Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Julius and I were travelling first class on the train from Hamburg to Cologne because the saver fare for first class was cheaper than the normal fare for second class, which I didn’t understand but I was never that good in math anyway. Also, you should take what you can get, as my mother always says. In first class, the seats have nicer upholstery and there is room for your legs. We didn’t have a seat reservation though and the only unreserved seats that were next to each other were facing the opposite direction of the train and instead of facing the built-in screen of the seatbacks in front of us we were looking into the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Meyer (“with a Y from Offenbach near Frankfurt, eh, your little one is adorable, how old is he?”), who also boarded in Hamburg and were eating salami sandwiches from what looked like an inexhaustible supply. Both things, the smell of salami and sitting backwards, made me feel sick and Julius probably inherited that from me, which we could now determine. Shortly before Bielefeld, he threw up without notice all over the table that separated us from the Meyers.

The newspapers that the Meyers had not yet read and now wouldn’t be able to anymore were saturated with Julius’ breakfast and the three little packets of “High C” that they had previously forced on the little boy. “Little kids need vitamins. Drink up – it’s healthy!”

And so he did.

“Is there more?” I asked Julius, while I frantically unearthed a tissue pack and tried to figure out where to start wiping.

“I don’t think so,” Julius said cautiously.

Mr. Meyer removed himself discreetly, while Mrs. Meyer jumped up in a flurry and magicked a pack of wet wipes from her luggage, the kind I always used to carry around when Julius wore diapers.

With the wipes, everything was quickly clean again. Mrs. Meyer threw them and the newspapers away in a similarly conjured garbage bag. Then she opened the window, beamed at me and said “all taken care of!”

I apologized and thanked her about a thousand times.

“No need to be embarrassed, little one,” assured Mrs. Meyer and stroked Julius’ hair. “Sometimes kids do that, they often have problems with their tummies, you just have to push through it! What a sweet little boy, huh, so reasonable for his four years, and you are a very nice, clever young mommy, really, don’t be embarrassed.”

I suddenly had the urgent need to throw myself on Mrs. Meyer’s breast and ask her whether she wanted to adopt me. It had been a long time since someone had said anything that nice to me. Unfortunately, Mrs. Meyer already had loads of daughters and sons and grandchildren and therefore probably no interest in adoption. Besides – if she got to know me better, she would certainly quickly take back the “clever mommy” bit. Nice, yes, clever, no. My own husband had recently called me the “least organized, least capable woman I have ever met” and then promptly announced that he wanted a divorce. And I was also not that young anymore. I mean, you can still feel like twenty when you are thirty-five but you won’t look it.

For that reason alone, I would love Mrs. Meyer forever.

Unfortunately, we had to get out at the main train station in Cologne and we never saw the Meyers again. I dragged our suitcases and Julius onto the platform and collided in the process with a sky blue bunny over six feet tall, reeking of beer. I was still grabbing my chest in panic when the bunny burped an “oops” and hopped away. Only then did I see that he belonged to an entire group of pastel-colored rodents who were hopping around the garbage cans and singing “beer here, beer here.”  A patchwork clown dragging a suitcase and a woman with a blue curly wig, who was clinging to his free arm somewhat uncertainly but energetically, countered the rodents with “Mer losse de Dom in Kölle.”

It was Carnival in Cologne.

To come home to Cologne on a Carnival Sunday after you have spent seven weeks on the wintry sleepy island of Pellworm, is sort of like landing a spaceship on a strange planet, though without the aliens taking much notice. I looked around for Lorenz, my future ex-husband, the father of my children. But there was no sign of Lorenz although I told him several times on the phone when we would arrive. I actually hadn’t counted on his appearance. Since the divorce proceedings had started, he no longer felt responsible for me in any way and that meant in this case that we would have to take the subway.

I took a stronger grip on Julius’ hand and carved a path through the commotion. On the way from platform five to platform eleven we saw only a few people who were not in costume and/or drunk, and even a group of Japanese (real and uncostumed) tourists seemed completely frightened by the activity. Closely pressed together they looked around uncertainly, and not one of them was taking pictures.

“I feel sick,” said Julius.

Alarmed, I dropped the suitcase and pushed a long-haired vampire away from the next garbage bin. I had to lift Julius up so that he could throw up into the opening and the vampire’s comment that it was a paper recycling bin and not a landfill bin came too late. But on a day like today, when half of Cologne was throwing up into garbage cans, he couldn’t really make me feel that guilty about it.

Next to the vampire there was a (likely) masculine being with a Gerhard Schröder mask on who, judging from the strong odor, appeared to be sweating terribly from the latex.

“Wanna come drink a beer with us?” he asked me.

Julius puked. Apparently there was still enough “High C” in his stomach.

“That’s gross,” said the vampire. “Is he yours?”

“Little kids have problems with their tummies,” I said, just like Mrs. Meyer with a Y, and stroked Julius’ hair. “There’s no reason to be embarrassed. You just have to push through it.”

