letters
A Berlin-based writer engages in the study of belonging and in-between places after years spent faraway from 'home'. Also, rats.
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Sheets upon sheets of snow outside our window. An endless landscape of things buried under it, spinning past us.
Snow capped fir trees and vast granite rock faces covered in cracking ice. Little wooden houses, many of them red underneath all the white. Train stations with funny names like Grog, and Trog and Tund or whatever it is these places are actually called, all rectangular wooden structures with chipping paint and sometimes the odd person standing in front of them. Fur-lined parkas, almost-mullets and nearly-handlebar mustaches. Hefty rucksacks. Salmon rivers, chunks of floating ice, the kind of slippery rocks my mother would unthinkingly jump to and from only to turn around and watch me grimace as I pull my boots off and wade through. Sometimes she’ll meet me halfway and extend a hand which I’ll begrudgingly take. Blue tinted everythings come out in the endless pictures I take. “This is the boring part, wait til we go further north,” my mum says, peering up from her computer screen where she’s been editing the paper of a PhD student of her’s, the one I jokingly call her parasite given that she seems to need much more attention than my mum, who’s now semi-retired, is supposed to offer. “You undo all your union work when you work overtime like that,” I say. “I know,” she replies. “But I like it”. There’s a Chinese expression. “Falling leaves return to their roots.” My brother is one such leaf. He now lives close to where our family is originally from, a five hour train journey, one hour bus ride, and 30 minute drive away from Trondheim, where my “Nordland” Mormor settled and raised two girls whose father, loving and good as he was, had kind of hoped had been boys. This is the corner of the world my father first visited when he came up to meet my mother’s family. “What does a Hungarian man eat?” my great aunt wondered at the time. She went to the shop and came home with a packet of Asian noodles. My mother now divides her time between Trondheim and London, a half-fallen leaf herself. Her sister’s place is a ten minute drive away from her flat, and they’ve lived there since we were kids, in the district Mormor and Morfar had chosen originally to set up base. The red district. Politically, I mean. In my aunt’s home, the same framed picture of Keith Richards stares at you as you take a piss, and Pattie Smith’s wry smile can be found next to pictures of the boys in various states of mullet. Dogs have come and gone, but all of them have been rambunctious and wild. The latest edition is a beautiful but feral border collie mix who you’re invited to offer snacks to, an exhilarating, reactions-testing game where if you’re slow and authoritative enough in how you hand it to her, she’ll sit obediently. Move too quickly and she’ll assume it’s a play fight and take your fist in her mouth, breaking the skin on your knuckles. At one point in the evening, a cousin will come home from his pizza delivery shift, hand you a snus which you put behind your gums, and smile his charming, conspiratorial smile. You’ll compliment his beard -- which matches that of the guy on his shirt, Dude from The Big Lebowski -- and ask him about how the shooting of strangers on the internet is going. Same as always, he replies. Of course, when the evening comes to an end, he won’t be the one taking the dishes to the sink. Seven peaks, and farting sheep It’s true, the landscape that surrounds Trondheim has its charm, but this journey north has conjured up something far more epic. We’re now just below the Arctic Circle. Our destination reveals itself in the form of huge, hulking mountains, seven eerie peaks that line an archipelago of a cluster of hamlets, and snow caked homes of wood sprinkled across a series of islands shrouded in sea mist and bludgeoned by crisp gusts of wind that turn your cheeks pink. The land of sea breeze weathered farmers, fishermens, straight shooting salt-of-the-earth types. This is my brother's partner's stomping ground, replete with a swimming pool that doubles as a cultural centre and centre for all sorts of other things, a small lab in which my brother worked for a brief time measuring methane levels in sheep’s farts, and, apparently, a biker gang. But mostly just old people who are still shoveling snow well into their eighties. Not far from here you’ll find a municipality home to some of our poorest ancestors, and further north, my Mormor’s home town, close to one of the world’s wildest maelstroms. Legend has it, when my Mormor was a child, my Mormor’s father tied her to a boat and rowed her across the deadly waters, a test in fortitude she apparently passed. He was a good man. Falling leaves return to their roots. Here I am, enraptured by the night sky and the sheer volume of stars on display, lying in a pull out bed surrounded by framed Moomin sketches and purple-haired toy trolls, trying not to think too much, trying to stop the head spin. I am the bad one. I’m not the bad one. We are bad ones. I’ve been wanting to set a novel in this very spot, been sent pictures of their home, told fascinating stories of their surroundings, felt inspired by every little detail shared to explore the imaginative possibilities here. Every effort has proved wanting, felt like circling the superficiality of things without getting into anything real. So here are the real things. I haven’t seen my brother in over five years. Before that another four years had passed during which I’d broken all ties with my family and wouldn’t communicate with them at all, despite multiple attempts (some less mad than others) on their side to open up a dialogue I just didn’t feel capable of having. I fended for myself, kept my walls high, worked. Also began therapy. Life is about choices, and through that time, I chose myself, however painful that choice was for everyone. It just felt like there was no other way for me to figure out who I was without everything else piling up on me. It was the hardest, most heart wrenching, most important choices I would make for myself. Besides one other: choosing to come home and piece together all the shards of myself I had been running so chaotically from as to be endlessly spinning