Sandra Hoffmann lives in Munich, where she teaches creative writing at the Literaturhaus as well as at the universities of Augsburg and Karlsruhe. She also writes for radio and newspapers, and is an avid surfer. Her novel Was ihm fehlen wird, wenn er tot ist (Hanser Berlin, 2012) won her the Thaddäus Troll Prize, followed by the Hans Fallada Prize for Paula (Hanser Berlin, 2017). Her most recent publication is her first book for young adults, Das Leben spielt hier (Hanser, 2019).

Katy Derbyshire was born in London and has lived in Berlin for over twenty years. She is an award-winning translator of contemporary German writers, including Olga Grjasnowa, Angela Steidele and Clemens Meyer. Having taught literary translation in New York, New Delhi and Norwich, she now co-hosts a monthly translation lab and the bi-monthly Dead Ladies Show in Berlin. Katy is the publisher of the V&Q Books imprint.

V&Q Books, Berlin 2020

An imprint of Verlag Voland & Quist GmbH

First published in Germany as Paula in 2017 by Hanser Berlin

Copyright © 2017 Hanser Berlin in der Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich.

All rights reserved.

Translation copyright © Katy Derbyshire 2020

Editing: Florian Duijsens

Copy editing: Alyson Coombes

Cover design: Pingundpong*Gestaltungsbüro

www.vq-books.eu

Paula

by Sandra Hoffmann

Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire

‘Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?’

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Contents

Paula

Translator’s Note

We have a word in German: schweigen. It means deliberately remaining silent; it is different to merely being quiet. Schweigen offers nothing to hold on to, not even if you reach deep into your pockets for a coin to flip between your fingers, or a shopping list on a scrap of paper. You hear, from somewhere else or from inside yourself, the dark sounds of muteness turning against you; you hear them as rumbling, as murmuring, as ongoing grumbling, muttering, somewhere far away and yet also near. As though all the unspoken words were seeking ways out of that mute body and into the room, forging their way to you. They rob you of your peace and of your sleep. Schweigen, when someone lives close beside you and remains so silent, swallows down every word so unrelentingly that there is nothing left over, not for you or anyone else. Schweigen, at the table when the knives and forks scrape against plates, when someone, just one voice, says: Could you pass the salt, please? And someone else passes it. And above it all, that deliberate silence that seems to eat you up, you and all your good summers and your few good winters. As though joy itself might never return. And you hear the sound of stockinged legs moving under the table and the dog brushing past a chair, a cough or a throat muscle constricting as glugs of water go down. When the sounds of bodies have occupied so much space that there’s nothing but density in the room, a buffer against the outside world. That deliberate silence ends up trapped in every crack of a house; it radiates, emanates, makes a house into a fortress, and the only possible release is a drastic end. You can stay and die, or you can leave. In that quiet, though, even a tractor outside in the road would be a beautiful sound, a promise, someone mowing the field for the first time in the year, the day still light. The world would be there again. Bright light and language.

My grandmother Paula died on 10 November 1997 at the age of 82. She never talked about herself, not to the very end. She took her whole life to the grave, all her secrets and all her troubles.

When I run through the park in the morning, jog around the lake and hear the swans and waterfowl, when I watch the mandarin ducks, luminous like bright dots among the other birds, I often think of my grandmother, dead for 18 years now, and I think of my parents. I’d like to show them the park, the dogs I pass regularly on my run, the lovely spots on the side streams of the Eisbach, the water’s surface occasionally brushed by willows. The men face-down on the ground next to their personal trainers, doing complicated gymnastic manoeuvres, or hitting a small punch bag suspended from a tree over and over and over, to make them feel strong for whatever reason. I’d like to show them the yogis saluting the sun, the Japanese woman swinging her arms oddly as she walks. I see the surfers on the Eisbach wave, and sometimes I stop to watch them. I watch these strangers and I’m glad of them, glad I can weave my way between them and, without speaking to them, I know: I’m happy that they’re here. I’d like to say to my family: Look, this is where I live now. This is how my life has turned out, and it’s fine. But my grandmother is dead. And my parents aren’t really interested in any lives not directly related to theirs. I talk to them as I run; I show them my world in my mind, and it always makes me sad.

That deliberate silence has been passed down the generations.

