Higher Ground

By Anke Stelling and Lucy Jones

A prize-winning novel about class, money, creativity, and motherhood, that ultimately reveals what happens when the hypocrisies we live by are exposed ...

Resi is a writer in her mid-forties, married to Sven, a painter. They live, with their four children, in an apartment building in Berlin, where their lease is controlled by some of their closest friends. Those same friends live communally nearby, in a house they co-own and have built together. Only Resi and Sven, the token artists of their social circle, are renting. As the years have passed, Resi has watched her once-dear friends become more and more ensconced in the comforts and compromises of money, success, and the nuclear family.

After Resi’s latest book openly criticises stereotypical family life and values, she receives a letter of eviction. Incensed by the true natures and hard realities she now sees so clearly, Resi sets out to describe the world as it really is for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Bea. As Berlin, that creative mecca, crumbles under the inexorable march of privatisation and commodification, taking relationships with it, Resi is determined to warn Bea about the lures, traps, and ugly truths that await her.

Written with dark humour and clarifying rage, Anke Stelling’s novel is a ferocious and funny account of motherhood, parenthood, family, and friendship thrust into battle. Lively, rude, and wise, it throws down the gauntlet to those who fail to interrogate who they have become.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Apr 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781925938760

Anke Stelling

Anke Stelling was born in 1971, in Ulm, Germany. She studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. Stelling is a multi-award-winning novelist whose previous works have been much acclaimed. Higher Ground is the first of her novels to be translated into English. Stelling lives and works in Berlin.

Book preview

Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Prologue

Everybody knows that

Only yourself to blame

Not everybody knows that

No matter what you do

Moving up in the world

The really big Tupperware containers

Tough luck

Save me

The truth

The misery contest

Love

Free will

Shame

Misery

The leap

Victims

Higher Ground

Anke Stelling was born in 1971, in Ulm, Germany. She studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. Stelling is a multi-award-winning novelist whose previous works have been much acclaimed. Higher Ground is the first of her novels to be translated into English. Stelling lives and works in Berlin.

Lucy Jones studied German at UEA with W.G. Sebald, and worked as a freelance photographer before becoming a translator. She has lived in Berlin since 1998, where she heads Transfiction, a translators’ collective, and runs the Fiction Canteen reading series. She translates literary fiction, art texts, plays, and journalism from German.

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

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3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USA

Originally published in German as Schäfchen im Trockenen by Verbrecher Verlag in 2018

First published in English by Scribe 2021

Text copyright © Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2018

Translation copyright © Lucy Jones 2021

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

9781925849905 (Australian edition)

9781913348014 (UK edition)

9781950354627 (US edition)

9781925938760 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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Listen, Bea, the most important thing and the most awful, and the hardest to understand — but if you somehow manage it, also the most valuable — is this: nothing in life is black and white. I have to get that off my chest at the start. Because I keep forgetting it. And I probably keep forgetting it because what I want most is for things to be black and white, and realising they aren’t is painful. But at the same time, it’s comforting.

How can something painful be comforting? There you go. That’s exactly the kind of ambiguity I mean.

Like when I say: ‘I love you’, for example. Oh, yes, I love you. It’s incredible. You’re incredible! You’re so beautiful, clever, and alive. I want to kiss you and argue with you, and you’re the best thing ever. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and at the same time, I’d rather you didn’t exist, because you being alive is unbearable. I’m so afraid for you, and I’m afraid for me, just because you were born. And my advice to you, quite frankly, is to get away from here as quickly as possible. Run as fast as you can, put some distance between you and me, and grow up fast. I’m toxic for you, see? Families are a hotbed of neuroses, and the ruler of this particular hotbed, our nest, is me. I’m the eagle with claws and a protective, feathery bottom, a screechy voice and a vast wingspan, and I’ll peck out the eyes of anybody who comes too close to you. I’ll circle above you, teach you how to fly, and be a step ahead of you in everything you do. I’ll show you the beauty and dangers of the world, and when you fly away, I’ll wait behind in the nest, indulgent, begrudging, and proud.

You already know what I’m talking about.

You shuddered recently when you came home. ‘Jesus, it stinks in here!’

And you’re right, darling. It stinks. Of us. Of family. So luscious, cosy, and disgusting; so, get the hell out of here! Let me hold you close to my breast. And remember — you have to get away.

Everybody knows that

I’m a very late starter. Or is it the same for everybody? Do we all realise halfway through life how much we’ve failed to understand even though it was staring us in the face?

