Kathrin Schmidt
tr. Susan Vickerman

Pulling the Wool

It nearly undid her. Watching his toes emerge from the bottom end of the quilt little by little as she gradually pulled it up towards her felt like being unravelled. The further she pulled it up, the more sensitive his reaction – presumably to the chill wafting in. Even in winter she never had the heating on in their bedroom. The way the dark hairs on his legs went erect never failed to give her a slight, silent frisson of desire. Sadly she always had to get up much too quickly, while he slept on. The warmth of the bed held him captive, trapped in blissful, all-enveloping darkness, while she, due to her paper round, had to rise barely two hours after midnight.

With a sigh she switched the lamp back off so as not to wake him, brewed coffee in the little kitchen and had a slice of toast spread with her favourite jam. Red jam. Sometimes, if he’d done the shopping, there was only yellow jam or plum jam. She then went hunting for a piece of cheese or a bit of left-over sausage, and if she succeeded in finding anything would eat it knowing she’d now have to go shopping again for their supper. Shopping was one of the most hated jobs she could think of – that feeling of exposure, when she put special offers or products that were especially cheap on the conveyor. There wasn’t enough money for more, despite her newspaper deliveries, which she did with the family car. This job was why they hadn’t got rid of the car, though she sometimes wondered if it was worth it since the job made her only slightly more money than the cost of running it. Her four children were by now ‘out of the woods’ in terms of all the initial expenses, as Mr Laurer the neighbour would blithely trot out, but ‘the woods’ had only meant dirty nappies and bed-wetting, whereas they couldn’t be deeper ‘in the woods’ now that they all attended school, in view of the things that went on there. She’d told her youngest son there was no money to buy Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Though on that score she was glad, because in her view those cards were quite clearly damaging to children’s brains – the way they got them then swapped them, only to get more and swap more, their fierce battles not stopping at deception and theft.

Finally, two hours after midnight, she put five breakfast plates on the table and the things that children and husband would need to start their day. They made their sandwiches themselves. If the sausage and cheese were finished, as today, she’d quickly fry them some egg patties which would have cooled down by morning so they could be put between slices of bread. When she came back, after seven o’clock, she’d go back to bed and would sleep throughout the morning, getting up with thoughts of lunch around midday. When the children came home from school she tried to be fresh and cheerful for them. But didn’t always manage it.

Today she came home dripping wet, having got totally drenched in the penetrating rain, even on the short sprints between car and mailbox. Hoping to ward off the cold which was already beginning to announce itself with shivers and a runny nose, she took a hot bath, after which, to wrap up warmly, she grabbed one of the three or four knitted sweaters she owned but would ordinarily avoid like the plague. She quite simply detested them. They made her itch, even through the blouses she made a point of wearing underneath. Even when her mother gave her the wool to approve before knitting the thing, and she rubbed it on her neck to try it out, the resulting item was always itchy. Snuggly, she’d say, on receipt of these gifts. She alone knew what she really meant by that. She had secretly given the sweaters to friends, keeping only a handful, which she’d only wear if her mother came over. Due to this guilty conscience she kept her wardrobe firmly locked, usually keeping the key on her in her trouser pocket. Her mother had even passed on her knitting machine, a monster of a thing that for a long time resided, half-hidden and ignored, in the gap between the wardrobe and the wall. Her mother had given up machine-knitting when her eyesight failed and it became too much effort to wind the thread around the hooks for casting on. This had turned her into an even more enthusiastic hand-knitter. The children were actually delighted by this; they’d sometimes even commission a particular design. Hadn’t their youngest boy just asked Grandma for a Yu-Gi-Oh sweater, in fact? Which Grandma would knit – try stopping her! She smiled. She had put on a long-sleeved angora base-layer under the chosen batwing sweater. Glancing in the mirror she saw a pink, fluffy dragon.

Sifting through the advertising leaflets she’d taken from the mailbox downstairs she came across a small red flyer. A scrap merchant was collecting in the area. When she saw the date was today, she thought of the old machine. She got it out. The accessories were stowed in a box on top of the cupboard: an assortment of weights, combs and ‘transfer tools’. On a smaller box she read the words intarsia carriage which, when she opened it, contained something unidentifiable. But she liked the words. Images of a carriage inlaid with tiles came to her: images of ornamentally carved wooden doors, and internal sides and roof decorated with exquisite mosaics. For a moment she smiled. She had finished separating the scrap-metal machine parts from the plastic components that she would dispose of following the recycling instructions, when the absentminded act of sliding her fingers across the many tiny needle-hooks suddenly triggered the astonishing thought: she had never ever knitted anything in her entire life. At the very bottom of the wardrobe, below the skirts and trousers hung neatly on the rod, was a stash of machine knitting yarn. Looking through the box she found a perfectly acceptable red, and hunted for the instruction booklet she’d already set aside for paper recycling. It took two and a half hours to assemble the twin-bedded knitting machine with its every bell and whistle, and when she was done she fell asleep, exhausted.

