The Dance by the Canal

by Kerstin Hensel

  MEIKE ZIERVOGEL PEIRENE PRESS

  When I pass homeless women, I look into their faces and wonder: why her and not me? I sense that maybe our differences are not as great as I would like to believe. Dance by the Canal tells the story of a woman who fails to find her place in society – neither in the communist GDR nor in the capitalist West. Her refusal to conform to the patriarchal structures of both societies forces her into ever-increasing isolation. This book will make you think.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dance by the Canal

  About the Author and Translator

  Copyright

  Now that I’m sitting down here by the left pillar of the bridge with this large, smooth sheet of packing paper at my feet, I feel joy for the first time in years. It’s no coincidence that fate has brought me this paper – I’ve been chosen to write. I’ve been put on this earth for no other purpose than to tell the story of my life, and today I will begin.

  Up on the bridge it’s hot, a once-in-a-century July day. Air shimmers over the asphalt. Squinting up, I see silver and grey, car tyres, women’s legs, men’s legs, children, dogs. Up on the bridge life is sweating, the city is baking. Here, where I’m sitting, it’s cool. The canal drifts serenely by. It’s so hot that from time to time the water stops flowing, or changes direction, or becomes a thick mush. But it’s cool under my bridge. I squat against the damp stone wall, my hair sticking to the back of my neck, water from the bridge soaking into my shirt. Dripstones and moss lurk in the dark vaults above me. Drops quiver on the tips of stalactites and don’t fall for a long, long time, and then they splash onto the stony embankment, or onto my knees. Sometimes it can take days for a drop to fall from the deck of the bridge. The bridge is always damp, water is constantly seeping from its old stones. It’s a good thing that I don’t have to sweat like the people up in the city, it’s a good thing that I’m not radiating heat like a car tyre, or having to rush to work, or hurry home thirsty.

  I found a big sheet of blue packing paper and stole a dozen wooden pencils. It’s pleasantly shady here, on this once-in-a-century July day in 1994 in the city of Leibnitz, where I’ll begin to write the story of my life. A task I once hated and was coerced into doing has now become a need.

  This desire to write has come from sitting under my bridge, the last free bridge in Leibnitz, the bridge I conquered. It’s a desire that comes from having a place of my own. I make myself comfortable. My old jeans are protected by the three sheets of honeycomb board I’m sitting on. I don’t have anything else, and this is as good a place as any to begin.

  I’m writing under my real name: Gabriela von Haßlau. They used to call me Binka when they thought I was being stupid or silly, and Ehlchen when I was being a good girl. Gabriela only when they hated me. My earliest memory is of a violin case. I got it for my fifth birthday. Brown leather on the outside, green silk on the inside. I opened it and looked at the instrument and I thought it was an animal, an enchanted dachshund. I began to wail and my father pulled my braids.

  – It’s a violin!

  Uncle Schorsch was visiting us from Saxony. He laughed.

  – What a silly little Binka your daughter is!

  Mother blushed. Father chanted in my face:

  – Repeat after me! Vi-o-lin! Vi-o-lin!

  I cried over the bewitched dachshund. Mother took it out of its case and placed it in my hands.

  – Careful! said Father, and the violin bow stroked the dachshund’s fur, which Father called strings.

  – Repeat after me! Str-ings! he said.

  As the dachshund whimpered, I cried like never before. Uncle Schorsch roared with laughter and sloshed cognac over his shirt.

  – Let Ernst be earnest! Mother pleaded, trying to hush her brother.

  Uncle Schorsch snorted behind his handkerchief.

  On the evening of my fifth birthday, I held the violin in my left hand and the bow in my right. I scratched away and the violin made the sound of a cat screeching.

  – F sharp! Father commanded, and: D sharp!

  I curtsied, just like I’d been taught to. There was goose liver pâté on the table and Mozart on the record player. The villa rang out with music and smelled of birthdays. Uncle Schorsch was laughing and spilling whatever he could find on the dinner table down his shirt: cognac and Russian sparkling wine, pâté and salad. I learned to tell the difference between a dachshund and a violin. My father was a vascular surgeon. And even though it was my birthday, he still talked about varicosis. It was his favourite word, and I listened carefully whenever he pronounced it. I loved this word because I never had to repeat it. Va-ri-co-sis! was never asked of me.