“Ewww, gross,” said Gerhard Schröder. “And I wanted to drink a beer with her.”

“Still, nice ass,” said the vampire.

“Helau[1],” I said. I was starting to get worried. It was possible that Julius hadn’t inherited my reaction to sitting backwards and the salami smell, but rather had caught a stomach bug. Just in case, he belonged in bed with a Vomex.

I studied the schedule. Our train would come in seven minutes. We could survive that.

A retiree with a yellow-dotted hat on his bald patch elbowed me in the ribs and said in an unfriendly tone: “Platform 10, Gisela, and hurry up! How often do you need to check?”

By now, my mood was also pretty sour. I elbowed the retiree in his beer belly and responded with: “Even if you break my ribs, Karl-Heinz, I will take the train from platform 11.”

The retiree stared at me astonished. I didn’t know him but felt that he belonged to that type of older men who never apologize and always park in the pregnant woman parking space in front of the supermarket. Behind him stood a very obese, short woman around seventy, wearing a tinsel wig and pink-colored heart glasses. Gisela, I assumed.

“I’m right here, Heinrich,” she said in a high, squeaky voice and tapped the retiree on the shoulder. Heinrich. I wasn’t that far off with Karl-Heinz.

Heinrich looked for a while between me and tinsel-Gisela and itched himself under his Carnival hat. Then he said: “I thought you were someone else. That happens, you know?”

You know???

I looked closely at Gisela and hoped that Heinrich had cataracts, and a very advanced case of them at that.

The subway arrived and opened its door with a sigh.

“I’m sick,” said Julius. Unfortunately, Heinrich couldn’t get out of the way fast enough.

“That happens, you know?” I said.

We lived on the first floor of a beautifully remodeled old building. No one who looked up at our windows from the street would guess that this was an apartment the size of a football field. Lorenz and I had bought the apartment when he had been appointed prosecutor ten years ago. That is, Lorenz had bought it. I just moved into it.

Lorenz was seven years older. When we met, I had just turned twenty, was in the second semester of my psychology studies, and still completely lost in the big city. The streetcar and subway systems made me really nervous. After I got lost on the way to a study group at another student’s place only two stations away and ended up in a mysterious town called Zülpich-Ülpenich without my wallet, I started to ride my bike everywhere, regardless of how far something would be.  I was good at riding my bike. I was born and raised on the North Sea island of Pellworm. My parents have a farm there, mostly milking cows. I was actually supposed to be a boy and take over the farm later. My parents still don’t know what to do with girls.

“Of course we still love you, Constanze,” my father always says, but when my brother was born three years later, I think that they seriously considered giving up the extra kid – me – for adoption. When I say that to my parents – and sometimes I still do -, they roll their eyes and say that I should finally grow up and stop being such a girl.

The fact that I ended up going to college in Cologne of all places didn’t exactly make my parents happy. They thought that I wasn’t mature enough for the big city. Unfortunately, they were right. I would have preferred to have gone to Hamburg, which was closer to home and had an easier public transportation network. The Rhinelanders are, in my opinion, also only half as open and welcoming, as the saying goes: without a cent in Zülpich-Ülpenich – that was not fun. No one wanted to loan me a bicycle or give me money for the return trip home or even let me use their phone. No trace of Rhenish warmth. The taxi driver who finally drove me home came from Turkey.

As I said, I had a hard time acclimating to life in Cologne. I looked very Frisian – tall, blonde, and gawky, with disproportionately large feet and hands. I wore metal-rimmed glasses, chewed my fingernails and stuttered when I got excited. To look shorter, I slumped my shoulders and had adopted a shuffling gait. And to demonstrate this fresh start and my new adult status, the first thing I did in Cologne was to find a hairstylist to give me a – in my opinion – “cool short hairstyle.” But the hairstyle was not cool and I’m not even totally sure now that it was a style. But it was unremarkable and plain and matched perfectly with my mostly gray and navy blue clothes. I usually wore jeans with sack-like shirts, comfortable walking shoes and no makeup. With this look, I fit right into my psychology seminars. To further strengthen my sense of belonging, I had an unhappy relationship with one of the boys from my apartment, Jan Kröllmann. Out of a false sense of shame, I never told Jan that he was my first, which really wasn’t a good foundation for our relationship. I was so shy and uptight that Jan could only see me naked when it was pitch black in the room – so, not at all. He cheated on me quickly with the girlfriend of another roommate who, as he said, had the more comfortable bed. Since they didn’t have sex in the bed, but rather on the carpet in the hallway, in the bathtub, and on the kitchen table, I had a strong suspicion that she had other advantages over me besides the bed. Out of fear that I would stumble across them, I barely left my room and spent a disproportionate amount of time in the university library. The fact that another roommate persistently offered to take Jan’s place didn’t exactly make the situation any less complicated, especially because this roommate was a head shorter than I and had a penetrating body odor. I was close to giving up my studies and returning to Pellworm to spend the rest of my life milking cows. Fortunately, that’s when I met Lorenz and changed my mind.