1915 was the year of the wood rabbit in the Chinese calendar. The German politician Franz Josef Strauss was born, Ingrid Bergman, Edith Piaf too, Frank Sinatra, Pinochet. It was the second year of the First World War; the first International Women’s Peace Congress was held in The Hague; Albert Einstein talked publicly about his theory of relativity; and Virginia Woolf published her debut novel. Paula was born on All Hallows Day, the first of November, in a small village in the middle of Catholic Upper Swabia. She was her parents’ first child. The conditions Paula was born into were modest; her family did not have much money. She grew up with two sisters and a brother, who died on the front in the Second World War. She did talk about his death. Over and over, more often than I wanted to hear it.

He died, in the war.

That was Paula’s story. Five words long.

When she died, it was the end of the story of a woman I know little about. She experienced a world war, gave birth to two children. She profited from Germany’s postwar boom, but never learned a trade and was like a guest worker in her own country. Cleaning lady was the name of the job she did. Sometimes I can sense her voice. I listen to her like I listened to her sister Marie; she is dead now too. I listen to her like I listened to my mother, who has long since stopped talking about her mother’s deliberate silence. I hear all their voices; they don’t cohere, they come and go; they like to hide. When I get too close to them they flee; that’s how it seems, anyway. I think it might be possible to tell Paula’s life story with their help. I want to get to the bottom of it.

She was my grandmother.

I am an unreliable narrator. I’ve done talking therapy. I’ve reflected on my life. I’ve tried to trace the paths I’ve taken, to understand the past storms inside of me so that I can weather the storms to come. I have got good at all that. You can rely on me in that respect. Yes, you can rely on me to make up everything I no longer know, everything I’ve never known, everything I have to know – put it all on the page. How else might it be possible to unfold what I never knew alongside what I still know very well? How can a writer tell a story that returns over and over in her dreams – nightmares or fears or dark forebodings that extend all the way to my present life? How can I tell a story that darts up in the form of an image in the daytime, and then darts away again? And how can I say why I haven’t been to the cemetery for seven years now – or only once, secretly.

One thing I don’t have to make up: the way the skin of my grandmother’s face felt, like a violet’s petal, almost translucent, like it had never been touched. No furrows meandered along it, nothing but fine lines, signs, traces, like birds leave behind in the snow. And I still know her scent. Warm and not sour. Mild and not coarse. Her smell was better than she was. Softer, gentler. She never smelled old. When I want to, I can still feel that warm grandmotherly body and the wall with the woodchip wallpaper. I can see myself lying between them, on those nights after I had bad dreams. The rosary moves between my grandmother’s hands, and she lights consecrated candles. Sometimes my face brushes against hers.

I love you and I hate you – children never say both in one sentence. Children say one or the other. ‘I love you’ is not a line from my childhood. But neither is ‘I hate you’. Nothing was clear-cut, other than our fear of dying. And at some point, I refused to let my grandmother take my hand.

In a drawer in her room, underneath the hymnals with or without gilt edging and all manner of little booklets and cards depicting the saints, she kept a brightly coloured chocolate box, a sturdy straw box and a probably homemade blue album with red and white embroidery on the front cover. All three were full of photos. Pictures of people of various ages, a great many men, some of them soldiers. Men on motorcycles, a man with a car, men in a field, men alongside ships, beside tanks, by forests and roadsides, men’s names on crosses. Men with men in fancy cars. More rarely, men with women in cars. Some of the men are wearing work outfits that I recognise from documentaries about forced labourers. Many of them are in uniform. There are men in elegant suits, men with ties and bowties, men with monocles, smart men in casual clothing. Dark-skinned men in uniform too, presumably Moroccan men, almost certainly in fact. Men with happy faces, priests, black and white priests in robes. Altar boys. My father, beaming and handsome at his wedding to my beautiful mother. No real family photos, apart from pictures of families I’ve never seen before. Women. Paula’s sisters: Marie and Theresia. The three sisters with a child. Theresia’s daughter. Theresia’s daughter and my mother. My grandmother Paula with an inflatable rubber ring in a lake. Paula next to a handsome man in a meadow, long white gloves that match her flowered dress, Paula with the same man on a large motorcycle, Paula at the grave of a man who was once her bridegroom-to-be, Paula and five other women at a kitchen table, cheerful. Women in groups, lined up like a gymnastics team. Paula with her mother, Paula with an unknown woman and unknown children. And so on. Paula at her daughter’s wedding, looking at the fairy-tale bride: dark, joyless, the eyes the darkest things in her stern face. Paula with a handbag in a flowery meadow, her gaze sombre, clutching ox-eye daisies. Her grey bun tightly wound. One leg bandaged beneath her suit. Next to her, my mother in a pencil skirt, back-combed short hair and sunglasses, rather Audrey Hepburnesque as always and striding along a country path in heels like it’s the Champs-Élysées. I spot myself, a girl with a boy’s haircut in a green dress, not flirting with the camera. My grandmother Paula on the leather sofa with Marie, my mother and me. My mother looking like she’s come straight out of the pages of a chic young fashion magazine, palazzo pants, a blouse that would be from ETRO these days, her hair, her painted fingernails. She is 26 and so gorgeous I can’t take my eyes off her. And then I see it: my mother feels out of place. I see her dark, melancholy eyes, I see that she’s not present. And I see Paula and Marie taking care of me, the child with the doll and the badly cut hair, an exception to the rule. They’re taking care, as always. I’m six years old in the photograph. I know that because my hair was longer at seven and eight: my shiny mid-length Cilla Black hair that I was only allowed for a while. Wearing real clogs and a denim pinafore dress on the island of Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore, I was allowed to be a girl who was not second to her mother. After that, my hair was cut again.