  It was my father’s word. Mine were words like violin, pâté, Mozart. Uncle Schorsch’s words were mine too: beddy-byes, stroppy madam, in a huff. Father forbade Uncle Schorsch’s words.

  – It’s bad German, he said, and really, unless Uncle Schorsch can find something better than being deputy director of the Consumers’ Cooperative Union in Grimma soon, then…

  Mother tried to soothe her husband:

  – Well, you can’t choose your family.

  – You can! Father said, and: Diction matters. Repeat after me, diction, Christiane!

  Uncle Schorsch would leave of his own accord once his supply of laughter and jokes had run out. It was usually after the Sandman show. We owned a television and the time with the Sandman was mine. Ten minutes, and then I had sleeping sand in my eyes and Uncle Schorsch declared:

  – Your peepers are teeny and your doggy is sleepy.

  – Violin! Father shouted.

  Uncle Schorsch said goodbye. And while I tried to sleep, Father and Mother argued in the living room. I pulled the bedcovers over my ears and whispered: Violin, violin, violin. The next morning Father had already left for work at the clinic. The sun was shining through the villa’s old, large windows. Mother dashed around trying to mop up dust. A dirty tablecloth and the last of the pâté were the only visible remains from the birthday party. The violin case lay brown and menacing on the cabinet in the living room.

  – You ought to take lessons, Ehlchen, Mother said.

  I couldn’t go to kindergarten because Father was the chief vascular surgeon and Mother was a housewife. I couldn’t play in the street either because there wasn’t anything to do on our street. And anyway, the villa had a garden where I was allowed to draw a hopscotch court in the gravel with a stick. Father called it Heaven and Hell, Uncle Schorsch called it Hop Score. Bad German. I hopped from hell into heaven on my own, my left leg hitched up, my jumping leg too shaky to reach heaven unpunished: it landed on the dangerous lines, or next to the box, or would buckle completely. I fell by the wayside. I had no one to play against. Father made sure I didn’t fall in with bad company. But I didn’t have any company, good or bad. Underneath the stairs that led to the laundry room in the cellar at the back of the villa, spiders had spun their webs. They stayed hidden in the back part of their den, black and skulking. I collected ants and beetles for them, and sometimes, as a special treat, earthworms. I would place the tiny creatures on the edge of the web and the spider would pounce from its hiding place, killing the victims with a single bite before sucking them dry. I fed the spiders every day until Mother caught me, shredded the webs with the mop, and squashed each and every one of the little beasts.

  I wore patent-leather shoes, tights, a petticoat, a cotton vest and a green and red crocheted dress. Or a blue and white crocheted dress. Mother plaited my black hair into French braids, which were held in place with golden bands. Before bed she would tear tangles out of my hair with a brush, pulling them out until I whimpered with pain.

  – Think of all the people with varicose veins, Father would say
, you don’t see them crying.

  Mother cried. She was sitting on the red plush sofa with a bottle of cognac in front of her, Father’s favourite drink. Mother drank two or three cognacs and a siren wailed from inside her. She was like a stranger. I felt frightened and wanted to call Father at the clinic, but then the siren stopped and Mother said very quietly:

  – They’ve shot your Uncle Schorsch.

  The word shot wasn’t one of my words, or Mother’s, or Father’s. It didn’t belong to Uncle Schorsch either. It simply appeared, conjured out of nowhere. It sounded like bad German. I shook my head and whispered in Mother’s ear:

  – You’re not allowed to tell anyone, it’s our little secret, OK?

  Mother nodded and pulled me onto her lap.

  – You silly little Binka, she said, you have to forget all about Uncle Schorsch.