I ran over Lorenz with my bicycle – totally romantic. He was standing in the middle of the bike path. Up until the last minute, I thought that he would jump to the side since I was ringing my bell like crazy and making frantic hand gestures; also I was yelling pretty loudly about ignorant pedestrians on bike paths. But Lorenz was so engrossed in his files that he neither heard nor saw me. I swerved at the last second onto the pedestrian path but another bicyclist headed toward me, also trying not to hit Lorenz. All three of us collided, we made quite a commotion and it was a while before we had separated all our limbs and bicycles. It was a miracle that no one was seriously injured, aside for the scrapes I got. Lorenz was kind enough to see that the accident was entirely his fault. He waited until the other cyclist rode off cursing him and then invited me to dinner. I still think that his invitation was pure coincidence: if the other cyclist had been a woman and much better looking than I was, then Lorenz probably would have married her. He had decided that it was time for a serious relationship and when Lorenz decides something, it’s a done deal. He was an ambitious, young lawyer in training with clearly defined future plans and he seemed to me like a gift from God. Jan Kröllmann was nothing to Lorenz Wischnewski – that was clear right away.

Looking back, I think that I didn’t need much to fall in love. Out of convenience, I fell in love with the first man who came along.

Lorenz was the first man who recognized that I wasn’t an ugly duckling, but rather a swan. Under his guidance, I got rid of my sack-like shirts and bought fitted t-shirts, grew to like wearing heels, size 11, and switched out my metal-rimmed glasses for contacts. Thus transformed (three weeks after meeting him and only my dog at home in Pellworm would have recognized me), Lorenz proudly introduced me to his friends and then to his mother.

That he only presented me publicly after I had changed my appearance, should have made me suspicious, but I was in love. There was no longer any reason to slump my shoulders and shuffle my feet, for Lorenz was taller than I was even in heels. Finally, a man who knew what he wanted – namely, me! I could not move out of my apartment and into Lorenz’s fast enough.

My pregnancy came almost as fast.

Of course that wasn’t on purpose. When my period didn’t come, I panicked. Pregnant! Especially now when my life had become something so wonderful! Lorenz – the first man who had seen me naked, would throw me out of his apartment, my parents would kill me, and I could never show my face in Pellworm again. In the gynecologist’s waiting room, I prayed that I had a horrible, even incurable disease – please, please – I took the pill every day at the same time, please let me be sick, an insidious cyst, a malignant myoma, anything but pregnancy.

My prayer fell on deaf ears. After I saw the baby on the ultrasound, I was really happy that I didn’t have to die.

And I had been wrong about Lorenz and my parents. When Lorenz found out about the pregnancy, he did not throw me out of his apartment. He proposed. And when my parents heard of the marriage proposal, they invited us both to Pellworm to introduce Lorenz to the neighbors and discuss the selection of strollers.

About eight months later, our daughter Nelly was born, then Julius, and for fourteen years everything was great. I had given up my studies to raise my children and tried to fill my life with all the right things: the right books on the right party small talk, the right shoes to match the right dress, the right vacation locales with the right friends, the right meals for the right occasion, and the right interaction with the right housekeeper. The latter was hardest for me. It took a few years before I figured out that it isn’t sensible to befriend the woman who cleans up after us. In the end, you sit down with your new “friend” over coffee, listen to her depressing marriage stories, and give good advice that is never followed. Every afternoon you pay your friend the agreed upon fee only to do all the housework yourself afterwards. Strangely enough, such friendships only last until you decide to hire someone else to clean so that you have more time to discuss the friend’s marital problems. Your husband (rightly) calls you silly – at least that was the case for me. But I was very young and totally inexperienced (my mother never had a housekeeper, of course) and I had a lot to learn. Nevertheless: Mrs. Klapko, the first housekeeper I did not call by her first name, has been cleaning, ironing, and vacuuming for us for five years and thanks to her our apartment looks so clean and tidy that it could be photographed for an interior design magazine.

Everything was going well for us. Until my husband suddenly and unexpectedly asked for a divorce four months ago.

I was completely thrown by this. The evening had begun like so many others: Lorenz had worked overtime and I had put the kids to bed without him, warmed up his dinner, and talked about the day over a glass of red wine.

Without any run-up, he announced: “Conny, I want a divorce.”

It wouldn’t have taken much for me to have fallen from my chair at that point.

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” I asked.

“Of course not. I would never make a joke about that,” responded Lorenz sternly.

Bewildered I stared at him and considered which part of the film I had missed. Hello? Does anyone hear me?

In the meantime, Lorenz shared his plans regarding my and his future: “Of course the children will stay with you, though I will keep the apartment, if nothing else because of the proximity to the court. Ulfi will take care of all the financial stuff for us so we don’t need to worry about that, but I thought it would be nice if you and the kids would live in my mother’s house. The children would have a backyard and you would have even more space than you do here. Also, it’s my parents’ house and to sell it to strangers doesn’t feel right to me. What do you think, Conny?”