The children came home from school. No lunch was waiting for them and after a wary look into the parental bedroom, they took things into their own hands and cooked pasta, the supply of which was always plentiful. They ate it with butter and Maggi sauce, which would have prompted a rant from their mother about the importance of a wholesome diet with vitamins and protein and which would probably have ended with a ban. So they were happy. To celebrate they got themselves ice-creams from the freezer too, and if the youngest had been more careful and hadn’t slipped on the tiles as he closed the freezer door, or had been able to hold back his yells, she might not even have emerged from her den till suppertime. But suddenly she was standing in their midst, her eyes heavy with sleep. Dumpling eyes, as her husband called them. The little boy immediately stopped howling and looked delighted to see her, pushing his head into her lap. ‘All better’, she said. She sat down and took a plate of pasta, adding ketchup. It had cooled down too much, anyway, for butter and Maggi, though she had entertained the thought, today, of quite simply joining in with the children’s pleasures. The fact was, she too was happy: the children had cooked for themselves, letting her sleep. Their chatter was riotous. Too much effort to join in. So she just quietly watched her thoughts which, like little white mice, latched onto the curtains, scurried up to the pelmet, waved her goodbye and headed out through the open window. A lovely, cold day, in which peace reigned. Her mother had given them the little house in the middle of a former colony of allotments when she herself moved into a small new-built flat with a kitchenette and communal heating system. Because the dimensions of the allotments went far beyond the prescribed allotment size, it had been declared a ‘development area’, and new houses had been conjured up out of the clay all around their little old house. Luckily they had had the heating replaced while they were both still breadwinners. But a further ten years had gone by since then, here in this outlying area of Berlin. The windows were all warped and leaky and needed replacing. The outside walls, grey and crumbling against today’s blue sky, were still uninsulated, and the garden fence dated from the early years of the previous century. It was actually a beautiful wire fence with fine trelliswork and an entrance that curved in a great arch above all who came through it. But this too required major repairs, needing patching in many places, and in some cases replacement of the posts that supported the trellis. She felt perfectly capable of this task: even the job of mixing concrete was not new to her. But with sleeping through the mornings, and seeing to the children in the afternoons, there was little time for it. She sighed, watching her thoughts as they scurried back in through the window. But they didn’t stop by the children, running instead in a herd right out of the kitchen, across the hall and into the bedroom, where the knitting machine was all set up. She had to admit, that old table was of some use now after all. Her husband had wanted to chop it up many a time. After sending the kids to do their homework she went and consulted the instructions on how to get the monster going. After some time, the first rows were knitted – with varying tensions, since she had adjusted it a few times, trying it out. She was amazed. The red yarn had turned itself into an astonishing two-dimensional item. The uneven sizes of the holes between stitches made you want to peep through them. She finished by turning the knob to the position that promised the tightest knit, and began to work with the transfer tools, weaving a little jacquard pattern right across the width of it, trying out a right-to-left design. By the end she’d knitted a piece that measured almost three metres long and eighty centimetres wide. But she hadn’t done the shopping... She made semolina pudding using two cartons of UHT milk, placing sugar and cinnamon alongside it on the table plus some homemade apple sauce.

Her husband came home over-tired. He worked as a representative for a small Westphalian manufacturer of men’s and women’s orthopaedic footwear, and travelled all over East Germany selling his wares. Today all he’d had to do was drive to Cottbus, taking in some small shoeshops in the towns and cities along the way. He didn’t get enough sleep. Even when he bounced into the Volvo (a company car) in the morning, he’d invariably come home jaded. He too was now in his late forties. Perhaps age was already taking its toll? This didn’t diminish her sexual desire for him, and he, in turn, normally couldn’t resist her familiar charms when he felt her bare breasts on his back or her buttocks in his lap. It’s good with him, she reflected, taking another plate from the cupboard. The two litres were just enough. She herself only took one or two spoonfuls.

Next on the menu was a game of Yahtzee. Playing this game with six people required some forbearance but the children stuck with it enthusiastically.  When at last their kids stood in rank and file before them, washed and with their teeth brushed, saying goodnight, they were both, as ever, completely overwhelmed by parental emotion: the mother proud; the father feeling so humbled he actually dabbed a tear from his eye. And when the kids were in bed, he said how much he loved her, and they kissed and rolled on the floor, incapable of getting up until they were (for the time being) done.