I always thought I was clever, understood the world, and was a good judge of character. After all, I could read before I started school, could express myself well, and was good at doing sums in my head. I knew I had to steer clear of Frank Häberle and the caretaker, and I could rely on Simmi Sanders and the needlework teacher. But as for the bigger picture, structures and power relations, I didn’t have a clue — that my life might have been different, for example. That must be what they call security. Feeling safe. A happy childhood.

I can still remember the exact moment when I realised: Fuck! If my parents had lived somewhere else, we’d have had a different kitchen floor.

I was in my twenties when this flash of insight came to me, after I’d already moved several times — first out of my parents’ home to Berlin, and then a few times in the city.

This time I’d landed a really fantastic kitchen floor: dark green, 1930s pulped chipboard in excellent condition.

My parents had 1960s West German PVC tiles, thirty by thirty with a streaky grey pattern — which meant that it kept changing direction. There was nothing wrong with that floor: I had grown up on it just fine. And it was easy to clean. You practically had to get stuck to it before my mother said: ‘This could do with a mop’ and then I would shake some scouring powder over it and scrub it with a bare brush, amazed at how black the water was that I poured down the toilet afterwards.

The floor was the floor. And if people had a different floor, it was because they were different people.

The toilet cistern had a black lever on the side. I would push it down to flush away the dirty water. It was never renewed, not even when all kinds of water-saving flush systems became fashionable, or when the mechanism got so old that it broke, and the lever snapped off from wear and tear. My parents never told the landlord. In all the years that we lived in that flat, I never once saw the landlord. Perhaps that’s why it took me so long to work out that there were flats you rented and flats you owned — because my parents treated their rented flat as if it were their own, calling a plumber if there was no way round it and paying him out of their own pocket. Why? To avoid arguments, I imagine. To pretend they were free.

‘Why are you so angry?’ Renate, a friend of my mother’s, asked me when we were sitting together in a café.

I flinched because I thought I was very composed, sitting there drinking my tea and talking to her about all kinds of things. She, however, only wanted to talk about the book I’d written, in which I accused mothers like mine of saddling their daughters with their dreams of freedom, without giving them a clue how to put them into practice. Renate had taken my book personally. Rightly so, I thought, even though I hadn’t been thinking of her in particular when I was writing it.

‘No generation can avoid being blamed by the next,’ I answered.

‘Well then, good luck with your own children,’ she said, and I nodded.

‘Yes, thanks a lot.’

I am a last-word freak. But so is she.

‘You’re welcome.’ She said it with that facial expression: poorly disguised smugness, fake meekness.

I can do that expression too. Mothers pass it down to their daughters, along with their unfulfilled dreams. In fact, this expression tells of your dreams while your lips stay tightly pursed, and you say nothing. Lips pursed, chin jutting forward slightly — Renate is a pro at that expression. But so am I.

And Bea has started doing it too, and I can’t stand how some things just keep on playing out forever. I’d rather be angry, talk, write, and spit in Renate’s tea, so she really sees for once what being angry means.

‘Do you remember the floor tiles we had in our flat?’ I asked.

‘No, why?’

‘They were ugly. And it didn’t have to be that way! But I had to work that out for myself. You didn’t talk to us.’

‘Of course we did, all the time! Don’t pretend we didn’t.’

‘Not about floor tiles and why we had them.’

Renate raised her eyebrows and gave me a derisive look. That’s another thing she’s good at: making you feel that you’re out of your mind.

She used to do it back when she came over to visit my mother, and I would join them and tell them some story — about school, friends, or the injustice of the world. Renate would raise her eyebrows, along with doubts about what I’d said, pointing out things I’d overlooked, doing her best to unnerve me. And I let her, instead of using her objections as arguing practice.

These days it’s different. These days I argue back. So I told her I was now convinced my mother had thought the floor tiles were ugly too, but had accepted them because they were all she could afford, they just happened to be there, and had nothing to do with her. But that’s where she’d made a mistake; now, the floor stood for her. Well, okay, maybe that was a slight exaggeration: for me, my mother is the woman who stood on that floor.

Renate’s eyebrows stayed raised.

‘Don’t you get it?’ I asked, furious. ‘I should have known what she really wanted, and how we ended up with the things I thought were normal, and what other options there might have been, and why she didn’t take them!’

‘And what has that got to do with you?’

‘Everything! Because I stood on that floor too!

