The doctor suggested exercise, and Beth goes to the pool even though she is not a good swimmer. She has always been afraid of breathing at the wrong time and getting water in her lungs. She has arrived early, before they have taken the blue cover away. It looks more inviting than the water, more solid.
Two women are in the foyer. They are draping white sheets over tables. They have cardboard boxes and a plastic mannequin.
There are two swimmers in the fast lane and three in the slow. Beth swims with her face out of the water. She knows that children now don’t even bother to learn the strokes where you keep your head dry. They all start their lessons by putting their faces in the water and breathing out. Everything is different now, even breathing.
When she gets back to her locker, she can hear her phone vibrating against the locker door as it rings. She pictures Evan calling her, trying to hold on to their vanishing child, squeezing the phone between his ear and his shoulder. But by the time she has opened the locker, it has stopped. The phone says unknown caller.
In the foyer, the women have set up their tables. They are advertising a wedding fair. The mannequin is dressed in an ivory gown and there’s a veil over its head, even though it has no face. One of the women tries to put a leaflet in Beth’s hand as she passes. Evan says Beth should bring Rose swimming, but what if she starts to disappear in the water, and can’t be found?
Beth stands in the dark in front of the bathroom mirror. She feels for the cord and pulls, and the little light flickers on. She doesn’t look like herself any more. She pulls the cord and the light goes out.
In the morning, she puts Rose in front of the mirror.
– What can you see?
– Rose, she says.
– Yes, but what about this? She points at the new place just above her left elbow, where she can see all the way through.
– Arm, Rose says.
Beth visits the optician. She has worn glasses since she was fourteen. He sits her in the chair and pulls out the little card where he has written down everything he knows about her, and the numbers that describe her eyes so precisely. He takes her glasses off, gently folds the arms and places them on his desk.
She hates the strange frames he puts on her, the round lenses he drops into the slots. They make her feel monstrous. She can never tell, can she see better with, or without? The letters on the chart seem to shift and flip. He looks into her eyes with the light. She can feel his breath on her face and smell his skin. It is uncomfortable. She wonders about her own smell. She holds her breath.
He checks for blind spots by asking her to stare into the dark and count tiny pinpricks of light as they appear and disappear. She thinks of the first time she noticed that little star on Rose’s finger. The lights are brief, sometimes weak and at the very edge of what she can see.
– I wasn’t sure if I was imagining them, she says when the test is finished.
He says there is nothing wrong. He picks up her glasses from the table and puts them back on her face. Everything is clear again but her head feels light.
In the morning Rose calls for her, but when Beth goes to her room, she cannot see her. Then she sees, Rose is sitting at the end of her bed, but only half there. The left side is clear, but somewhere in the middle she fades and the right side isn’t there at all. Beth carries her downstairs. She can feel the missing arm holding her around her neck, the invisible leg gripping at her hips, but her heart feels as though it wants to break out of her, and it is beating too fast. She stands Rose in the kitchen and breathes slowly. She rubs the cream all over. Gradually, over the day, Rose comes back.
Beth thinks it must be her eyes. It doesn’t matter what the doctor and the optician say. They can’t know everything. They can’t understand everything. Now, she can see the little stars, pinpricks of light, all over her own right hand. And then a place on her wrist where there is nothing. She goes to the bathroom and turns on the light over the mirror. It buzzes and flares. She cannot see herself any more. Only her right eye is visible, the edge of her brow, the top of her cheek. The rim of her glasses disappears to nothing at the bridge of her nose. She blinks hard, but nothing changes.
A Gift of Tongues
PAUL McQUADE
His hands swallow mine when he speaks. Ich liebe dich. And I can’t reply, can’t say what I want to say – I am still on Chapter 7: Politics. Unable to respond, I smile. This is how the relationship goes: we muddle along, half-understanding. Nods, smiles, and laughter fill the gaps.
The smile has communicated something. He puts a box in my hands. The gold ribbon slips its knot, coils and falls along the table, swimming into the dark below. The red crêpe crackles like dead leaves.