in circles of my own making. Better and better Here is a beautiful baby to meet. Tiny hands and gorgeous, rose-tinted cheeks, tufts of blond hair, the back of her head feels so soft when you run your fingers along it. How her little green eyes light up when she sees you, how she snorts and chirps and gleefully chucks cucumber pieces on the floor for you to pick up, how she presses the button on the book that has it sing about wheels on buses, going round and round, again and again. How each new press of the button brings her a whole new thrill. She is so perfect and so good. She wraps her tiny hand around your index finger, looks up at you like you’re the best thing in the world. Adores your hectic go go dancing, chaotic singing, breathless bouncing to and from avoiding the quiet things in favour of the familiar family ruckus. Loves the trumpets in A little bit of Ronya in my life, a little bit of Ronya by my side, a little bit of Ronya’s all I need… Her giggle cuts through the tension like a knife. All this pressure to be good to each other despite all the things we are thinking about one another, all the things we’ve previously told each other in moments of unedited rage and hurt none of us can take back. But I’m just trying so so hard to be good. Not with Ronya. With her you don’t need to try anything at all. She just thinks you are good. An eventual, little explosion of my brother’s. Ronya’s been wrapped up warmly and put in the buggy to nap outdoors, I didn’t even know this was a Norwegian tradition. But then, I was never the Norwegian one out of the pair of us. I was the one who wound up with all the fiery Hungarian genes. I wander outdoors with them, chattering loudly, oblivious to the child napping in this magically-restoring Norwegian air. He hushes me angrily, swearing, furious about this indiscretion. That tone. Like I’m a small, selfish, stupid, wilful little girl. A tone reserved only for me. He never uses it on any other woman we know. Yes it sounds patriarchal, sounds like everything that I’ve been running from that keeps finding me again wherever I go, in whatever circle I try to ingratiate myself in. Wherever I go, there will always be at least one man who tries to talk to me like that, in whatever language he knows how. Bitch, be humble. Sit down. I can’t escape it. There’s just something in me that makes them do that. A badness. And how dare he use that tone with me? After all the things I’ve done that prove I deserve just as much respect, just as much portioning out of that validating goodness that seemed so easily to come to him, with his gleaming school reports, gorgeous blonde hair, this sunflower-like soaking-up of everything good that he does. How dare he use that tone with me? After everything. After all this proving of myself that I’ve done on my own and without any help from anyone and with all these odds stacked against me. The spot at the same Good University as he earned. The impressive jobs I talked my way into. Star-studded mentors I therapised. The frontpage exclusives I spilt blood over. Every new place in which I’ve built something for myself, all the hearts and minds I’ve won along the way. Every academic I’ve been the wisecracking, fresh of breath air around, every party addled maniac who has leaned on me because I know just want to do and say as that k-hole is creeping towards them, every musician who has relied on me for my sense of rhythm and weird fucking melody memory bank, every fighter who’s found me a “fun” partner to spar with. Not technically proficient, mind. Fun. Unpredictable. Every journalist who has bashfully, secretly, passed their copy onto me so I can transform their boring story of a plane crash that killed no one into a fucking Shakespearean masterpiece. I even taught myself all the science stuff mum shared with you. Scientists salivate at the work that I do for them, turn my colleagues down. I’ve earned so much approval now, you wouldn’t even know. You’re so strong Sarah. So impressive Sarah. So strong and impressive and smart, Sarah. No one works harder than you, Sarah. Can you do this for me, Sarah? You’re an angel, Sarah. What a badass, Sarah. Just as good as you. No. Better. Stronger, faster. Braver. Smarter. So worthy, no one gets a chance to think anything else of me. Ever. So much approval. Never enough approval. Just as smart as you. No, smarter. Just as fast as you. No, faster. Bolder, better, brighter. Stronger. Wiser. How dare you use that tone with me. Accelerando Retreat to the guest room, lock the door. Angrily pump out bicep curls to grime tracks, calming. Come outside again. He’s rushing around, fretting in the kitchen. “Please do not use that tone with me” Spoken softly, controlled. Learning to set boundaries takes practice. Gets a little bit easier each time you do it! He turns around. “All you want to do is come here and make me feel bad,” he says. “You just want to make me feel bad.” “You’re projecting.” “You’re a toxic person. You make everything toxic. I don’t want you here. I don’t want anything to do with you. I’m trying to build something here, I’m trying to heal. I don’t want you here.” Arms tingle. Legs too. Hands go a little shaky, then everything starts to shake. Nothing else to do in a moment like this than run. My signature move. Out of the house, onto the road, no phone, thin coat. Doesn’t matter. When I’m like this I don’t feel anything, that’s the only good thing about this state that I’m in. Running in parallel to the seashore and these epic, snow capped mountains. Slow down eventually, find a little campside, walk down to the beach, breathe doesn’t take long to regain. Tiny red cabin at the end of the peer, safely isolated from everything. Easy to break into, not even locked. Inside it smells like fish. Pipes, ropes and rods, knives. Snow floating, waves crashing on the other side of the window. Chattering voices. Yeah, so you’re toxic. Nobody fucks with you. You’re a bad bitch. Such a fucking bad bitch no one fucks with you. Fucking try me, man. Fucking bring it. I’m fucking toxic. And then, finally, the quieter, wiser voice underneath all of it is allowed to speak. The voice that took years of therapy and solitude. And love. To tease out. You’re not here to prove to anyone that you’re a good person. When we were very little and on one of ferry trips between