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her husband was away at
sea so often. She called to her girls to come inside and get washed
and changed. I asked if I could come too, but the answer was no,
"my mother" wouldn't allow it. So I had to go home.
    I remember the occasion vividly. It was early one afternoon at
the end of July or the beginning of August, and very hot outside.
The kitchen window was open, and everything - all the shabbiness
of my surroundings, for which there was no financial reason - was
bathed in brilliant sunlight.
    Father worked in an office in Hamburg. He sometimes told me
about it, and I knew, even at the age of four, that he earned a
good salary. We could have lived more comfortably than we did.
My parents had done so in the old days. They often used to treat
themselves to nights out in Hamburg, where they dined and danced
and so on.
    But Father had needed a lot of money himself since Magdalena's
birth, and the hospital was expensive too. The doctors at Eppendorf
were surprised by Magdalena's survival. She paid many visits to
the hospital, sometimes for another operation, sometimes just for
a few days' observation. Mother always went with her, and Father
had to pay for her bed and board. It was the same old story every
time they came back: another few weeks, a month or two at most.
    We shared our home with death, and Mother fought for every
extra day of life. She never let Magdalena out of her sight, not
even at night, which was why Father slept in my room. There were
only two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. My parents never expected to have children when they bought the house, so the
second bedroom would have been a guest room.

    Mother was standing at the stove when I asked her for some
lemonade. It was an electric stove. We also had a refrigerator, but
the rest of the kitchen amenities comprised the clumsy old secondhand furniture my parents had bought after their marriage.
Everything in the house was old, Mother included.
    She was forty-four at this time. A tall woman with a thin face,
she looked much older than her age. She had no time to spare for
herself. Her stringy grey hair hung down to her shoulders. When it
grew too long she cut some off.
    She was wearing a coloured apron and stirring a saucepan.
Putting the tumbler in the sink, she turned to me and said:
"Lemonade?"
    Mother had a soft voice and always spoke quietly, so you were
compelled to listen hard. She shook her head as though she found
it utterly incomprehensible that I could have had such an absurd
idea. Then she went on in her quiet, deliberate way. "Do you know
what they gave our Saviour when He was dying and said He was
thirsty? They took a sponge soaked in vinegar and put it to His lips.
A mug of water would have rejoiced His heart and alleviated His
sufferings, but He didn't complain - and He certainly didn't ask for
lemonade. What does that tell you?"
    This can't have been the first such conversation I had with
Mother, because I already knew the answer by heart: "That our
Saviour was always content with His lot."
    Me, I was never content. I was a difficult child. Stubborn, quicktempered and egotistical, I wanted everything all for myself; and
if I wasn't stopped, I simply took it. That was the only reason
why Magdalena was so sick, Mother explained. Magdalena had
come from Mother's tummy, and I had been in Mother's tummy a
short while before. I'd used up all her strength, which would have
sufficed for at least three children, so there'd been none left for
poor Magdalena.
    I didn't care when she told me such things. Although I wasn't
intent on being a bad person, being good wasn't so important where my sister was concerned. I didn't like Magdalena. To me,
she was just an object like a piece of wood. She couldn't walk or
speak - she couldn't even cry properly. If something hurt her, she
squealed. Most of the time she lay in bed, or sometimes for an
hour in an armchair in the kitchen. But that was on an especially