There is a box inside the box. The second made of glass. The light refracts as it emerges, hiding its contents in white light. Only when I cover it with my hands can I see what is inside: a long slab of meat. Pink, glistening.
‘Eine Zunge,’ he says. Chapter 3: Anatomy.
He has bought me a tongue.
It is winter in Berlin. The sun, cloud-veiled, only deepens the city’s shadows. The shadows press up against the buildings, the strange music of the city pours along the streets. Sigh of bus doors, percussion of the U-Bahn. People walk, not hearing, but feeling its movement. Couples crowd the bridges of the Spree, lip-to-ear, whispering secrets the river shelters in its long exhale.
Thöre tries to strike up conversation on the S-Bahn. It is late afternoon, the cabin filled with people on their way to the Grunewald. I stand on tiptoe and speak into his ear, so that other passengers cannot hear my kauderwelsch German. Small hairs glance against my lips; white arms soft as peach fuzz carry my words deep into his skull.
Kauderwelsch. Gibberish. Gobbledygook.
My German is comprised of Thöre, a textbook, and the lessons that my work makes the new transplants take. Once a week, for an hour and a half and full pay, we sit in a meeting room and talk. Situational German. Please-and-thank-yous. Polite conversation for business lunches. We look forward to working with you. No one takes it seriously. Sometimes when we go out, the other new-starts speak entirely in English, even when ordering, not bothering with even a cursory danke or bitte. There is something exciting about this. Something rebellious. I expect someone to snap, to swear, to tell them to speak German, the way I had seen the French do in Paris. I hold my breath and wait.
No one says a thing.
I met Thöre on one such outing. The new staff, two managers, one of the company lawyers. A bar in the east, street level, light spilling out over Soviet high-rises. We sat in our corner with Bavarian wheat beers, suspended safely in a cloud of English. It was the lawyer who disturbed our seclusion, standing up to shout in German across the bar. A man came over. They hugged, kissed – once on each cheek – and he joined us, taking a seat between the lawyer and me. A couple of half-hearted waves and quiet hellos from my compatriots, and the conversation closed over his entrance. The man and the lawyer turned to each other to talk amongst themselves.
When the lawyer popped to the bathroom, the man leaned across and asked if I spoke German. His breath felt alive against my cheek, and under the reek of bar bodies, he smelled of sea salt and coriander. Emboldened by the Weissbier, I tried to remember all those meeting-room conversations. The beer made things smoother. I tried to introduce myself.
‘You speak Kauderwelsch,’ he said, in English. ‘But it’s cute.’
The lawyer returned and they went back to talking in German, though the man – Thöre, he said his name was, Thöre as in Thor – looked at me while the woman talked in his ear, smiling a deep, knowing smile.
When I stepped through the door of my apartment later that night, I pulled out the miniature German-to-English dictionary a friend had bought me as a goodbye present, and looked up what Thöre had said to me.
Kauderwelsch. Noun, neuter.
When I forget the word I want, when a ph
rase is beyond me, coiled slyly on the tip of my tongue, close as the tail end of a dream, Kauderwelsch is there, waiting in the space where the other words should be.
The train comes to a stop. Thöre leans down.
‘We’re here,’ he says, his mouth covering, for a moment, the entirety of my ear.
He takes my hand and leads me out into the forest of the Grunewald.
‘It is a very simple operation,’ the doctor explains in English. ‘You don’t even have to be put under full anaesthetic. In fact, the results are far better if the procedure is performed in twilight sleep.’
I hold the boxed tongue in my lap. It seems drier now, under the clinic lights. Smaller. Frightened. I wonder if this is a sign that it is sick, like a dog’s nose.
‘And afterwards, I’ll be able to speak German?’ I ask.
‘Faultlessly.’
Thöre takes my hand in his.
The doctor lists side-effects, reiterating after each how safe the operation is, how unlikely it is that I will suffer anything other than the pure joy of bypassing years of study.
‘Strange things, tongues,’ the doctor says. ‘I have to say, it’s really quite a wonderful gift your boyfriend has bought you. Your new tongue will open doors.’
