I couldn’t tell Thöre this. I lacked the words. Instead I took his hand and placed it on my chest, let him feel my heart beat its own affirmation: das, Herz, das, Herz, das, Herz. Then I remembered something from Chapter 3.
‘Herzen,’ I said. Hearts.
He smiled. Almost as if he understood.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
I drum my fingers on the table. Rain falls against the window, muttering its response. A series of sharp taps, long sprays. Morse code on glass, there where the name of the cafe is written back to front. The words Der Ausguck seem almost fluent on their hand-drawn pennant.
I pick up my coffee and take a drink. Nothing. I finished earlier, but keep the cup at my mouth so I won’t have to respond. While Thöre explains. How things have changed. Since the tongue.
‘It’s just that,’ he continues. ‘We’ve changed. I don’t know.’
I gulp air like a landed fish, pretending there is still coffee in my cup.
‘I thought the transplant would have made things easier. But it hasn’t. It’s nothing like the brochure said,’ he says. ‘You seem like a different person now.’
I put down the empty cup. Slowly. Attempt to work out what I am going to say. A couple appear at the window and peer in, trying to see through the breath on the glass whether there is anywhere to sit. One of them turns and says something to the other. Their words sound strange, as if the glass has inverted them too.
‘If I’m not me any more, then who am I?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ Thöre replies.
A bell announces the couple’s entrance. They take a seat at the wall behind Thöre, both of them on the same side of the high table, watching the rain against the window while they talk. When they speak to each other, it is still gibberish to me, glass or no glass. Yet it seems familiar. What language is that?
‘I’m sorry,’ Thöre says. ‘But I don’t think we should see each other any more.’
The tongue changed everything but most of all it changed Thöre. It was as if a wall had come down. We emerged from our division, freshly gifted with speech. As if all that had come before were just whispers through brick. But it was not only a matter of language. It was all the little things bound up in it: the sighs, the many meanings of a touch, the warmth in his voice that came and went, like a square of sunlight through a window. The world was gold when it was there. But gradually, it began to turn ashen. He no longer talked to me with his chin in his hands. Now it was hands on table, eyes on fingernails. He looked as if he missed something.
Die Gabe der Zungen did not contain a chapter on relationships. I would never have been able to ask him about it, with my old tongue, would never have been able to have a serious conversation about our feelings. The new tongue had changed all that.
‘Is everything all right?’ I asked him.
He looked up from his fingernails. He seemed surprised to see me there.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine. Just tired.’
We said no more about it. But I felt as if I had done something wrong. He no longer laughed when I made mistakes. At first, I thought this was because I no longer made them. But soon I couldn’t shake the feeling that all I was capable of was mistakes. And Thöre no longer had any patience for them.
I guess, with my new tongue, I should have known better.
I return to my old life, my old apartment, my old Berlin. But with the new tongue in my head, everything is different.
I know I have been back to my flat. I have had to wash clothes, pick up documents for work, make sure nothing is mouldering in the fridge. But when I move around it now, it feels like trespassing.
I try to reconnect with the other transplants from work, to revive the old friendships I had neglected during my time with Thöre. We go to a bar in the east. It is vaguely familiar, but the memory is dim. We settle at a table in the corner and talk in English. The language hangs in the air around us like haze, making us feel safe and invisible. As if to the Germans around us we were nothing but the faintest of shimmers on the farthest horizon.
The lawyer is there. It is the first time I have seen her since Thöre and I broke up. She is the partner of one of Thöre’s friends, Elke. A slight brunette whose family ties to Bavarian aristocracy show through in the imperious way in which she ignores me. When I speak, she does not look at me. The others exchange looks. I wonder if I am saying something offensive, but no one interrupts, so I persevere. As the conversation goes on, and empty glasses crowd the table, one of them finally asks: ‘When did you start speaking like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like that. Your English is weird, now. It’s like you can’t really speak it. And your accent. You don’t sound like you any more.’
You seem like a different person now.
‘Who do I sound like?’
‘You sound like you’re from Hamburg,’ the lawyer says.
‘But I’m not,’ I say. ‘I’m from . . .’
I sit there, dumb. The tongue in my head lolls lifeless. I try to remember but the word is not there, only Kauderwelsch, burning brand-hot, turning my cheeks crimson.
‘I didn’t mean to offend you,’ the man says.
‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘It’s yesterday’s snow.’
I hear it, then. The words sound wrong; the voice is not mine. The table seems to move off into the distance. The room is spinning, or I am. Nothing is solid. I excuse myself, telling them the Weissbier has gone to my head, and dive into the night air.
The Soviet high-rises tower above me. Headlights cast long shadows along their faces as I try to find a train station. I walk. Time slips away. I do not recognise these streets; they were not part of me and Thöre. And now I am lost. In this city I thought I knew.
I hold my hand out in the road and a car stops. I climb into the taxi. As it drives to my flat, I look out the window, trying desperately to recognise just one building on the other side of the glass. But nothing looks the same. When the driver stops and asks for the fare, I ask if he’s sure we’re there.
