Marzahn, Mon Amour

For Doris and Hartmut Eisenschmidt, my parents

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

FRAU GUSE

HERR PAULKE

FRAU BLUMEIER

HERR PIETSCH

THE RUSSIAN WOMAN

FRAU FRENZEL

HERR HÜBNER

ERWIN FRITZSCHE

THE NOLLS

FRITZ

WORK OUTING

FRAU JANUSCH

PEGGY AND MIRKO ENGELMANN

WRITERS’ PUBESCENT DAUGHTERS

GERLINDE BONKAT

HERR AND FRAU HUTH

SUBSCRIBE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

COPYRIGHT

The middle years, when you’re neither young nor old, are fuzzy years. You can no longer see the shore you started from, but you can’t yet get a clear enough view of the shore you’re heading for. You spend these years thrashing about in the middle of a big lake, out of breath, flagging from the tedium of swimming. You pause, at a loss, and turn around in circles, again and again. Fear sets in, the fear of sinking halfway, without a sound, without a cause.

I was forty-four years old when I reached the middle of the big lake. My life had grown stale: my offspring had flown the nest, my other half was ill and my writing, which had kept me busy until then, was more than a little iffy. I was carrying something bitter within me, completing the invisibility that befalls women over forty. I didn’t want to be seen, but nor did I want to see. I’d had it with people, the looks on their faces and their well-meant advice. I sank to the bottom.

On 2 March 2015, a few days after my forty-fifth birthday, I packed some clothes, shoes, towels and a fitted sheet into a large bag and took it across Berlin, from Friedrichshain to Charlottenburg. I was afraid I might bump into my literary agent when I came out of the S-Bahn station, as her office was nearby. Recently, she’d passed on nothing but rejections: my novella had been turned down by twenty publishers. I took a few detours and tiptoed around a few corners, but it was much too early for her to be out. When I reached the house at number 6, there were other women standing by the entrance, also with big bags or wheeled cases. Women like me, no younger, no slimmer. Hesitantly, I asked if I was in the right place. They nodded. We smiled weakly: yes, me too, trying out something new again, who knows if it’s the right move? I smoked a cigarette with a careworn doctor’s receptionist from Spandau, and then it was time to go inside. The lift could only hold two people. We all took the stairs; each floor led to another. By the top floor, the legion of women were panting under the weight of their baggage. Another woman stood in the doorway, tall and thin, dressed in white.

‘Gitta,’ she introduced herself without smiling, giving each of us her scrawny hand. ‘Get changed and spread your sheets over the chairs. Make sure you cover the armrests.’

We crowded into the changing corner and unpacked our things, careful not to take up too much space. We were ashamed of our ageing bodies as we cast off our dark trousers for white ones. We stretched our sheets over the chairs and clumsily lined up. We were desperate not to make a mistake. We were back in the classroom: we had signed up for the Chiropody A course at a school for healthcare and beauty professionals which pretentiously called itself an academy. Gitta was our teacher.

We made a lot of mistakes. We forgot to examine each other’s feet, we forgot the towels for our laps, we forgot the cushions for behind the knees. We mixed up our claw toes and our hammer toes, our cuticle nippers and our nail clippers, our disinfecting solution and our alcohol. We were sloppy with the hygiene procedures. We wasted our cuticle softener, put our scalpels together wrong, unable to fit the blades to the handles properly. We were too careful, too brutal, too thorough, too hasty, too slow, too quick. We hurt each other. Sometimes someone would start bleeding and would need to be patched up. We forgave each other for everything. When we couldn’t answer Gitta’s questions, we hummed and hawed ineptly, like losers, fakes and idiots. Her sharp voice made our necks tense up.

At break times we went downstairs, stood in front of number 6, ate our sandwiches and smoked.

One of the women was a blonde from Eastern Europe who wore sweaters interwoven with gold. She had the loveliest uniform out of all of us, a tunic with a cinched waist and diagonally arranged buttons. Her mascaraed eyelashes curled upwards and her contact lenses gave her blue eyes a shimmering sparkle. Glamour Puss had come here for a break from the adolescent brood eating her out of house and home, and maybe also because of her own worn-out feet. She’d gone through three pregnancies in her high heels. She originally came from Georgia but had been living in a town in the Erzgebirge Mountains for years. Every morning she spent three hours on the train to Berlin, then three hours getting back in the evenings. Anything was better than sitting around at home, she said, and now her son was fifteen she could leave the local man she’d married. When I told her how good her German was, she said she used to work as a translator. Another time she showed us her tongue, which had a piece missing ‘from tongue cancer’.