‘What about my old tongue?’ I ask.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ he replies. ‘We take care of everything.’
Thöre squeezes my hand and looks into my eyes. He mouths the words: Ich liebe dich. Still unsure what to say, I nod.
‘Excellent,’ the doctor says. ‘A nurse will be along in a moment to get you prepped. Just sign here.’
The pen makes a scratching sound, like an animal trying to escape.
‘I can’t wait,’ Thöre tells me while we wait for the nurse. ‘I’m finally going to be able to talk to you.’
‘We talk all the time,’ I say.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I don’t,’ I insist.
‘You will,’ he replies.
* * *
The first present Thöre bought me was a flat white, the second a textbook. We met at a café near my work. The conversation a series of starts and stops. Almost not quites. When he talked for anything longer than a sentence, slowing down to make sure I could make him out, I let the words pass over me like water. I examined the curve of his jaw, how the stubble didn’t quite reach his cheeks, the way the sunlight through the window made one eye wolf-yellow. When he asked me about myself, I responded as best I could. I knew the questions from class, but couldn’t remember the right answers, only what other people had said. I told him I had a brother when I have two. That one brother is older when I am the oldest. That I am eight and twenty instead of twenty-eight. He smiled at each mistake, chin in hand.
‘I bought you something,’ he said
He slid an oblong of brown paper along the tabletop. I wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t have, that it was nice of him, that I would repay the favour by buying him a drink. But I didn’t know how. Instead I unwrapped the package, dumbly.
Inside was a textbook. A Japanese woman laughed with a blond man on the front cover. Above them, in slender green font, was written: Die Gabe der Zungen.
‘Thank you,’ I said
I flicked through the pages and saw a phrase.
‘The next round is on me.’
Thöre laughed. After coffee, we took the underground in the same direction, Thöre getting off a few stops before mine. He kissed me and told me he would see me soon. After he left, I caught eyes with a woman sitting nearby. She smiled and said: Sie sind so ein süßes Paar. I smiled in response, unsure of what she had said. She returned the gesture and returned to her paperback. The exchange pleased me: as if I were just another German on the subway, kissing my boyfriend goodbye. It felt good.
It felt as if I were invisible.
The new tongue is stapled to the inside of my mouth. Dissolvable double-hinges, the doctor explains. Due to the need for movement, it would be impossible to bind the muscles with sutures. Instead delicate little hinges have been affixed to the join between the old flesh and the new. They glitter in the clinic lights as I move a pink hand-mirror in front of my mouth, watching my tongue lick the white walls of my teeth, brush the inside of my mouth. The mirror makes my teeth seem small, but to my tongue, these things are gargantuan: my teeth are cliff-faces, the roof of my mouth a universe wide. I put the mirror down. I shut my mouth. It feels as if I have closed my eyes.
I notice a taste. Slightly salty, like cured bacon, with a faint hint of bergamot. Tea-smoked meat. I use the new tongue to explore further; the hinges butterfly and pull at their fleshy moorings. The taste comes from all over. A taste my old tongue had forgotten. The taste of my own mouth.
‘It will take some time to adjust,’ the doctor says as I sign my discharge. ‘Little things might take you by surprise. Just be prepared.’
‘Don’t worry, doctor,’ I say. ‘I’m already getting used to it. The only thing is the hinges. How long will they be there for?’
‘A couple of weeks,’ he says. ‘But we’ll get you in for a check-up after that, just to make sure everything’s fine and the hinges have fully dissolved.’
‘And my old tongue?’
‘Don’t worry. We’ve taken care of it. All you have to do now is focus on resting up and enjoying your new life.’
The tongue has made everything new. Even the air. I feel it pour over the lump of muscle in my mouth, feel it fill each delicate branch of my lungs. It is scented with the green of the Grunewald as we walk out of the clinic, and on the S-Bahn home, the stale coffee on Thöre’s breath and the coriander punch of his cologne. Thöre is remarkably quiet. He sits next to me, grinning.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Nothing,’ he says, beaming ear to ear.
