LITMIR.BIZ

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I get it. Life is tough.

      At Christmastime I have to hide from my little family the fact that I really miss my parents. Not necessarily those parents, but parents in general. The parents of one of my friends always say to her, “Whoa, you got fat!” when she comes home for Christmas. I told her just to stop going, but she still heads home for her annual dose of humiliation. I can’t understand it. But it’s possible that in her case it has something to do with an inheritance. If my husband hadn’t popped into my life and made any inheritance unnecessary, I’d probably still see my parents regularly, too. I definitely think money keeps a lot of screwed-up families together, forcing children to humiliate themselves.

      I was heavily indebted to my previous husband. The first thing my new husband did was pay off all my debts, and I’ve never been able to completely cast off the feeling that he bought me from my ex-husband like an old camel. I think it’s true, I let myself be bought—because I badly needed security. I was such a mess mentally from my trauma that I couldn’t have dealt with a life weighed down by debt. Georg was able not only to fill the financial role of the father but to fill the mental role of both parents. Naturally Frau Drescher thinks this is too much pressure to put on my new husband, and she’s probably right again. But I’m still working through that with her.

      I get my daughter ready for bed. For seven years it’s been the same routine, like in prison: bathe, brush your teeth, go to the bathroom. For me, brushing your teeth is a matter of life and death. I think that only low-class scumbags ever have kids with bad teeth. Especially bad baby teeth. That’s just not acceptable. You have to drastically reduce their intake of sweets. And you have to make sure they brush their teeth at least once a day. For a good long time. I’ve developed some nasty tricks to ensure proper oral hygiene despite the natural opposition of my daughter. I use the same trick that people typically use to impose moral behavior—they invent a god and say that he sees everything, so you’d better be good.

      When she was still little, I talked to my daughter constantly about the tooth trolls named Cavity and Bacteria. They are children’s book characters invented by the German government or something in order to get kids to stick to a good oral hygiene regimen. It’s pure scare tactics. The book explains that the tooth trolls feed on bits of food left in your mouth and that their excretions burn holes in your teeth. I told Liza over and over, “If you don’t brush, Cavity and Bacteria will come with their hammer and sickle and bludgeon holes in your teeth—and those holes will hurt, which will mean you’ll have to go to the dentist, who will have to drill into your teeth before he can fill in the holes.”

      The comparison to God is not so apt, though, since Cavity and Bacteria are real, basically, and there are real consequences if you don’t brush. With God there are never any consequences. God doesn’t see everything or punish anything—because there is no such thing as God. Liza has so thoroughly internalized the importance of brushing her teeth that sometimes, when it’s really late and I am inclined to lay her sleeping body in bed fully clothed, she wakes with a start and goes to brush her teeth because in her paranoia she thinks she’ll wake up with loads of holes in her teeth. All the better. She’ll thank me one day—or probably not. When friends of ours with kids the same age tell us that their children have cavities, I act as if it’s totally normal. But in reality I’m thinking, Oh, God, what a terrible mother she is! I get off on the fact that my child has no cavities. All because of me and me alone! Ha!

      Then we go into her room and I lie down next to her and read. Right now we’re reading Gulliver’s Travels.

      She asks, “Mama, why are you whispering?”

      No idea. I have to think about it myself. Why indeed? “Um, to make it more suspenseful?”

      “Stop it.”

      I continue reading, without whispering. Then I stop at an awkward point and allow myself to be persuaded to read a little further. I learned that from Jan-Uwe Rogge. You should be hard and follow through on things, but once in a while you should also show children that they can convince their parents to change their minds, using charm and a good argument. They should learn to convince people, to change their minds. Liza learns that from me.

      After reading, I sing the two songs that I’ve sung to her since she was nursing. Just so she has constants in her life—something I never had. The first song is “Sleep, Children, Sleep,” and the second is an English children’s song called “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” which is about a sheep that takes its own wool to various customers’ homes. No idea what lesson it’s supposed to be teaching.

      Finally I lie next to her in bed until she falls asleep. Our apartment is like a dungeon. There are only a few windows onto the street. The previous owners did all kinds of renovations in the building, almost certainly illegally. There’s just no way they would have gotten permits for all the things they did. Long, narrow hallways, miniature rooms without windows. Because some rooms are in the basement, it’s like a cold rabbit hole. People always get lost, even Liza sometimes. It’s a very intestinal apartment—as if the rooms and hallways are part of a giant, subterranean colon.

      I’m also slowly beginning to worry whether the apartment makes us happy or not. When we moved in, newly in love, we didn’t care about the apartment’s backstory. Now that the honeymoon phase of our relationship is over, the story of the previous owners bothers me more and more. When you’re first in love, you think you are immune to anything bad in the world. Once daily life has begun to encroach on that feeling, you notice you’re not so unique, as you so arrogantly thought at the beginning. And then the things that happen to others suddenly make you think, too. In the case of the previous owners, she had money—she was in banking—and he was an ordinary worker. She started to waste away. He did, too, for a while. Then he got a liver transplant and was suddenly healthy and lively again. Then he left because he couldn’t stand her anymore.

      And we moved into their apartment without even thinking about it for a second. If it were a movie you’d think, Oh, boy, there’s definitely trouble in store if you move in there. Or maybe you’d move into a place like that if you didn’t know about the history. But never with all the information at hand.

      Liza lies down and acts as if she is ready to go to sleep. As a good example, I’ve closed my eyes and am breathing deeply, in and out. I learned to breathe that way from a masseuse—it’s a way to stave off panic attacks. You fall asleep better that way, too. It makes you feel as if you have your life under control. Crazy. It also shows how poorly you breathe otherwise, during the rest of the day. I listen closely to her breathing, to see whether it’s changed from the way it is when you are falling asleep to the way it is when you are deep asleep. But suddenly she speaks in the darkness.

      “Mama, is Hitler still around?”

      “What would make you think of that?”

      Oh, man, please fall asleep. This is bad.

      “At school, one of the kids said to another when they were fighting, ‘You’re as bad as Hitler.’”

      “No, don’t worry. He killed himself a long, long time ago.”

      “Oh, good. In that case I can fall asleep. If he hadn’t have killed himself, would he have gone to prison?”

      “Of course he would have been put in prison. He killed so many people.”

      “Mama, do we know anyone who has been in prison?”

      “Why?”

      “I’d like to visit someone in prison sometime. I want to see what it looks like in there.”

      “No, unfortunately not. Maybe someday.”

      I would love to take revenge on the newspaper publisher who capitalized on my family’s car accident to earn dirty money selling our blood and agony to voyeuristic readers. If I didn’t have a husband and child, I would have founded a terrorist organization immediately. I’ve sworn that as soon as my child is out of the woods, I will kill myself—which I want to do anyway—and take those responsible with me. If I get up the nerve. If the plan works and I don’t die, I’ll be put away for the murder of at least three people—as

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