Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything (12 page)

Neither Alfred nor Frieda says anything, but I can see that Alfred is smiling. I'd love to stuff his half-eaten roll down his throat, and then follow it with another. Siegfried is the only one who talks any sense: “Henner wouldn't do anything like that; he's not the type.” I'm so grateful to him for that.

After breakfast I gather together a few things and say that I'm going to my mother's. Johannes says he wants to drive me. He's not angry anymore, but I am, because of how he talked to me in front of his parents. With a shrug and an awkward wave of his hand he lets me go down the steps, shutting the door behind me. Then I go to Henner's.

In the kitchen everything has been tidied up. There is no reminder of last night. Henner is sitting at the table, eating. When I enter he doesn't stir. He doesn't even raise his eyes. I walk past him almost silently, and take my bag into the room next door. Then I get a chair and sit next to him. He watches me out of the corner of his eye and keeps eating, undeterred.

He should be the first one to say something. I know how to be silent, too.

How long do we sit there like that? I don't know.

For a very long time.

I find it hard to gauge time in this house. Sometimes hours are like days, and at others they pass like minutes. But when nothing has happened for what seems like ages and Henner has long since finished eating, I put my hand on his cheek. He groans and looks down at the table. “I would have killed him,” he says, and when I say nothing he adds, “and myself, too.” Those are words that stand between us like walls.

Now I don't know what's right, but I think what he's saying is true. Then he goes on: “You don't need me, Maria. You're seventeen! My God, what are you doing here?” He stares at me. It's not that I need to think about it, but I hesitate before saying, “I want you! I'm old enough; Grandma Traudel was only seventeen. You can't just send me away like that.”

His eyes are still fixed on me. I'd been expecting ridicule, but there's nothing . . .

“I'm not sending you away,” he says. “I just want to say: you can see what it's like here. You've seen what I'm like. I've got nothing to offer you, nothing at all.” As he speaks he waves his right hand dismissively. I am surprised by how much this affects me. I have to swallow several times before I can say, “I don't care. I just want to be near you. That's all.” He gives a tired smile and pulls me over to him sluggishly. We sit there, slumped, more silently than the silence on the farm, and for a long time, for a very long time.

We spend the rest of the day in bed. We don't talk much, we just touch each other, and he reads me the last chapter of
The Brothers Karamazov
. At one point Alexey says, “Certainly we shall rise again, certainly we shall see one another, and shall tell one another gladly and joyfully all that has been.” I want him to repeat it straightaway—it sounds so beautiful, so full of hope—and my delight makes Henner happy, too.

20

I'm home by the evening. I don't say much, apart from that I've still got homework to do, and go straight upstairs. In the next-door attic room Selma has given birth to five tiny kittens, sired by some stray from the village. Another event that Johannes has immortalized on film. I don't know how many photos he's taken so far, but it must be in the hundreds. They're scattered on every surface and are a reminder that time is passing. His first pictures have already aged. I look completely different now, something he's noticed, too, but only because of the photographs. When I'm right in front of him he doesn't seem to see it at all.

I've arranged with Henner that he picks me up from school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'll tell Johannes that I'm going into town
with some school friends, or to the park for an ice cream. Saturdays are when I visit my mother, and I do actually go to see her in the mornings, but before lunch I take the path through the woods to Henner's and stay the night.

September, with her glorious late-summer days, gently fades. Henner and I have gotten used to the rhythm of our lies and our love. We see each other regularly, and whenever we drive past the track that leads to the Brendels' farm, I hide by lying flat on the backseat.

The initial magic has vanished; our meetings have now taken on the comfort of routine. He no longer pounces on me the moment I come through the door, and sometimes we just talk. The fear of being discovered has given way to a realization that the truth doesn't always come to light. It makes me wonder what else goes on in secret that I'll never find out about.

I'm not working at the tavern anymore. The landlord would have been quite happy to wait and see if Henner was going to rape me. When I tell this to Henner, he becomes sullen and says, “So that's what the creep thinks of me, is it?” But Henner has never been bothered by what people say about him.

