Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Prologue
Everybody knows that
Only yourself to blame
Not everybody knows that
No matter what you do
Moving up in the world
The really big Tupperware containers
Tough luck
Save me
The truth
The misery contest
Love
Free will
Shame
Misery
The leap
Victims
Higher Ground
Anke Stelling was born in 1971, in Ulm, Germany. She studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. Stelling is a multi-award-winning novelist whose previous works have been much acclaimed. Higher Ground is the first of her novels to be translated into English. Stelling lives and works in Berlin.
Lucy Jones studied German at UEA with W.G. Sebald, and worked as a freelance photographer before becoming a translator. She has lived in Berlin since 1998, where she heads Transfiction, a translators’ collective, and runs the Fiction Canteen reading series. She translates literary fiction, art texts, plays, and journalism from German.
Scribe Publications
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Originally published in German as Schäfchen im Trockenen by Verbrecher Verlag in 2018
First published in English by Scribe 2021
Text copyright © Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2018
Translation copyright © Lucy Jones 2021
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.
9781925849905 (Australian edition)
9781913348014 (UK edition)
9781950354627 (US edition)
9781925938760 (ebook)
Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.
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Listen, Bea, the most important thing and the most awful, and the hardest to understand — but if you somehow manage it, also the most valuable — is this: nothing in life is black and white. I have to get that off my chest at the start. Because I keep forgetting it. And I probably keep forgetting it because what I want most is for things to be black and white, and realising they aren’t is painful. But at the same time, it’s comforting.
How can something painful be comforting? There you go. That’s exactly the kind of ambiguity I mean.
Like when I say: ‘I love you’, for example. Oh, yes, I love you. It’s incredible. You’re incredible! You’re so beautiful, clever, and alive. I want to kiss you and argue with you, and you’re the best thing ever. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and at the same time, I’d rather you didn’t exist, because you being alive is unbearable. I’m so afraid for you, and I’m afraid for me, just because you were born. And my advice to you, quite frankly, is to get away from here as quickly as possible. Run as fast as you can, put some distance between you and me, and grow up fast. I’m toxic for you, see? Families are a hotbed of neuroses, and the ruler of this particular hotbed, our nest, is me. I’m the eagle with claws and a protective, feathery bottom, a screechy voice and a vast wingspan, and I’ll peck out the eyes of anybody who comes too close to you. I’ll circle above you, teach you how to fly, and be a step ahead of you in everything you do. I’ll show you the beauty and dangers of the world, and when you fly away, I’ll wait behind in the nest, indulgent, begrudging, and proud.
You already know what I’m talking about.
You shuddered recently when you came home. ‘Jesus, it stinks in here!’
And you’re right, darling. It stinks. Of us. Of family. So luscious, cosy, and disgusting; so, get the hell out of here! Let me hold you close to my breast. And remember — you have to get away.
Everybody knows that
I’m a very late starter. Or is it the same for everybody? Do we all realise halfway through life how much we’ve failed to understand even though it was staring us in the face?
I always thought I was clever, understood the world, and was a good judge of character. After all, I could read before I started school, could express myself well, and was good at doing sums in my head. I knew I had to steer clear of Frank Häberle and the caretaker, and I could rely on Simmi Sanders and the needlework teacher. But as for the bigger picture, structures and power relations, I didn’t have a clue — that my life might have been different, for example. That must be what they call security. Feeling safe. A happy childhood.
I can still remember the exact moment when I realised: Fuck! If my parents had lived somewhere else, we’d have had a different kitchen floor.
I was in my twenties when this flash of insight came to me, after I’d already moved several times — first out of my parents’ home to Berlin, and then a few times in the city.
This time I’d landed a really fantastic kitchen floor: dark green, 1930s pulped chipboard in excellent condition.
My parents had 1960s West German PVC tiles, thirty by thirty with a streaky grey pattern — which meant that it kept changing direction. There was nothing wrong with that floor: I had grown up on it just fine. And it was easy to clean. You practically had to get stuck to it before my mother said: ‘This could do with a mop’ and then I would shake some scouring powder over it and scrub it with a bare brush, amazed at how black the water was that I poured down the toilet afterwards.
The floor was the floor. And if people had a different floor, it was because they were different people.
The toilet cistern had a black lever on the side. I would push it down to flush away the dirty water. It was never renewed, not even when all kinds of water-saving flush systems became fashionable, or when the
