The Dance by the Canal Read online

  Bottles of cognac orbited above me. The doctors said a lot of words, none belonging to me.

  Because they couldn’t find anyone else, Frau Popiol remained my violin teacher. Father thought it over for many hours and came to the conclusion that Frau Popiol was strict enough, respectable enough and passionate enough to teach me the violin. But Kurt, who Father saw as a distraction, had to sit in the kitchen from then on. Mother fed him cake.

  I was so unmusical that Frau Popiol gave up on me after a year of futile effort. In the final lesson I played ‘Hänschen klein’ almost faultlessly, and then the bow fell out of my hand. That’s it. Frau Popiol tore the red flames from her head. Under her wig: gleaming white skin. The flames lay next to the violin bow. That’s it. I closed my eyes and awaited my punishment.

  – Come, Frau Popiol said.

  – Vi-o-lin, I said.

  Frau Popiol placed her hands over my closed eyes. I could smell resin, sheet music. The hands stroked down my nose and across my mouth, tenderly and awkwardly and slowly and endlessly. Frau Popiol’s fingers opened my lips; sticky with fear, my lips offered resistance. The fingers pressed my upper and lower jaws apart. The violin teacher’s fingers pressed through my gappy teeth.

  – Come.

  – Where?

  – Wherever you want.

  I swallowed, bit down. Ungifted. That’s it. Frau Popiol laughed. Now my eyes were open. I stared at the bald head with fascination.

  – Come!

  A strange tongue on mine, a forceful strange tongue, thrusting and churning between my teeth, inside my littlegirl mouth, wherever you want, Frau Popiol’s tongue didn’t stop, Frau Popiol’s fingers didn’t stop, the blue and white crocheted dress, I wanted to say something, sing something, unmusical, but you were paid well, come! Frau Popiol lifted me into the air. She was a strong, stunningly beautiful woman, I floated in her arms, flew from the distress, towards the bliss. That evening I told my parents about this bliss.

  The violin was shut away in its case. The case was put away in the attic.

  – Frau Popiol is sick, I heard Father say.

  Varicose veins, I thought to myself. Father will make her better.

  – No, once and for all, no.

  I never had to have a violin lesson ever again. I started school that September.

  *

  I’ve filled the front and back of the packing paper. Strange how easily the words come to me. Have to maintain the flow. I just have to avoid falling down that last hole. That would mean the end of freedom. But where I’m at now, I’m nowhere near the end. Earned myself a meal. Can’t leave the bridge. If the tramps come it’s all over. But why would they come today of all days when they have the Sunday Bridge and the Green Bridge? My bundle of papers and my bag of things all tied together, I go to eat. There’s fish in mustard sauce at the shelter, once a gymnasium named after Aviator Cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn. Excellent. And I receive a new blanket. The clothing steward remarks:

  – Maybe you’d like to give a job or an apartment a go, Fräulein Haßlau?

  – Von Haßlau, I correct her.

  A pitying shake of the head. But I know who I am. Well fed. Summer. Once-in-a-century heat. Leibnitz is dozing. Most of the factories have closed down, most people are at home or who knows where. Maybe on holiday in the Canary Islands… The sun blinds me. I could go to Schiller Park and wander by the neatly trimmed bushes like a tourist. Or sleep on a smooth, white marble bench. Or wash my hands.

  Schiller Park. At the fountain. Goldfish snapping at my fingers. My reflection shows straggly black hair. I should wash it. Tomorrow evening at the shelter.

  You’re not going to get me! I pull my fingers out of the fountain. They didn’t catch me, not a chance. At the park’s exit I find two cone-shaped paper bags, one with bright flecks of cherry juice on the edge, the other clean, smooth, as if new. Tearing them apart makes two semicircular sheets of paper, enough to keep writing.

  Full and clean, I make my way back to my spot under the bridge. The coast is clear. All mine. The canal is still flowing rust red. The only brewery still open has discharged its waste water into it, hop brew mixes with colour, a cocktail for rats. I indulge myself in a little nap on the new blanket from the shelter before I continue writing. I wake up just as a drip falls from the largest stalactite and lands on my forehead.

