Monika Helfer: Die Bagage.

Riffraff.
Novel.
Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2020.

Monika Helfer

Excerpt

Here take the colored pencils, draw a small house, a creek a bit below the house, a well, but don’t draw a sun, the house is in the shade! Behind it the hill, like an upright stone. In front of the house an upright woman; she’s hanging laundry. The clothesline sags, knotted between two cherry trees, one on the right of the porch towards the front door, the other on the left. Now the woman pins a romper suit and a small cardigan, that means she has kids. She often washes her children’s and husband’s things, and her things, she even owns a particularly lovely white blouse. She wants her family to be as clean as the families in the city. She has lots of white clothes, which nicely accentuate her dark hair and dark eyes and the dark eyes of her husband. The others, down in the village, seldom wear white, some not even on Sundays. She has a serious face, deep eyes. Draw the eyes with the charcoal pencil! Her hair is combed back tightly; it’s black with some brown mixed in because the tip of the charcoal pencil has broken off. The good colored pencils don’t shine and are expensive. Reality blows into the picture, cold and without mercy, even the soap is in short supply. The family is poor, they only have two cows, one goat. Five children. The husband, as black-haired as the wife but with hair polished shiny, is handsome, twice as handsome as the others. A narrow face, but devoid of joy it seems. The wife, barely thirty, knows that men like her, there’s not a single one whose desire she doubts. When her husband pulls her towards him, he feels her breasts and belly, he said it just like that once, he thinks he’s going to black out and lets himself drop onto the bed in exhaustion. She undresses hastily, lies down next to him and knows he’s only pretending to sleep, he doesn’t want to fail. That’s why she’s left the thin undershirt on. So that everything isn’t obvious right away. She looks through the open window at the night sky. Not even the moon comes out from behind the mountain. Every once in a while, it passes closely – then she can spot the glimmer above the ridge. Sometimes one of the kids screams, then another, she knows which one. But she doesn’t manage to get up, she’s not tired, she thinks, I’m just lazy. How old will I live to be, she wonders?
The girl, two years old, appears in front of the bed, in the middle of the night. It’s Margarethe. Grete. She’s shivering.
"Mama," she whispers.
The mother whispers back: "Come here!"
The little girl crawls to her under the covers. The father is not supposed to know. The girl does not lie down between the parents, but on the edge of the bed. She needs to be held tightly so she doesn’t fall off, fall down to the ground, because the bed is high.

The girl was my mother, Margarethe, a shy one, who ducked and stared at her mother’s skirt every time she ran into her father. He was, on the whole, affectionate with the other four children, and he would also be affectionate with the two who were born later. It was only this child he loathed, Margarethe, who would become my mother. Because he thought she wasn’t his child. He had no anger towards her, no rage; he just detested her, she disgusted him, as if she carried the scent of the intruder her whole life long. He never hit her. The others sometimes. But never Grete. He didn’t even want to touch her to hit her. He behaved as if she wasn’t there. Until the day he died, he never spoke a word to her. And she wasn’t conscious of him ever having looked at her. That’s what my mother told me when I was only eight. My grandfather wanted nothing to do with the shy one. This prompted my grandmother to cuddle the shy one more than the other children, and also to like her more than the others. Maria was the name of my beautiful grandmother, who would’ve been pursued by all the men if they hadn’t been afraid of her husband.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. This story starts before my mother was even born. The story starts before she was even conceived. It starts on an afternoon when Maria was pinning clothes on the line. It was early September, 1914. She saw the postman down by the road. She could see him from quite far away.

(P. 7-9)

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