Read Online Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything by Daniela Krien, Jamie Bulloch - Free Book Online

wrapped it in sandwich paper. I put the package in my bag, as well as the note and a pencil.
    When I enter the shop I’m reassured, for the moment at least. He may be joking with the women, but he only has eyes for me. Softly,almost casually, he says, “There you are, Maria. I’ve brought the mare along; you wanted to go riding today, didn’t you?”
    “Yes,” I say. “I’m coming.”
    Then he helps me up into Jella’s saddle; on the stallion there is just a horse blanket. “Bring her back safe and sound, Henner!” Marianne calls out behind us. He gives a short nod, and I feel horribly deceitful.
    We trot once along the woodland path by the railway tracks and then go straight back to his farmhouse. He takes the horses to the stables and shuts the main gate. I can’t be sure, but I think I saw Alfred at the end of the path.
    In the kitchen he makes coffee and I unwrap the cake. It’s still warm and smells so lemony. Henner takes a piece and has a bite. “Did Frieda bake this?” he asks.
    I shake my head. “No, I did.”
    He grins, no doubt astonished by my efforts. “It tastes wonderful, Maria,” he says. “It’s a long time since anybody baked me a cake.” Then his face darkens and he gives me a peculiar look. I stand up and go close to him. He pulls me onto his knees.
    Then he lays me down on the kitchen table and takes me. The dogs are lying by the door, their beefy heads resting on their paws, quietly watching us.
    Afterward we drink cold coffee and smoke. There’s a volume of poetry on the table. My head was on it when Henner stood behind me and lifted my skirt. One stanza is underlined, beside it are some illegible words. A woman’s handwriting, I reckon; Henner didn’t write that. I like the verse, even though it makes me feel melancholic:
    We are the wanderers without goal,
    The clouds blown away by the wind,
    The flowers trembling in the chill of death,
    Waiting to be mown down.
    “My mother’s,” he says. “All the books were hers.” He stares at me. “She wasn’t cut out for farm work either. Like you.” And then he talks to me for ages about his mother; all I’d heard about her was that she was a drinker and a bit of an oddball.
    Henner’s mother—Helene Henner, née Mannsfeld, then Bechert in her first marriage—was thirty-five when she had him. She was born in 1915 into a middle-class family in Berlin. She was an only child. Her father died in the war, in a military hospital following the amputation of both his arms. Things got more and more difficult for the family. The mother’s money lasted a few years more, but by the beginning of the 1930s it was all gone. She never married again, Helene’s mother.
    Helene went to a good school; she was well educated and had fine manners, just no money. She was eighteen when she met the lawyer Ernst Bechert, and she married him immediately, despite her lack of funds. Ernst built up his career and became a member of the Nazi Party. They had no children. In 1940, he was conscripted and returned in February 1945 with a serious head injury and only one eye. But when the Russians came he hanged himself in the kitchen of their apartment. Helene couldn’t get away in time. The streets were already teeming with Russian soldiers, and it was hard to disguise her beauty even beneath a dirty headscarf. They got her in the cellar. She didn’t know how many there were, but it must have been dozens. One injured her so badly that the others, who’d been waiting their turn, no longer wanted this half-dead woman. She must have bled like a slaughtered animal, and it went on like that for weeks. She confessed all this to her second husband on his deathbed, and it was only then that he understood everything.
    In the summer of 1945 she dragged her battered body out of the city. No one knows for sure how she made it to Thuringia and our village. She was given work and a little room at the Henners’ farm, and a year later she married Franz, the youngest son,