  I promised I would. That evening Father turned the television up very loud and I heard it again, the word shot, and I heard other words too: showdown, peace. The siren wailed inside Mother. The Bad German in our family died with Uncle Schorsch. Father decided to find me a violin teacher. Frau Popiol wore a curly red wig and a pinstriped suit like a man. She brought her son Kurt, who was stupid. Cretin, Father said. Kurt crouched in the furthest corner of the music room. He was always shaking his head and bending his pale sausage fingers back against the joints. I watched the boy with interest. He was maybe fourteen years old and he fascinated me.

  – Don’t be frightened of Kurt, he’s a sweetheart, Frau Popiol said.

  I wasn’t afraid of Kurt, it was his fingers that scared me, the way he bent them like rubber. Frau Popiol told me to stand in front of the piano and took the violin out of its brown case.

  – What’s this?

  I didn’t say anything because I knew that Frau Popiol knew that I knew. But Frau Popiol didn’t back down.

  – What is this?

  – A doggy, I said.

  Kurt clapped his hands.

  – You’re learning the violin, Frau Popiol said, and touched her red wig nervously.

  – Vi-o-lin.

  – Yes.

  I obediently picked up the instrument and played F sharp, C sharp, D sharp.

  – STOP! commanded the teacher. I dropped the bow.

  – Pay attention, child.

  – Yes.

  – Do you want to learn the violin?

  – Yes.

  – Not everyone gets this opportunity.

  – Yes.

  – How old are you?

  – Five.

  – The right age.

  – Yes.

  – Do you know what a note is?

  – Yes.

  – Yes?

  – Yes. She showed me the correct way to hold the bow. Elbows out. Relax. Fingers loose. Straight back. Elbows out. Head bent to the left. Relax. Fingers loose. Elbows out. Not like that. Yes, like that. Higher. Higher.

  The bow quivered. I just looked at Kurt, crouching happily and foolishly in the corner, a monkey, slobbering, shaking his head. I would have liked to know if he wanted to play the violin. For a second time the bow fell on the floor. Frau Popiol’s hand rapped on the piano lid.

  – What are you thinking about, girl?

  – Vi-o-lin.

  – Right, let’s start by testing your rhythm. Copy me!

  Frau Popiol clapped her hands, I copied her, and mis-clapped on the second beat.

  – Hopeless, but your father’s set on it.

  – I want to play with Kurt.

  – I’ll come back again tomorrow. Then you’ll know how to hold a bow.

  Frau Popiol took me in her arms to say goodbye, kissed my braids, her red curls mixing with my black plaits. She kissed me for a long time, until she reached the base of my neck and I was shaking from the tickling. Kurt bent his fingers and Frau Popiol pulled him up out of his crouch and onto his feet.

  – See you tomorrow, Ehlchen, she said.

  Ehlchen was my mother’s word.

  The writing is going well. Steam is rising from the canal. Today Leibnitz’s wool-dyeing factory flushed red into it, yesterday it was blue, blue like packing paper. After three hours of writing I take a break, raise myself up from my corrugated seat, stretch. I have to stay close to my bridge, otherwise the squatters might move in. I myself have attempted to squat twice before: I went under the Sunday Bridge and the Green Bridge looking for a place to sleep out of the wind. And both times, the cardboard already laid out and me covered with my grey blanket from the shelter, their lordships showed up. Rat! That’s our spot! Three men, old canal dancers, mangy and randy. This, they said, was their place. I didn’t know, so I took my blanket and cardboard and plastic bag of belongings. I ran from the Sunday Bridge to the Green Bridge. This was the one thing I knew from my first day of homelessness back then: it was forbidden in doorways, gateways and under balconies. So I headed for the Green Bridge, which wasn’t in the centre of Leibnitz and had only a small sliver of an embankment. But the Green Bridge was occupied too. And those pieces of shit chased me away: Go to a hotel! They took my blanket and laughed at me with their tooth stumps. Bet she’s from the welfare office, piped up a young one, and the mob bleated, mooed, brayed at me along the canal. You have to get your own patch. Territory is territory. I learned quickly, found my bridge, between the wool-dyeing factory and the old industrial plant. It’s just called the Canal Bridge and holds off the wind and rain. Or the heat in once-in-a-century summers.