Liverpool and Trondheim, my brother and I teamed up on a treasure hunt organised by staff to keep us entertained. This is one of my earliest memories, definitely its sharpness is uncanny. We’d unthinkingly wandered into a men’s bathroom, and were joined a few moments later by an old man who, on examining this memory with adult eyes, was obviously quite drunk. He stumbled towards me, put his arms all around me in ways that a young child would only understand were not good and. Well. Being me. I knocked him out cold. Jazz hands. I violently jolted away from him with a force that brought him crashing to the ground, his face smashing against the tiles, glasses hopping and sliding across the room. Brings a whole new meaning to the killer instincts an MMA coach joked that I had, doesn’t it? My brother froze. A few moments later another man enters the room, sees the motionless body on the floor, tells the two children to leave. A therapist has asked me to milk this specific memory for all its trauma-informed juices, and I have done, diligent student of the therapeutic process that I am. Trust the process! Although I’m starting to grow a little bit wary of this increasing fixation with rooting through every little moment of our lives for endless nuggets that can clearly and definitively explain to us why we are the way we are the way we are. Pick at so many scabs and you end up making new wounds that don’t even have to be there. But I think the most important piece of information this memory offers is about how two quite different but equally ‘good’ (whatever good even means!) people instinctively react when they are just trying to survive something. And that there should be no shame or guilt in any of it. My brother’s partner slows down in her minivan as I’m pacing down the road. “I appreciate you coming, but I really just need to be on my own." “You really shouldn’t be out here alone like this, you need to talk to someone” “I can’t talk to you, he’ll just think I’m being toxic. Anyway, you shouldn’t have to deal with this stuff” “No he won’t think you’re toxic. Just get inside. You know he doesn’t mean what he said.” My sarcastic jokes, sarcastic laughter prompts giggles from a beaming Ronja strapped in a car seat in the back. Few sounds have pulled at my heartstrings with greater intensity than the ones she makes when she’s being playful. “Such a great kid. I just want to be a part of her life.” “I know. Look, all families have their shit. You guys. None of you are bad people. You just don’t know how to talk to each other. You just push each other’s buttons and blame each other for everything.” Looking out of the window. “Yeah, you’re right.” The winner takes it all Home. Back in the guestroom. Locked door. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. That big rock that presses down your chest like that? It’s back again. Can’t move under it. Someone on the other side of the door. Can I come in? No. mum, I need space. Dinner’s ready. NOT HUNGRY. Can’t you be civil? (underbreathe: what a catchphrase) and finally. Sarah, I’m sorry. I want to apologise. Come out when you’re ready. We need to talk. Stay motionless. Two options present, really. Option a) stay here. Refuse to speak. Get the train tomorrow. Never look back. Hold on this one final win over him. YOU are the bad, horrible person who needs to apologize. I am the person YOU hurt. Do this and I win this moment, but throw thousands of dollars and euros of therapy, years and years of working on myself to be a better person, down the drain in the process. Option b) I suck it up. Go outside eventually, walk up stiffly to him. Yes. Let’s go talk. Yes. Let’s go to the guest room. No. I’m not eating. OK, sorry, can I. Please, don’t look at me when I talk I’ll sit here. I’m really sorry I was just flustered and frustrated that you couldn’t see I- when you use that tone you make me condescended to, you used a tone that everyone uses that makes me feel small and stupid. I’m doing all this work on holding boundaries with men and you blast me for asking to be treated with respect- I don’t think you're stupid. I was always in awe of, envious of, even, how quick footed you are. Improvisational. The way you bounce around, getting all these different jobs. My intellect feels stodgy by comparison. Look I know I sublimate a lot of my feelings about others onto you, but I just feel so much panic around you. You just get in my face. You never give me time to come to you. I wanted to come to you earlier and apologise but you wouldn’t let me. Like when we were growing up, always walking on eggshells around you. What can do so that our interactions don’t create so much panic around you? What? What can I do? What are the words that I can stop saying, the gestures I can stop making. What do you need me to do and not do so you can feel safe around me? I. Well. For a start, I don’t like it when you use those psychotherapy words against me. You feel like I weaponise them? I can see that is how you might feel. I will try not to do this Therapist: The thing about you, Sarah. Is that you feel so much. And then, as you are feeling it, you are analysing all of it. This is your gift, and your curse. And. Well. I want us to stop feeling like one of us needs to win. All this pressure around winning against each other. I know, I hate it. I hate it too. And what do you need from me? I need you to accept me. I accept you. He brings out a tray of fish and potatoes which I eat. We go outside together, shovel snow and joke about old teachers, and all the other stuff I have no one else in this world to joke about with. What a head on her shoulders Ronya’s mama has. What fierce and loving parents she has, I tell him. That’s the thing about us. What we never lacked was fierce love. The next day, we’re packing up to leave. Sun’s out, can almost see the peaks of the fantastic looming mountains, Ronja with peanut butter all over her mouth, bobbing this way and that, pulling faces at us all, knowing that it’ll make us laugh. I take her in my arms for a final gorgeous cuddle and think, how can something so wonderful come out of our messy and complicated lives? T his tiny magnetic otherworldly bundle of joy. I would do anything for her. I think. Anything. Bad things. Good things. Messy things. Anything to make sure she stays this -not good- This wonderful.