My grandmother was born in a village called Assmannshardt, which had ceased to exist after the Thirty Years’ War that devastated 17th-century Central Europe. All its inhabitants had died of murder, pillage, starvation, plague or rape, and then the village was burnt down. For whatever reason, new settlers came from the Montafon valley and Vorarlberg, on the other side of Lake Constance. My grandmother grew up in that village. Her own mother was a strict, cold woman, my mother says, but in the photos I have seen of her she looks gentle and that makes her seem young, although she must have been very old by the time they were taken. Paula’s father, my mother’s grandfather, lived a long life and was the most adorable person you could imagine, my mother says. Good cop, bad cop, that’s what I say. He was her substitute father, that’s what she says, and: What would she have done without him? Her life would have been impossible but for him.

There is no order in the photo boxes. There are pictures upon pictures, hundreds, some small, some slightly larger, some that look as though they’ve been flipped and turned countless times, and others yellowed but apparently untouched. There are several copies of some, as if they’d been intended as gifts to others. And inevitably, the photos begin to lead lives of their own in my thoughts, turning to me behind Paula’s back, saying: You can tell us any story you want. We’re here.

They are seducers. They pretend to reveal all willingly, but they remain resistant. Wordless. Paper.

And if I had asked my grandmother for permission?

She wasn’t a storyteller, she was a woman who prayed, a woman who remained immersed in herself; she wouldn’t have answered. She would have said no by not saying yes. She explained the Rosary prayer and its five decades to me while her rosary beads lay on the table, not moving. She told me when each of the Rosary Mysteries are said and when to say the Joyful Mysteries and when the Sorrowful. I would always forget.

She herself prayed countless times a day and I’m sure at night as well. Her hand would move in her apron pocket like a small creature, unwilling to show itself at work. Yet the rosary is nothing but a string of beads with a cross on it. No more and no less. Though that’s not quite true. The number of beads is fixed, as is how to pray the Rosary and when. And if you believe in it, it helps, she would say. Someone’s watching from up above, and He means well when you’re good. He forgives everything if only you turn to Him enough, she would say. Life and God’s love both depend on how much, how often and how well you pray. That’s how I understood it as a child. If you pray the wrong way you’re at risk. If you don’t pray enough, you’re more likely to die. If you don’t pray your sins away, you’re in big trouble. So I prayed too. Prayed that I’d wake up again the next day when the day had been good, and that I’d wake up again the next day when the day had been bad, because I’d secretly thought bad thoughts about someone and secretly said bad words. It was possible to pray without a rosary, in bed at night, my legs drawn up under me, my body bent over them, the crown of my head against the wall; in yoga, it’s called Child’s Pose. At confession, it meant 20 Our Fathers, 20 Hail Marys, contemplation during both, and between them my requests for forgiveness, for His forgiveness. I prayed that I’d wake up again in case I fell asleep and hadn’t prayed enough, and that my mother and father and brother wouldn’t die.

I never knew whether God saw or heard me, I just didn’t want my grandmother to die. I wanted her to leave me alone with her prayers, which she claimed to pray for me when really, she was praying against her fears. Later, I wanted her to die. And once I stopped wishing her dead, she did die.

What makes a person? And how can a woman add up, build up to a real live individual if she’s done her utmost to reveal nothing of herself? Her voice, to find out what her voice adds up to, you have to imagine yourself so close you can feel her, hear it, her inner murmur, her silent conversation, her thinking through prayer. Groping for understanding, it is impossible to get close enough if you don’t start with your own memories. It is impossible to invent the truth. Precision is essential. Fiction is the only way to close the gaps between image and image, fragment and fragment. Enduring the constant fractures in memory, the breaks in our relationship, as though she could still say: No, I won’t give you permission. No, you may not know me. No, you may not tell my story. How far do vetoes extend? How far does silence reach? She refuses, even in my memory, vetoes me inventing her, Paula, beyond death itself. The commandment to stay silent. And then: how words can be forged out of what has been silenced.