Hello? Hello? I kept calling for backup. But no one responded.

“Conny?”

“Hm?” I was clearly in shock. I probably had saliva running down my chin. I tried to piece together individual bits of what Lorenz was saying but it just wasn’t happening. His mother had died four weeks ago at the age of 83 from a heart attack. Maybe Lorenz’s divorce ideas were just a delayed reaction to her death? I tried to activate the remnants of my psychology courses: was there perhaps a sort of . . . uh . . . oedipal . . . uh . . . pressure to divorce . . . uh . . . postmortem? I couldn’t remember to have ever heard of such a thing. Actually there were only two possible explanations. Either Lorenz had a brain tumor or . . .

“Julius could go to the ‘Villa Kunterbunt,’ the kindergarten down the street; it has a great reputation and the percentage of ill-bred foreign and welfare kids is practically at zero,” said Lorenz, interrupting my chaotic stream of thought. “He wouldn’t be hit over the head every day with a shovel and the teachers don’t wear headscarves. That would be a very obvious improvement to this integrative, alternative joke of a school he goes to now, don’t you think? Nelly can of course stay at her school and would just have to take a longer bus trip to get there. But if she wants to switch: the high school there also has a good reputation and she can even ride her bike. But I think we should let her decide for herself, you know?”

Either he had a brain tumor or . . .

“Is there someone else?” I burst out.

“What?” Lorenz looked at me as though I had lost my mind. “How’d you come up with that?”

“Yes, tell me!” I cried. “Why else would you suddenly want a divorce? We’re fine.”

Lorenz sighed. “I knew that it would be difficult to have a rational discussion with you about this. You are so emotional.”

One of us had clearly gone crazy. Feverishly, I mined the last fourteen years for an explanation for Lorenz’s wish to divorce and found nothing, not even a serious fight. Okay, so I gave up my studies and never tried to have a career, for which I sometimes feel guilty. The women in our circle were not only more competent in dealing with their housekeepers, they were also generally employed despite their children; most were even something great like an investment banker, lawyer, or doctor. It was easy to feel inferior in that circle when everyone was exchanging stories from their everyday lives: about an exciting criminal court case, a patient revived at the last second, or the chaotic Nikkei, while the worst problem that I had solved that day was how to get gum out of my young daughter’s hair. But Lorenz had never had a problem with me staying at home; in fact, he had always said that he earned enough money for both of us and he was right. (Particularly because he was the only child in a family with two childless rich uncles who had died one after another during our marriage. Even though they gave the largest part of their estates to various foundations, there were still plenty of bonds, paintings, and money market funds for their only nephew and great nephew.) Also, we saw over the years that many marriages in our circle fell apart despite the women being so hardworking and clever. No, there were no fundamental discrepancies between us, even our sex life was completely normal. Once or twice a week we slept together, when the children were in bed, and that was a lot more than most other pairs with small children could claim. There had occasionally been a few smaller harmless disputes in our marriage. Something about how I preferred to carry my “Tchibo”[2] purse even though Lorenz had given me a Louis Vuitton bag, or how years ago I once left Julius’s diaper pail in the hallway when the senior prosecutor and his wife had come over for dinner. I could really only think of one thing that Lorenz had been upset about and that was the issue with the new neighbor.

Recently I had brought the garbage down and locked myself out, a classic move that we have all experienced: the door shuts and the keys are inside. There was a vegetable lasagna baking in the oven and Julius was napping. The neighbor who had our apartment key for emergencies or when we were out of town was gone and Nelly wouldn’t be home for two hours. Because the lasagna was nearly finished, I immediately rang the bell of the apartment above us where someone had just moved in, an ageless, bearded man who had until then not introduced himself. He was luckily at home. I was in a hurry because I didn’t want Julius to wake up and find himself alone in the apartment, so I said hastily, but not rudely: “Hello, my name is Constanze Wischnewski and I live in the apartment below you, welcome to the building, I’ll bring you a welcome gift later, but may I please go out to your balcony?”

The bearded man was somewhat overwhelmed by this and just stared baffled at my bare feet. But I couldn’t wait until he had woken up out of his momentary paralysis.

“It’s lovely here,” I said as I pushed past him into the living room and gaped at the complete lack of furniture. Only “Bang & Olufsen”[3] and floor-to-ceiling CD holders. “So minimalist.”

Because the man still didn’t say anything, I opened the balcony door and climbed, but not without offering profuse thanks, down the steel pipes covered in Japanese knotweed to our balcony. The rest was easy: One casement of the bedroom window was tilted open so I reached through the crack, opened the other casement, and climbed in. I was proud of myself: neither the lasagna nor Julius suffered any consequences.

