of distinguishing the difference between normality and abnormality, it expressed the boundary itself.

‘Yes, I can see,’ I said and carried on walking. As if nothing was happening. But in fact, a lot was happening. It was a revelation. I still see that woman very clearly in front of me, and I’m still looking for words to describe that boundary myself.

Jack was with us too and wanted to go back to the lift and have a longer and better look. I pulled him away roughly, fearfully.

‘Mum-my!’

Lynn is standing by my bed in her jacket, hat, and scarf. She proffers her pursed lips for me to kiss goodbye. I kiss them.

Sven comes in again. I feel a stab of guilt in my chest, as always when I’m visibly doing nothing and he’s busy. I imagine an accusation just because he’s come in — ‘Why do I have to go to childcare and not you?’ — Although I know he’d deny it. ‘Stay in bed!’ he’d tell me if I actually said it out loud, but even that would sound like an accusation to my ears. I want to get rid of these ears. Sven wasn’t the one who gave me them.

Sven bends down and kisses me. I am unwashed and ashamed — of my hair, my bad breath, my idleness. I want to become the woman next to the lift. How did she manage to be so free?

I may have given birth to our children in front of Sven, but even that was dictated to me by the fashion of our times. If it hadn’t been for the extreme circumstances and adrenalin, I would have felt ashamed then too: of my appearance, my lack of control, and for everything that came out of my body alongside the baby.

I want to masturbate in front of him. I’ve never done it before in case it repulsed him. Or bored him! I’d rather ride along in the slipstream of his arousal, and do my thing in secret. Don’t attract attention, don’t disturb, just oblige and disappear.

‘How pathetic,’ Bea would say, a word she’s started to use often recently.

Did I teach her that word?

‘To be pathetic is to sink even lower than poverty,’ I write in my broom cupboard after getting washed and dressed. What is the opposite of pathetic? Admirable? Feisty? Doesn’t pathos come from suffering, and so isn’t even related to the idea of uselessness? I flick through the etymological dictionary. ‘Stirring, arousing pity, so miserable as to be ridiculous.’ From the Greek, pathos.

Outside in the backyard, a child is crying. She sobs with heart-rending, throaty, gurgling noises — not the contrived crying used for blackmail, but real suffering. Now she even manages to articulate what the problem is, faltering and choking on her own tears: ‘Mummy — don’t want to. Mummy. Don’t want to. Mummy, don’t want to. Go childcare.’ And then she takes a deep breath and carries on crying. The sound is so bleak and full of suffering, it could make the skies fall. I try not to pay any more attention, but the noise carries on, and on, and on. How come no one is helping her? I lean forward so I can see out onto the back yard. She’s standing there in a green raincoat, two and a half, perhaps three years old. Her mother is standing in the passageway, looking at her smartphone. Is she waiting for her daughter to stop crying