  I was called Gabriela von Haßlau.

  Thirty first-year pupils laughed. Schneider-Dagmar, Grumert-Thomas, Gallwitz-Jutta and whatever their names were all laughed about something that Father and Mother never laughed about; about something that everyone at Father’s clinic marvelled at in awe and pronounced with particular care: fffon Haßlau.

  – Noble Anhaltinian stock, said Chief Medical Officer Ernst von Haßlau.

  – A bourgeois relic, said our teacher Fräulein Brinkmann.

  Back home I shrieked:

  – They laugh about von, they laugh at me, I don’t want to go to school, I don’t want to be called von, no one else is called von, we’re a soshalist school, we—

  – So-cial-ist, Father corrected. Repeat after me.

  I was stubborn. Didn’t want von. Father summoned Fräulein Brinkmann and had words with her. The next day the class didn’t say a word when Fräulein Brinkmann called out:

  – Gabriela von Haßlau!

  Even at that age I knew that she would leave me alone from then on because of Father. He was a doctor, a chief medical officer. The other children’s parents were machinists, textile workers, clerks. Fräulein Brinkmann reminded me of a chicken: gaunt, featherless, with a saggy neck. Her voice seemed to come out of her ears, her mouth barely made a sound. She cheeped the multiplication tables and the alphabet, she cheeped while up against thirty-one rowdy children, her throat getting plumper, her body getting thinner. One day she couldn’t say another thing and crumpled into her chair.

  At night I dreamed of Frau Popiol. In my dreams she was our teacher. Anyone who managed to solve a difficult maths problem would be crowned by her red wig. I was ungifted and never received the wig, but there was nothing I wanted more than to possess those flames. So I sold my violin to Kurt in exchange for a magic powder that would make me the best at maths in the whole school. I solved every problem, but Frau Popiol kept her wig. I cried and came up with more amazing solutions. But Frau Popiol shook her bare head.

  – I’m sick, Gabriela, you know that.

  – But the others…

  – Yes, the others will soon lose all of their hair too, they need my help.

  – Are they all sick?

  – Yes, Gabriela. Frau Popiol laughed, cackled, and suddenly she looked like Fräulein Brinkmann.

  – You made the children sick! I screamed.

  – It was your father, said Frau Popiol.

  I woke up, got out of bed and tottered into the living room. The light was still on. Father was sitting in his huge armchair drinking cognac, still wearing his suit. He’d already emptied half the bottle; long, thin shards of glass and cigarette ash lay all over the parquet floor. Father stood up unsteadily and shooed me out of the room.

  – Get out of here.

  – I had a bad dream.

  – Get in bed with your mother.

  I ran into the bedroom and lay beside Mother. In the morning, Father was asleep in his armchair, still wearing his suit. He’d overslept. An ambulance picked him up and took him to work. Mother poured the Napoléon cognac down the toilet. The whole bathroom smelled of it. She swept up the shards and the ash. She was a calm and placid woman; only when she swept and cleaned did a furious energy come over her. She would thrust the scrubbing brush into every corner, water splashing. She would press thick brown rolls of beeswax into the linoleum, rubbing them in with violent, circular motions, scooting around on her knees. The iron-weighted floor scrubber clicked and clacked, Mother yanking it this way and that, ten times over the same place, until the floor gleamed. She went over the parquet with the duster mop, and each time she shook it out of the window and dus
t clouded up she would groan:

  – This filth, this perpetual filth!

  On the windows she used Klarofix, blue ammonium chloride; for the toilet and washbasin Ata scouring powder; all day long she scrubbed and polished, pulling muscles in her knees and back. Father wanted to employ a cleaner, but apparently they didn’t exist in socialist Leibnitz. So he brought home three nursing students. They buzzed around the villa with a broom and bucket, then received ten marks each. They were sworn to secrecy and told to return to the Herr Doktor’s once a week. Soon certain items of jewellery went missing, along with imported soap and perfume. On International Women’s Day I gave my mother an upholstered knee cushion that was covered with wax cloth.

  I didn’t get on at school. I couldn’t figure out what they wanted from me. Fräulein Brinkmann, the chicken, sent me to sleep. I was always tired, whereas the other children babbled and clowned around and pelted Fräulein Brinkmann with staples.