When I told Lorenz the story that night, he already knew about it. The bearded man had caught him in the stairwell and asked about the psychiatric drugs that I must be taking. And complained that the previous renter had not told him anything about me. Apparently, he sensed an opportunity for rent reduction. Because of me! As if I were dangerous! Lorenz was humiliated. That night he uttered that insulting sentence about how I was the least organized and least capable woman he knew. Moreover, I was reckless and irresponsible and walking around barefoot was a vulgar country habit.

But he would hardly want a divorce because I walked around barefoot, right?

“Is there someone else?” I repeated with a wavering voice.

“Nooo!” Lorenz said with emphasis.

I didn’t know what else to do so I started to cry, less from worry and more from helplessness. And because I couldn’t stop crying, Lorenz felt sorry for me and tried to explain his decision.

He said that his feelings for me had changed, that was all. That our potential was simply exhausted and we could no longer develop as a couple. And that we were too young to have a marriage without love. And that if I looked deep inside, I would eventually come to this conclusion too.

In the following weeks, I tried to look deep inside and search for this realization, while Lorenz was already working energetically on the implementation of his plans. When he had made up his mind about something, there was no going back. He explained to the children that Mommy and Daddy still loved each other but not enough to live together. And that Daddy would be sleeping in the guest room for now. But grandma’s house – it has been so sad that it was alone without a family – would be where they, the children, and Mommy, that’s me, would be living as soon as the heating was repaired. Then the house would be happy again and Daddy would not have to sleep in the guest room anymore. And in the backyard of grandma’s house they could put a wonderful swing and a sandbox and Daddy would come over often and visit them. And they could come over to Daddy’s house any time to visit and everything would be really, really great.

That worked for Julius, who didn’t ask any questions and was as even-tempered and happy as he always was. But Nelly was fourteen years old, not four, and she found Lorenz’s explanations flimsy. Furthermore, she couldn’t be bribed with swings and sandboxes anymore. In an uncharitable move, she blamed me for this mess.

“I’m not buying any of this,” she said. “What did you do?”

Nothing. I had done nothing, absolutely nothing. Maybe that was too little?

“I don’t want to move to grandma’s house. That’s like a total wasteland,” Nelly cried. “You just have to make up with Daddy.”

Yep, if only it were that easy.

“But we didn’t even fight, honey,” I said and tried to sound calming, superior, and grownup.

“Well what is it then?” called Nelly. “Is Daddy cheating on you?”

“Nooo!” I said with emphasis, just like Lorenz.

“But why doesn’t he love you anymore?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “You know, feelings can sometimes . . .”

“Fuck!” yelled Nelly and started to cry. “I don’t want to move to this boring house in the suburbs. I think it’s really shitty that you aren’t doing anything about this. You’re ruining my entire life.”

But what was I supposed to do? Lorenz’s decision was made. He had lost no time informing all our friends, acquaintances, and relatives about our imminent divorce. They were surprised, though not as surprised as I was. Things like this happened in the best of families.

Everyone was very friendly and very neutral but, even if a neutral approach in these cases is theoretically considered correct, neutrality is not very useful on a practical level. Yes, I would even go so far as to say that neutral friends aren’t friends at all. If I hadn’t had Trudi, I would have felt even more alone than I already did.

Trudi, whose actual name was Gertrud, was the only one in my circle of friends who was not “correct,” according to Lorenz’s standards. I had met her in college when I had tried to finish my degree two years after Nelly’s birth. (Which I – by the way – never accomplished.) Trudi had, in Lorenz’s words, a crack in her teapot; she believed in strange spirits and aliens and knew all the stations of her many previous lives. She had been a brilliant psychology student, graduated at the top of the class, and had blown off two great job offers because they “didn’t feel right.” Since then, she had completed a series of mysterious, cost-intensive workshops that enabled her to sense water veins and electromagnetic fields, soothe nature spirits, and analyze the aura of an old car tire. Aside from that, she was a really good friend, the kind that you can call at four in the morning if you need help.

Trudi was the only one not being neutral and gave me a hug, saying “Lorenz is a jerk, Conny. I have experienced this a hundred times in my circle of acquaintance. This is a mid-life crisis. It’s normal for men to separate from their families during this phase and to switch out their wives for someone younger. And their Volvo for a convertible Porsche. It’s why I never got married.”

“But Lorenz isn’t cheating on me,” I said. Admittedly, he did have a Volvo.

Trudi wasn’t convinced. “I’m pretty sure about this. My instinct is never wrong.”

“He just doesn’t love me anymore – that’s all,” I said. “And somehow that’s even worse.”

“What an idiot!” Trudi put her arm around me and trotted out all the platitudes that someone in this situation could ever want to hear. “He didn’t deserve you. I always thought that you weren’t a good match. And look at it this way: when one door closes, another one opens. Who knows what fate has in store for you. Your next big adventure is here, isn’t that great? If Lorenz has someone else, then we will find someone else for you too. Someone better. That would be easy the way you look. It will just be hard to find someone who is taller than you. I can’t help but be old fashioned in these areas. If men these days can’t be smarter than we are, then they should at least be taller than us. Oh, this will be great: the single life in your mid-thirties is so much better.”