Renate shook her head and ordered more tea. Went to the bathroom, clearly didn’t want to talk about it. But now she has to, since my mother can’t: she died before I realised what I needed to ask her, where I needed to dig deeper because, as I was to find out from Renate, her silence was deliberate, not an oversight. Neither Renate nor my mother wanted to burden their children with anecdotes and old stories, especially not ones about their lack of options, unfavourable starts in life, or lesser evils.

‘We wanted you children to be free to follow your own path.’

‘Yes, exactly,’ I said. ‘Clean slates all round.’

Renate wasn’t in the mood for my irony. She preferred to be the one to tease.

‘Your mother would have obviously preferred terrazzo flooring in a chalet on Lake Geneva.’

Yeah, yeah. Obviously.

List for Bea: pulped chipboard floors are my personal favourite, but they’re ridiculously expensive these days because they’re so niche. Pulped chipboard has become a luxury for enthusiasts only, so forget it.

Floorboards in the kitchen might look nice at first, but they’re prone to grease stains, and all the dirt falls into the gaps. You know the kind from our flat: a floor like that is very hard to clean.

On the other hand, a tiled floor, which is easy to mop, isn’t exactly low maintenance either because you have to mop it every day. It doesn’t absorb or hide anything unless it has a streaky or speckled pattern — and then, Bea, it’s absolutely hideous. Even worse than PVC, in fact, because tiles are cold underfoot, except if you have underfloor heating. Let’s just say that neutral terracotta tiles with underfloor heating are okay if you have a cleaner who takes care of them all the time.

I’ve never had a cleaner. I’ve worked as a cleaner, but that isn’t part of my list about floors — or is it?

Of course it is. Definitely.

I’ve decided to tell you everything. Nothing is natural; everything is constructed and connected; everything helps or harms somebody or other; and anything that’s taken for granted is particularly suspicious.

Bea is fourteen and needs to be taught the facts of life. She has to be initiated and introduced to the world of kitchen floors, the division and distribution of labour, cleaning jobs, labour costs, accommodation costs, basic and additional costs, cost-benefit calculations, and the whole business of setting off and settling up, both financially and emotionally.

Unlike my mother, I won’t presume that she’ll find out everything she needs to know in time; unlike Renate and her friends, I won’t hold back for fear of having a negative influence on my children, of discouraging them or stunting their development. Quite the opposite: I imagine arming them with knowledge and stories, so they don’t go out into the world as naïve, carefree souls, but are, instead, loaded with insights and analytical powers. Munition and weapons are heavy.

Speaking of weapons.

A letter came for me. It’s addressed to me and contains a neatly folded sheet of paper, which is the termination of the lease on our flat. No, that’s wrong. It’s a copy of the termination of the lease on our flat for my attention. Because our flat is really Frank’s; Frank’s name is on the contract, and he’s terminated the lease.

We’ve lived here for four years. When Frank and Vera moved into K23, we took over their flat. A stroke of luck, because ours was already too small with three kids — and by then, we had four. What a stroke of luck that we knew somebody with an eighteen-year-old lease who no longer needed it.

But what comes around goes around.

This letter is a comeuppance for what I’ve done, and that’s why it’s not addressed to Sven, or to us both, just to me. This whole mess is my fault. I put Frank in a position that made him do it. I only have myself to blame for everything that’s happened, and that’s what I’m doing here in my broom cupboard, my two square metres next to our old-style Berlin kitchen, which is really the pantry, which is really the rear section of the loo that it shares a window with. The kids are at school or childcare, and Sven is in his studio, which he’s only temporarily able to lease, until the investor has reworded and resubmitted the rejected planning application. It all comes down to the wording. I stare at the letter.

Dear Sir/Madam it says impersonally, addressing the housing agent, and for me, there’s an extra stamp saying: For Your Attention, and no salutation whatsoever. Just the green rubber stamp. Very official and very strange, because Frank isn’t an official, he’s an old friend. Where on earth did he get that stamp? Couldn’t he have phoned?

No. Frank doesn’t want to talk to me.

‘There’s no talking to you,’ Vera would say.

Vera sent me an email months ago, which said: ‘This is where we part ways.’ Which I hadn’t interpreted as: ‘You better figure out pretty quickly where you’re going to live, because I’ll get Frank on to you next.’

I’d understood that she was terminating our friendship, and didn’t want to see me anymore.