‘Positive,’ he tells me as he takes the money. ‘Hey, are you from Hamburg? My brother lives there.’
I tell him to keep the change.
I thought I would feel safer back in the apartment, doors locked, curtains drawn. But I still can’t shake the feeling that the person who lives there is going to come back, that they will demand that I leave and go back to my own home. But where is that? Where am I from?
Without Thöre, I have nothing to do on the train out to the Grunewald except watch, through the window, as the city recedes. The forest slowly wins back its space. As the train approaches the stop for the clinic, I notice a building in the distance, red-roofed, surrounded by trees in neat rows. It is familiar, somehow, though I am sure I have never been there.
The doctor places my tongue in clamps, the long root of muscle drying in the air, and runs his fingers along the small bumps where the gills of the tongue have closed shut.
‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘Barely a scar. How are you finding it, any problems?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It seems to be working fine. I speak German, now. No problems.’
‘And faultlessly, too, I have to say. Your boyfriend must be pleased. Is he working today?’
‘No,’ I reply. Then: ‘Yes. I mean, yes, he’s working, but no, he’s not my boyfriend. Not any more.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he says. His eyes are wet, glistening with sympathy in the clinic lights. It is strange to see the man that way. He looks like a little boy. And yet, he doesn’t seem surprised.
‘Does this happen a lot?’ I ask.
‘It is a danger,’ he says. ‘But most of the time, no. It depends, you know? On the people. The new tongue helps people speak, that’s all. Sometimes it’s a blessing, and in other cases . . .’ He shrugs. ‘
Sometimes, post-transplant, things just fall apart. Your guess is as good as mine why. They just do.’
‘Doctor,’ I say. I hesitate, not wanting to offend him. I put my hands on my knees and look down at them as I speak. ‘I’m sorry, doctor, but I want you to give me my old tongue back.’
He puts his hands over mine.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But I can’t.’
‘But it’s mine,’ I say. ‘It’s my tongue.’
‘When you give up your tongue,’ he says, ‘you give it up. You can’t go back to it. It’s a problem of auto-immunity: you can take in a new tongue, if it’s managed properly. But your body remembers the old one, and if you try to put it back in, as if it were something new, you would confuse your defences. Your body would try to destroy it.’
‘What have you done with it?’
The doctor hesitates.
‘I can’t really tell you,’ he says. ‘There are issues of . . . confidentiality.’
‘Doctor,’ I say, ‘it’s my tongue. I don’t think you’ll be breaking confidentiality if you tell me where it is.’
‘That’s the thing,’ the doctor says. ‘It’s not your tongue any more.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Perhaps . . .’ he says. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I showed you.’
We had gone to a restaurant on Charlottenstraße for my birthday. Thöre picked German wines, regional specialities, laid all of Germany out on a table for me. The soft lights of the restaurant made everything gleam and blur.
A taxi back, and we were walking unsteadily up the stairs to Thöre’s place, bodies soft and lush with wine. Thöre pressed me against the wall of the stairwell, then pressed a box into my hands, his swallowing mine. Then lip to ear, he whispered: ‘One last gift.’
The box was black, its join sealed with a disc of red wax and the imprint of a ‘T’. A key wrapped in red crêpe, small bow around its waist, nestled on a mound of grey silk. Next to it lay a strand of snowdrops.
‘A key?’ I asked. Chapter 2: The Home.
‘Aye,’ he said. The sound of the word, made strange by his mouth, was almost musical: as if the affirmation were carried away by it, the vowel now a note, fading, legato, as Thöre plucked the key from its swaddling and placed it in my hand. Little teeth of metal dug into my palm.
I turned the key in the lock. Thöre stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders, watching, seeing from just above my eye-level, his own home open to me with the swing of a door. I knew what to expect: a minimalist art print in a black frame, a concrete vase with three plastic lilies, dust on their mouths, and a glass sphere for percolating coffee. Yet for some reason, opened with a key that was my own, it seemed different. As if by some sleight of hand the room behind this door had vanished, replaced by another through subterfuge and shifting compartments.
Thöre swept me off my feet. Literally. One arm buckled the hinge of my knees, so that I fell back and into the other. The key in my hand flew up in the air.
It took me over an hour to find it again the next morning. When I locked the door behind me on the way to work, I wondered whether the same apartment would greet me that evening, or if each turn of key would always make things feel new. A new apartment, a new Thöre. A new me.
The doctor punches a code into the wall. His hands are sheathed in latex gloves, powder blue. There is a brief sigh as the door swells open at the press of a hand. They seem so small, in those gloves. Like the hands of a child.
There is darkness before us. Then fluorescent lights shudder, flicker, race along, until off in the distance, the corridor is nothing but light. The doctor leads me down the corridor, explaining that normally this area is out of bounds, but that he wanted me to understand how it worked. We walk by glass boxes in airtight recesses. In each one, a stub of muscle glistens.
‘Where do you get them?’ I ask.
‘Donations,’ he replies. ‘Donations. The tongue you have, now, for example, was donated by the family of someone who had recently passed. Originally from Hamburg, I believe.’