  Stiff from sitting, I stretch my limbs and step out from under the bridge’s shadow. Great to have written so much. The world of my childhood matches the warm rust red the canal is offering today. Summer shimmers over Leibnitz. I’m free. Today, with the unstoppable decline of my family completed, I realize that all of it set me up for independence. Granted, I’m alone and too scruffy to attract another person’s attention in the near future, but what is this disgust people have when they come across me, or the pity they cough up while sweating under their sense of obligation? As if things are better for them. No one knows my name any more, no one knows what I’ve done, who I was, who I am. What a stroke of luck. I have to admit that I’d see things differently if I hadn’t been chosen to write. I would doss, drink and stink. But I don’t stink. I’m clean. I wash every day in the water fountain in Schiller Park, early in the morning, when the gate’s still closed. Then I eat breakfast at the shelter. Or I wash at the shelter and have breakfast in the park.

  – Everything’s fine, I say. But it’s only fine because I can write.

  By midday I’ll have filled the whole reverse side of the packing paper. I feel the momentum within me, a heaving, driving pleasure.

  I learned to play the violin. After two weeks of lessons, Frau Popiol was happy with the way I held the bow. For the first proper note I needed another two weeks. Kurt was the only one impressed by my playing. He flexed his fingers and grinned whenever his mother poured her own toxic brand of teacher’s frustration over me. I was unmusical. Father paid Frau Popiol well. In May 1963 he was appointed chief medical officer at the surgical clinic. And on the day of his appointment he behaved like a normal human being for once. At breakfast he sat me on his knee. I could smell the Spike aftershave he’d received from his varicose vein patients from the West.

  – Giddy up, rider! he sang, and the tips of his black moustache wiggled.

  – Today is a big day, Ehlchen. Today I will become the chief medical officer.

  Mother, too, was cheerful.

  – You’ll have to become even more earnest, Ernst.

  – I have a surprise for you, Ehlchen.

  Father lifted me into the air and kissed my mouth. His breath smelled like a pharmacy.

  – Today you’re going to play the violin for the doctors’ collective.

  He knocked back a cognac and left the house. I didn’t want to. Refused. Frau Popiol was called in for crisis management and she beat out: F sharp! C sharp! D sharp! Until it stuck. Mother ironed a white lace blouse.

 
– Don’t embarrass us, child.

  – The child will embarrass you, Frau von Haßlau.

  – What are we paying you for, Frau Popiol?

  F sharp! C sharp! D sharp! The doggy howled, squeaked, whimpered.

  – You’re playing it wrong, Gabriela!

  – But we’re paying you, Frau Popiol.

  The party at the surgical clinic drew closer. Chief Medical Officer Ernst von Haßlau collected Mother and me at the clinic door. He stood before me, large and white and smelling of unfamiliar cognac.

  – Stay in the septic zone.

  Septic was one of Father’s words. I held the violin case under my arm and swallowed the word septic. Mother smiled nervously, hanging off her husband’s arm. We walked through the reverberating hallways of the clinic, tight, high corridors where the paint was peeling from the ceilings in big patches. The old yellow on the walls reeked of lacerated knees that had been doused in antiseptic. The doors, lacquered white and with mysterious names written on them, like Laboratory, Ultrasound, Op I and Op II, were damaged and rotten. A whimpering sound was coming from somewhere, a metallic clatter from somewhere else.

  – Keep up, Ehlchen. They’re waiting for us.

  I ran on tiptoes between my parents, the violin case dangling from my hand. I felt terrified, as if I was about to have a massive injection.

  All I remember of the party is the blue hole. I was on a small stage with the violin in my hand, a room full of white figures in front of me. I lifted the bow – and fell into the blue hole. I woke up on a trolley, opened my eyes – above me was Father’s moustache, quivering at the ends.

  – Gabriela!

  A nurse appeared and fed me some drops.

  – Do I have varicose veins too? I asked.

  There was laughter all around. But Father wasn’t laughing.

  – We are going to find you another teacher. I’ve been utterly humiliated. You’ll be the death of me.

  I lay on the trolley in Op II, the huge, round lamp above me. I hoped that it would come crashing down and bury me.