My mother was talking about her childhood. About how she would sometimes stay the night with the teenage daughter of the Dorns, who owned Kantstrasse 19 and also had a painting and decorating business, the office and storeroom of which was in the courtyard. She said it was my grandmother who had got the job, and the flat that went with it, as caretaker, although there was an informal understanding that her husband, my grandfather, would carry out any necessary small repairs.
My grandparents had come to Berlin in 1925, when my mother was only a few months old, and at first they had lived in an allotment hut – a Laube – beside a railway line in Wilmersdorf, before moving to Kantstrasse, in Charlottenburg, in the heart of bourgeois Berlin. “My father had difficulty finding full-time work until he was taken on by the stonemason – ” and here I couldn’t make out what my mother said – Galitzer, Galinsky. “What’s the name?” I said and jumped up to fetch a scrap of paper and make a note of it. My mother was silent for a moment. “If you write that down,” she said, “I’m going to stop talking altogether.” And her eyes turned dark and shiny as brown marbles and she glared at me in the way that would have overawed and scared me even in my forties. Now it didn’t work any more, but I was hurt and angry and I shouted at my mother: “Where is my family? I don’t have a family.” (Now you’re bringing that up again, muttered my mother.) “You never think about the consequences of what you do.” (The consequences for other people, I meant, for myself and my daughter Hanna, I wanted to say.) “Stories have names, stories have names in them,” I repeated childishly, helplessly, as if I were confronted by a recalcitrant Rumpelstiltskin.
*
Later, I come into the kitchen and my mother is bent over the sink, her hands in the basin, and for a moment, from behind, she looks like a child playing in the water and soap bubbles. But a child doesn’t have a hump.
Since her fall my mother has hardly been further than the gate to the churchyard behind the house. She was very lucky, she only broke a couple of vertebrae – smashed and lost a couple of vertebrae – but after the brace was taken off, she slowly, not immediately, became more stooped, shrank, and the hump ballooned out from her shoulders. She was always a small woman, but what must it feel like for someone who always stood so straight, to go out now as a hunchback? How must it feel? Perhaps it’s shame, I suppose one can call it that, as much as greater frailty, which restricts her to the ground floor of the house and the few yards of patio and back garden where she throws down crumbs for the birds.
I remember a picture of my mother. (Recently I suggested that we look through the photograph albums together – “What do you want to do that for?” she snapped, instantly on the brink of a bad mood.) I don’t know when it was taken, perhaps still in Germany around 1950. The photographer has caught her striding down a street, in a winter coat, black plaits pinned up, her head turned a little to the side, looking straight into the camera eye. Maybe times were bad, there were disappointments, but here is someone, the image seems to suggest, confidently facing the future. It’s not true, of course, she was always determinedly walking away from things, from whatever past, parts of the past were a burden to her. And she couldn’t walk away from her mother, my grandmother, which is why she became so resentful of her, I think. My mother thought, that her past, these pasts had or should have nothing to do with now, the present. She always acted decisively, but because she didn’t reflect on who she was or had been, her decisions were invariably wrong ones.
(December 2006)
*
When I went through my mother’s documents and pictures, the photograph was no longer there. She must have destroyed it. Why? I have no idea. There is no one she would have given it to. [And so, like her words, her stories, it exists only in this text.]
Also missing was a group of photos of her father, playing cards, joking with friends, a beer bottle in his hand. They were the only pictures of her father. Of the two teenage class photographs I remembered, one, with a picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall behind the class of girls, was gone. In the remaining photograph the most prominent image behind the pupils is of innocuous Cologne Cathedral. Some of the girls are obviously best friends. My mother gazes out at the camera as if she were in a different picture. It is as if her portrait had been inserted in the group portrait. Self-contained, with her smooth skin and dark eyes, her face framed by jet-black hair [...], my mother looks like an ancient Egyptian who has somehow squeezed in among all these German girls.
(December 2007)
Category >> Stories