He seems in good spirits; he's sorting things out on the farm, repairing fences, looking after the horses, and planning to renovate parts of the house. It's not true that he still fetches his water from the well; he only does this in summer. He's on the mains like everyone else and he even has a boiler.

I help him clean and tidy up the house: I clean windows, wash curtains, scrub floors, and wipe years of dust from cupboards and shelves. He's astonished when he sees what I've done and showers me with endless praise until I turn bright red with happiness.

I could live like this, I think.

At his farm we hear nothing of political events. He really doesn't have a television or a radio, only a record player, but we don't put that on, either. There's no time for it during the week, and on our Saturdays
we read to each other from books. Henner is an artist manqué. When I tell him this he laughs, but it's a bitter laugh. Hardly surprising that he has no friends in the village. They don't like oddballs, particularly not the kind who read a lot of books. They turned a blind eye until he started neglecting the farm. Once upon a time Henner had more animals, as many as you could have on such a small amount of land—cattle, pigs, chickens, and the horses, of course, which stayed. He had to buy feed; the land he rented out didn't cover the cost of the hay and concentrated feed that was needed.

When Henner's mother died in 1965, his father and grandparents were still on top of things at the farm. His grandfather died eight years later, and his father in 1980. Henner joined the agricultural collective at eighteen and worked in cattle breeding. When he got home in the evenings, he still had things to do on the farm. The collective was not the right place for Henner; headstrong and obstinate, he had endless spats with the others, while all he really wanted to do was run his own farm. And when his grandmother was the only family he had left, this is what he did. He slaved away all on his own, but in the end it became too much. One by one he got rid of the animals, until all that was left were the horses. He wouldn't be parted from them; he knew about horses best of all. With the money he received from the sale of the cattle he bought more horses, good studs, and within a few years his stable was known throughout the region. Compared to horses from the West they're supposed to be worthless, but nobody around here believes that.

The Ursula affair happened in 1974, the year after I was born. Henner was in prison while I was being breastfed by my mother. I often think about that.

There is much that separates us and a few things we have in common, which I prefer talking about. Like me, Henner was a Pioneer, but he didn't join the Free German Youth, nor did he take part in the state initiation ceremony. You couldn't call Henner's family enemies
of the state—they weren't even political. They just wanted to be left to run their farm in peace. Okay, Henner's mother hated the Russians, but that was for other reasons. I don't think they cared which system they lived under. All they wanted was to be farmers and not have to worry about taking their son to the Pioneer hall every week, to join in whatever useless stuff went on there.

It was the grandmother who prevented his initiation. As a Catholic, she insisted at the very least that Henner be confirmed in a Protestant church. The nearest Catholic parish was just too far away. He could have had both, of course, the initiation and confirmation, but his grandmother said that one couldn't serve both God and godless idols. She could be a very stubborn woman. The family agreed that the Free German Youth would have been a drain on the boy's time, and understandably so; there were endless events, meetings, parades, and holiday camps. The farm couldn't afford to be generous with time off.

I didn't join the Free German Youth, either. That was mainly down to David. His fondness for me was conditional: he wasn't interested in anyone who went along with the regime, even though later he fell in love with just such a girl and never said another word to me. By then I didn't care, because I'd already met Johannes.

For both Henner and me there was one serious consequence of not joining the organization: we were barred from taking our school leaving exams and would never be allowed to go to college. For me everything changed when the Wall came down, but for Henner it was all too late.

I don't know whether he would have studied. He was definitely clever enough, but he was torn between the farm and this other, enticing world opened up to him by books. Sometimes he would go into town, and it was there that he first met Lutz and the set painter. With them he could discuss things that nobody at home understood. What might he have done if he'd been seventeen when the Wall came down?

But he doesn't want to pursue the thought. He doesn't like talking about himself. It took ages for me to get this much out of him. He's a funny one, Henner. He knows more about me. The only thing I never tell him is the most important of all.

