Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything by Daniela Krien, Jamie Bulloch

by his answer that I push his hands away and swing over to the other side of the counter. He must have seen his failure in my eyes, because he comes around, grabs me by the wrists, and says with the certainty I had wanted to hear, “You’re coming anyway!”
    Then we hear the car out in the yard. “Hi, Henner,” Johannes says as he enters. He comes behind the counter and gives me a kiss, but Henner has already gone. It’s all so sordid and yet I’m still going along with it.
    Johannes asks when lunch will be ready, but there’s nothing happening in the kitchen. We all realize how much we’re missing Frieda. I start preparing lunch; I’ve learned a lot over the past few weeks. Later, Siegfried praises my cooking—he said he was amazed by how good it was. Strange that I’m trying to distance myself from the family just as my place within it is becoming more secure. No one here has any sense of the finer things in life. “Maria,” Siegfried says, “who would have thought?”
    I owe my name to my mother’s nostalgia. As the daughter of a communist she rarely went to church, but once she saw a nativity play and the girl playing Mary made such an impression on her that she used to wish she were called Maria too. She’s a northerner, my mother; she never felt at home here in Thuringia. She loathes the rolling landscape that I love so much. When she was pregnant with me, my father packed her things and simply took her with him. She cried the whole way, not stopping until they reached the village where I was born. When she went into labor she really ought to have gone to the hospital, but because my father and grandparents were not there, and she couldn’t make it to the nearest telephone in the co-op, I entered this world on my grandparents’ kitchen floor. Looking back, my mother wasn’t at all unhappy about this. Other women had told her that in hospital they took the babies away at birth, and theyonly saw them every four hours for feeding. But she was able to keep me. She didn’t put me down for days, apart from the odd spell in my crib, and then only so that she could sit beside me and stare. At least this is what my grandmother told me; she wouldn’t stop moaning about it at the time, but now she no longer mentions it.
    We would go up north whenever we could, and there were always tears when we said our good-byes. It was on one of those holidays to visit my mother’s parents that I saw the West for the first time. We took a trip to the small town of D. The border strip, with its tall, barbed wire fence, ran alongside one of the streets. One of my mother’s relatives lived on the third floor of an apartment block in that street. You could see the West from her windows. Beyond the River Elbe and across the meadows stood a solitary house, which I’d never be able to visit. I can quite clearly remember what I thought and felt that day. I must have been around seven, and I couldn’t take my eyes off this house. How on earth could people live only a few hundred meters away, and yet we’d never get to meet them? I mean, we could almost see them! And they us. We could have waved to each other, or signaled with lights, like I used to back home with our neighbor’s son. I got stomach cramps and didn’t want to eat any of the cake, even though it had strawberries on top.
    When we left my uncle’s apartment and came out onto the street, I ran over to the fence and stuck my nose through the wire. My mother called me back—in the end she had to drag me away—the dogs behind the fence were yelping, and a soldier raised his rifle and screamed, “Get away from the fence!”
    You never forget something like that.
    It’s been almost a year since we were first allowed across the border, but we’ve only been to the West twice.
    Siegfried wants to go to Bavaria on Sunday, the day after tomorrow. They’ve planned that when Frieda comes home, he’ll go back with Hartmut for a week and visit a Demeter farm. He’s