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s your accent,’ he says. ‘Your new one, I mean. You sound like you were born and bred in Hamburg.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I tell him. ‘Why would I speak English with a German accent?’
He laughs. His eyes reflect the trees as they pass by in the window. For a moment a house with a red roof shines there also. His expression is the same as when I make a mistake in German. Amused, affectionate. But I hadn’t made a mistake. Had I?
Thöre’s Berlin was different to the one I knew. The Berlin in my head, marked only by bars, restaurants, and coffee shops around my work and flat, branched out, connecting, like tendons, the smaller satellites where we met. I knew the city after a month. Not by direction, but by the memories Thöre and I made: seafood in Charlottenburg, slow walks in Mitte, parties in Neukölln. Thöre’s friends. They spoke to me in German, first, then switched to English. It seemed as though everyone in Berlin spoke English, to one extent or another. Only Thöre spoke to me in German.
One night in his apartment in Kreuzberg, as I leafed through Die Gabe der Zungen in bed and waited for him to finish brushing his teeth, I called through to the bathroom to ask him why, when everyone else spoke to me in English, only he insisted on German. I heard him spit, heard a tap running. He came and stood in the doorway, the band of his underwear folded over slightly where he had put it back haphazardly. He looked at me as if gauging something. The answer he gave was not textbook: he stopped and started, adjusted what he wanted to say, repositioned sentences mid-flow, so that in the end all I was left with were fragments, clauses out of order.
He does not speak to me in English because he wants me to know something. Something about the truth. Or something real. Him. Something real about him. Himself, maybe. The real him.
He climbed on to the bed, moved up my legs with predatory grace, and closed the textbook in my hands as he gave me a mint-sweet kiss. Then he turned out the light. He fell asleep in seconds. I found it harder. The feeling that I had to be alert, in case I missed something, was hard
to shake, even though Thöre was no longer speaking. It was impossible to relax. To help me get to sleep, I ran through the vocabulary list I had just been reading.
Augen, Nase, Herz, und Zehen. Eyes, nose, heart, and toes. Arm for arm, Fuß for foot. And Zunge – tongue. Chapter 3: Anatomy. Die Anatomie.
This is how I fell asleep: Thöre’s mouth to my ear, his sleep-heavy breath keeping time. While I counted tongues, and waited to dream.
* * *
I talk to people in shops, on the train, strike up conversations with strangers at work. So excited am I by my newfound ability to speak and be understood. It feels like diving: deeper and deeper into Berlin, with no need to rise and fill my lungs with English. My new tongue has gills. The half-open wounds of the hinges, now dissolved, breathe the city. Berlin tastes of ash and June and ozone.
People ask me if I am from Hamburg. I tell them that I have never left Berlin. They laugh and ask me why I have a Hamburg accent then, and when I tell them I am not German, they say I must have learned from someone who spoke Hamburgisch. But the woman at my office is from Frankfurt, and the only other teacher I had was Thöre.
It never felt as if I were learning German with Thöre. It was as though I were learning a language only Thöre and I spoke. From the beginning he taught me to understand him with hand gestures, repetition, and glacial speech. I spoke a language of errors, parataxis, and diminishing returns.
I knew I had made a mistake when Thöre laughed. It was a particular laughter, almost affectionate. As if my mistakes pleased him, though my pronunciation did not. Everything sounded wrong to him. The words the same but unfamiliar, pressed through the meat grinder of my mouth – I butchered the language, he said.
The only sound I made that pleased him was ‘ch’, as in Ich for I, as in I love you. Ich liebe dich. This he said after a month had passed. I didn’t understand. To explain, he placed my hand on his chest. His hands swallowed mine. Something beat, warm and urgent, against my palm. The word came into my head in the rhythm of that beat: das, Herz, das, Herz. As if the two could not be separate. As if they needed each other. The first nothing without the second. Meaningless. This is what Ich liebe dich meant to me: something added, extraneous, something straining, and significant.
Best British Short Stories 2019 Page 18