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So,
I showed that text to a German friend the other day, and the response I got was: “How cute! I mean, you can tell that you’re not a native speaker, but it’s quite endearing!” Not really the critique I had hoped for, if I’m honest. I’m not the next Günter Grass? The horror. I thought I was perfect. It seems clear that a lot more work than a brain-splitting week of cramming is needed to master anything approaching sophistication in that language. And now my head hurts a lot and German words look like soup. I’ve done it, though -- burst through whatever barrier had shamed me into hiding my shoddy German grammar from the world. Felt like the first time I recorded myself playing the flute after basically not touching it for a decade. What an amateur. Embarrassingly uncontrolled tone. And kind of how I felt when I came back to Germany after Hong Kong and struggled to string a sentence together. “This should feel like breathing for you. This is who you are,” were the words rattling in my head. Well, who we are changes, some things come with those permutations, other things fall away. The devil that angrily flogs me and my disobedient flute-playing fingers (still too inefficiently bouncing off the keys…) has lost some of his thrall, and I’m learning to find, hold on to, stretch shamelessly at the contours of the pleasure that comes with this devotion to craft. To have this power to turn breathe into something magical. It’s a really nice thing to have. Like an old friend who always reappears to celebrate and commiserate, provided you treat them with the right level of respect and attention. I was talking to a friend, lately, about loneliness. She’s a bit of an interloper, like me, struggles sometimes with the yoga world she’s part of. “One of the girls said something like ‘nobody has to feel lonely, you can always choose to come closer to people. Such bullshit, sometimes I just feel lonely and I can’t help it.” I commiserated. Sometimes we all feel lonely and we can’t help it. I kind of think that’s why art exists, it fills those scary spaces between us and sustains us in our fragile places. Me and Bach vibing, me digging his arpeggios, him telling me he digs my richness of tone but could I please pay closer attention to the time signatures and not make up my own. Yeah I just read that back and it does rhyme. To be honest I am not sure Bach would approve of me if we did actually get close. What he’d think about the vegetables I forget about, left to rot in the fridge, or the fact that in most ways and about most things I’m really just winging it and my success rate is really changeable but what would drive me even more nuts is the threat of doing the same thing each ad finitum (unless it is Sonata BWV 1034, because Bach, that one’s a total banger), the fact that I probably shouldn’t enjoy trespassing and asking people uncomfortable and annoying questions as much as I do, the fact that a lot of things still scare and embarrass me much more than I want them to, the fact that there’s still this ridiculously needy child inside me that I can only really placate with compulsive scrolling of fat animal pictures. The fact that my training this month (averaging two to three hours per day sometimes) churned up too much of an edge, that I had to dial it down and let the adrenaline leave me. See, the devil stalks my gym sessions too. Loves the point where pain alchemises itself into exhilaration. Loves the power and strength coursing through my body when I’m up in its jam like that, loves the complete abnegation of anything else mattering in that moment. Loves how swiftly those fast twitch muscles fire, that acceleration, divine coordination. Loves the nod of respect from fellow athletes when they see that you're not pissing about. Loves all these new neurological pathways formed about what this body, this mind can do when they are working in sync with one another towards goals that satisfy us both. Me and the devil. Still, give the devil all your power and a breakdown is imminent. Strained my back on a smith machine of all things, got far too jumpy, my body taking on something of its Hong Kong charge, got far to rambunctious with my box jumps (hip extension on point, though), so have self-prescribed a deload week and taken a foot of gas on the lactic-acid inducing conditioning side of things. To fill the time I’ve been sociable. The kind of social encounters you need to have when you’ve gone so far into your own head you think you’re the only one who has problems or insecurities and find out they’re everywhere. One of my friends grows things that make you go sparkly, and had me try some. Revolutionary. At these doses your brain is like a technicolour playground of joy and creativity, but with no real loss of control over your critical faculties. Or your physiological ones. Picked my flute and wacked out my hardest piece, and guess what? Those fingers were on fire, not a single glitch (OK, so maybe my diaphragm should have been better controlled, the recording’s a little bit too bombastic for my taste, but anyway…) Obviously I will be exploring these insights on the mat, when I’m ready, and, well, many other arenas as I play with forging new neural pathways that replace the old. If we want to carry on with our quite lazy religious metaphor: In these iterations, I am no longer the devil’s slave, I’m its master. Hi, ich heiße Sarah.
Ich komme aus Ungarn, Norwegen und England, bin überall und nirgendwo aufgewachsen. Ich bin immer im Gange und kann nicht stillstehen, denn der Boden zwischen meinen Fersen fühlt sich an wie Treibsand. Schreibt man das so? Dass etwas wie Treibsand sich anfühlt? Ist solch eine Metapher übersetzbar? Das prüf ich schnell nach. “Halten wir daran fest, so haben wir Felsengrund unter unseren Füßen, andernfalls begeben wir uns auf den Treibsand menschlicher Spekulationen.” So schreibt jemand: Menschliche Spekulationen als Treibsand. Diese Formulierung klingt gut. Sehr klug. Philosophisch. Dann: Dass Treibsand der ? .... Was soll denn hier drin? Ich brauche ein Wort, das die Eigenschaft des Bodens verkörpert. Bodentlichkeit? Ich glaube, das ist ein echtes Wort, aber ich verkomplizierte alles. Dass Treibsand der Bondentlichkeit. Was für ein Kopfschmerz. Nein, ich erzähle nur eine einfache Geschichte. Ich hatte kindisch Norwegisch bevor ich Deutsch lernen musste, weil ich immer so gerne mit meiner norwegischen Großmutter Zeit verbracht habe, und sie weigerte sich Englisch zu sprechen. Sie verstand alles, aber wir durften nur in ihrem Zuhause Norwegisch sprechen. Eine einfache Regel: Ihre Kohärenz war einer ihrer wunderschönen Reize. Mein Vater sprach kein Norwegisch. Jedoch musste meine Mutter Ungarisch lernen, während wir in Budapest lebten. Da war sie sehr oft alleine mit uns Zuhause, als mein Vater immer überall bei der “Story-Jagd” durch Osteuropa und die Sowjetunion verreisen musste. Wieder diese redaktionelle Bearbeitung: “Story-Jagd?” Verfolgungsjagd der Geschichten? Diese Deutung ist so hesslich. Ach, Geschichts Jagd. Das passt. Meine Mutter musste in Budapest mit zwei kleinen Kindern auskommen. Freunde von Freunden haben geholfen, aber manchmal nicht so ernsthaft. Ungarische Menschen sind sehr wörtlich und äußerst überzeugend mit ihren Wörtern. Zudem war das System, in dem sie zu überleben gelernt haben, einfach anderes als was meine Mutter kannte. Wenn man in einem System erwächst, dass das Vertrauen meistens fördert, weisst man nicht wie, und wo, und wann man die Regeln des unzuverlässigen Systems beugt, damit man sich um sich selbst richtig kümmert. Meine Mutter war zu nett und zu naiv. Ausbeutbar. Menschen, die an zügellose Korruption gewöhnt sind, beziehen sich einfach anderes auf Regeln und Verbrechertum. Da die für sie geltenden Regeln kein Sinn machen, befolgen sie nur ihren eigenen Kodex. Man vertraut niemandem außer sich selbst. Meine Mutter hat mir erzählt, dass sie einmal von engen Freunden überzeugt wurde, ein Auto aus Österreich ins Ungarn zu schmuggeln. Wollte nur hilfreich sein. Jetzt lacht sie darüber, aber man hat dass ein großes Drama ausgelöst, als mein Vater von seinen Reisen zurückkam. Jetzt beugt sie gerne Regeln, die sie stört - vielleicht ein bisschen zu gerne. Und ich? Ich habe keinen Boden. Alles hängt davon ab, wo und mit wem ich fliege. An intellectual challenge came up this week that of course I’ve unquestioningly lept on.
