Stuttgart; (I don’t know exactly when, but I was a child).
Marianne was washing the floor around the toilet bowl, crying. On her knees, without a scrubbing brush. She and Raimund had had an argument, and afterwards, he’d slammed the door to his room. Marianne had no room of her own. She was cleaning the bathroom.
It looked terrible, seeing her kneeling there, crying and wiping those two square metres. I was afraid.
What did it mean? That she was Raimund’s cleaning woman? But that wasn’t true, she didn’t have to do that. That she had no place to go except the bathroom? What about the living room, bedroom, or kitchen?
I would have liked to be her ally, comfort her, help her — but against whom and in what battle exactly?
If this were a novel, it would be the key scene I suppose. Her impotent calls for liberation. But, thank God, the heroine has the chance to save her daughter from a similar fate by daring to tell her the truth: that it is pointless to try and save others from the truth.
To make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs; where people shit, someone needs to clean; where there’s love, people get hurt, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.
You need a hammer to forge your own destiny. If you hit things, they change shape. If you have a fire, you can get burnt. And DIY has its limits.
Shortly before Christmas, December 1982; Stuttgart.
Marianne didn’t complain that she didn’t have her own room. She wanted us kids to have our own rooms — that was important to her. Because she hadn’t had one as a child.
The study belonged to Raimund, and he often slept there too, because he snored. Next to the fold-out sofa, there was a desk with drawers of ‘documents’ — forms, contracts, our children’s ID cards. Marianne never sat at that desk. If she wrote letters, she did so in the bookshop, after closing time.
And anyway, she said she wasn’t good at writing letters; she preferred Janosch postcards with the message already on the front.
Marianne didn’t complain, but I thought it was unfair. And so I decided to give her a room for Christmas.
My favourite chapter in The Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren was the one in which Lisa gets her own room for her seventh birthday. I wanted to re-enact that scene, and so I brought up the old dining table from the cellar, where it had disappeared under a pile of books and suitcases; then I shunted my shelf into the middle of the room as a partition and stuck sheets to the back of it with drawing pins so that you couldn’t see through it.
My surprise could have been ruined when I took Marianne’s chest of drawers from the living room so that some of her things were already in her new room. But luckily, she didn’t notice, because she was so busy at the bookshop in the run-up to Christmas.
I was proud of my idea and played around with the best way to present it to Marianne. Lisa from Noisy Village is first led around blindfolded on a wild goose chase before she is guided into her new room. I couldn’t do this on Christmas Eve with Marianne. I decided to make her a voucher, something like: ‘A room of your own.’ ‘Your room’ — I drew various versions in 3D and joined-up handwriting, and then scorched the edges of the paper to make it look old. While I was drawing, I imagined Marianne’s eyes shining.
On Christmas Eve, Marianne opened my envelope. In our family, each person took their time and turn to open a present. I saw amazement in Marianne’s eyes when she read what was on the voucher, then she looked at me, and I jumped up and led her by the hand. The others followed a bit reluctantly. I opened the door to my room and presented ‘Marianne’s room’. But now I saw it through the others’ eyes, it didn’t look like a room, more like a table behind a shelf, hung with a sheet.
‘That’s sweet!’ said Marianne and hugged me, but by then I’d realised that it was a crazy idea. What was she supposed to do at that table in my room?
I saw my sister’s forced Christmas smile and felt ashamed. I had wanted to trump her present with mine, but it hadn’t worked at all. Even our brother, who was only five, realised this. If anything, I should have moved into his or my sister’s room and made a real sacrifice by giving up my own. But this was just silly—
Marianne politely skirted around this.
At some point around Easter, she suggested clearing out the cellar and while doing that, putting the table back down there. She was discreet and didn’t mention my failure. I loved her for that, I really did. Because her silence spared me further shame.
Wrong, Bea. She might have relieved my shame by keeping quiet, but she could have got rid of it altogether. I was probably craving validation, and hadn’t carried out my idea radically enough, but what kind of project was it in the first place? The size of our flat couldn’t be changed by DIY; it was the flat that Marianne and Raimund could afford, and the fact that every kid had their own room was part of our parents’ cover-up, a plan to ensure we didn’t feel disadvantaged compared to our schoolmates, who not only had their own rooms but savings accounts too, into which their parents paid the child benefit that they didn’t need to spend on a flat big enough for the family.
That Christmas, or that Easter at the
