I take Frank’s letter out of the envelope again and look at the light-green stamp.
Should I have known that Vera would go this far? Why Vera though? This is Frank’s doing, and perhaps she doesn’t even know about it. Perhaps that’s precisely the point: Frank wants to prove for once how he can follow something through, steely and merciless. This is his flat, his contract, and his past, for Christ’s sake!
So while Ingmar was browsing the DSM and Vera was writing twee emails, Frank ordered a stamp from a stationary shop and gave notice on his flat. For once, he didn’t have to put it to the vote.
I want to comfort him.
‘I know you can’t help it, Frank. The number of times you had to give in and just take it, rise above it. Like with your lovely East German PVC, for example! Your washing machine, which still worked like a dream. Your jazz records, which Vera couldn’t stand. Your penchant for spicy Szechuan. You don’t always want to make quiche Lorraine! But the kids don’t like anything else. And your wife’s friends don’t either. Why do you always have to put up with them anyway? And has anybody ever thanked you? I understand, Frank, honestly. I’m happy to be your opportunity to show everybody who wears the trousers.’
That’s what sent him completely up the wall in the end: this gooey, emotional understanding. Who am I, and why do I know him so well?
I wasn’t there when Vera met him. Unlike Friederike and Ingmar, who we all got to watch, Vera got to know Frank without any witnesses.
‘You what?’ said Friederike when Vera spilled the beans six months later. That she was dating the guy she’d edited a video for, a guy who’d studied art but had retrained since and needed videos for his workshop, just a typical guy, you know? And so, none of anybody’s business, right?
‘Excuse me,’ Friederike said. ‘I’m the last one who’ll have anything against him.’
‘She means it doesn’t matter what we think of him,’ I said, and Vera: ‘Thanks for the translation, darling.’
‘And are we going to get a look at him?’ Ellen wanted to know, and we got a look at him over the first quiche Lorraine in the old flat share, although it wasn’t really a flat share anymore because Frank’s flatmate was away teaching in St Gallen half the time.
‘Hmmm,’ we said with our mouths full while getting a look at Frank.
I don’t know. Tell me what you think, Bea. What kind of impression does Frank make?
He’s a nice guy. A really nice guy. But I like nearly everybody when I first meet them.
And I had already had you. And Ellen was pregnant and, anyway, it was time to start a family instead of carrying on with plans of shared lives and flats and work — that was too difficult somehow. So we each, in turn, got pregnant, moved in together as couples, tried to resist a little longer, stayed for a few more months in our old flat shares or lived alone until the logistics got too complicated, resistance seemed silly, and the old plans were stashed away — which wasn’t possible because they hadn’t been concrete enough, and we didn’t have any role models.
We tried for a while. After A-levels, we’d moved to Berlin together, into the building Christian’s father had bought or repossessed after the fall of the Wall, or however else he came to own it: I couldn’t have cared less about the exact details back then.
1993–94; Friedrichshain, Berlin.
We moved into the entire fourth floor of a building in Mühsamstrasse, and in summer we also had use of the attic and rooftop for parties. For a whole summer we sat on the rooftop: Vera, Christian, Ulf, and me. Felt the warmth of the sun-baked bricks of the chimney on our backs, listened to Kurt Cobain on a battery-run Discman, stared down Karl-Marx-Allee at the Berlin TV Tower soaring above the buildings — long before it became ubiquitous as a biscuit cutter or a logo on Babygros.
The other flats were occupied by old tenants who weren’t particularly friendly to us. Now and then, Frau Eisenschmidt knocked on our door at night and asked us to be quiet; she had terrible rings around her eyes that we alone surely couldn’t be responsible for. We tried really hard to be quieter because we liked Frau Eisenschmidt.
It was obvious that our idyll could only last one summer and two winters: ‘The old dump has to be done up!’ we shrieked, aping Christian’s dad’s voice and feeling as if we were victims as much as the old tenants. Except that our future hadn’t yet begun. This was just the start, a warm-up, a foretaste of the real deal of living and working together.
Sounds naïve, doesn’t it, Bea? And it was. How else can I describe it?
Vera wrote in her break-up email that she no longer wanted to be stuck in the past, and Ulf said that I’m the only one still interested in the old stories.
And of course, it might be embarrassing to think how we imagined we were like the squatters in Rigaer Straße even though we were the children of the new owner.
And we might be ashamed to remember that we still played BAP and The Police at parties and sang along loudly to Rio Reiser; or that our best artworks were the birthday presents we designed for our parents. But hey! Is the occasion so important?
Yes, probably.
I should have noticed, paid attention to the details. Who had which motives? Who thought what exactly?
A comedy of errors, 1991: five twenty-somethings from Stuttgart were gearing up to leave home. Off into the big blue yonder! Out into the Great Wide Open! (I