(Sarah trying to punch above her weight again, making things hard for herself as she always does.) By the end of the week, I’ll need to get my German back to where it was in my university days, where we were translating into and out of the language and marked with a harshness that still gives me a bit of angst every time I put a German word to paper. I remember the words of my German grammar teacher, Rainhild -- an absolute battleax of a tutor (but very much with her heart in the right place) as we broke up for the Christmas holidays: “Tell all your friends, ‘I am sorry, we can’t spend very much time together. I am a student at Oxford and I have to study”. Of course I ignored her advice and spent my holidays in London trying to play catch up on the fun all my school friends had had at their universities. Life is about choices, as my mentor says. (This articulation is pretty binary, but): We either sit with our declension tables and verb lists for hours on end or we hang out with the tribe of misfits who adopted us in high school and led us by the hand through the city’s rave culture, one of whose mother is an artist and collector of dead objects and houses them in a museum in Crouch End which doubles up as a den for a bunch of teenagers who could do whatever they want, so long as they didn’t touch the dead lamb which potentially had been embalmed with arsenic. Very different from my home, of course, which was similarly chaotic but far less bohemian, where I’d had to dismantle the lock on my window and sit precariously on its ledge to smoke, and in which strange things like the instruction to “go up to your room and learn these 300 French words in the space of an hour and I’ll test you” would descend upon me apropos very little. Weird flex but OK. These friends were great of course, but sometimes they were a struggle to spend a lot of time with, and I’d regularly get comments about the disappearing acts I’d pull on them, too. Trying to integrate the two very different people I was at home and with them felt impossible somehow, like I had no core to fall into. That’s the challenge with us shape shifters, we’re too easily swept up by someone else’s dance and struggle to find our own rhythm. Makes it even harder to find time for those declension tables, doesn’t it? So this week, I’ll return to the dance of proving myself in German, ask myself tough questions along the way. I’m kind of excited about it, to be honest. What is it that has hampered my progress in this area? Since my return from Hong Kong the language, at least the spoken part, has mostly come back. For sure I understand everything without hiccups, and I have fully functional friendships in German. Many Germans I know insist on only speaking English with me, so they can practice their language. I’m starting to push back a little, but I get lazy if I’m honest. The biggest hindrance is of course my ego. Words are my domain, I derive a lot of pride and joy for being the person who just always has the perfect word at the ready, delivered at the speed of a bullet train. In German I falter and grasp for the right ones, arrive at sort of next-best-thing verbal contortions that aren’t exactly what I mean, and cheat a lot by throwing around English words that I know are understood, and just have this serious mental block when it comes to putting words to paper. I understand where this comes from. Speechlessness for me is still sometimes a fright, sitting close to the threat of powerlessness and a loss of agency. Something apt my (lovely) therapist pointed out a couple of months ago. “You and your words. You find them so quickly it’s almost like you grab hold of them so that you don’t have to feel what they mean to you. It’s like, if you find the word for the type of tree you want to describe, and quickly note it down, you won’t take the time to witness how it moves, its smells, its colours, and all of that.” She has a point. Saying goodbye to a special person
Hi blog, are you there? It’s me, Margaret. So 2023 thus far has been, interesting. A week of gorgeous crisp blue sky opened with more sobering news: One of my mother’s closest friends (and certainly, my favourite) passed away abruptly after a relatively short battle with Leukemia, here in Berlin. She was the mother of a classmate from when we lived in Bonn in the late nineties. We spent most Sundays at their house playing Mortal Kombat as the adults smoked, joked and talked adult things in the kitchen downstairs. Bonn was a happy time for my mother, and I think this friendship was a real contributing factor to that sense of belonging the small expat circle there gave her, at which this friend played the role of glue that held everything together. I’m writing this because she was an inspiring woman, and I feel inspired to write about her. She was a warm, strong and highly intelligent Israeli woman of intense principles. Passionate about politics and a staunch critic of her government, she uprooted her family to start a new life in Germany, where they knew no one. She held onto that rage and indignation such that those political values and strong sense of right and wrong reverberated through her family, so much so that each funereal speech given explicitly referenced the sacrifices she made that kept her moral compass intact, and articulated her anger at the Israeli state within Berlin’s largest (and extremely beautiful) Jewish cemetery. And she did all of the above while living struggling with MS that gave her severe limp, having to provide for her family, while maintaining her wicked wit throughout. A real force to be reckoned with. My mother really loved her. Their large, loud and generous family welcomed our small and awkward one with open arms, and when my mother and I visited her it was so nice to see that bond they shared was just as strong as it always had been, despite years of life they had living apart. “We’re soulmates,” they said. By coincidence, my mother spent the final years of her career researching treatments for blood cancers. They spoke about the drugs she was on, and my mum was pleased and hopeful about the fact that she was on a new and really promising drug. Her friend mused that the MS and the Leukemia could be connected to