But I didn’t want the single life.

“Trudi,” I said with emphasis. “Lorenz is not cheating on me. He just doesn’t love me anymore and I don’t know why and it’s making me miserable. It would have been better if he had been cheating on me. That would at least feel normal.”

I had always thought that family came first for Lorenz. Right after his career. That he wanted to ship us off to his mother’s house after fourteen years together just because his feelings had “changed” seemed to come out of nowhere.

If Lorenz wasn’t cheating on me then he must have a brain tumor. That was the only plausible explanation and I clung to it like a lifeline.

Instead of going to the neurologist, Lorenz went instead to his friend and lawyer Ulfi Kleinschmidt, who confused me even more by presenting the divorce formalities in such legalese that I didn’t understand a thing. But I didn’t want to look stupid so I signed everything that Ulfi put in front of me so that “the process would be sped up.” Although I didn’t want the process to be sped up at all. Maybe Lorenz would die from his brain tumor before the divorce. Something like that can go really fast.

“I’m completely healthy,” Lorenz said. “And you have to accept that it’s over between us.”

But I just couldn’t switch tracks that quickly. While I watched how Lorenz carefully dismantled the pieces of our marriage and only went to dinner parties without me – our so-called friends had decided that Lorenz was probably the more important contact to have -, sitting in our apartment increasingly felt pointless, like I was an uninvited guest. I began to pack up my and the children’s things half-heartedly, which Nelly acknowledged with hysterical screaming fits.

“My things are staying here! I’ll be here most of the time anyway. I’ll only go to grandma’s lame house to sleep! And I’ll definitely not be inviting any of my friends there. Daddy said that he won’t touch my room here.”

There wasn’t much to pack anyway because everything belonged to Lorenz. He had picked it out and paid for it. I always let Lorenz handle questions of taste, which was like a red thread throughout our marriage. The entire apartment was furnished with ridiculously expensive, silver-gray goat hair velour, Rolf Benz sofas with black leather upholstery, a coffee table that cost as much as a small car, and giant abstract paintings which would cover the college funds of our kids if they were ever sold.

Only the softwood kitchen sideboard, which I had given Lorenz when we got married, stood out from the rest of the furnishings. I had found it at home in Pellworm in our neighbor’s cowshed, under many layers of paint. It had taken weeks to strip and sand it, then paint away the cowshed odor with linseed oil and essential orange oil.

Lorenz had been very moved when I had presented the sideboard to him, tied up with a pretty white bow.

I started crying when I remembered this moment. The memories flooding my brain were making me cry a lot actually. Some days my eyes never dried from all the crying. Trudi found this alarming. She said that my aura was completely poisoned and that I had to move out immediately to save my soul. She was not convinced by my brain tumor theory, but rather offered for me and the kids to move in with her until Lorenz had arranged for the heating in his mother’s house to be repaired. But aside from the fact that Nelly was suffering from further hysterical screaming fits from this suggestion, the idea was not very good. Trudi lived with her three Siamese cats and an entire collection of spirits, invisible to us thankfully, in a small two-bedroom apartment and had no understanding of what it would mean to share this with a teenager, a small child, and an acutely depressed mid-thirties woman. If I hadn’t had children, I would have taken her up on her offer immediately. We would have killed several bottles of red wine every night and watched sad movies. Nothing is more comforting than drunk-watching the Titanic sink – I mean, you just feel better about your own life when you see that. But I had to remain rational for the kids.

“Oh, come on!” Trudi said adventurously. “We’ll have a great time! The three of you can have the mattress in the living room and we’ll do energy massages and aromatherapy and a picnic in front of the TV and . . .”

“No, no,” I said. “Otherwise you’ll change your mind about me and then there won’t be anyone who loves me.”

Instead of moving in with Trudi, I was rational and took the kids with me to Pellworm, although there I had neither a comforting friend nor Titanic movies nor red wine. But every year we had spent Christmas with my parents and I wanted the kids’ holiday to be as normal as possible. Unfortunately during the holidays there was no one around to repair the heating in the house of Lorenz’s mother and when he had finally found someone he learned that the heating could no longer be repaired but had to be completely replaced. That meant that we had to stay longer at my parents’ house. Nelly had to return home after the holidays ended because she had school. She was in an exceptionally good mood when she left since my parents didn’t know what to do with girls and they also spent the entire time trying to convince Nelly that she looked just like me.

“Really, just like Constanze at her age,” they said. Girls don’t like to hear things like that. Even today, I would rather not look anything like my mother. To make matters worse, Nelly found my confirmation pictures – me as a fourteen year old with slumping shoulders, metal-rimmed glasses, and size 11 college shoes – and broke out in tears about it.

“And they think I look like that?” she cried.

