Julia Franck - Back to Back

And that is?

Enchanting, yes. Ella nodded.

And that — who do you have there?

My dog Bello.

I see. Alfred suppressed outraged laughter only with difficulty, snorted hard, and looked at Ella. Your dog? And you walk around here with him on the leash like that?

If I didn’t he’d bite. Ella tickled her dog’s head. Sorry, but he has to be kept on the leash.

Alfred bent down and clapped the dog on his back. Well, well, my good fellow. The dog growled. As Alfred straightened up his hand touched the garland round Ella’s shoulders. Then he tapped the skin of her flat bosom with his forefinger, clearly below the collarbone. Would you like some wine?

Thanks, but no, I must look after my dog. Ella tugged at Thomas’s leash and ducked under Alfred’s arm. The dog barked, he was barking at Alfred, the greedy finger had not escaped his notice.

And he’s looking after you, right? The lovely Ella and her naked dog! You could hear that Alfred had been drinking, maybe drinking too heavily. At least, several guests turned to Ella and Alfred and their eyes fell on the naked figure of Thomas, still unrecognisable in his mask. A big, fat woman with red ringlets and a peacock-feather dress cried out in delight. Could she sit on the dog? Her hand was already groping for the furry neck, her long fingernails dug into it, and before Ella realised what was happening she let her heavy buttocks down on Thomas’s back. There was a cracking sound, a groan, and Thomas collapsed on the floor under the peacock feathers. The woman rolled over to one side, lay on her back, spluttered and roared with laughter. Thomas’s prick was exposed as he lay sideways, one leg at an angle, the coat lining falling aside, the mask slipping up, his face distorted, his eyes closed in pain or shame.

Ella stood beside him, clapping. As long as she went on clapping, she hoped, more of the guests would look at her than at him. And a lot of them were looking. She nudged Thomas with her foot and hissed: What’s the matter? Stand up. Thomas hauled himself a little way up. Ella grasped the furry nape of his neck in both her hands, held it firmly, the way you pick up a cat by the scruff of the neck, and dragged him through the crowd. Loud music was playing, the plucked strings of a guitar, One morning very early. A dark-haired woman, throwing herself into it, was singing the Partisan song. Ella propelled her dog through the dancing throng, sometimes he crawled on all fours, sometime she had to push him, and among the dancers who were singing along Ella could clearly make out Käthe’s clear, high voice. She was the only one who could sing the Italian text, their struggle for freedom, every verse, every line of it, her voice drowned out the rest. O partigiano, portami via, ché mi sento di morir, e se io muoio su la montagna, o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao, e se io muoio da partigiano, tu mi devi seppellir. Ella heard her own voice in Käthe’s, and she knew every line: what her mother said, what her mother sang, when you sang it your arms and legs tingled, you wanted to burst apart and open up. She felt like dancing too, but first she had to get Thomas out of the crowd.

As soon as Ella had closed the door of her room behind her, Thomas tore off the coat lining, took the mask off his head, and threw himself naked on his bed.

Bastards.

It was your idea, Ella pointed out. She sat on the chair and smoothed out her parrot feather. You wanted. . she had to giggle again. . you wanted to go out there half naked.

Thomas rubbed his fist over his hip bones. Very funny, he groaned, so was that an invitation to crush me? Bastards.

Bastards, Ella repeated.

Not because of that clumsy idiot. What gloriously lousy blindness. How long do they think their freedom will last? What kind of stinking freedom is it if they lock us up?

Lock us up. You say that as if we were going straight to prison.

So we are. Straight to prison with the raving lunatics. They all look, and no one says anything, no one’s surprised. What do you think they need their damn Wall for? He’s lying, old Walter is, when he calls it a little fence.

Ella turned the quill of her parrot feather between her hands so fast that it looked as if it were a bluish goblet shape.

What use are the sky and the suburban railway and your friends to you if the world doesn’t notice what’s going on here? Communist decadence, that’s what it is, dictatorship. Do you want to live behind a wall, surrounded by a wall? Bella ciao. Käthe will never see her beloved Italy again. What a joke, she says she’ll take us to Italy some time, she’ll take us to France some time. Maybe we’d even have been able to go to New York and visit Uncle Paul?

Was that him just now?

She’s never once taken us anywhere. And now she’ll just have to go round in circles herself, always following the Wall, maybe to the shores of the Baltic for all I care.

Thomas stood up, put on a pair of trousers and a shirt. Through the open window, they heard the rain pouring down, the willow tree and the ruins of the mill on the other side of the road were suddenly brightly illuminated, a flash of lightning, the air smelled of damp soil, they heard thunder rolling quietly in the distance. Maybe, and he went to the window where he had hung herbs up to dry a few days ago, maybe that’s the death wish of the people here, they torment themselves if not blindly then with pleasure. Thomas cut some of the herbs off with a pair of scissors and collected the rustling leaves and dried stems in his hand. He smelled the herbs, spread his hand out flat, and cut them up smaller and smaller. It’s like being in kindergarten, the world is too large for them, they’d rather build a little fence round it and then no child can get away. Be good and stay in the guardianship of the collective, never put a finger outside it, not a foot, not a thought. Build a wall round it, keep people away, there’ll be no time off from your servitude to the state, you brought it on yourselves. Thus spake Walter Ulbricht.

What do you mean, a wall? Where do you see a wall? Ella let her jaw drop; she wanted to show him that she couldn’t follow his fantastic train of thought, and didn’t want to.

That’s what Ulbricht’s been talking about recently, exit permits to the world outside or not. The scissors clicked as he snapped them fast, the leaves must be cut up smaller and smaller. He denies that it’s being built but he already has a name for it. Don’t make me laugh!

They could hear music in the corridor, obviously the guitar player and the woman whose singing he accompanied were going through the whole house. Flying into space, past the stars to race.

Hear that? They’re composing a song for Yuri Gagarin. The world is getting larger, not smaller. Come on, let’s go out and dance.

I wish I had your dreams, Ella. It’s trickery, all of it. Gagarin flying into space doesn’t make our world larger, it makes it smaller with the help of exit permits. They’ll close the border. Don’t be so blind.

Ella slowly shook her head. What made Thomas so sure, was he obsessed? A few days ago Ella had come into the garden when Thomas and Michael were lying in the grass making up poetry. They didn’t feel as if they’d been caught out in something, they took no notice of Ella only a few metres away, pretending she had to see whether the washing on the line was dry. She listened to the words clattering back and forth between them. The world is overcast and grey, / timid is the wind as well. / Leaden, the sea surges this way / breathing in a sluggish swell. The typewriter on which Thomas clattered away stood between them; he stopped, sat up, took the sheet of paper out of the machine, put a new one in so that he could touch the keys again, noting down Michael’s words. Those words sounded like an answer, a mingling of their ideas, a duet. We sit sadly here and talk, / we do not hear each other’s words. Did he love Michael? All we hear is words, and know / that in the morning light we’ll see / a road that’s bound to part again. / We know it well, and we could weep. They had been talking about the metre of death, because as Michael saw it poetry was not the only thing to observe metre, so did the vanishing of life, they had been talking about death, farewell, prison, the blind alley in which they saw themselves trapped. Ella now lost her temper again. She had found it more and more difficult recently to fire Thomas’s enthusiasm for the other world, the world in which they played at being animals, at being other people, danced at a party like a married couple.