He stops in front of a case. The tongue inside seems impossibly small. I imagine it must have belonged to some sort of animal.
‘This is your tongue,’ he says.
I look at it. I look at it the way an animal looks at its reflection, recognising there something strangely familiar and at once completely other. How had I never seen it before, its swell, the lumps at the root, those bumps on its surface, like a secret written in Braille? Is the new tongue like this? Are all tongues the same? Even on the way through this room filled with them, I had only noticed their pinkness, their wetness, how fat they seemed, lying there disused.
‘Unfortunately, it already has a buyer. A politician. Tongues like yours fetch a premium,’ he says.
‘What do you mean like mine?’ I ask.
‘People whose mother tongue is English,’ he says. I am alarmed by the mistake. It feels dangerous. Like a trap about to spring shut.
‘But it’s not,’ I tell him. ‘English isn’t my mother tongue.’
He is visibly unsettled.
‘But that’s what your boyfriend wrote on the application form. Mother tongue: English.’
‘No,’ I say, realising that in the time Thöre and I had been together he had never asked me. ‘He was wrong. English isn’t my mother tongue.’
‘Oh,’ he says, crestfallen. ‘Do you have any proof?’
‘What kind of proof would I have? Look, wouldn’t you get in trouble if you sold him my tongue, knowing full well that, proof or not, there’s still a danger that it’s not worth the “premium”.’
He sighs. ‘I’ll tell him the situation and see what he says. He might still want it. But if not, it’s yours for the standard price.’
‘Does this mean I can have my tongue back?’ I ask.
‘Yes and no,’ he says cautiously. ‘Like I said, we can’t put the tongue back in your head. But we can give you it back, I suppose. If the buyer no longer wants it. You’d have to buy it, of course. And take care of it. It has to be kept cool and moist. When people purchase the tongues as gifts, we supply a glass box. Technically there’s no reason that it couldn’t be kept in one long-term.’
‘Please.’
The word hangs in the air for a moment, in that room of quiet tongues. I hear the rawness in it, how desperate I must sound to him. I wonder if the tongues hear it too.
The doctor nods.
We make the necessary arrangements. I fill in paperwork, declaring that I will take responsibility for the tongue, that it will be gifted to Thöre on a date to be confirmed. The doctor signs off on the lie. After the paperwork is filed, I ask him why he is helping me.
‘Let us just say that I have a certain amount of sympathy for your situation,’ he says. He sticks his tongue out on its side: along its underbelly I see faint arcs, like the closed slits of gills. ‘The marriage didn’t last long after. Like I said, sometimes things just fall apart.’
The doctor shakes my hand at the entrance. His hand seems bigger to touch, almost gargantuan. Yet it fits perfectly into mine, as if made of a piece. I turn to leave but stop, unable to shake something.
‘One thing,’ I ask. ‘Do you keep the tongues until they find a new owner?’
‘We try,’ he says. ‘But some tongues aren’t as popular. We keep them as long as we can, but if we can’t find an owner, we have to get rid of them.’
‘What do you do with them?’
‘Well,’ he says. ‘You’ll have noticed this clinic is in the Grunewald. There’s a reason for that. If we can’t find a new home for a tongue, they get processed into fertiliser. It’s quite interesting, actually: the composition of the tongue, all the things that go into making it, produce a fertiliser that makes things grow almost twice as fast as normal. We sell it to a small paper mill nearby. Maybe you saw it on the way in,
it has a red roof?’
‘A paper mill?’ I ask. An image flashes in my memory of a house with a red roof. It feels as if I had lived there, once.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s owned by a pretty famous publishing company. They make language textbooks. Die Gabe der Zungen. Maybe you’ve heard of them?’
That night in my apartment, I count tongues in my head, but can’t sleep. Each time I close my eyes I see them: all the tongues no one wanted, falling between blades, their pink meat turned to slurry, poured on to saplings. The slim frames shake with the weight of the tongues. The leaves are slick with them. From little acorns, mighty oaks. Then with an axe, down they go. Cut and pulped, pressed, printed. And the people carry them with them as they walk, under arms, wrapped in brown paper, just as I had done – the last of someone’s tongue.
I get up to fetch a glass of water. The apartment is quiet, still. Peaceful. I am growing used to its space, the hush of the cars below the window. The feeling that someone might come in at any minute has lessened.
I pour ice cubes from the freezer into a glass then fill it from the tap. Stopping for a moment, I go back and take something out of the refrigerator. Seated at the kitchen counter, the clink of the ice fills the quiet space, as I watch my warm fingerprints fade from the chilled surface of a glass box.
It lies there, under glass. My tongue. The one I can’t put back in my head. It is strange to have it there, that I should be the one to keep it. It belongs to me, but at the same time, it doesn’t. I can’t shake the feeling that I am only keeping it safe for a time, that it is something held only until it can be passed over. Like a gift. Is this how Thöre had felt, safekeeping the tongue that now moves in my head?
Best British Short Stories 2019 Page 19