The room was dark by now, and when he stood up he cracked his head on the carriage-rest of the knitting machine and swore, but she just laughed over the egg that swelled up, and fetched the steel knife-sharpener from the kitchen because it felt sufficiently chilled to use as a compress. When, a little later, they went to bed, he opened a bottle of white wine and they had a drink. By the time they were done with their second round of sex it was after midnight. Swearing herself now at the thought of having to get up in two hours, she lay on her side and, with her feet tucked between his legs, fell asleep.

The alarm rudely awoke her from brief, racing dreams, the episodes succeeding each other at such high speed that on waking she couldn’t recall them. Before she was fully alert he had kissed her, and as she pulled the quilt up little by little to watch the hairs on his legs go erect, it came to her: she could ‘undo him’ in wool! She imagined a onesie knitted in soft red wool, in a loose, loopy jacquard pattern, with two little strands of wool right at the bottom that could be pulled to unravel him! For a moment the fantasy of the resulting ball of wool growing ever larger made her come over a little dizzy: for a minute she had to sit on the edge of the bed with singing in her ears. But she then leapt up and started on her day’s work, which was now to take such a very different turn: no sooner had she delivered the newspapers than she was sitting at the knitting machine. It wasn’t easy to get to grips with the techniques of increasing and decreasing, and it took a whole week to learn to do circular knitting. But then she cheerfully got on with it, starting at the top and knitting a tube. At what she guessed was the right point, she divided this into two tubes, subtly tapering them according to the shape his legs had in her imagination when he wasn’t there to look at, then closing them up at the foot. She hadn’t worked a gusset into it. At the shoulders she sewed on four hand-crocheted tapes that could be tied closed. After the unravelling, they would be all that was left over. She was now really excited about his birthday.

Since it fell on a Sunday the children had made him his breakfast. Bacon and eggs, red and yellow jams, plum preserve and honey – they must have pooled their pocket money – and even a bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge. They waited for their mother, who would be home from her job around nine in the morning today, then brewed the coffee right on time and sat in front of the television. She had nothing to give him other than the red onesie, but didn’t dare for him to unwrap it in front of the children and, when she got home, kept the parcel back, giving him a meaningful look. He understood. After a long and plentiful breakfast as a family, they sent the foursome off to the matinée as their Sunday treat.  When he unpacked the parcel he was dumbfounded, incredulous, but she was smiling, and since he was still in his bathrobe she put him straight into the onesie, tying the tapes on his shoulders. He looked down at himself, speechless with dismay. Spotting himself in the mirror on the wardrobe door he was transfixed. With a gesture of command, she ordered him to lie down, then started by loosening the strand of wool at the tip of his left foot – the first act of undoing. Slowly, very slowly, one by one, the rows unravelled. It was exactly as she’d imagined it: her sexual desire increased unstoppably with the size of the ball of wool in her hands. For the right leg she started a new ball. Two further pauses in her mounting desire were due to arriving at the torso, when she started a ball from nothing again. And now, as the knitting dissolved, so too did that initial feeling of dismay. As he watched her hands roll the balls he was having more and more fun; indeed, some little way from the balls in her hands he could feel something else going on. It was almost like a little snake was darting its tongue at his calves, his thighs; as if, as he lay before her entirely at her mercy, the flames of some hastily-gathered and lit kindling were licking round his buttocks, belly and chest.  And when, in this extreme state of pent-up tension, she finally, silently put down the wool, something inside him erupted. He grabbed a ball and slowly began to wind the wool around her body. She stood up, letting her legs be wound round individually, while her arms got bound tightly to her sides. By the end her head looked like a mummy’s, bound in a red husk. She closed her eyes and, with no option of moving further than onto their bed, waited, feverish. And at last felt him. Sharp. In the moment before the climax, which they approached in unison, it felt like they were being swirled together, two active chemicals that would ignite each other and shoot up to a new high – and in that instant she got hooked, in her mind’s eye, into the up-down, up-down of the little needles in the rope-lock, until all her senses were subsumed, at last, in its rapping, rhythmic judder…

Multi-award-winning contemporary poet and novelist Kathrin Schmidt was born in the former German Democratic Republic, her voice feminist, political and distinctly of the east. Her German Book Prize-winning novel You’re not dying (2009) was translated into thirteen languages and was brought out in English by Naked Eye Publishing in 2021, translated by Christine Les.

Sue Vickerman began translating literature following the UK’s Brexit vote which triggered her to throw a rope across to Europe. Being northern English, Vickerman chose East German Kathrin Schmidt’s writings because both hail from regions of ‘left behind’ peoples where populism is on the rise. Sue’s latest translated work is Twenty Poems by Kathrin Schmidt (Arc Publications, 2020). She edits for Naked Eye Publishing (UK). suevickerman.eu