pesticides used by the Israeli government. “Well, there’s no data to back that theory up,” my mother said flatly, the way she always does when she’s got that scientist’s cap on a little bit too tightly for the room. To be honest, I’ve come to love her for it. She was telling me mostly recently that another old friend of hers has found a new boyfriend who it turns out is an anti-vaccer nutjob who believes pandemics can be healed through singing at a specific vibrational pitch. That was a dinner party that didn’t go well, apparently. “I just tried to explain the science to him,” she said. He got so annoyed at her his border collie leapt to her defense. Imagine that. Being so off your rocker that an animal specifically bred to stand your ground picks the enemy side. But back to our departed friend. More nice things to say about her: On seeing her again last year I was struck by how clearly she saw me. My mum joked about my odd hobby of picking up big rocks and carrying them around when I’m at the family hytta in Norway. “I can see why you like that. Sounds really stabilising,” she said. I told her that whenever my mum sends me pictures of my niece, I respond with pictures of my rats. She leaned her head back and howled with laughter. Seriously. Total badass bitch vibes, even through chemo. On leaving her flat, she loaded me down books, including an analysis of the life of my favourite German playwright (Kleist), and shared my number with a woman who lives near me and likes to go running, the daughter of a Syrian friend who had been trying to teach her Arabic. And another thing, a diamond quote from her shared by one of her family members at the wake. “Do not walk in front of me. I won’t follow you. Do not walk behind me. I won’t lead. Walk beside me, be my friend.“ In which the writer's troublesome but beloved rat passes away
Hermann is dead (long live Hermann). Apologies for the facetious delivery of the news to my thousands of readers who I know are deeply invested. I’ve been in a terrible funk this week. To cut a long story short, Kotti’s death brought about a rapid decline in Hermann’s health. He stopped moving his hind legs, took to dragging himself slowly around the flat using only his front legs, until he gave up moving entirely. Going into more details about his decline seems disrespectful to him, so let’s just say he was obviously very sick and that keeping him alive would have been -- I would like to say “inhumane“ -- but this word suggests humans have some moral standard that is superior to animals. And that’s just bullshit to be honest. Humans suck. Well, some humans. The vet and her assistant were very nice. You learn a lot about people when you find out their feelings on the world’s most perfect creature. I’ve seen it all. Disgust. Wonder. Admiration. Cautious intellectual curiosity and the kind of curiosity that grows quickly into warmth and affection. “I don’t think Hermann likes me,” said my roommate, trying to figure out which snacks she could win him over with. “Don’t worry about it, he’s a total emo,” I replied, as Hermann glowered from his hammock. By the time Hermann and I had arrived at the late night clinic, his misery and discomfort had grown so acute he had started lashing out and biting. I warned the vet and she spoke to him directly, the way a true rat-lover knows how. She told him she knew he was a good rat, really, and she complimented his fantastic coat, wonderful tail and marvelous little fingers. “I really don’t understand why some people don’t like rats at all,” she said. Her assistant nodded. So there we were, three rat lovers surrounding this little, somewhat petulant but really very wonderful, really intelligent, and I mean -- I know all rat moms feel this way -- super special creature, telling him how great he was, and that he would soon be playing with his best bud again, as he lay motionless on the table, his heartbeat slowing until it finally stopped. The vet opened the window briefly, and then shut it. “We always do that when we euthanise an animal here,” she said. “So their souls can go to heaven”. I went home with wet eyes and holding their empty handheld carrier. It took a couple of days to get out of the habit of checking up on them, and making mental notes to pick up their mascarpone and fill their water bowl. But now it does feel like they’ve properly left. It’s an eerie thing to consider their lifespans next to ours. Here they were, these once rambunctious middle aged rat men who had Iived through a spring, a summer, an autumn and winter by my side, growing old while I, I don’t know, took one day after the next, grasping onto to one thing after the other only to feel it gently slip between my fingers. Picking up the crumbled pieces of whatever it was I had begun to build to see if I might make something new out of that rubble. Kotti, an angel in rat form, reenters heaven
As the year comes to a close, our ongoing rat love story arc takes a sad turn. On the 21st, I noticed that Kotti seemed weak and saw him take a little stumble and lie down in the fetal position. I wondered whether he might be too cold, turning the heating up and wrapping him in some cloth. The next day he seemed even weaker. I took him in my arms, felt the limpness of his body and found his normally pristine white coat to be matted and yellowing. I fetched some of his favourite snacks and laid out a feast in front of him. He ignored it all, but rubbed affectionately against my finger with his furry little head and gave me his best blue steel. By that evening we were in an Uber heading to a late night clinic on the other side of town. To lessen Kotti’s stress, Hermann accompanied us, but unhelpfully seemed intent on trying to sit on Kotti’s face. By the time we saw a vet, Kotti was pretty out of it. She couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, but offered to put him on a drip overnight and have him see a specialist first thing in the morning. He passed away in his sleep in the early hours. I can’t really overstate what a nice little guy Kotti was, and what a pleasure it’s been getting to know him this year. It’s cheesy, but there’s a line in Mary Oliver’s famous poem Wild Geese that I think now will always remind me of