The careworn doctor’s receptionist from Spandau worked full-time and had taken time off to complete the course. Her fourteen-year-old son was suffering from a rare, incurable illness that made him more and more immobile the older and bigger he got. Soon she would no longer be able to carry him, and the painkillers she took for her back had already ceased to have any effect. In two years, her boss would be retiring and she wanted to be self-employed by then. Whether she would have her own practice or stay at home with her son remained to be seen.

Then came the patients: mostly elderly people who were giving up three hours of their day to get their feet looked after for free by unskilled novices. I saw beads of sweat on Glamour Puss’s forehead, her hair in a net, her eyes behind protective goggles, the lower half of her face behind her white mask, as if she was going into battle. I saw the blade tremble in the careworn receptionist’s gloved hand, before she hacked at a patient’s heel until it bled. I saw Glamour Puss’s blue eyes water from the smell of a severe fungal nail infection. We hunched over and tensed up, Gitta’s sharp eye always over our shoulders, her sharp finger at our weak points and her sharp criticism in our ears, which glowed red with trepidation.

None of us had taken a direct path; all of us were on the rebound from somewhere, stranded or bogged down. We knew what failure felt like. We had arrived humble, modest and subdued, ready to forget our previous lives, erase our accomplishments and start again with clean slates. We had reached a low point, at people’s feet, and even there we were failing. Gitta didn’t make a note of our names. We would disappear; the next lot would come, women like us, middle-aged mothers, eager and obedient, nameless players in a nameless midfield, relegated to the footnotes of our own lives.

At home I learned the names of the twenty-six bones in the foot by heart and studied nail structure, foot deformities and the causes and symptoms of thrombosis. I memorized the materials that burr heads come in, the effects of herbal medicines, types of skin cancer, the difference between viruses, bacteria and fungal spores, the specific problems affecting diabetic feet and terminology like ‘fissures’, ‘rhagades’ and ‘varicose veins’. My partner would test me in the evenings as we lay in bed, buried under paper covered in notes and drawings of feet.

We took our written theory test in the attic of number 6. A doctor came to the academy to mark the practical test. We all passed – Glamour Puss on her second attempt. We were relieved and even proud. Gitta presented us with certificates and shook hands with each of us. She smiled. She had been a good teacher. After a coffee near Charlottenburg S-Bahn station, we went our separate ways, parting with a wistful sadness. I don’t know what became of the other women.

When you’ve become invisible you can do terrible things, wonderful things, peculiar things. No one sees you doing them. At first, I didn’t tell anyone about my decision to retrain. But afterwards, when I was swanning around with my certificate, I came up against revulsion, incomprehension and, the hardest to bear, sympathy. From writer to chiropodist – what a spectacular comedown. I had forgotten how much people, the looks on their faces and their well-meant advice, got on my nerves.

I wasn’t going to wait around for them. I had two strong hands that could do a worthwhile job. It wouldn’t be an easy start, but it would be glorious, like all beginnings.

You’re at an age when your child’s youth takes you back to your own, but your partner’s illness has turned you from lover into carer. Surfacing in the middle of the big lake and swimming on, there’s plenty you can see, plenty you are familiar with and even more you can imagine. You’re at an age when, if you’re at the start of an adventure, thoughts of how it will end are already creeping in on the quiet. My middle years, working as a chiropodist in Marzahn, will have been good years.

FRAU GUSE

I take the M6 tram east, fourteen stops to the outskirts of Berlin. The journey lasts twenty-one minutes. I get off and immediately register the difference in temperature. As always, the weather here in Marzahn, once the biggest expanse of plattenbau prefab tower blocks in the former East Germany, seems more intense than in the centre. The seasons have more of a smell about them.

Our beauty salon is less than two minutes’ walk from the tram stop. We have our ground-floor location to thank for so many of our clients with crutches, walking frames and wheelchairs. I look up, struck as always by the sense of being dwarfed by the eighteen storeys bearing down on the salon. Here, at the foot of this enormous building, is where I do my chiropody.

I change into my white work clothes, take my sandwiches to the kitchen, make myself a coffee, get my room ready and check the diary to see if anyone has cancelled or booked a last-minute appointment.

And then the doorbell rings. Quarter to ten. I hurry to the entrance, turn the sign from ‘Closed’ (red)