If we were to sit around a table, tell each other stories, happy and sad, talk and talk for nights and nights, perhaps then a life would build itself up?

But Paula’s life remained silenced, and that deliberate silence stole into our family’s life like a virus, passed on from one person to another, from one generation to the next.

And you thought – not only as a child, but later too – perhaps only animals feel at home in these silent parts of the world. Perhaps their bodies make paths for themselves, perhaps their fur protects them. Perhaps it’s their different language. The mewling and grunting, the yowling and barking, and the way birds sound in spring, in summer, the way they grow quieter in winter. You suspect that some animals transform deliberate silence into silent speech, and that some have no effect at all on the human world.

I am seven years old. I’m balancing on the wall, trying not to tread on any moss. If you tread on moss, you die and fall into a grave. It’s not a game: from my great-grandparents’ grave, I balance along the wall over to the water tank, pump the handle a few times and drink out of the iron tap. Then I pump another three times. Water runs into the trough. The sound is lovely. Three is a good number. A safe number. I walk back along the wall. I’m only allowed to do that when no one else is at the cemetery. The moss on the wall is black and brown and yellow and red. Only green in places.

Why is that? I asked my grandmother, but she didn’t give me an answer.

It’s to do with the age of the moss, my Uncle Gustl said.

After counting to 20 exactly nine times as I balance and once to three, I get to the grave. I can look down on the grave from the wall.

My mother says there’s a child in the grave as well. He doesn’t have a name. He’s underneath my great-grandmother and great-grandfather.

Why doesn’t he have a name?

The baby had a split spine, my mother says, and she says it was Auntie Marie who told her, my grandmother’s sister. It might have been her other sister, though, Theresia.

What does that look like, I wonder, is the spine not closed, does it reveal everything inside the person like in diagrams of the human body in school textbooks?

Why didn’t he grow properly? I ask.

All sorts of things happen, my mother says. If you have a split spine you also have damage to your brain.

The boy who would have been my mother’s brother must’ve had brain damage then.

They have the same stubborn streak, Paula and her sister Marie. When they don’t want to speak, they don’t speak. They wear the same brightly patterned aprons they did 20 years ago, as though they were still living in their village, where everything was dirty. Our house is not dirty. Auntie Marie and her husband give us all kinds of things; it doesn’t matter whether we have done anything or not done anything to deserve it. My brother and I are their godchildren and they do everything for us, having no children of their own. From Auntie Marie and her husband Gustl, I learned the names of animals and how to stroke deer. We visited all the animal parks and all the adventure playgrounds within a day’s reach of their Goggomobil microcar, as long as we could get back before dark. I learned the names of flowers and stones from them, and how the Swabian Alps came to be. And I learned to understand the family’s soft but impenetrable Swabian dialect. I learned how to tell the difference between clay, limestone and marl.

I’m on the back seat of the Goggo car with my Auntie Marie next to me, and whenever my uncle talks to us, my aunt says, Eyes on the road! She doesn’t seem to see that he’s not looking at us, or only in the rear-view mirror, where he winks at me through his thick glasses. From the back seat, the countryside outside looks just like our dear Lord always wanted it to be, as my Oma Paula would say, but thankfully she’s not with us this time. Auntie Marie smells of 4711 cologne and I don’t think it smells awful, but I don’t like it when she hugs me because I don’t want to smell like her. I’m wearing my green dress with the long sleeves and the white trim; I’m growing out of the dress because children grow a lot between the ages of six and seven, before they start school. The dress is too warm for a cloudless day in the Goggomobil. I look out of the window, and although everything looks so beautiful I’m not happy. Not cheerful and carefree. I’m scared something might happen because I’ve thought a bad thing, and I mustn’t think it or say it again, and if I don’t start praying right now it will happen. I can recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary as easily as my bedtime prayer. I try not to murmur as I pray, staring out of the window and thinking the prayer mutely to myself, because no one needs to know, because it’s my secret. If I manage the Lord’s Prayer twice without interruption, nothing will happen. He is very much concerned with my sins. The Virgin Mother is concerned with my hopes. Sometimes I hope for things that aren’t nice, so then there’s not much difference.