Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything (14 page)

I walk to my mother's. I don't feel anything; I just walk.

She's still asleep when I get there. I put the bag beside her bed and lie down next to her. She tells me the rest later. How she saw me when she woke up and asked me what was wrong; how I started crying and could not stop, my body shaking with waves of pain; how I threw myself on the floor, hit my head on the floorboards, and
started screaming. Then she called the doctor and I was taken to the hospital. They told her I'd had a nervous breakdown.

I was transferred to the adolescent psychiatric unit, where I stayed for several weeks.

Heavily sedated, I slept right through the reunification celebrations.

Sometime later, when I have told my mother and no one else the truth, I go back to the Brendels'. They only find out the bare minimum: that I had a nervous breakdown but nobody has determined the precise cause. A fragile personality, the mother moving away, an absent father, having to repeat the year at school—all in all, a seventeen-year-old girl experiencing extreme emotions at a turbulent, uncertain time.

This autumn I'll be leaving the Brendels' farm and moving to Leipzig with Johannes. I don't know what I'll do there yet, but I'll find something.

I often think of Alexey, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, who said that at some point we will all rise and meet again, and tell each other everything.

Absolutely everything.

The author has quoted from the following:

The Brothers Karamazov
, trans. David Magarshack (Penguin Books, London, 1986); Georg Trakl's poem “Gesang zur Nacht,” from his
Gedichte
(Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1974); “Die Moorsoldaten” (“Peat Bog Soldiers”); Knut Hamsun's
Victoria
and
Markens Grøde
(
Growth of the Soil
)

Daniela Krien was born in East Germany in 1975. She studied cultural sciences, communications, and media and has worked as an editor and scriptwriter for Amadelio Film.
Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything
, her first novel, has been translated into fifteen languages.

Jamie Bulloch is the translator of novels by F. C. Delius, Daniel Glattauer, Katharina Hagena, Paulus Hochgatterer, Birgit Vanderbeke, and Alissa Walser.