Read Online All That I Am by Anna Funder - Free Book Online Page B

Königsdorf, a smallish coalmining town in Upper Silesia where my father owned the lumber mill. It was a German town until I was twelve, when the war ended, and then the area was ceded to Poland. The new border ran four kilometres away from the villa, and I kept on catching the tram every day to school, which happened, now, to be in another country. We stayed completely German.
    Because Dora was an only child, our families had encouraged us to think of each other more as sisters than cousins. After my operation, almost every school break I went up to Berlin, so the two of us grew up with holiday intimacy and reprieves during term in between. I had an inkling of the luck of this arrangement even as a child: the time apart allowed us to escape the friction of siblings. I suspected I would have been annoying to her, full time.
    Still, I shadowed her. I joined the Independents in Königsdorf at sixteen. By eighteen, when I finished school, I was desperate to get to where the action was. It was spring 1923 when I went to visit Dora at Munich University.
    Dora had finished her PhD on the economics of the German colonies, and was staying on at the university to teach for a year. She had written to me about the campaign for Toller’s release she was running from her room on campus. Though Dora had never met Toller–he’d been in prison since 1919–he was our party’s most famous member. From his cell he’d sent four plays into the world–searing works about the human price of war and the need for peaceful revolution, freedom and justice. One of them had played for more than a hundred days. Ernst Toller was the wunderkind of German theatre and the conscience of the republic. As long as he was locked up, we considered the new Weimar Germany to be as bad as the Kaiser’s old, warmongering one.
    Dora couldn’t make it to the station in Munich to meet me, but she’d given me directions to a café. As I walked through the Englischer Garten, I watched a brother and sister flying a kite papered with green scales. When I got closer I saw they were banknotes. In her letters Dora had described women running from factories to bakeries with their pay in wheelbarrows, hoping to buy a loaf of bread before the prices inflated. I knew the hyperinflation was caused by the government simply printing more currency to pay off its war debt, but it was still a shock to see the money worthless in front of me, dipping and tugging at the air.
    Dora wasn’t at the café yet. I ordered a coffee for 5000 Reichsmarks. When she opened the door I saw her first, as she scanned the room. Her hair had been cut short, and she wore a pale-blue collarless shirt and trousers. As she pulled out a chair she apologised for not having met the train. She didn’t offer a reason.
    ‘Was it hard to convince your parents to let you come?’ Dora smiled, taking out a tobacco pouch and starting to roll a cigarette.
    I nodded. ‘They think I’m here to lose my virginity, though they can’t bring themselves to say it.’
    She laughed. ‘Well, you are here for the cause. And you are a materialist like the rest of us.’ She removed a stray piece of tobacco from her bottom lip, her smile wide as a plate. ‘We would say it’s silly to value something for its non-use.’
    We laughed so hard that Dora started coughing and people stared.
    When the bill came it was for 14 000 RM–Dora’s coffee had cost 9000 RM. The waitress shrugged. ‘If you want the same price, ladies,’ she said, as if explaining a natural phenomenon to children, ‘you need to order at the same time.’
    Dora took me back to her room. I could stay there with her. Over the bed hung the WANTED poster of Toller I knew from her bedroom at home. She’d glued the top over a rod and tied a string to each end. She told me it was forbidden to put more hooks in the walls, so she’d taken down the crucifix that had been there and used its pin. I supposed she’d put the Christ away in a drawer.
    I read the