I now move between the two farms as if it's completely natural. You can become accustomed to anything. The only time I feel a pang of conscience is when Johannes touches my body. I've been saying no recently. He's so easy-going about it, it seems to verge on indifference. This makes me both happy and sad. Could this be true love, because he takes me for what I am?

And Henner? I take him for what he is.

I love Henner. I really love him, even when he's drunk, even when he says nothing, and especially when he touches me. I love him. It's as simple as that.

21

Changes are afoot at the Brendels': Siegfried has grand plans.

We're all sitting around the table and Siegfried is talking more than he has in all the months I've been here. I don't recognize him.

He wants to lease land from the collective and from some people in the village. It needs to be at least thirty hectares, chiefly pasture, a few hectares of arable land and one hectare for growing vegetables. “I'm planning a thorough crop rotation,” he says solemnly. Nobody knows what this means, so he explains that it's important for the soil and helps keep pests to a minimum. Two years of clover, then wheat, barley, peas, rye, followed by another two years of clover. He also talks about the nitrogen content of the soil and natural fertilization.
But it's not going to be exactly like the Demeter farm. He says he can do without the “anthroposophic superstructure,” which he finds too weird. He intends to increase his cattle holding from a dozen to twenty-five. He wants to process the milk yield into cheese and yogurt, so they'll install a cheese kitchen in Frieda's rooms upstairs and a storage room in the basement. None of this is magic, as he keeps saying. The animal sheds will have to be converted and he wants a garage for the vehicles. Then the cows need a proper feeding station and the milking stalls will have to be renovated, too. He's calculated that he can produce all his own feed on the additional land, even the concentrated feed the animals need as a supplement to the hay. He wouldn't need silage, because it's apparently not good for unpasteurized cheese.

Marianne gapes in astonishment but says nothing. Frieda and Alfred find it hard to understand what he's saying. Lukas is staring at his father in admiration, while Johannes doesn't know where to look. He must be worried that he won't be able to get away from here after all.

Now Siegfried is thinking aloud. Rather than selling his calves young, he might fatten them up here on the farm, slaughter them after two to three years, and sell their meat himself. But it might get tight with the hay. “What do you think?” he asks.

Silence.

But Siegfried is unstoppable. It's going to mean a huge amount of work for all of us, and when he says “all” he stares at each of us in the eye. Even me. I don't know what he imagines, and I must have looked pretty stupid, because now he's roaring with laughter and saying, “Maria's on early milking duty, five a.m., and we're going to get her into cheese-making. As I said, none of it's—”

“Magic!” Marianne finishes off Siegfried's sentence and slaps him on the shoulder. He laughs and puts a thick slice of salami in his mouth.

I've never seen him like this, Siegfried. He's absolutely euphoric. And the way he's been going on about it, it wouldn't surprise any of us if everything turned out just as he's described.

The chicken population is already bigger than it was before the fox massacre. Siegfried works like an ox, not wasting a second. Even Johannes and Lukas have to get stuck in. These days Marianne hardly ever gossips with the ladies from the village. Thanks to her, the shop now looks gorgeous. Even Alfred has had to change his lackadaisical approach to work, and it keeps him away from the drink.

I've become a full-fledged member of the family. I helped out with the shop renovation—painting the walls, writing signs, and making extra space for produce from the farm. Soon Frieda will be baking loaves with our own flour, and her bread is superb. They could add vanilla or other ingredients to the yogurt; this was my idea. Siegfried's enthusiasm has infected us all.

Now there are flowerpots on either side of the shop entrance and a sign announcing what's on sale today. If all of Siegfried's plans are realized, the shop will be bursting at the seams in a year's time—or two at the most. But he's already thinking about starting a delivery service. In fact, he's thinking far in advance about everything. Johannes and I find it a bit unsettling because we don't know what we're going to be up to in a year's time, or even where we'll be.

Johannes is taking pictures of everything for posterity, and saying that we need to advertise in town.

There is such enthusiasm here at the Brendels', I'm getting carried away with it, too.