She’d also written ‘I love you’, and it wasn’t until the termination of the lease arrived that I realised there are two ways of saying this: simply and passionately, because it’s true. Or threateningly, to show that action will be taken. Parents talk like this. And gods.

When I held that termination letter in my hands, I realised Vera had been using it in the second instance, because even though I’m not her child, I’m a very, very old friend, a member of her chosen family. In other words, family rules apply to me too.

In Vera’s family, love was always emphasised very strongly, no matter what horrors were going on at the time or followed later. Vera’s declaration of love should have made me suspicious; after all, I had ‘seriously broken the rules’ and therefore ‘shouldn’t be surprised’.

The rule I had broken was: ‘Don’t wash your dirty laundry in public.’ It’s a nice phrase that holds families together. ‘Laundry’ stands for privacy, ‘dirty’ for ‘unpresentable’, and ‘wash’ for spilling the beans, snitching, and telling stories. And when I say that telling stories is my profession, Ulf says: ‘You can’t use that as a smokescreen.’ Because in the end, I chose my profession.

There’s a children’s book by Leo Lionni that defends the profession of the artist. The book was a bestseller forty years ago and is now a classic, but that doesn’t mean its message has sunk in.

In the story, a group of mice is busy collecting food supplies for winter, and it’s hard going. One of them lies in the sun all day and says he’s collecting smells, colours, and impressions. Will he have the right to eat from the supplies when winter comes? But behold: at some point, during the darkest, hungriest period towards the end of winter, the lazy mouse’s moment comes, and he saves the other mice by describing the colours, smells, and tastes out there in the world. ‘You’re a poet,’ say the other mice, and the artist mouse blushes and nods.

I wonder whether Leo was also chased out of his flat because of his story? I bet some of his friends with full-time jobs recognised themselves in the depiction of the humdrum gatherer mice, and his ex-wife said how arrogant he was to recast himself from failed breadwinner to world saviour. But who knows? Perhaps they all laughed, and Leo’s book was a favourite birthday present for friends and relatives; perhaps they were proud, and grateful to him for managing to express their ambivalence and their never-ending struggle with life choices.

In any case, Vera, Friederike, Ulf, Ingmar, and the rest were not grateful to me for finding words for the mess we were in. Quite the opposite, in fact: they even thought ‘mess’ was an unsuitable description. Because everything was fine.

What’s good: to have made it this far. To have made it to higher ground — or, at least, to have got your kids into the school of your choice, which is better than the local school in any number of ways.

Everybody’s still healthy. And cheerful — or, at least, not bad-tempered enough that something has to change. We’re still at the stage when taking out your bad temper on others is enough — on the ones who don’t behave the way you think they should.

What sucks: calling this good life ‘a mess’.

In the darkest moment, instead of telling stories about the sun and the colours, I talked about how dark the moment was. Only some mice found this comforting, whereas others didn’t; and some, who played a role in my story of the darkness, felt betrayed and exploited.

‘Who do you think you are to impose your views on others?’ they asked. ‘And who, may we ask, gave you permission?’

I gave myself permission, the poet mouse.

In the darkness, it’s dark, and in my broom cupboard, it’s lonely.

The statutory period of notice on a lease is three months. We have to leave this place by the end of the year.

Do you even know, Bea, that the lease is in Frank’s name? I’m afraid I’ve left you as much in the dark as my parents did me. I’m afraid you might also take our kitchen floor for granted.

I took a gamble on the flat. And lost. Only myself to blame. What comes around goes around.

No one talks about things, at least not the important things, such as personal hardships and your own part in them. Twenty-five per cent of the whole sum — I wonder what that is in euros?

I can write what I like. The only sound I can hear is the humming of my laptop. The humming is disturbingly loud these days. Who knows, maybe it’ll give up the ghost soon. I need a back-up, a security copy.

Did you know that writing provides security? It’s an insurance, a reassurance, a linchpin for the future. There it is in writing, see? Yes, I remember!

I can’t provide you with a house, Bea, not even a flat; but I can tell you everything I know.

I don’t care if you want to hear it or not. I’m Resi, the narrator of this story and a writer by profession. Sucks for you: why did you choose a mother like me?

Because that’s another widespread myth: that children choose their parents. That before they’re born, they are little souls floating on their way to find the right couple. It’s like the idea that parents get the child they deserve — or need — to become real grown-ups.

Do you like stories like these? I don’t.

But you see, I’ve heard people telling them and seen their effects. That’s another thing I realised too late: the strength