Kotti: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Kotti will forever represent that soft animal. A soft animal with an astonishing talent for posing for the camera. You couldn’t really take a bad picture of him. He somehow always knew to look straight into the camera like he was God’s gift to ratkind. And, you know, Kotti didn’t have to be good, as the poem goes. But he just was really good. So good I surprised myself even with the number of tears I’ve shed over the loss. And I’m not a crier. At all. Kotti got along with everyone, and would always come up to you just to say hi and see what you were up to. In my head (and this really does make me sound like a crazy rat lady), he talked to me in the voice of Toad from Mario Kart. Enthusiastic. Excitable. Encouraging. “HEEEEEEY!!!! OMG CHICKPEAS!! SOOOOOOOO GREATTTTTT!!!!!” Hermann, by contrast, sounds like the lead singer of Machine Head (in my head). But he’s grieving, too. He’s not been himself at all since I brought him back from the vet. I would do anything to have him back to his rambunctious, knicker-chewing self. But what I have now is a rat son who will sit on my lap for hours on end like a sad cocker spaniel. My mother, an immunologist whose love language is researching aggressive cancers of past-their-prime rats, advised against finding him a new rat friend who might just piss him off or stress him out. So instead I just have to figure out how to be his best bud while he’s still here with us. He was no spring chicken either, when he moved in. For the year end I promised myself I’d get out of town if only for a snapshot of time. So tomorrow I’ll be on a train to Gdansk/ Danzig, a city I’ve obsessed about since reading my favourite childhood book, the Tin Drum, which is about a horrific murderous dwarf who serves as an allegory for everything bad in this world (aka the anti-Kotti). A Guardian review would probably describe “The Danzig Trilogy” as a “grotesque tour-de-force”. My favourite part is when Oskar gets into a bizarre staring contest with an owl, in book 2. Anyway, I’m excited mostly because for the first time in years, if only for a couple of days, I’ll be alone in a city where nobody knows me. That specific exhilaration is something I haven’t felt in years, and which, despite my best, most “grounded”, most “rationally-desirous-of-setting-down-roots self,” I just can’t wait to feel again. If only for a hot minute. P.S. Stalwart readers of this blog (all five billion of you), might have noticed this title being a hat tip to a post inspired by the steely reserve of an old roommate in Hong Kong, "One Cat Come, One Cat Go". Our writer interrogates belonging, community and obligation but mostly just whines about her pet rat Hermann blowing hot and cold.
Temperatures dropped dramatically, spelling and end to The Great Hermann Revolt. Our furry agitator/pioneer has, it seems, opted against freedom and in favour of the warmth, cuddles and companionship of a life in which the night times are spent behind bars, and the day times are punctuated with spoonfuls of peas, mascarpone and modest excursions. His favourite hole under the kitchen counter is getting blocked up, and little by little, we’ll be blocking up all his other little hiding places. Kotti is delighted. Hermann is only moderately disgruntled. We’ve had a couple more escape attempts, all of which have seemed almost half-hearted. Lately I’ve almost been feeling like he's pleased to see me, and appreciative of my affections. Perhaps these are projections. In Viking Iceland, law enforcement was a relatively simple task. Citizens had to toe the line, because failing to do so meant getting cast out into a tundra in which it was impossible to survive on one’s own. Communities were strong and pecking orders were adhered to because lives depended on one another. You either conformed or you died. I am not sure how I would have fared in that context, to be honest. I hope at least that I would have found some witchy friends to while away those aggressively cold winters with. Because if I had to join any club vouchsafing my survival, I imagine I could find a way to fit in with the one where people get together and draft cryptic texts that claim to ward off dark forces. That’s basically just good marketing. I think I might actually be a witch, you know? Although I’m Googling now and it seems like Hermann’s not a very good familiar. A thread on r/Wicca claims that a familiar should be so in sync with its witch that they would put themselves on the line in battle. If I ever found myself in any danger I doubt Hermann would lift a finger. And he would ultimately side with whoever offered him better snacks and left him in peace. A couple of months ago I brought up my quandary of trying to bring solitary-hero, self-isolating Hermann out of his shell. This was at a discussion at a community art event in a gallery with a grizzly/grim aesthetic. The works looked like death metal album covers in abstraction, and an enormous whale bone was placed at the centre of a large, Huxley-referencing door propped up to serve as a table over which to discuss the topics of belonging and community. Why did I bring up Hermann? Because he wants it all. Total freedom, life on his own terms, his favourite cheese on tap, an infinite supply of my favourite underwear to chew through. I mean, he’s a rat, so, fair enough. I’m just not sure it’s good for him, living with this ruggedly-individualistic delusion that he’s the master of his own destiny who owes nothing to nobody and can tear up whatever he fancies, even if it’s a nice colour and has quite a high silk percentage. Anyway, at the event I made a friend. She’s an artist, originally from Russia, who had spent the last few months carrying a very long black scarf everywhere she went, knitting it longer and longer as a way of keeping record of the emotional things going on with her. Since then she has destroyed it. I asked her how she felt now that her scarf was gone, and with this theme of creation and destruction being central to her process. “Kind of sad, you know. But that’s how it goes. You experience things and you alchemise them.” In which our weary author examines her codependent relationship with her chaotic rat son.