“No, honey,” I tried to console her. “You only inherited the good parts of me.”

“What good parts?” Nelly cried out rudely.

While my daughter was happy to be able to go home finally, Julius and I had no other option but to stick it out on Pellworm until the damn heating was finally replaced.

Julius was happy to be here; he was a boy and my parents liked boys and the fresh North Sea air was good for both of us. We collected mussels by the pound and were, despite the weather, outside a lot, not least because that was the only way I could escape my parents. It wasn’t easy for me to be with them for so long as they had a particular way of letting me know what they thought of me: namely nothing. My mother didn’t let a day pass without saying at least one time: “if you had only listened to us and gotten a job! All those years lazing around! Nothing good could come of that. Now here you are – no man and no career!”

“And with a pile of hungry kids,” my father liked to add, as though I had at least fourteen children who all had to beg for a warm meal.

There was no wine cellar to comfort me and I wasn’t miserable enough to open a jar of the homemade currant preserves that my mother had stored for decades. It also rained a lot. So I was really happy when Lorenz finally called and said “Pack your bags: the heating is done and everything is ready. Julius got the emergency kindergarten spot at the Villa Kunterbunt! You can come home.”

All I needed to cry tears of joy would have been if he had added that he had been cured of his brain tumor.

At least, now, we were finally back home.

I heaved the heavy suitcase onto the stone steps by the front door of the building and took a deep breath. At the same moment the door opened and the bearded man from the apartment above us came out. When he saw me, he was suddenly in such a hurry that he stumbled over the suitcase without a greeting and hurried away.

“Nice to see you again,” I said, but the bearded man had already taken flight, as though I were a psycho with a drawn knife running after him. He probably thought that I had broken out of whatever mental institution I had spent the last seven weeks in. At least this time I had shoes on and they were even from Gucci.

“I want to go to bed,” Julius said. He was pitifully pale and I hurried to open the building door that the bearded man had so thoughtlessly let close behind him.

Except that I couldn’t open the door. Something was wrong with the key.

I rang the doorbell.

“Yes?” came the voice of Nelly, which sounded fairly cranky even through the speaker.

“Nelly honey, we’re here!” I said sweetly. “But something is wrong with the lock so someone will have to come down and let us in.”

Now I heard the voice of my still-husband through the speaker. “Wait there. We’re almost ready.”

“With what?”

No response.

“We’ll be warm in a minute,” I said to Julius. “You were very brave. Later I’ll tell you the story of Goldilocks that time she got sick on the train.”

I heard steps in the stairwell and then Lorenz opened the door, alive and well. He looked even better than usual, somehow suntanned. The brain tumor theory was officially dead. This man was not sick.

Nevertheless he smiled at me. About as warmly as one might smile at a vacuum cleaner salesman, but still. “Great that you’re on time. So we can leave right away.”

Leave? Where? Aha, classic, he probably didn’t want to cook anything. “Okay, if you’re thinking of taking us to McDonald’s – Julius just threw up all over Cologne.” I said.

“Huh?” Lorenz wrinkled his forehead. He had knelt down and was hugging Julius but was now pushing him away with both hands. “Don’t get me sick. I have zero desire for a stomach bug.”

“It’s because of all that High C from Mrs. Meyer,” Julius said.

Behind Lorenz I saw Nelly on the stairs, loaded up like a small pack animal with backpack, suitcase, and something that looked like rolled bedding. When I saw my freckled, long-limbed, and large-footed child, the tears welled up in my eyes. I had not seen her in five weeks. We had never been separated for so long. I had called her twice a day because I missed her so much. (From my cell phone because my parents only had a telephone for emergencies. And for holidays and birthdays – the saver fare.) I had a strong suspicion that this desire to be close was one-sided. Nelly would have been fine if I had only called every second weekend, if at all.

Whatever. I hugged my tall daughter so tightly that her bedding fell to the floor, including the stuffed animal with the sucked-on ears that slipped out of it. “And, did you have a nice time with Daddy?”

“Mom! Don’t sniffle in my ear.” Nelly pulled away. “Hey Jules. Long time no see.”

Julius beamed at Nelly. “Nelly, I threw up three times. Once on the train, once in the garbage can, and once on a man’s jacket.”

“Yes, there will probably be a warrant out for our arrest because of it,” I said and picked up the stuffed animal from the ground. “But what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t write down our address for old Mr. Whiny because the subway would have left without us. Man, was he mad.”

Julius nodded. “Daddy? What is a nutty, backwood broad?”

“The man probably meant your mother,” said Lorenz. His look made it clear that Heinrich had spoken Lorenz’s opinion. “But now we have to go. Off to the car and to your new home.”

“Now?” I asked dumbfounded. “Lorenz, it’s already dark and I just dragged myself from the train station hungry and thirsty with a suitcase that weighs a ton and a vomiting child . . .”

