Resi felt like she was in a film.
Finally, it was real, and she was the one experiencing it.
She sat on a rooftop in the city’s former East sector, as if she was in a promo shot of a band. Unfortunately, she didn’t play an instrument except for the recorder, but it didn’t matter; she got by on irony and picked up some claves. The main thing is that she was herself. No more pretending — Resi was the leading role in her own life.
Resi was Paula from The Legend of Paul and Paula, Julia from You Love Me Too, Tracey from Manhattan, Bernd from Taxi to the Toilet, Nola from She’s Gotta Have It, Corky from Night on Earth, and Catherine from Jules et Jim.
She travelled every day to Kreuzberg and cooked vegetarian lunches for twenty primary school kids in a parent-run after-school centre. Cleaned the place too for twenty marks an hour for those who weren’t into the parent-run part. Transcribed interviews with family members of mentally ill patients for a PhD academic. Sewed the teacher a pair of trousers that actually fitted.
Resi found it difficult to fit those scenes into a life where the sky was the limit. On the sun-baked rooftop with Kurt Cobain playing, it was easy. In the supermarket on Reichenberger Straße where she picked up the ingredients for millet risotto, the escalator went down into a neon-lit basement that stank of bananas.
Resi took her camera so that at least she could capture it on film. But there wasn’t enough light. And the photos didn’t show the smell.
But still. Art was the only way to record and survive the contradictions; to separate references from actual experience, and then to spin it all around again so quickly that you could tell what was what.
And it’s still like that, Bea. Or is again.
Even the world of lunchboxes and to-do lists, bank statements and compost buckets, Advent calendars and emails about lice, has to have another side, and I won’t stop turning and spinning everything around until it shows up — so that I show up in the only life I have.
Sound overly dramatic? I don’t care. I won’t let my style be dictated. I can’t play the piano; I’ll take claves. I owe it to my one and only life not to be intimidated by shame or fear.
I hear Sven putting the kids to bed. I’m ashamed. I’m afraid. I don’t know how to tell him.
‘Sven, listen. This letter came for me.’
He doesn’t look up. He’s sitting on the sofa with his laptop on his knees. Or he’s outside on the balcony, and the traffic is too loud.
‘Sven!’
Now he looks up. Or turns around. I don’t know how it goes from here.
When I told Sven about Ingmar’s diagnosis of me, he laughed and quoted Michel Foucault. Sven isn’t afraid, not of Ingmar, not of being misunderstood or excluded. Sven knows what he knows, and he won’t let anybody take it away; all I want is for the letter and everything that led up to it not to exist. I’m willing to give up everything.
I’m too weak for Sven.
I could phone Ulf.
When Ulf told me Ingmar’s diagnosis, I laughed and waited for Ulf to join in. But he didn’t.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘as far as I know, I wasn’t abused or maltreated as a child; I didn’t have to take care of my parents because they couldn’t, but of course perhaps I did without noticing. So please tell me, Ulf; you’ve known me for such a long time.’
He looked sad and reproachful. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you.’
‘But did you or did you not see Raimund coming out of my room, and me lying bent double on my bed in 1983?’
‘Stop that, Resi, it’s revolting. Just stop being so revolting.’
As if I had thought up this scenario and not Ingmar.
And as a punishment for my revolting thoughts, words, and writing, Frank is sending us to Marzahn, but even that can be interpreted differently.
‘He wants to settle things for good.’
‘Frank wants to release himself from existing ties.’
‘We’ll each have to see for ourselves where we go from here — and perhaps one day, we can be reunited.’
This said in a pastor’s tone. It’s Ulf’s voice I hear saying these sentences, Bea, Ulf’s effort to act the go-between, Ulf’s stooping to my level, like his mother once did, and his great-grandmother in the colonies.
Ulf’s favourite song in the book of hymns was ‘Jesus my Joy’. We didn’t learn it during confirmation lessons, in which the pastor tried to keep us interested with a new set of songs, guitar accompaniment rather than the organ, and the feeling of singing around a campfire.
Ulf preferred the language of the old hymns: Jesus as lamb, God as shepherd, the flock as shelter, and the angels as heavenly hosts.
I didn’t find anything comforting in those words, which must have meant that I wasn’t living close enough to the edge with my winter jacket, braces, recorder, and library card.
Grandma said I had poor posture.
‘Didn’t she do ballet?’ she asked in Ulf’s direction while pinching my back.
I had to giggle. Grandma had a weird way of talking as if I wasn’t there. And the way she touched me: like she was testing goods.
I could have married Ulf, back then when I was eighteen. But it didn’t occur to me. The status it might have conferred didn’t interest me: I was against any kind of status to begin with. Relationships were based on love, and love was only real if it was pure — in other words, free. Untainted by ties, duties, and interests.
‘God, the lamb, my faithful man.’
Ulf and I were pure, free, and equal. I liked his voice. I liked it when he sang.
January 1986; southern Germany.
Ulf was the captain of the handball team, could shoot the hardest and run the fastest; he was also brilliant at every