It’s been two weeks since Hermann’s all out rebellion began. Two weeks of trying to do whatever we can to figure out how to get him to return to his cage at bedtime. Of trying to stay vigilant to his clumsy rustling so as to determine where he is, what he is up to, where he is hiding his snacks (his regrettable enthusiasm for my underwear drawer continues), and which of the many water bowls I have left out for him he has inelegantly capsised. Two weeks of waiting, hoping, praying for his approach only to have him tauntingly run over my feet as I’m trying to meet a deadline or look vaguely professional on a Zoom call. Two weeks of meticulously cleaning everything only to find a nice little pile of droppings in the corner of the room that I’ve set out to meditate in. He is technically toilet trained, you know, but has apparently unlearned all of that just to make my life difficult. Meanwhile, the patience of golden child Kotti as he waits lonely and forlorn in his cage for his brother’s return wears thin. He’s having a rebellion of his own, tossing his kale around and making a mess of his litter tray. The anxious attachment force with him is strong. Kind reader, through this difficult time, I’ve even resorted to uttering obscenities. “Do you think he thinks his name is Dickhead, now?” asks my new roommate, who moved in a couple of weeks before the great Hermann revolt began, and who has mercifully shown good humour through this Hermann-inflicted chaos. Still, through all of this, Hermann’s revolt and everything else, I’ve had to ask myself tough questions. What is it about me that allows for all this orbiting chaos, and can I opt out? How far do my responsibilities towards other stretch, really? And with what level of nonchalance can I, like a cat with a precious vase, tip off the table other people’s shit that’s not really mine to carry? Because, the thing is, when it comes to managing my mutinous rat children, I don’t really have much control over the situation, it seems. But a lot of other aspects I do have some control over. So. "Very old person dies," other newsworthy interrogations and some deep philosophy chat.
September arrived, and with it, migrating bird formations, a more rat-friendly climate and the death of a queen. Times like these make me really appreciate not being in a newsroom. The sheer volume of nonsense being published. I mean, Metro ran a story about queen-shaped clouds. This said, annoying as the coverage is, with all the freak news events that have marked the last, I don’t know, decade -- Brexit, Trump, pandemics, harbingers of climate disaster, autocracy’s rise and rise, JK Rowling being rubbish, etc. -- there’s something comforting about an event as innocuous as “very old person dies” making a lot of front pages. It almost feels quaint. Charles’ face on all the money though? This I am uncomfortable with. There are so many other better faces to put on the money. What about Ozzy Osbourne? He’s a real national treasure. Still, the event has made me think more about my own supposed Britishness and ties to a place I’ve managed to avoid now for seven years. That’s right, I haven’t been to London in seven years. That’s insane. My home city. The thing is, I’ve been avoiding going back. I picked Germany as my post-Hong Kong homecoming spot, when it actually, in a way, isn’t my home at all. Here I’m an outsider looking in, as I probably would be in the U.K. now, too. Maybe part of my resistance in finding my way back there comes from this fear of seeing everyone far more settled than I am in the lives they’ve chosen for themselves, while I’m sitting here certain of only one thing: my competence as a rat mom. Still, though, I’ve been told I’m not the only 30-something who doesn’t have it all figured out. And even the ones that do aren’t peddling any ideas that this is the perfect way to be. I say this having been on the receiving end of a trickle of post-pandemic U.K. visitors, most notably one of my best friends from university who’s now a prominent philosopher and whose friendship has been really influential and also, really complex. If I’m honest, perhaps I was always kind of jealous of the stability and structure her life had that I don’t think I see myself having. She’s lived in Oxford now, for well over a decade, has a small house in a village to the north of Port Meadows, a husband and a little black cat, and her career is still going as well as it always was. “I remember there was a time where it felt like my life could branch off in so many ways, and that’s not the case anymore. I’ve chosen what I’m doing. I like it and I’m good at it,” she said. As always, what I admired about her, this focus she always had on the things that mattered to her, was what I felt had always been eluding me. This even reflected itself in where we both are physically. Seven years ago, I got her into yoga after being forced through the brutal contortions made obligatory by the teachers I had in China (one of the first Chinese expressions I learnt was “body no good!”) I have stupid, t-rex arms and very stubborn hamstrings, so I can’t say I was ever especially good, but I was definitely not as terrible as I was when I first started. And I was interested. In all the stuff about mind and body and breathe, where there was tension in the body and how to relax it to deepen your stretch, getting out of the thinking mind through movement and all that. It appealed to her, too, and she’s said that she always associated her practice with me. In my first years in Hong Kong I was still devoted. I joined one of those intense morning Mysore groups, where you go, nobody talks and you do the same sequence again and again, everyday, until your teacher tells you you’re ready for your next pose. And guess what? After two years he stopped giving me new poses and I got bored and stopped going. So now, guess who, out of me and my friend, can do all the fancy stuff that happens at the end of classes, and whose Utthita Hasta Padangushtasana brings shame on their former (very quiet, but very nice) Mysore clan? (yes, I had to look up that term). This said, I can now throw a competent punch, figure out how to elude a take down without running away from an MMA sparring scenario crying my head off, run really quite far without getting that tired, and do lots of other things that I might not have learnt or experienced had my focus zeroed in on this one thing. So maybe drilling down on one specific path was never really what I was designed to do anyway, and that’s OK. (Have you read range by David Epstein? It’s quite good). It was funny because while me and my old university friend were yoga-ing here in Berlin; I felt a faint trace of competition between us both quietly observing where the other was. Even though comparison is the biggest no-no there is in the yoga world. I noticed the smoothness of her transitions and she, presumably, noticed my now increasingly obnoxious guns. Over drinks afterwards we talked about old friends, and caught up on all the stuff happening in the stretches of time in which we’d lost touch. My abrupt departure from Hong Kong? “Well, at this point I’m just collecting nervous breakdowns,” I joked. The thing about those is that you do come back from them stronger and more self-aware each time. She talked about her career. “The thing about analytic philosophy is it’s like chess. It’s just a game that I’m really good at, that I don’t necessarily think everyone needs to understand or even like it, to live a good life,” she said. About embodiment. “Yep, definitely a thing”. About rats, obviously, and all the other things in our lives that felt meaningful and had made us happier people. And I guess it was just nice, to be in that moment and feel kind of at peace with all of it. |
Sarah KaracsA Berlin-based writer engages in the study of belonging and in-between places after years spent faraway from 'home'. Archives
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