“I think it’s best for everyone if we don’t lose any time with the move,” Lorenz said, with a meaningful look at Julius, and closed the door behind him. “Although move is too strong of a word. Everything you need is already over there. The house just needs its people.” And then he laughed cheerfully.

I really wanted to hit him over the head with Nelly’s stuffed animal.

“Daddy’s in a big hurry to get rid of us,” said Nelly. “He practically pushed me down the stairs.”

“How nice,” I said. Oh, if only I would have stayed on the train and gone home with the Meyers (with a Y!) to Offenbach near Frankfurt. Maybe they would have adopted us if we had asked nicely.

“Don’t exaggerate, Nelly,” Lorenz said. “I don’t know why we’re still sitting here talking. Tomorrow I have to work through a mountain of files and don’t have time to drive you, so let’s go. Stop messing around. Julius needs to go to bed.”

“And I need to pee,” I said and tried my house key again in the lock.

“In twenty minutes you can use mother’s bathroom – I mean, your bathroom,” Lorenz said and laughed nervously.

Lorenz had to get used to this and so did I: “Mother’s bathroom” was now where Constanze pees. That was now documented by a notary.

Still: “But I have to go now,” I said. Lorenz was in a ridiculous rush to start his new, family-free life. Apparently his ex-family was not even allowed to use his bathroom. “The key is jammed . . .” I fell silent, because I suddenly had a suspicion. Warily I looked up at Lorenz: “Did you actually . . . – you didn’t have the locks changed, did you?”

“I did.” Lorenz looked earnestly at his watch.

“But – hey!” I couldn’t believe it. The man had changed the locks as though I were a criminal from whom he had to protect himself! “Don’t you think that it would have been enough to have changed the lock on the apartment door? I mean, in the event that I had decided to steal your stereo while you were at work. Or” – the idea just now came to me – “suffocate you with a pillow while you slept?”

But Lorenz found my thoughts annoying. He wasn’t the least bit embarrassed by my discovery. “Conny, can we go now? Julius is freezing.”

I would have loved to contract one of Nelly’s hysterical screaming fits and make a terrible scene for Lorenz on the street but terrible scenes weren’t my thing. Instead I repeated a little stubbornly now that I really had to pee, regardless of his being in a hurry.

Lorenz gave in with a sigh. He gave Nelly the car keys and directed her to take Julius down to the underground garage and wait for us in the car.

“You can buckle Julius in,” he said. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”

Apparently he didn’t want me to enter the apartment without a guard. “Are you afraid that I’ll pee standing up?” I asked irritated, while we climbed the stairs. “Or do you think that I’ll be able to smuggle that valuable coffee table under my jacket and out of the apartment without you noticing?”

“I just want you to hurry,” said Lorenz. “I know you!” He opened the apartment door. So, he knew me! Don’t make me laugh. Very slowly I sauntered down the hall. Instead of the bathroom I turned into the living and dining areas and looked around. Exactly as I expected: it was as though I had never lived there. No trace of me. Not even the red wine stain on the carpet that I had caused before I left for Pellworm.

Lorenz had followed me with a sigh.

“Where is the kitchen sideboard?” I asked, just to give him another reason to sigh.

“Where do you think? Together with your other things at Mother’s house. Uh, your house.”

“But it belongs to you,” I said. “I gave it to you for our wedding.”

Lorenz sighed. Then said: “I thought you would perhaps want to have it back.”

“You just want to get rid of everything to reminds you of me, right?”

Lorenz didn’t answer. He played with his keys impatiently.

“What was all your stupid talk about staying good friends! You – you – you can’t even handle living under one roof with my sideboard!” My voice sounded a little shrill and I stuttered as I always did when I was upset.

“Just go pee,” said Lorenz.

“Why – do you want to inspect the crime scene afterward? Seriously, Lorenz, regardless of whether you give away the sideboard or change the locks: I will always be a part of your life.” I almost added that old classic “I’m the mother of your children!” But before I could sink that low, I decided to go to the bathroom. Lorenz couldn’t have cared less about my thoughts anyway. He waited directly in front of the door, probably so that I wouldn’t steal the valuable designer toilet brush.

Such an undignified end to a marriage.

“The thing with the sideboard is so petty! I never would have thought you would do that,” I said, when I came out of the bathroom. I tried to sound cool but my stuttering betrayed me: “What did you do with the family ph-ph-photos? Cut me out of them?”

Lorenz looked at me with some compassion. “Did you ever think that I might have given you back the sideboard because it doesn’t fit the style of the apartment?”

Nope, the thought hadn’t occurred to me.

“And about the photos: I brought all the photo albums to mother’s house. Um, to your house, I mean.”

That was only right; after all, I had been the one to put the photos in the albums.

“Can we go now? The kids are waiting!” Lorenz pushed me solemnly into the stairwell.

When he locked the apartment door, it was me who sighed for a change.

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[1] Carnival greeting in Cologne

[2] Tchibo is a German chain that sells coffee and household goods.

[3] A Danish electronics company