The approach on the farm is far more businesslike than it was a few months ago. And it's harvesttime. Apples, pears, plums and elderberries need to be picked and processed. I opted for the elderberries. The large sprays are heavy with ripe fruits, and I turn them into juice, jelly, and jam, which we'll later sell in the shop. Marianne is incredibly grateful to me, because this is painstaking work. But I've
found a way of combining the berry harvest with reading so I don't get bored.

I do the same at Henner's. We carry bucketfuls of fruit into the house. For the last few years Gabi from the tavern has taken care of this, as Henner would have let everything rot. I store some of the fruits in the cellar; with the rest I make batches of compote and jam. I asked him to pick up some ingredients in the West: vanilla, cinnamon, ginger, and a few others. Everything Gisela told us about. It smells so wonderful in the kitchen that he keeps going out just so that he can come in again. I make us a fruit soup of elderberries, apples, a pinch of cinnamon, and lots of sugar. My hands are jet-black from the berries, which makes Johannes wonder. “It must be at least three days since you cooked up the berries, but your fingers are still black,” he says, and calmly I answer, “It's like a dye, this elderberry juice.”

Things are changing for my mother, too. When I go over there one Saturday morning she's sitting at the table eating plums. She looks fresh, not so thin, and her expression is quite different. She runs her hands through her hair and with an unfamiliar ring to her voice says she's got something to tell me. She twiddles a plum in her hand, and eventually says she wants to move, back to where she came from. I don't reply, but I can feel the blood racing to my head and my temples throbbing.

With tears in her eyes she gives me a rather long-winded explanation about how she's finally realized she doesn't belong here, and she never will. Back home—that's how she puts it—back home there's even a job waiting for her. She wrote to her brother, who still lives there, and he wrote back saying that a new hotel is being built, due to open next year. They're going to need a large number of staff, including accountants, and so many people have been leaving the
area. She's crying, but still, she looks happy when she tells me. Then she asks whether I'd like to go with her. I can't look her in the eye when I answer her, although I'm absolutely sure what I want to do.

No, I say, I can't go with her. This is where my school is, Johannes, and all the people who mean something to me, apart from her, of course. She starts to weep even more, and I feel so miserable about the scant time we've spent together over the past few months. She doesn't try to change my mind; it would be a waste of time. Then I do my best to convince her that I'll get by fine without her, even though I'll miss her horribly. Besides, it's only five hours by train, and I'll come often, every holiday. But the most important thing is that it's going to be wonderful for her to return finally to the place she's always longed to be.

Yes, she says, it's something she's always wished for, and I can't ever remember having seen her eyes sparkle like this.

It won't be happening quickly, of course. The move is planned for next spring; before then she wants to go and have a look around, visit old friends, write her job application, and start preparing everything.

I don't know what to say to her. I'm happy, and yet sad at the same time. I'm worried about not having a refuge anymore, no mother to comfort me when I feel miserable. Who's going to do that now? She continues to talk and she talks quickly, saying much more than usual. She keeps brushing the hair from her face and the tears from her eyes. She needs to talk to the Brendels, she says, there are various things to sort out, and I need a bank account for my child benefit and the money she's going to send me every month until I've finished school. So much to think about!

But I'm not thinking about any of it. I'm just wondering who's going to be there when Henner decides he doesn't want me anymore. I'm on the verge of telling her everything, but she's still rabbiting on, talking about this new opportunity and her friends, many of whom still live there and—who knows?—there might even be a man among
them who'd be right for her. Some of them are divorced now, after all, and back then a fair few of them were after her. “Ah . . . ,” she says, “it would be wonderful to find someone to love again.”

I can understand exactly what she's saying, and I really hope she does find love. Then I look at the clock; just after half past twelve. Only a few minutes ago I was regretting that I hadn't spent more time with my mother, but now I'm desperate to leave her, to see a man who would be just the right age for her. I keep telling her she doesn't have to worry about me, and I stress this point. I'll be in good hands at the Brendels', they'll look after me just as well as she would. As I'm saying this I fetch my bag from under the chair, and when she's finally stopped crying I go. In fact, I run. I take the shortcut through the woods and down the rocks, across the bridge, and along the meadow to the man who's waiting for me.