  – I expected more from a doctor’s daughter, Fraulein Brinkmann said to me with a sad, helpless look.

  – You’re far more intelligent than all the others.

  Or, to be more precise, there was a big red ‘I’ for ‘Intelligentsia’ next to my name in the register as a result of my father’s occupation. Next to all the others were ‘L’ for ‘Labourer’ or ‘C’ for ‘Clerk’. I could tell that Fräulein Brinkmann was alluding to this ‘I’ in an attempt to get through to me. She was looking for an ally.

  – I can play the violin, I told her.

  Fräulein Brinkmann smiled.

  – Well, there you go. Then why don’t you pay attention in class?

  – Frau Popiol was better.

  – And who is Frau Popiol!

  – My teacher.

  – I am your teacher.

  I avoided Fräulein Brinkmann. I knew that I had to do something to not stand out. The ‘I’ was a sign in the register. From then on I did my fair share of staple throwing and chair rocking. My fellow pupils cheered me on and accepted me as one of them: Ha, the doctor’s kid wants to play too!

  Joining in was fun. It was a world away from playing hopscotch in the garden – a world full of rowdiness and thumping opened up to me, boisterous fun that could be triggered by a despairing teacher. The Good German of my parents was far behind me and I wallowed in the other children’s expressions. Most importantly of all, it brought me into the company of Katka Lorenz. Katka, the smallest, fattest and dirtiest among the girls in 1a. She had eight siblings, her mother worked doing laundry, and Katka didn’t know her father. After school Katka took me back to her flat on Leninstraße: into a cradle of filth and slovenliness. I held my breath, went giddy from the stench and the allure of the place. Trousers, skirts, coats, underwear for ten people hanging, lying around, knotted together; mattresses and duvets an indistinguishable jumble; apples, a loaf of bread, beer bottles, baby rompers: a heady spell.

  Katka showed me how to put on her big sister’s clothes. She was an angel. Katka told me how her big sister would hit her and how she, Katka, would then kick her little brother. Katka showed me how to steal gobstoppers from the cooperative store. Katka was musical. She danced without music, she was always dancing, waltzed her tiny, dirty body, revolved it through chaos and squalor; ate entire slabs of Zetti chocolate or cooked a whole pan of oats with cocoa. She would consume the porridge all by herself; I never managed to get down anything that she offered me. In the afternoon her brothers and sisters would come home from school and work.

  – Haven’t had a fuck today, one older brother said to the other older brother, who then said:

  – Do it with Katka’s new friend, then.

  I would run out of Katka’s flat. Only to return. Every day after school, I was drawn to her place. I no longer held my breath, rummaged happily through the filthy clothes, ate porridge with cocoa as a mark of friendship. I told my parents that the school day had been extended and that this was the reason I was coming home late. My parents believed it for two whole months, then my mother caught me walking arm in arm with Katka. We’d stolen pink and white peppermint sticks – sweet, cheap fondant of the sort I was never allowed at home because it was common. In Katka’s company I stuffed myself with big sticks of this delicacy, smearing my face and school dress with it.

  My mother no longer allowed me to see Katka Lorenz. She picked me up from school every day and kept an eye out for Katka to make sure she wasn’t anywhere near our villa. I got worse at school. In danger of having to retake the year, according to Fräulein Brinkmann.

  Father hauled me off to a psychologist.

  – Childish disobedience, apart from that she’s normal. An intelligent child.

  – What’s the matter with you, Ehlchen?

  Father drank cognac, and when Napoléon was conquered he attacked the Wacholder gin or the Polish vodka. Mother swept up dirt and glass shards from the parquet. She soon forgot all about the question of what was wrong with me, my shame was on the inside after all – on the outside I was the doctor’s little daughter with the big ‘I’ in the register.

  Then came the parties. Our villa, a unique building within the industrial city of Leibnitz, was surely destined for them – and what with Father being the most eminent vascular surgeon, he had, after all, social duties to perform. The drunken, merry surgical team suggested to him: Throw a party, Doktor von Haßlau! It was a way out of the deathly silence, the state of meaninglessness, that Father fell into every night when he came back from the clinic. A condition that settled over him like a fog. Mother would open the door for him and the first fog would overwhelm him. Father would go into the kitchen and have a cognac or two, Mother would try to bat away the fog with sentences like: How was it at the clinic today? Or: There’s roulade for dinner, just the way you like it, Ernst.

  When I came home from school Father would be in his chair, while the corners of Mother’s mouth would be twitching.

  – He never wants to eat, she would say.

  I’d eat two roulades for Father, even though I’d already be feeling sick from the fondant or sherbet that Katka brought to school and slipped to me under the exercise books.

  It was when the parties started that I began to bunk off school with Katka.

  – When you end up doing laundry, Katka said, you’ll make more money than if you study at university anyway.

  I’d remember this insight every time we made it back to school for the last lesson of the day and Mother would pick me up as if nothing had happened. We kept Fräulein Brinkmann off our backs with excuses, and threatened to shoot sharp staples at her if she squealed on us. At break time I would escape from her well-meaning grasp. It won me respect from the class.

  It was Mother who insisted on the parties. She had no other desire than to rescue her spouse from his fog and to see him happy and distinguished again. She was somebody too, after all, and it had started so well in 1946, when she gave up her job as a radiographer for him, for him and the villa and this life. Mother organized the party and wrote invitations to Father’s colleagues and our relatives. Father tore up the second lot of cards.

  – No family, you know what they’re like.

  Uncle Schorsch’s death came up in conversation. Father called Uncle Schorsch a fool, even though he hated the Russians too; they were the reason for his sadness, his fog… I was sent out of the room.

  – Go and play in the garden, Ehlchen, there’s going to be a party tonight.

  Skipping school for the first couple of lessons was the best. Katka and I preferred it. We had discovered our new adventure: the canal. It flowed red, blue, grey or ochre through the city, swallowed the effluents from breweries, textile companies and machine manufacturers, and the outflow from the wool-dyeing factory. There was a smell of hops and malt hovering over it and at the bottom slimy plaits of grey algae drifted by. Katka knew a place under the Green Bridge for forbidden things and other thrills. Goldenrod and something that looked like giant rhubarb grew on the embankment. On the left bank, on the upwar
ds slope, stood a little summer house, so dilapidated and overgrown by moss that we could have knocked it down with a few blows of our sticks.

  – A nutcase lives there, said Katka.

  In fact, as we waded into our adventure, the curtains of the little moss house twitched. I was frightened, but being with Katka spurred me on. Katka danced and stripped naked on the edge of the bank. She told me to do the same. I was embarrassed and worried that the filth in the canal would irritate my skin, but Katka told me about the elves who became more and more beautiful the longer they danced. Katka needed it of course, she danced and sang, and the swells of her body rose and sank in rhythm with Let’s twist agaiiiin and Rock rock rock ’n’ roll. We would leap around naked on the banks of the canal whenever it was warm, laughing and fooling about. We put sprigs of goldenrod in our hair, ate the sour shoots of the canal rhubarb, got the runs, would shit ourselves empty, and screech whenever anyone looked down at us from the bridge. Eventually the police found out. One morning, two officers were standing at the railings of the Green Bridge. We spotted them straight away, turned off before the bridge and crossed to the other side of the street.

  – Stop! the policemen shouted. Stay where you are!

  We set off running, our satchels bouncing up and down on our backs, sandwiches and notebooks being thrown about inside. We knew it was all over, our adventure betrayed; and I knew there would be a terrible punishment, a terribly painful punishment, because the red ‘I’ in the register was my mark, while Katka had only a harmless thin pencil ‘L’ and didn’t need to fear any repercussions. We raced down the street, the VoPo officers on our tails. We heard them panting and Katka, while still running, said we should double back. So we slowed down suddenly, turned on our heels and split up, heading back in the direction of the canal, up the grassy slope. I was overwhelmed by an excruciating stitch. Katka was too fat to keep going.

  It was then that the door of the moss house opened and we were beckoned inside. I throbbed with fear right to the tips of my braids. Even my brave Katka bit her lip.